What to Read at the Park
Surprise! It can be anything. Just keep a book in your bag at all times :)
Welcome to Amateur Bibliotherapy, my newsletter about book-y things. Use this Google Form at any time to tell me about what you’re reading—you might be featured here or on my Bookstagram! I’m an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which means that I may make a small commission if you make a purchase through my affiliate links. That commission will be donated to Welcome To Chinatown.
Happy Sunday. Pre-summer is upon us, which means everyone wants to spend time in the great outdoors. My Bookhampton tote is currently packed with Sun Bum, a picnic blanket, p/k/w, refreshments, and a book just in case I end up in a park for a while. And it honestly happens most days! So between bouts of inhumane humidity, I've been resting in the shade of park trees, chit chatting my days away, and checking out everyone else's tote bag game.
With that in mind, I've kept my book-y thoughts short this week so we can all get back outside.
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Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa describes the friendship between a down on his luck confectioner who makes subpar dorayaki all day and a mysterious old lady who helps him improve his cooking before her mysterious past comes to light. I thought this would be a fairly light read, but it's actually a pretty tragic depiction of isolation and loneliness in contemporary Japan. Though I wished the characters were more fleshed out, I enjoyed the detailed cooking descriptions that felt like a secret language that fostered an unlikely friendship.
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Luster by Raven Leilani is my first five-star book of the year. In short, it follows a Black twenty-something whose life spirals out of control after she starts dating a much older (and married) white guy. Leilani's chaotic prose and extreme specificity in describing the narrator's increasingly unhinged circumstances made this book a wild reading experience, to the point that I could really only read it first thing in the morning before the news cycle's heaviness could descend. Its exploration of unglamorous New York living, "navigating white self-consciousness," and sexual power dynamics at work(!) and elsewhere made it fascinating and brutal.
🏊♀️
The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka is really two books in one. The first part details the inane minutiae of an underground university pool and the people who swim there, told in the first-person-plural to evoke a communal meditation on "routine and identity." The second part examines the life of one swimmer, Alice, who has dementia. Overall, I thought it was a lovely reminder that "it is our perfectly ordinary proclivities that make us who we are," even when those proclivities are mundane.
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Normal People by Sally Rooney is, unfortunately, a very good book. Reading about the relationship between Connell and Marianne hit me right in the gut, even though my loyalties switched just about every chapter. The power dynamics! The second-hand embarrassment! The physicality! Ugh. There is absolutely nothing original I can say about this book, and that's fine. But if you want to psychoanalyze these two characters with me (particularly after I watch the show), my DMs are open.
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Book Lovers by Emily Henry is a delightful palate cleanser that also stands on its own as an actually enjoyable book. I appreciated its twist on the small-town romance trope—in which a city slicker falls in love with a small town resident by accident, and dumps their city-loving fiancé to live happily ever after in some rustic tiny locale—and the fact that it actually gave a city-loving couple a happy ending! It's "both a tribute to and takedown of this cultural form by a star of the summer beach read," as it's just the right amount of corny and silly and cute.
That's all for this evening. Consult this list of queer book recommendations from queer writers to celebrate Pride month in the meantime. Bye!