What To Read When The Blood Moon Rises Once Again
We’re talking Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom; apocalyptic smog; and books about art, grief, beauty, and butts.
Greetings from my desk, where I am enjoying takeout japchae and slathering myself with aftersun lotion. I’ve been traveling hither and yon, but wanted to send out a small hello because it’s been a little while.
before we get into it…
The building housing Yu & Me Books, New York’s first woman-owned Asian American bookstore, suffered a devastating fire on the fourth of July. Though their recovery GoFundMe met its $150k goal within 24 hours (by nearly double, at time of publication), you can still donate to help cover staff wages, replacement inventory and tech equipment, and other expenses as they bounce back.
alright, here we go
Weird vibes going on these days, am I right? The skyrocketed air pollution levels that have been choking New York cultivate major Rorchachian “End Is Nigh” energy, and warm weather only compounds that for me. It has not, in fact, been the best of times.
But on the bright side, I had another spell of excellent bites around town (Anton’s no-frills angel hair francese, Crown Shy’s sticky toffee pudding with green apple sorbet, and Agi’s Counter clams casino get special shoutouts); finished out the Young New Yorkers’ Chorus season with a gorgeous performance of the winning piece submitted for our Competition for Young Composers; whiled away the hours on the Promenade; pet a parakeet named Creme Brulee on a leash; celebrated 10 years of bookstagram buddy Chelsey living in New York; swayed and screamed to a brilliant Boygenius set at Forest Hills; pretended to read beside Candlewood Lake; saw, among a number of theater productions (gay Shucked! gay Dial M For Murder! iykyk!), the inimitable Fat Ham; made friends with Bridgehampton’s wildlife (feral kittens and a groundhog named Peaches share land with cottontail bunnies and skittish deer); and other shenanigans apart from playing 110+ hours of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
books i bought
In fairness to me, these books were mostly purchased in more interesting circumstances than usual. Books Are Magic hosted an off-site event to promote Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, who spoke with Peng Shepherd about writing processes, developing characters, and the wild French translation process for Babel. My ticket came with a copy of the book, which Kuang kindly personalized (see above). I bought a souvenir copy of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street after seeing Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford’s iconic performance from the last row of the theater. During a very humid trip to Sag Harbor Books, I couldn’t resist the pull of Brian Blomerth’s Bicycle Day, a psychedelic art book of sorts, and a hat with a hand-stitched whale on it. I was pleasantly surprised by the McNally Jackson Seaport location recently, which was hosting back-to-back author events; I rewarded myself for braving my nearby office with the purchase of Fruiting Bodies: Stories by Kathryn Harlan and Ex Wife by Ursula Parrott. Kayla kindly sponsored my purchase of Dyscalcula by Camonghne Felix from Books Are Magic on another humid day. And finally, I picked up second-hand copies of The Guest by Emma Cline and Venus and Aphrodite: A Biography of Desire by Bettany Hughes at Housing Works on Montague.
books i read
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Yellowface by R.F. Kuang (hardcover). Yellowface is the aptly-titled tale of a floundering white author who steals the brilliant manuscript of her dead Chinese American friend, edits it into a white savior narrative, and passes it off as her own work. I had a great time voraciously reading this one, which was a fast-paced and fervently-plotted interrogation of publishing industry racism and its corresponding ~DiScOuRsE~ on social media. Some reviews have called it a “publishing thriller,” though it’s not particularly illuminating about the industry itself (and I would argue it’s mostly a satire taken to a thrilling extreme). I think I feel most comfortable reiterating Kuang’s description of the book: Yellowface is an exercise in listening to someone tell a story about themselves that you know to be categorically false, though the narrator is clearly convinced otherwise.
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Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us by Rachel Aviv (audiobook via Libby; review TW for EDs). This book had an 18-week wait at the Brooklyn Public Library, which produced some high expectations. Rachel Aviv, a staff writer for The New Yorker, details the biographies of five individuals experiencing mental illness who “sit at the crossroads of alternative explanations for their pain,” alongside her own experiences. The text combines oral histories from friends and family members about each individual with the subject’s own diaries, alongside medical notes and interviews with doctors, to explain the nuances of medical institutions approaching mental health issues. Aviv, for instance, was diagnosed with anorexia at age six after learning about Yom Kippur’s observance of fasting as atonement. She was discharged after she lost interest in non-eating, and still wonders about the accuracy of her diagnosis. Her experience illustrates how “stories can clarify as well as distort the mental distress that a person is going through,” rather than offering closure for lived experiences. The other portraits in the book illuminate additional gray areas between individual experience and diagnosis. Aviv’s work speaks volumes about the complexities of social, medical, and personal explanations and interpretations of mental illness — and how “the stories that heal us and harm us can be damn near impossible to differentiate when we’re unwell” (Olivia and I have clearly been reading the same books lately).
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All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley (audiobook via Libby). After the death of his brother, Patrick Bringley quits his job at The New Yorker to become a security guard at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. This memoir traces his experiences at the museum by spotlighting his favorite works of art, his quirky coworkers, and the inner machinations of a job that is “equal parts dreamy, dull, and pragmatic.” I appreciated the behind-the-scenes look at the Met, even if it came through a bit of rose-tinted glass in light of the institution’s history, and the book’s poignant depiction of all-consuming grief.
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Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke (audiobook via Libby). Every time I saw this excellent peach-emoji’d cover on a bookstore’s shelf, I snapped a photo to remember it for later. It paid off when a coworker and I decided to start an unstructured book club of two, and I learned she really only liked to read nonfiction. I appreciated Butts: A Backstory for its candid discussion of a butt’s historical and contemporary role in society, including Heather Radke’s own musings on her body. Its key interrogation of why we’re so obsessed with butts is what hooked me, but Radke’s well-researched explanations of the intersection between evolving fashion sensibilities and racial politics made this a compelling read all the way through.
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Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital by Elise Hu (audiobook via Libby). NPR host-at-large Elise Hu dabbled with Korean beauty techniques and products after moving to Seoul to become the publication’s founding bureau chief. She swiftly learned that South Korea’s innovative makeup formulas, inexpensive access to plastic surgery, and cutting-edge drugs and injectables are all elements of a society that prizes beauty as a fundamental part of a “looks obsessed patriarchy,” all while very clearly living in a technological future that the rest of the world is hurtling toward. Hu’s book examines the “collectively understood ideal for women” in Korea following her experience of feeling “unwelcome in [her] own body” while pregnant and living in Seoul outside of that ideal. Through interviews with Korean women of all ages, CEOs of companies from one of the largest and most influential beauty markets in the world, and feminists challenging the nation’s norms, Hu investigates the pressures and ramifications of relentless body work for women in South Korea and around the world. It’s a great source of well-researched reporting blended with memoir, and I appreciated Hu’s nuanced approach.
Other books I read recently by the pool and beyond include Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos (my first 5-star book of the year), Hotel Splendide by Ludwig Bemelmans (a blast of hotel hierarchy shenanigans), Pure Colour by Sheila Heti (a strange and contemplative project, though I hear I would prefer the author’s earlier work), and Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford (brutally honest and heartbreaking). I also read advanced copies of Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands by Heather Fawcett and Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi Vo, which were both comforting and lovely sequels to series I already adore. I’ll plan to write about some of these in future newsletters, since this one is just about as long as Substack will allow. Bye!