I listened to this as an audiobook, narrated by the author herself, and remember I did in fact cry in a grocery store (not H Mart).

★★★☆☆ Unpleasant to read. Wong’s paints her recollections in lurid, sensational, and vindictive grotesqueness.

★★★★★ This book pre-dated and predicted the pandemic, manipulating the ruptures and revelations of a fictional plague event to comment on contemporary life and society. This book is set in my hometown of Vancouver and is deliciously local.

★★★★☆ Jia Tolentino is my absolute favourite cultural critic and essayist. She speaks to me and on topics I care about with such acerbic clarity and personality. My favourite essays from this collection…

This book is kind of a nesting doll of allegories and allegorical literature. The main character is a novelist who starts off writing a romance between a typing teacher and student that sharply turns in the middle of her writing into a magical realist horror.

★★★★★ TLDR: this is the best memoir I have ever read and you must read it, I cried in anger, in joy, in catharsis, I learned, I was moved, shocked, proud - Chanel Miller is a phenomenal writer and immensely talented, smart, sharp, emotionally mature person whose writings and experience on trauma and rape culture and justice you absolutely need to read.

★★★★★ I don’t give out many 5 stars and books like this are the reason why - it’s so resoundingly good that I couldn’t bear to lump it in with lesser books. So beautifully composed, toggling between post-apocalyptic survivalism and an urban capitalist grind.

★★☆☆☆ This is like a John Green novel but with less of a thesis and more annoyingly obvious it’s an oblivious man writing how he thinks young women think/feel/act.

★★☆☆☆ A book recounting a series of crimes and insidious acts committed by a middle-school teacher and her students against one another. Story begins with the apparent drowning of the teacher's four-year-old daughter, and each character gets their own POV section recounting what happened and what happened next in their perspective.

★★★★☆ So so good, it’s called Dear Girls to her daughters but for me it was like reading a letter from an Asian American big sister.

★★★★★ I’ve given every one of the ATLA graphic novels 5 stars but this one is probably my favorite. Made me cry in the subway. Too good.

★★★★★ JUST SO FUCKING GOOD IN EVERY WAY I’M SO FUCKIN SHOOKK MAN. Like there’s beautiful art, so wonderful and charming and concise and smartly designed panels for maximal fun storytelling and pay-off.

★★★★★ PURE MASTERY in storytelling through text and image, makes concepts of colonialism, industrialisation, sovereignty, geopolitics, and cultural heritage somehow SUPER accessible for kids

★★★★★ Three apparently unrelated tales come together with an unexpected twist, in a modern fable that is hilarious, poignant and action-packed. American Born Chinese is an amazing rise, all the way up to the astonishing climax--and confirms what a growing number of readers already know: Gene Yang is a major talent.

★★★★★ The Emperor of All Maladies is a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer - from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence.

★★★★★ Anne Anlin Chen is my hero. This book thinks through all my deeply personal/political but also academic/curatorial/editorial questions about race in America and proffers so many fertile morsels (some indubitably grotesque, some uneasily beautiful) through which to digest these questions.