Have you ever asked yourself:
- Is humanity doomed to repeat its mistakes, or does it have the real potential to change?
- How can we abide by the responsibilities we have to the people we love and to society, even if those appear to be at odds with each other?
- Is it possible to truly return home or find a refuge from suffering?
- Is human nature inherently selfish or generous? Predictable or surprising?
If so, give this mysterious novel of ideas a try.
"When the City Gets Old" is one of the most moving political poems I've read. I admire the way Lok Fung describes the ambiguous feelings that surface when witnessing historical change close to home and watching a place you love become a place you no longer know. Amid the political commentary are compelling interpersonal elements -- people say goodbye and try to process the changes together. A nice intro the to the translated literature of Hong Kong.
Yam Gong has mastered the art of being alone in the company of others. A kind of literary outsider for many years, he wrote during breaks as a maintenance worker at Kowloon Wharf. His whimsical poems observe passing street performers, bohemians, and rainstorms while vividly recalling a childhood in Hong Kong. He asks: What does it mean to move the immovable? I read this for the paradoxes it provokes in me: when I want to remember a city I've never been to, re-live what I have yet to experience. When I read it, I feel like I've lived a whole life but ultimately know nothing. I cherish that feeling.
Heirloom Kitchen: Heritage Recipes and Family Stories from the Tables of Immigrant Women (Hardcover)
Recipes passed down from generation to generation are not only some of our most prized -- they are our family heirlooms. Gass gathered these recipes from immigrant women who consider food to be the legacy they want to pass down to their children and grandchildren. (I'm shocked that so many of them shared their secrets.) This was the first cookbook I ever bought, and I regularly return to it. Nonna Gina's meatball recipe is the only one I use, and Soon Sun Kang Huh's galbi is a showstopper. I want to cook them all!
Have you ever moved to a new place? It can be scary to leave your home and meet so many new people! This book of poetry about a boy named Ba-Da who moves with his family to a new town can help. Big life changes aren't easy, but Kyunghee Kim's words remind us we have the bravery within to weather them.
T.S. Eliot said April is the cruelest month, and indeed that was revealed to me this past April when just getting up to do the dishes felt hard. I reread Carlina Duan's poem "Possible" from Alien Miss. I felt like I had inhaled a dose of helium and was lifted out of my chair. Things started to feel possible for me again. I love the exuberance and range of these poems, which showcase her skill of tapping into specific wells of memory and feeling like extracting syrup from a tree. And like someone with a naturally green thumb, she makes writing poetry look effortless.
There was once a tree that was so gnarled, crooked, and fruitless that a local carpenter declared it useless. Day by day, the tree stood while the cinnamon trees were stripped of their bark and the cherry trees were hacked down. The gnarled tree appeared in the carpenter's dream one night. "How have you lived for so long?" the carpenter asked. "It's simple," the tree replied. "Uselessness is my strategy!" So go one of the most famous stories in one of the most influential philosophical texts in the world. Required reading for anyone, especially if you're into religion and philosophy.
A group of friends at a banquet play a game of sorts: who has the best definition of love? Emboldened by wine, each friend gives a funny, fantastical, or earnest speech about what they believe love truly is. This was one of the first texts I read as a freshman in college, and it has stayed with me ever since. Not only is it a good introduction to Plato and his concept of the forms, but it has been influential on so much literature and philosophy that has followed it.
I first read this years ago when I discovered that I loved writing. I became enamored with Stephen Dedalus's classic story of breaking away from his Irish Catholic upbringing and the tumultuous politics of his day to cultivate an artistic voice. On the surface, our lives are very different, but in the most important way they harmonize: we both care about finding and representing something beautiful. The reader dreamily walks through his life as he tries to learn "what the heart is and what it feels."
I fell into this book right after graduation and feared it would take me years to finish. It only took a month. The pages just flew away. By the time I furiously flipped to the end, I felt like Tolstoy had shaken me by the shoulders and reminded me, through every deeply humanized character and beautiful metaphor, what it meant to live.
See also:
- Wait, was I supposed to be doing that this whole time?
- Why is friendship so hard?
- What is the least awkward way to host a party? To leave a party?
- Why am I sad all the time?
- Why is brunch so f**king expensive? It’s just EGGS.
- How long can beans last in the fridge??
Fellow kind-of adults: rejoice! We’re not alone!
An aging mother and her grown daughter reunite to journey across Japan in this novella that asks what it means to truly know someone -- especially a loved one who has begun to feel like a stranger. Why is it so hard to say what we feel to the people we love? Where in the world, or in a relationship, can we find the feeling that great art gives us? Au shows us that everything breathtaking about a sweeping, multigenerational saga can be equally accomplished in the quiet study of a single relationship. I don't say this lightly: this may be the best novella I've ever read.
You know that feeling when you're walking on the street and the light melts onto the pavement and buildings just so, transforming those familiar things into something you cherish? That's the effect Hayden's poetry has on the world around you. Born and raised in Detroit, he was once a UM student and professor and effectively became the first Black U.S. Poet Laureate. Most people only know "Those Winter Sundays," but there is so much more to fall in love with. Deeply philosophical, earnest, and mysterious, his poetry bathes my world in auroral light.
Every time I think I have a handle on human nature, my understanding is thwarted by the latest atrocity or random act of mercy. Good people suffer while cruel people are rewarded. A life driven by chance and chaos is the rule rather than the exception. And yet, I want it all to be clear. I want to be certain that there is meaning out there for me to discover. But when I urge the universe for an answer, I hear nothing. It's easy to spin this silence into nihilism, but this book proposes another path: the mind knows the world is meaningless, but the heart tugs us forward nonetheless. What happens when we follow the heart?
During the pandemic, I began The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien for the first time. My boyfriend and I read it out loud to each other (funny voices included), and it was one of the best reading experiences I've ever had. When we finally finished one night at 3 AM, I burst into tears. The next day I felt a surging, beautiful book-hangover. I haven't stopped asking myself: How can someone seek to do good, or anything worthwhile, without seeking power? "How do you pick up the threads of an old life?" This is an adventure story to fall into again and again.
Cha proved to me that the best books are those you may never fully understand. She presents us with a multi-genre classic that is incredibly moving despite (and maybe even because) of its incomprehensibility. Cathy Park Hong advised her students "to approach the book as if they're learning a new language." Intertwining the stories of the Greek muses, women martyrs, and Korean exiles and immigrants, Cha asks whether it is possible to transcend suffering -- and language itself -- in one of the most important works of American literature.
Imagine a history written like a fable. A drought-stricken Rwandan town encroached by Belgian missionaries must decide whether to ask the deities of their ancestors for help or assimilate and pray to the Christian God. A woman on a nearby hilltop who has been denounced as a pagan witch is one of the few who believe that they can conjure a legendary force to help them. But can she bring back the rain? Will her people defy the missionaries who seek to destroy their culture?
Is it possible to miss a city you've never visited? I've felt this way about Hong Kong for a long time and felt it especially after reading Wandering Hong Kong with Spirits by Liu Waitong. I'm impressed with his photographic eye, which manages to capture the city's constant state of construction and destruction. His poems range from political elegies for the city he once knew to imagist homages to Du Fu and W. H. Auden. I can't tell you how rare it is to find English translations of Hong Kong literature, which makes me treasure this book even more.
How do you leave a place better than you found it without destroying it, transforming it into something no longer recognizable?
The narrator, an artist and new mother, has just moved back to the rapidly gentrifying city where she grew up. She meditates on artistic creation, motherhood, and the destruction and recreation of entire neighborhoods. Above her bleak but beautiful cityscapes, the sky opens up to reveal a heavenly dream world of her memories. This book will feel real to anyone who has felt that a city has made them who they are.
Did you know that in 1977, over 100 protestors, many of whom were disabled, occupied a San Francisco federal office for nearly a month? They didn't leave until their right to an equitable and accessible country was enshrined in the law. It was the longest non-violent sit-in of a federal building in U.S. history. Read Heumann's story as one of the protest's leaders for a gripping first-person account of this oft-forgotten chapter of the civil rights movement.
Every now and then, on walks through the arboretum or while eating a sunlit breakfast, I'm reminded that I won't be able to keep any of this. Even the trees around me, which may outlast me, cannot live forever. I'm reminded of how little I know and how much life I still yearn to live. A certain kind of anxious joy emerges. Merwin captures these revelatory flashes in his final poems, which he dictated to his wife in near-total blindness. He reminds us that life is a gift that we must one day give back.
Have you ever asked yourself:
- Have I reached my full potential?
- How can I be happy in a world full of misery?
- How can I pickup a creative project or aspect of my life I have abandoned?
- Will I eventually be forgotten? Is it worth trying to be remembered?
If so, you must read this book, especially if you practice any kind of art. I read it over the course of many foggy Seattle mornings. Day by day, the clouds began to part and make way for a wide-open, silver sky.
"yes! radiant lyre speak to me
become a voice"
Dive into the dream-like writing of an ancient Greek poet who has lasted the test of time. Read about longing for past lovers, violets & hyacinths, "altars smoking with frankincense," and burning requests to the gods for living (and loving) to be a little easier. Not only is this one of the earliest texts we have of lesbian attraction, this translation by classicist Anne Carson is beautifully rendered with copious notes.
Like a fool, I totally slept on Bishop’s incredible oeuvre. Now, I turn to her poetry in the hope of writing one truly great poem. She is a poet’s poet – an illuminating force whose masterful use of form has so much to teach beginners and longtime poets alike. Don’t be afraid to read poems that elude understanding – that’s part of what makes her so great. And I dare you to find someone who writes a better sestina. Start with “One Art” and “The Fish,” and as you read, you may feel moved to write down a memory.
When Kalanithi was diagnosed with lung cancer early in his career as a neurosurgeon, he set out to write a memoir in the last months of his life. Not only is this the story of his battle with terminal illness, it also recounts his coming of age as a doctor -- how he fell in love with the scorpions and landscapes of Arizona as a child, discovered his twin loves of literature and biology at Stanford, and had a child with the love of his life, who wrote the final chapter after his death. I wish we had more of his thoughtful words.
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live." So go the famous first words of Joan Didion's epic essay collection The White Album. What happens when the narratives of our lives are no longer intelligible or even cease to exist? She exposes the illusions of American life in the '60s and raises questions that left me thinking for a long time afterward. Does history have winners or losers? Can humanity change in any meaningful way? And if we lose faith in society, what's left to believe in? Many aspire to capture their generation, and Didion is one of the few who have done it so well, we can't see it without her.
The best artist you've never heard of. Asawa spent her adolescent and teenage years in a Japanese internment camp, where she learned to draw from the Disney animators who were detained with her. She asked herself: how far can a line go? She began "drawing" in the air with wire, and the rest is history. Though highly regarded by critics, she has yet to become a household name, which I hope changes. In her husband's words, her art gives me the feeling that "all is possible."
This graphic memoir is a collection of conversations about race that Jacob has had throughout her life, and it is framed by an ongoing conversation with her young, biracial son about what it means to be Indian American. Rather than simply instructing her son, they speak honestly about their fears, mistakes, and hopes about living in this country. I have never seen someone weave photography with digital drawings before, which expanded my understanding of what a graphic story can look like.
In a slim book, Scarry ambitiously tackles what it feels like to encounter something beautiful -- a person, a garden, a work of art -- and makes a case for why we need to put beauty at the forefront of our lives. Reading her elegant prose feels like taking a walk with Matisse, Plato, Homer, and Simone Weil, among others, as they reveal the questions that a lifetime of thinking have brought them to. Perfect for anyone who thinks regularly about what it means to live a good life.
My favorite book from 2021. It destroyed me in the best way. Zauner uses the mouthwatering Korean food she grew up with to tell the story of her coming-of-age as a musician and her mother's battle with cancer with unflinching honesty. How do you pursue your dreams when the most important person in your life disapproves? How do you deal with losing a parent? How do you go on? This is a book to read when you miss your mom or one you might want to share with her.
A titan of Asian American poetry. I first discovered his writing in high school with the poem "Persimmons" (pg. 17) and fell in love immediately -- in his words: "some things never leave a person." I was a young Chinese American girl looking for my poetic heroes, and here I had finally found one. Here is somene who finds meaning in the search for wisdom, even when it's unfruitful, and clarity even in suffering. Here's someone asking earnest questions about love, nature, and mortality. I hope his words give you as much as they've given me.
Candace Chen works at an unfulfilling job in a publishing company in New York City selling gemstone-encrusted Bibles. She dreams of joining the glamorous higher-ups but doesn't quite fit in; she dreams of a future with her boyfriend, but their relationship is falling apart. Suddenly "Shen Fever" sweeps the world, causing the infected to repeat their daily motions in a fevered daze. (Eerily enough, this was written pre-Covid-19.) Candace watches the world collapse around her cubicle until she's the only one left -- and then she must escape. A capitalist critique, bildungsroman, thriller, and immigration story all at once -- I couldn't put it down!
There is a reason this book was sold out for months. I was overjoyed when I found out that someone had finally written recipes for the pastries and dim sum I grew up eating in NYC's Chinatown. If you've never had a bite of pillowy milk bread, this is your cue to make some, stat. These recipes are well-tested and delicious, perfectly embodying the style of Cantonese baking: sweet but not TOO sweet. Left me missing home.
I made his recipe for superior stock and it was absolutely divine. In this well-researched cookbook, Lopez-Alt has a lot to teach any cook, from those who have never cooked with a wok to people like me who can't imagine a kitchen without one. His focus on technique will make you a better cook, guaranteed. 加油!
Abstraction gets at the heart of making art. This tome's ambitious scope covers many of the most well-known artists like O'Keeffe and Frankenthaler but also highlights lesser-known artists from around the world like Wook-Kyung Choi, Vanessa Bell, and Zilia Sánchez. The common thread is that they dedicated their lives to their craft. This book changed my life and made me want to make my mark on the world.