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…

★★★★★ 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.

★★☆☆☆ I am definitely too old for this book (which skews on the young end of middle grade) and found it pretty boring with no stakes or real character development.

★★★★☆ 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.

★★★★★ 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.

★★★★★ Poet Ocean Vuong's debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read.

★★☆☆☆ TLDR: If you’re into romantic tropes, historical fiction, plot spanning an entire lifetime, and epistolary writing, you might be into this. Do not expect much by way of Iranian history, realism, suspense, dialogue, or character development.

★★★★★ This is a book about time and history. Personal histories and national histories. Writing history and reading history. Experiencing history and experiencing time. Ultimately, the book makes a solid case against fixity in the narratization of time (whether personal or historical), and for the tender ephemerality of experiencing life here and now.

★★★★★ A phenomenally thought-provoking collection of essays, musings, and one or two more formalized reporting pieces on queerness and diasporic Asian identity.

★★★★★ So beautifully true to first gen Chinese immigrant experience. Many coincidental similarities to my life, but above all so wonderfully cerebrally chemically reflexive on what it is to be the child of Chinese immigrants, how it feels to navigate that relationship in adulthood and face the impossibility of their meteoric achievements.

★★★★★ It’s 2019 and I honestly forget sometimes that Mindy Kaling was one of the people who literally created The Office.