Cemetery Boys - Aiden Thomas

My favorite YA novel this year, maybe one of my favorites ever??? Cemetery Boys is about a Mexican trans boy in East LA, living in a community of brujos and brujas. Assigned female at birth, Yadriel’s family wants him to be a bruja, but he knows he is a brujo, but is denied the chance to prove it and demonstrate himself thru the coming of age brujo ceremony. When mysterious deaths happen in the community, he has to work together with his cousin (who rejects bruja tradition of healing and opts to make traditional weaponry instead) and a young delinquent ghost to both unravel the mystery and prove his place as a brujo to his community. The plot and characters and writing are simple and straightforward (like all good YA, I think), but it is soooo well written and the story concept is so good!!! I love the way Thomas wrote and explored a trans story through this very intimately cultural lens of gender and a representation of the gender binary through gendered powers. Also once again I benefit from being an idiot, the twist was actually pretty surprising to me LOL.

Untold Night and Day - Bae Suah

One of those books that I am soooo sure is good but I am just not good enough at reading to fully understand it. A very dreamy novel, w/o a lot of plot or characters, just one insubstantial day and night in a hot Seoul summer. The book is easy to fly through, but in every phrase and corner I could feel a great depth of meaning and significance, just slightly out of grasp but perceivable. It is really an impressive novel, but in an atypical way. Not because of plot or characters or writing, something larger like the construction of the novel as a whole that felt masterful. Slippery the whole way through, but I could clearly feel there was something special and worth thinking really deeply about in there. I also enjoyed the translation, and enjoyed the translator notes at the end. I am sure the second read will be better, and am looking forward to that.

An Artist of the Floating World - Kazuo Ishiguro

I really really really love Ishiguro, he is one of my favorite writers. I love the way he writes, the way that the main context and background of the story unfolds in such a casual offhanded way. In his books, the narrators always bring you in with some commonplace everyday scenes, and only later, with context, do you look back and notice that something has always been very very wrong. I delight in that, in the same way I enjoy a good magic trick, and this book is no different. I also found the themes in this book particularly interesting to me. In An Artist of the Floating World, Ishiguro captures a sense of change, a time of complete tectonic shift in culture and beliefs. What better example of that than a society pre and post war? Everything changes from these catastrophic events. In these times:

What is the role and responsibility of artists? What is the purpose of capturing beauty, and what is beauty in a “pure” context? I am currently reading Orientalism, and this book reminds me what Said says about orientalism not as a collection of texts but as various forms and exchanges of power, political, cultural, etc.
Ono wants to make art that has real purpose, move beyond the floating world, but even that world turned out to be floating and unreal and unsubstantial. What is solid and truthful? Ishiguro writes to convey this deep sense of being left behind, a fear that comes from seeing an entire reality unmade and untruthed.
What is the role of memory in building our understanding of ourselves and the past? Can we understand the past as a recreation of yourself? In this last theme is my favorite part of the story- the first twist that this mild mannered narrator was actually a war artist, and an important contributing war artist which is why he is shunned. Second twist (and therefore much more unexpected, the first one is typical Ishiguro stuff)- was he even that important or remembered? Was his art important and capital P Politically significant, and is art important and politically powerful? Ono thought he was making art for a pure purpose, but the world that purpose served turned out to be a floating world, and later even his importance became insubstantial. From an Ishiguro interview on the book:

I could put down a scene from two days ago right beside one from 20 years earlier, and ask the reader to ponder the relationship between the two. Often the narrator himself would not need to know fully the deeper reasons for a particular juxtaposition. I could see a way of writing that could properly suggest the many layers of self-deception and denial that shrouded any person’s view of their own self and past.
And for me personally: the nagging sense of how difficult it is to see clearly above the dogmatic fervours of one’s day; and the fear that time and history would show that for all one’s good intentions, one had backed a wrong, shameful, even evil cause, and wasted one’s best years and talents to it.

My Brother’s Husband - Gengoroh Tagame

A short and cute manga about a Canadian guy (Mike) who comes to Japan to visit his husband’s brother after his husband passes away, and to meet his family. At each turn I was expecting something unbearably sad and difficult, but at each turn it proved itself to be a beautiful and heartwarming story, the pacing and characters just so crazy on point. Months later I still remember this story very fondly, a very heartwarming few hours of reading. ^_^

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants - Robin Wall Kimmerer

Braiding Sweetgrass combines biological and ecological science with indigenous wisdom to explore and share the lessons that plants and animals have to teach us. This was a very transformative book for me, one that began to help me understand a different way of relating to nature. It took me forever to read (a lot of mini sections) but it was very pleasant to read each section slowly, and I appreciated the time anyways to let the different lessons from each of the plants / vegetables / ecosystems that she teaches in every chapter sink in. I was especially moved by the chapter on trees (esp the ones about burning, regrowth trees, and salmon) and the chapters on the three sisters (how corn, bean, and squash are grown together because they support each other). The most important lesson I learned from this book is the way that nature supports each other. Things are out of balance now, but people are also a part of nature, and an important part of the balance. We have just taken ourselves out of old ways of being and existing with each other and with the earth. Many of us live without any genuine gratitude or attachment to the land. For me there are many days that go by where I don’t physically touch the earth. It’s sad. I have always understood the balance of nature like the cursed spirit Hanami in Jujutsu Kaisen- the earth and sea need time to heal, time without humans. But Kimmerer showed me that people are part of the cycle, and we have to be an active part of not just the restoration but also play our part in the system. We have to understand things not as rights, but come to see our privilege and gifts as responsibilities and come to see the responsibility itself as a gift. It is a simple concept, but in a world so focused on rights, what we deserve, and defending ourselves from life and each other, it is hard to imagine a world focused on our responsibility to life and the earth around us.

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl - Andrea Lawlor

My favorite fiction this year, one of my absolute favorite books ever. Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is about Paul, a shapeshifter that can freely change his biological markers and present himself and perform as different genders. It is a gender bending, transformative, academic smut that helped me understand sex and sexuality as something not inherently traumatic (like James Baldwin says) but as traumatic because of society and the way we all collectively understand and relate to sex and sexuality, both personally and politically. Paul is free in a way that I didn’t understand or want or want to understand until I read this book. For me, the best books are the ones that make me think, that sit with me, that change me, and I can look back on the book and see a clear demarcation between the me before I read it and the me after I read it, and I really feel that this book changed my life. It reminded me how playful and fun reading can be, but also how academic and serious and rigorous reading can be. I am always remembering Jia Tolentino’s review of The Memory Police about metaphors made real, and Paul’s shapeshifting abilities remind me of that, because they take something intangible (gender, sex, sexuality) and make it physical. It is a wonderful and smart way to get people to really think about and examine gender as a concept, because when all the biological markers are easily moved and changed, we have to understand gender as a performance and as a creation rather than as a biological law. And the writing!!! What a triumph. The pacing is the sentences is so good, so full of energy and variation and tension.

Just look back; that was the whole trick. Everything Paul knew boiled down to this one gimmick: try for what you want. He couldn’t always maintain, of course, but if you try one hundred times and you score five times, that’s five more times than if you didn’t try. And Paul tried for something every day, pretty much. Paul tried for a smile, a look back, an eyeful, a number, some illicit hallway kiss, a blowjob, a romance, a massage, a handjob, a finger up an ass, a free show, a licked lip, a passed note, a present, a surprise, something good, something better than the nothing he had.

I cannot speak more highly about this book and I recommend it to everyone. Also one of my favorite cover reviews ever- it really is Tight, Deep, and Hot.

Native Speaker - Chang Rae Lee

Native Speaker is about a Korean American spy that goes undercover to provide info on a Korean American politician in NY. The setup is so clever. I think it is a very smart idea to explore Asian American dynamics and issues by making the main character a spy. Just a good way to explore the ways in which Asian Americans are hidden in the US and put on disguises to fit into mainstream American society, and dig into some of the (sometimes true) Asian stereotypes of being emotionally closed off. I liked the book and found its ideas engaging, but I didn't enjoy reading it very much, and after reading it i felt sad that a book written in 1995 talks about and explores Asian American issues better than most mainstream Asian American media today, and our popular consciousness and understanding of Asian Americanness has not moved much (and has maybe even regressed).

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life - Anne Lamott

A lot of great advice on writing, and obviously the writing itself is good lol. The stories she tells are funny, and I think she does a good job of explaining what it is like to be a writer and the writing process from her perspective and her experience. The book also made me very curious about how writers from different cultures write too, because in my reading experience a lot of East Asian literature is pretty different. In my opinion the creative process is super intimately tied to your understanding of the self, of which the western conception is unique and not universal, so I am not sure about it being the definitive guide to Writing (specifically some of the guidance around how to write stories and how to write characters and some of the descriptions of the pain and anguish around writing), but I read it and it made me want to write, so I enjoyed it and I would recommend it to anyone. Some of this advice I found also actually helpful in writing code.

My Year of Meats - Ruth Ozeki

I read My Year of Meats with one of my book clubs. An extremely powerful book… after I read it I literally had trouble eating meat for two weeks and would get stomach aches. I have never had a book have this strong of a physical impact on me. It is two parallel stories: one about a Japanese American documentarian making documentaries to sell American beef to Japanese housewives, the other about a Japanese housewife married to the sexist Japanese producer of that show. I looooove narrative setups like that because 1) parallel but different storylines and characters often create a dialectic that very sharply defines the central theme of the book 2) when those stories converge it is always so hype!!!!! I also found it a very illuminating way to explain the ways capitalism moves globally, and the wild central plot is not just imaginable but actually happening everywhere. Recent example: a dog instagram I follow talked about how their Squid Game Halloween costume from Shenzhen was late. So a show in Korea produced by an American company watched by an American audience resulted in an American buying a costume made in Shenzhen which then got delayed by global supply chain issues. How crazy is that?! No man is an island, especially today, and like it or not we are all tied together through capitalism (I hate it) and through shared human experiences (I love it). There is so so much depth and richness to unpack in every Ruth Ozeki book. I can’t believe this was a debut novel! A real powerhouse.

鱷魚手記 - 邱妙津

I don’t have much to say about this book, except that it is one of the best books I’ve ever read, and within its pages captures feelings and thoughts that I did not know or know to be capturable. Pages full of difficult things, that, like Murakami puts it, are meant to be engaged with, understood, and digested, becoming the cream of your life. I can only imagine what it feels like to have something like this written for you, and it is clear why this is a seminal queer Taiwanese lit and a cult classic. Don’t read the english translation though, it is criminally bad (and makes me wonder if some other translated novels I read and didn’t like just suffered from a shit translation).

Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir
- Kai Cheng Thom

The coming of age story / anti-memoir of a young Asian trans girl that runs away from home and goes on an adventure. I liked this book a lot. There were a lot of parts that were “cliche,” but because it is a trans story, those familiar elements felt very new and exciting and enjoyable, and I loved seeing not just a fairy tale / feel good story with a trans protagonist but a trans version of that type of story (not representation but re-creation). I also really liked the poetry and the writing. The magical realism was a little convenient at the climax, and the other non main characters were a little flat, but it was very enjoyable throughout and I liked the subversion, although predictable, of a typical fairy tale happy ending.

A Closed and Common Orbit - Becky Chambers

This is the sequel to A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. Because I liked the crew and the writing I thought a sequel would be more of the same enjoyable stuff, but what a pleasant surprise to read a very different story! This one is much more character focused, much less plot, focused on just developing two characters rather than an entire crew w a very specific quest. Also my absolute fav sci fi book this year! One of my fav sci fi books ever!!! There is so so so so so much to like about this story. First the structure: I love a good dual protag, love a good dual story, love when they cross, both narratively and thematically. I’m always so so so pumped when it happens and I think it provides such a lovely alternate pacing for the book and builds up such a satisfying tension (see: My Year of Meats). Second: her take on a common quandary. The question of the humanness of AI is so explored and so much writing, both fiction and non fiction on it. I don’t think Chambers brings anything new, but A Closed and Common Orbit is still a very touching and wonderful story and an in depth and varied exploration of the subject via the parallels and contrasts in the two stories. Like I said before I am most invested and interested in sci fi as a way to explore and understand people and each other. The characters in this book are so strong, and the ending is really very touching and heartwarming. It makes me enjoy being an idiot, because the ending was very surprising to me, which definitely added to my pleasure.

Hip-Hop (And Other Things) - Shea Serrano

This is the third and final book in Shea’s (And Other Things) trilogy. I really like Shea’s writing and this is his 5th book I’ve read, so I was very excited about it also because out of the trilogy hip-hop is the subject I am most familiar & interested in. This book fell a bit short of my expectations though. I think there were too many goofy chapters, which is OK, but overall I felt like there was not a ton of very in depth writing and thinking about rap which I enjoyed very much in the rap year book. To me, his strengths in his previous books were his knowledge / research and his very conversational writing style, which was consistently funny and interesting and would occasionally give way to some very poignant insights. I just didn't get as much of that in this book, which was doubly disappointing because I really really enjoyed the Missy Elliot chapter (it was funny and educational and poignant and I listened to Missy Elliot for at least 10 hours after that) and it was an early chapter, so I kept waiting for more in the book. His typical style also often starts with a funny anecdote, and then later he reveals its significance and relevance in a very funny and natural and conversational way, but then in this book many chapters felt a little bit more deliberate and sometimes even forced :-(

The Book of Delights - Ross Gay

The Book of Delights is my 500th book since 2017, when I started tracking books on goodreads and reading again! It is a wonderful book, and reaffirms for me that one of life's greatest delights is reading the right book at the right time. The book is a collection of daily delights that poet Ross Gay wrote over the course of one year. Some of these delights are short, some of them are a few pages longer, some are brief and funny, some are inspiring and poignant; together they all paint a beautiful understanding of delight that I did not have before. Delighting in not bringing the groceries in in one trip. Delighting in tenderness and touch. Hunger as a form of delight. Delight as kin to loneliness. Delight as the joining of sorrows from our great individual wildernesses. It is clear that Gay sees and feels and brings forth so much delight from himself and into the world, and he helped me not only understand delight better but also find and look for delight in my own everyday life, in ways and forms both minor and major. I also love his writing style. This book is honestly pretty similar to Goodbye Again but I enjoyed this one much more. Gay is much more gentle and subtle with his stories, and gives them space to sit and breathe on their own without a lot of explanation, and many of his delights have poignant phrases and paragraphs that have sat with me since (especially delight 14, Joy is Such a Human Madness). Gay is also very very funny, and writes in a very personal and intimate style that made me feel, after reading this book, that he was my friend. This book is a real gift— I am delighted that I read this for my 500th book, and I am inspired to think about and write about my own delights. Some Gay quotes I enjoyed:

On touch, shared intimacy, and the universal pleasure of union
holding each other, the way we do
On the possibilities inherent in every walk
Among the purple things I didn’t gather today, and easily could have,
On the unreliability of emotion, and why my memory is so especially untrustworthy
I have a strong memory, I wonder if it’s true,
On the delight of going on for and with yourself
No one needs me to go on about the virtues of analog technologies, so I will
On the pleasurable imprecisions of grammar
This morning I was peeing into an empty rice wine vinegar bottle, which makes, with some olive oil, the vinegar, my very favorite salad dressing

Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind - Hirohiko Araki

The 6th Jojo series I’ve read, and so far my favorite one. Story follows a young Italian Giorno Giovanno (giogio?) who joins an Italian gang Passione to find and defeat the boss and become a “gang star.” At this point of the Jojo series Araki really has the formula down: Take a very principled hero, some variation of a Jojo -> Give them a mission -> Give them a team -> Make them all sort of anti heroes but with sympathetic backstories -> Give them a final boss, some variation of a Dio -> And then give them a bunch of enemies along their journey -> And finally, give them all a bunch of cool costumes, good designs, and interesting stands => and then you have a sick Jojo series.

This one is my favorite mostly because I like the character and stand design the most here, and Giorno is my favorite Jojo. I like his design, I like his stand power, I like how he’s clearly a leader and wins a lot of his battles with his patience and wit, and like all other Jojos, a principled and passionate hero. I also like the supporting cast a lot in this series. Bruno is especially good and I think a zipper stand is so interesting and creative. I also liked this version of Dio a lot, and all of the minor protagonists along the way have good stands and fights that do a good job of highlighting each of the different characters in Giorno’s crew. I lke how you always know what you’re getting with Jojo, even if what you’re getting is always so wacky.

Mini Reviews:

A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles

A very pleasant reread. I love how Towles brings glamor and honor to small settings and small moments, and manages to make even imprisonment (albeit in a fancy hotel) still feel grand and poignant. I found the ending abrupt the first time, and thought it hurt the book overall, but this time I felt satisfied, perhaps because I already knew what was coming and could appreciate the slightly meandering meat of the book more.

Gold Diggers - Sathian Sanjena

I have a theory that the thing that people find the most deeply annoying are the things that are close to them, especially the things that are so close that they are clearly branches of you, and with a few changes, could easily be you today. I say that because I found the overachieving overpressured overly competitive protagonist to be extremely annoying, and had to really suffer through his perspective for the first half of the book. He remains annoying in the second half, but I liked what Sanjena does with the gold, and the ending was good and satisfying. The symbolism and all the characters were a little too on the nose, but I can forgive almost anything for a good ending.

Attack on Titan - Hajime Isayama

I read this many times over the years and dropped it many times because I either got bored or found it difficult to follow monthly. I really didn’t like this manga very much. I think the world building is attention grabbing and the character designs and the initial mystery is very exciting (titans!!! In the walls!!! Titans are the walls!!!) but everything else was either mediocre or bad to me, especially the ending. As a side note, this time I read it because I like 2 gossip and I saw people saying on twitter that the manga had fascist subtexts.

Laughable Loves - Milan Kundera

A masterful, but very sad collection of short stories by Milan Kundera on love. In his stories, love is violent, painful, and pathetic, yet seemingly inescapable at every turn. I read it as a more impressionable person in 2017, and again in 2021, and while I enjoyed it a lot both times, I do not recommend it if you have malleable impressions and thoughts about love

Gambling Apocalypse: Kaiji - Nobuyuki Fukumoto

One of the OG gambling mangas. I do not know the history well but I definitely feel like there’s a very straight clear line that can be drawn from this work to Squid Game, which is funny and interesting to think about. Anyways for these types of stories I always like the characters, and I find the game construction / figuring out the “trick” to the game to always be fun, but eventually I always get sort of bored and then I get actively disinterested when the story (inevitably) devolves into a discussion on human nature and greed and morality. After reading at least 10 different versions of this I feel the same about all of them.

Toriko - Mitsutoshi Shimabukuro

A wacky shounen about food. The scaling is ridiculous, but the world building is good and the characters are cool and the food genuinely looks good (esp at the beginning, but it becomes kind of too crazy at the end).

American Gods - Neil Gaiman

Just as good the… 5th time? Shadow is sooo boring but the rest of the characters are good and fun and I will literally always like modern and / or reimagined mythology.

First Person Singular - Haruki Murakami

I was baited because the first story was so good, but then the rest got progressively worse until the end where the stories were offensively bad both in content and theme. The first story really is so good though!!!! I love that kind of short story, nice, short, sweet, and a good satisfying ending to think about.

Your brain is made to think about difficult things. To help you get to a point where you understand something that you didn’t understand at first. And that becomes the cream of your life. The rest is boring and worthless. That was what the gray-haired old man told me. On a cloudy Sunday afternoon in late autumn, on top of a mountain in Kobe, as I clutched a small bouquet of red flowers. And even now, whenever something disturbing happens to me, I ponder again that special circle, and the boring and the worthless. And the unique cream that must be there, deep inside me.

Another good reason why my favorites bookshelf is called “cream”

The Secret Hour - Scott Westerfield

A YA book that I read when I was younger, about a group of kids born on the stroke of midnight that have access to a secret 25th hour, when monsters run free. The writing is honestly pretty bad, but I didn’t notice or mind when I was younger. The concept remains cool though, and I can see why I enjoyed it so much. The idea of a secret midnight hour is just appealing when you’re a kid at night having trouble sleeping, each of the secret midnighters with their own power, the number 13 having some special significance, Jessica’s big power reveal, all very enjoyable.

Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements
- Adrienne Maree Brown, Walidah Imarisha

I read this for book club. A collection of sci fi short stories focused on social justice movements. I enjoy and respect speculative sci fi greatly, and a lot of the stories were interesting and interesting illuminations of problems in our current society. A lot of them felt too “on the nose” though, and too closely tied to today, and I was hoping to also see more hopeful scifi w imaginations of the future. A lot of these writers are also not professional writers, and while they had great ideas I think some of the execution was a little rougher around the edges.

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet - Becky Chambers

I loved this book!!! A very light fun sci fi read about a tunneling crew on a spaceship (they punch holes through space time to make tunnels that people can travel faster through). Just like in heist movies, my favorite part about these types of stories is the crew. Each member has their role, their own backstory, and the way the crew interacts with each other is so much fun. All the characters and their culture / customs / differences are well thought out, and I enjoyed the story and learning more about each character a lot. Even when the plot slowed down a bit in the middle I felt like the strength of the characters and writing kept the book enjoyable.

Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations - Jonny Sun

After reading the book I liked Jonny a lot but the book less. I enjoyed a lot of what he was writing about and related to some of it, but it felt like a lot of his writing was very plain and I think lost a lot of its charm when stated instead of written, and oftentimes that extra explanatory sentence would spoil the vibe for me.

Territory of Light - Yuko Tsushima

A short meditation on finding and building yourself, centered on being a single mother in japan and accompanied with lots of different kinds of light. A lot of fear, confusion, and anxiety in the book, but also brief moments of beauty and intense affection and care. Not a lot of sentimentality or self pity, which I appreciate and admired and found more relatable and realistic. I have come to appreciate light and its many different qualities and forms over the years. Recently I was working late at the pottery studio late by myself, and when I left and locked up I walked out to an empty street with lots of fog and very bright, thick beams of light. It felt very surreal, seeing almost solid chunks of light with the fog. This happened very soon after I finished the book, so light was on my mind, and after that I think I appreciated Tsushimas descriptions of light more.

James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations - James Baldwin

I haven’t read a lot of James Baldwin before, and thought this would be a nice gentle place to start. These interviews were good, and I now really want to read more Baldwin, but mostly I read it because I was so drawn to this quote in one of the interviews (I saw it on twitter):

“But the so-called straight person is no safer than I am really. Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility. Loving of children, raising of children. The terrors homosexuals go through in this society would not be so great if the society itself did not go through so many terrors which it doesn’t want to admit. The discovery of one’s sexual preference doesn’t have to be a trauma. It’s a trauma because it’s such a traumatized society.”
“I think americans are terrified of feeling anything. and homophobia is simply an extreme example of the american terror that’s concerned with growing up. I never met a people more infantile in my life.”

Effective C++: 55 Specific Ways to Improve Your Programs and Designs - Scott Meyers

I read this book for book club at work… and it was a very good book… sadly I am at a part in my career where I not only benefit from but also appreciate these types of books. I really learned a lot from this book, and I really like having very specific examples to study and learn from. Some of the items (especially ch7, templates, and ch8, memory management) were difficult to fully wrap my head around, but all programming / tech books are really reference books and make more sense each time you have to go back and look at them. This book in particular I think will be good as I dig deeper into the engine and C++ next year, and I think regardless of background or interest, every programmer benefits from a strong understanding of C++.

Beelzebub - Ryuhei Tamura

I liked this manga years ago when I was reading it, but on my second reread it was actually better than I remembered. It is pretty silly, but it knows what it is and does it well, never taking itself too seriously. It remains a funny battle manga throughout and the arcs are nice and short and actually with some pretty cool fights.

The Stranger - Albert Camus

I read this because everytime I drive, when the sun is shining right into my eyes, or when I’m on a walk, and the sun is bright overhead and I have to squint, I think of Meursault on the beach and how a very bright, strong sun bleaches and insubstantiates reality. No comment on the book itself.

Crying in H Mart - Michelle Zauner

I am a big fan of Michelle Zauner; I had a big Fader poster of her in my living room for something like 3 years. I liked her New Yorker piece a lot, I like her music, and I like her, so I was excited for this book. I heard some people say how it wasn’t that well written so I had low expectations going in, but the book was no asterisk good. It was well structured, and she was funny and interesting and wrote clearly and thoughtfully about something obviously very personal and painful. I liked how it was not very much about her music, but rather about her family and herself and her relationship to her mom and her culture and how they connected through food.

笑傲江湖 - 金庸

Another 金庸武俠小說. It was good, like all of his books are, but this one was definitely not one of my favorites. His stories are always long and exciting, but in this one the ending felt very abrupt, especially the bits around 任我行 and 日月神教 felt rushed. I also didn’t like the main character very much. I really dislike in 金庸 books when the main character falls for someone that clearly doesn’t feel the same way, and he gets wrapped in a painful love triangle that is super drawn out and primarily motivated by the protagonist being an idiot. It’s just a cringe storyline and was also my least favorite thing in 倚天屠龍記 and in 天龍八部. I also always really enjoy the martial arts, and I like reading about the different characters and sects and the slow buildup to the main character getting strong, but it just didn’t feel quite as satisfying in this one, compared to say 倚天屠龍記 or 射雕英雄傳. It was especially disappointing because a lot of people say this is their favorite (I read a thread on ptt). I also found book 4 to be super transphobic, especially the twist & the description of one of the central martial arts manuals. I know it is a product of a different time and culture, but I still found it off putting and for me, with the bad ending, really soured the series overall for me.