Hello world,
August 2020 to October 2020, my only real goal every day was getting through my workday. My therapist specifically had me working on not caring how productive I was each day, so I can base my self-love and self-worth on something other than my productivity. I appreciate my therapist for the revolutionary challenge and change she sparked in me and my sense of self. It really helped connect me to a truer, more peaceful version of myself. Anyway, personal growth aside, I managed to keep reading a lot, but fell very behind on the book reviews. In late March 2020, I made the goal of writing a book review for every book I read throughout a year. In a desperate attempt to keep by my personal goal, here’s a round-up of 27 books I read that I didn’t get around to writing a complete blog post for.
Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas / Roberto Lovato / 2020
One of the most comprehensive books on the contemporary Salvadoran migrant experience ever written. I hope it becomes a classic in Central American and Latinx studies. It’s all here: 1932, the civil war, migration, understanding gang violence, and one man’s reflections and making sense of it all. It’s a book I wish I would have read when I was 13. Lovato is one of our fiercest and sharpest voices. With the swagger of a once-gang member, once-born again Christian, and once revolutionary, Lovato writes in searing, lucid prose. I recommend this book for anyone interested in Latinx and Latin American histories, international politics, memoir, war literature, or gang literature. 5/5
The Book of Delights / Ross Gay / 2019
Written during the Trump era, Ross writes blunt, poetic observations of his daily life, in an attempt to flesh out the delight. In doing so, Ross opens our senses to the wonder and deliciousness, sometimes quotidian, sometimes spectacular, always somehow ubiquitous. Listening to this book is one of the most healing things I’ve done and practiced in the past month. This is not a book without its share of sorrow and loss, but a practice in staying present in the moment and finding the stars in the darkness. I recommend this book to everyone, but especially think it provides a valuable contribution to Black studies, as it focuses on Black joy rather than Black suffering. 5/5
Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way / Lao Tzu, rendered by Ursula Le Guin / 2019
I first discovered the Tao Te Ching through a poetic rendition of it in my local library in 8th grade. It was about the same time I discovered The Gospel of Thomas and The Laughing Jesus: Religious Lies and Gnostic Wisdom, two books that rattled my sense of self and the world. At the time, it provided me with a larger sense of meaning and spirituality when my then-Mormon worldview began to fray at the edges.
When I saw that literary powerhouse Ursula Le Guin had a rendition, I got my hands on it immediately. I worked my way through this book in the mornings and re-discovered some of the hardest earned lessons of my life, elucidated in pocket-sized stanzas in a language clear as water. They served as important reminders in a world constantly trying to distract us and convince us of other urgencies and priorities. Le Guin’s rendition is by far my favorite. It includes helpful—not distracting or pedantic—footnotes that help you wrestle with the meaning of the text. The notes includes critiques, etymologies, competing translations, Le Guin’s own wrestlings with the difficult language and sometimes obscure meaning.
Many of the translations of the Tao te Ching lose its humor, its fluidity and its clarity, reveling instead in obscurity and literalism. Le Guin makes Lao Tzu feel human. I recommend this book to everyone, especially martial artists, philosophers, the religious, and anyone going through traumatic experiences. 5/5
Letters to a Young Brown Girl / Barbara Jane Reyes / 2020
I was first introduced to Barbara Jane Reyes through Soleil David during my MFA program. I am incredibly indebted to her as Reyes is—or at least should be—one of the most important voices in poetry land, especially when it comes to women of color. Written mostly in prose poetry, Letters to a Young Brown Girl reads with the clarity and down-to-earth-ness of Yesika Salgado and the blade of Natalie Diaz in my opinion, a great marriage of staple content and razor sharp form. Anyone looking for music recommendations will be grateful to see a series of poems inspired by songs important to Reyes coming of age. If you are trying to raise a young woman que no se deja, with as much metaphor as passion in her eyes, you want to pass along this book. If you are trying to raise a human who honors the grit and wisdom of the women in their lives, pass along this book. While aimed at a younger audience, it is not without maturity and wisdom. I recommend this book to anyone interested in Filipinx literature, Asian studies, YA literature, and contemporary poetry. 3/5
Summerlost / Allie Condie / 2016
I should begin this quick review by admitting, I was very resistant to liking this book. It’s about Cedar City, a place where I worked overtime almost every week, basically had zero friends, was suffocated by whiteness and conservativism, and where I was incredibly lonely. Condie’s attempts to portray the place in a wistful, poetic, and even beautiful light were not welcomed by me!
Condie’s middle-grade novel covers the story of a young biracial (white and Asian) girl who has recently lost her father and younger brother to a car accident. Written in short, micro-fiction sized chapters, the book moves along quickly while somehow still capturing the smell-the-roses pace and atmosphere of life in rural Utah. Grief, especially at such a young age, is difficult to capture. Yet here, with tenderness, Condie renders the healing of a young girl, who finds ways to treasure and remember those she has lost, while developing new relationships and memories to push her forward. I'm also heartened—and I should say it, impressed!—to see the inclusion of a biracial Asian American character without letting racial issues subsume the rest of the book. The protagonist is a fully developed character and not merely a microcosm of larger race issues.
I recommend this book for everyone, especially 1) children dealing with grief and death, 2) white people trying to learn how to write POC characters, 3) people who need an easy read that will nurture and warm them and won’t demand your work brain to be on without sacrificing craft. This is a book you can cozy up to after a difficult day. 5/5
Appropriation: A Provocation / Paisley Rekdal / 2021
Writing about cultural appropriation usually makes me wanna pull my hair out. Even when I agree with the authors of the think pieces and hot takes, it’s a hard thing to talk about without sounding like you are too woke, foaming at the mouth, the champions of so-called “cancel culture.” Here, Paisley steps into these troubled waters with the grace of a dolphin who knows choreographed swimming routines. She manages to talk about these thorny issues with a clear-eyed precision, compassion, and without become belaboring. The fear of offending someone and clumsily crossing a line haunts many contemporary writers, so it is especially apt and touching to see this collection of essays written to an imaginary student, wrestling with insecurities and difficult subject material, who is asking for advice. This book should be required in every creative writing curriculum, and it should have been required decades ago. It would have saved many a young writer from the grief of muddling through these complicated issues on their own. It would have saved quite a few from getting their work trampled for sloppy renditions of cultures they didn’t know enough about.
I recommend this book to every creator, writer, and artist. It should be a staple of ethnic studies. It should win a grammy too. 5/5
Hood Criaturas / féi hernandez / 2020
féi deserves a spot in poetry right next to Danez Smith and Christopher Soto. Nonbinary, undocumented, and 100% magical, their debut collection of poems has an explosive use of form from the guttural anger of the prose poems “dontcomeformyhood” and “Brunch” to the slick quatrains of “When They Leave, a Pantoum.” While the collection deals with the very real traumas of PTSD and migration, it also celebrates and fights for its joy in poems like “first real nations of nations”. féi has so much soul and punch. I am grateful to get to peer into their light. I recommend this book to anyone interested in undocu literature, LGBTQ+ literature, Latinx literature, “political” poetry and contemporary poetry. 4/5
American Grief in Four Stages / Sadie Hoagland / 2019
14 stories in 155 pages, each with their own seductive sadness. I found myself sinking deeper into my seat, lowering into the sofa breathing this one in deep. These are inglorioIus struggles: a military veteran half-heartedly attempting to kindle a romantic relationship, a teenager trying to make sense of the suicide of his bright and popular little brother. The only reason I’m not giving this five out of five is because a few stories didn’t jump as high as the others, including “Fucking Aztecs” which repeats unfortunate stereotypes about natives. I especially dug stories like "Dementia, 1692”, which takes us back to witch hunts in Puritan America with a glass melting rhythm and sorrow. I recommend this collection to anyone interested in short fiction. 3.5/5
The Beethoven Sequence / Gerald Elias / 2020
I didn’t finish this political thriller. I stopped on this passage and realized all my suspicions that The Beethoven Sequence was, in fact, a bad book, and not simply a book that I wasn’t really interested were true. I especially hated that this book used the really politically fraught story of a man falsely accused of sexual violence as a mere plot device. Here is the passage that made me finally give up on reading, admittedly a couple of hundred pages too late:
“I’ve got this Mr. Clean fantasy,” she says, kissing the top of his head. “I have this thing about bald men. Have I ever mentioned that?”
“Even bald sex offenders?”
“They’re the best kind.”
His hand is inside her bathrobe, and he stands up to make it easier for her to find his zipper. He hasn’t been with a woman since the nightmare started eleven years before. Before his wife left him. Before he spent nine lonely years in prison. He can’t wait any longer. He presses his mouth against hers and she presses back. He pins her on her back on the kitchen table. She tears at his jeans and underpants and grasps his penis, pulling it insider her. He unties her robe and squeezes her breasts, hard. Eyes closed and her head back, she supports herself on her elbows, wrapping her legs around Whitmore’s waist. Her right hand falls into Whitmore’s dinner plate. As he presses into her, she grabs a handful of potato salad and coleslaw and smears it over his face and stuffs it into his mouth. Covering his lips with hers, the two of them tongue the food back and forth from one mouth to the other.
“You like chicken?” she whispers as she licks his face.
“What kind of question is that?” he pants. “Yeah. I suppose.”
“Good. Me, too.”
Feeling behind her for the remains of a chicken drumstick, she clutches it and slowly slides it into and then out of his mouth, as far as it will go, both of them licking at it, sucking on it. She wraps an arm around his neck as he rides her, his body spasming out of control. His wraps his arms around her back, pulling her toward him. He wants it to go on forever, but it has been such a long time. He shudders as he empties himself into her. He sinks onto her chest, panting, laughing, and crying at the same time.
“House confinement has its rewards,” he says, when his breath returns.”
I don’t recommend this book. 0/5
Women Who Run With Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype / Clarissa Pinkola Estés / 1989 & Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men / James Sollis / 1994
I read Women Who Run With Wolves because it was recommended to me my many women of color in my life and even my therapist. I read Under Saturn’s Shadow, similarly, because men of color close to me found this title powerful. Both these books strengths are also their greatest weaknesses. Namely, they both essentialize and flatten men and women a tad bit too much to fit into the archetypes they are interested in. As someone whose gender identity and expression doesn’t fit neatly into femininity or masculinity, I struggled a lot to see myself in either book, although I felt pieces of both deep inside me. Women Who Run With Wolves is especially for women who have had to repress themselves under the pressure of racism and patriarchy. Under Saturn’s Shadow is especially for men with a lack of father figures in their lives. Both have deep poetic moments that will sweep you off your feet—it just might not be the norm. If you aren’t into Freudian and Jungian psychology, these probably aren’t for you. I give both 2.5/5.
Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Promise / Gene Luen Yang / 2012
I stepped into the Avatar comic series tentatively. I read them for free online, even watched a couple dubbed on YouTube. At the time, I was dreadfully depressed and needed something to just get me to the next day. So I binged, escaping into the world of Avatar. I was impressed by how good the comics are! It’s hard to keep the integrity of such a beloved and masteful series, but Gene Luen Yang pulls it off! Here tensions between Avatar Aang and Fire Lord Zuko emerge as Zuko begins to negotiate with the Earth Kingdom over colonized lands. The plot creates a powerful snapshot of some of the complex cultural mixing that happen during colonization and lived up to my hopes and dreams for the series. I recommend this to all youth and anyone interested in children’s literature. 5/5
Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Search / Gene Luen Yang / 2013
One of the greatest mysteries in the Avatar series is what happens to Zuko’s mom. This comic rewards fans’ patience and curiosity and doesn’t fail to deliver a powerful, coherent story, covering this important mystery in Avatar lore, doing a great job of capturing the struggles of women in oppressive marriages. I recommend this to all youth and anyone interested in children’s literature. 5/5
Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Rift / Gene Luen Yang / 2014
This comic is especially good for talking with children about the complications of modernization and the importance of environmental stewardship. Avatar Aang fails to create balance in this issue, prioritizing friendships over peace between humans and spirits. This is a fraught decision, and Yang handles it well. 4/5
Avatar: The Last Airbender: Smoke and Shadow / Gene Luen Yang / 2015
This comic rewards us with the return of our favorite villain Azula, and she is somehow even more mad, reckless, and bone-chilling. She goes to ghastly extremes to disrupt Zuko’s reign in this one. Zuko learns hard lessons about the dark side of power and the importance of freedom. 5/5
Avatar: The Last Airbender: North and South / Gene Luen Yang / 2016
This series is especially good for talking about intracultural colonization and conflict. Katara and Sokka have to navigate not only coming from a defeated culture whose knowledge has largely been destroyed by war, but also trying to figure out power dynamics with sister tribes with more power. It is a little heavy on the politicking in my opinion, but a decent contribution the Avatar world 3/5
The Legend of Korra: Turf Wars / Michael Dante DiMartino / 2017
Again, I was impressed by how they sustained the integrity and the feel of the TV series. So, I enjoyed and was annoyed by all the same aspects of the comics as I was of the TV series. That said, I deeply enjoyed the way the series navigated the Korra and Asami’s lesbian relationship, creating believable conflict in a supportive family. The new villain is a logical outcome of the spirit world intermingling with the human world. 3/5
The Legend of Korra: Ruins of Empire / Michael Dante DiMartino / 2019
Here, DiMartino tries to create a redemption arc for Kuvira and deals with election stealing. It may have been the less-than-graceful attempts to reconcile Kuvira’s crimes and create a transformed character. It may have been the fact I was reading this alongside endless news about the US election. But this one had me as dissatisfied with it as I was with the Kuvira arc. 2/5
Them: Why We Hate Each Other—and How to Heal / Ben Sasse / 2018
As I live in a red state, I follow conservative Reddit, am a registered Republican, and now read conservative books to try to understand how to best do cultural and social justice work in this state. Sasse is an interesting figure in the Republican party, voting to impeach Trump but otherwise your run-of-the-mill small-town Republican with a love of pickup trucks, fear of porn, and belief in small governments. I profoundly disagree with Sasse’s romanticization of US history. In one passage, for example, he strains, arguing that the US is exceptional for abolishing slavery, ignoring the fact that plenty of Latin American and European countries abolished slavery before us. Abolishing slavery is a low standard for “exceptional” behavior and even in the scheme of the rest of the world, we were mediocre at best. If you can get past the warped and idealized renditions of US history and tearful patriotism on occasion, you might feel the empathy Sasse has for people navigating the digital revolution and the love he has for community building. Sasse might get a little preachy about building an authentic meaningful work and family life and about avoiding the toxicities of social media, but the majority of Sasse’s observations are hard to disagree with. I recommend this book to anyone trying to understand contemporary US conservatism and contemporary American politics. 2/5
The Only Good Indians / Stephen Graham Jones / 2020
I fell in love with Stephen Graham Jones when I first read Mapping the Interior last February. Jones is literary without pretension, popular for his horror and fantasy that draws heavily on Native lore, social issues, and intergenerational trauma. In the first story, racism is just as threatening of a force as the fantasy monster, as he is chased by both bigoted white men and an elk-monster. In general, his characters are Native men at various levels of stuckness, trying and failing to gain a better grip on their social and economic circumstances. It’s absolutely chilling to see some of them descend into madness, narrated in a brilliantly eerie voice and turn. His characters speak like real people of color, swearing, throwing shade on white folk, and navigating fraught cultural heritages. I recommend this book to anyone interested in horror, fantasy, Native literature, and fiction. 4/5
Calvin and Hobbes: Volume 1 / Bill Watterson / 1987
My partner bought me this book for Christmas because I never really read Calvin and Hobbes much and the comic strip was an important part of her childhood and is a fundamental part of her humor. While these comics didn’t often make me laugh out loud, they are incredibly charming. I particularly enjoyed watching how the comics played with gender, sometimes even subverting some masculine expectations for a tickle. C&H is wholesome, pure playfulness is a world that seems to very interesting versions of that. 4/5
Homegoing / Yaa Gyasi / 2016
Following a well-worn path in Black literature, this novel covers the story of a family in a Ghanaian village, eventually torn apart by the slave trade. It alternates the perspectives of the family left behind in Ghana, as well as the part of the family that will become African American and carries us all the way to the present. I especially appreciated the African portions of the novel, as they traced less familiar terrain (to me), including 1) the story of family that did business in the slave trade and the conflict it created between relatives 2) the story of a queer son in Ghana, navigating African leadership and social pressures of the slave era, and 3) the story of a woman condemned for witchcraft and the death of her child. Deeply lyric and wounding, Gyasi’s writing is carefully carved, chiseled sharp and penetrating. I recommend this book to anyone interested in multiple perspectives in fiction, stories about intergenerational trauma, and Black literature. 4/5
My Woman Card is Anti-Native and Other Two Spirit Truths / Petrona Xemi Tapepechul / 2016
A transgender woman, language worker, actor, poet, playwright, model, and the Artistic Director of Angel Rose Artist Collective, Petrona Xemi Tapepechul is a beauty and joy we don’t deserve. She works with ANIS to preserve the Nawat language in Central America. This collection centers on identity development, especially in fraught politicized contexts. You can critique it for its bluntness, use of form, and the centering of its stanzas, but if you’re reading it for polished literary craft, you’re here for the wrong reasons. This is an enunciation of self, creating space in a world trying to kill you, and doing it with finesse. Xemi is a force. 3/5
Terroir: Love out of Place / Natasha Sajé / 2020
I should start this off by saying I am absolutely the worst person to review this book. Natasha Sajé has been my mentor, former professor, letter of recommend writer, and has—like any teacher—shaped me for better and worse. As a young slam poet, I troubled her office hours with my dreams of becoming a great writer, and she carefully, albeit brutally honestly, provided me with feedback, excellent opportunities, and a place to work out my relationship with writing. I got my feelings hurt a couple of times, some of which I blame on my own arrogance and naivete, and other times due to my own frustrations that Natasha was not the hip-hop-fluent, Spanish-speaking, Central American mentor I really wanted. Our relationship has evolved from one of student-teacher, to colleague-colleague in some ways. I would not be anywhere near where I am today without Natasha, and I’m indebted and grateful for her mentorship. Needless to say, however, our relationship is rich and complex.
As much as I got a small window into her academic presence and felt like I knew her, I knew extremely little about her life and what shaped her. My first year of grad school I read a short essay by Natasha online and was stunned to learn that Natasha was once married to a Black man and that he died tragically and that I likely first met her when she was in the throes of her mourning.
Terroir is an uncomfortable book for many reasons. It deals with the grief of losing her husband and her journey of growth as a white person on racial issues. There are some sticky moments, as when describing her father’s racism, Sajé writes out the N-word, among other slurs her father used. She describes people of color using the clichés of chocolate and food. And while I’m sure that there are a number of moments in the book that will make some people of color cringe, its value comes in Sajé’s willingness to be vulnerable and acknowledging her past mistakes. This is hard work, but as far as white people processing race issues goes, it’s a worthwhile effort.
My favorite parts of the book were the bits that described her queer coming-of-age and her lesbian marriage. Natasha did a great job capturing the beauty of her relationships, whether its with her late husband, current partner, or childhood caregiver. I recommend this book for anyone interested in reading up about relationships, memoirs, and white perspectives on racial issues. 2/5
Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in LA / Luis Rodriguez / 1993
A predecessor to Unforgetting above, Always Running tells the gritty tale of Luis Rodriguez’s turbulent coming-of-age, including the sex, drugs, gang life, and racism he experienced as a kid. It serves as a powerful map of his way out violent behavior, including the social and school programs that provided important outlets and space for Latinx youth to process issues important to their lives. Always Running includes a fiery argument in favor of ethnic studies courses in high school and the importance for youth of color to see themselves represented. Rodriguez highlights the young women who led his high school activism and the young girlfriends that were good influences on his life.
This book broke into my soul. It covers race riots, murders, drug addiction, the too often unacknowledged scars communities of color suffer generation after generation. It is a required read in LA county I heard, and it should be a required read everywhere in North America. 5/5
The Shadow of Kyoshi / F. C. Yee / 2020
Kyoshi’s conflict with Kuruk, her efforts to create effective change rather than petty vigilante justice, and her conflict with Yun create a tense path for her to follow. While I’m usually not a fan of the politic heavy aspects of certain Avatar storylines, Yee manages to make them interesting by portraying them through Kyoshi’s unique perspective as an orphan turned Avatar and her general clumsiness as Avatar. We get to share her frustration and confusion at the elaborate social rituals of the Fire nation for example. This book was the entertaining, adventurous, emotional read I was hoping for. I recommend it to anyone interested in Fantasy, Asian literature, LGBTQ+ relationships in literature, martial arts, and YA lit.
Disparates / Patrick Madden / 2020
in Disparates, Provo Writer Patrick Madden is purposefully frivolous, tacking in his essays tangential musings whose charm is found in their quirkiness, their dorkiness. This can be really tickling and clever if you are into the vibe, but in general they are the dad jokes of an erudite English professor. I recommend this to anyone interested in seeing the range of forms used in contemporary non-fiction essays. 2/5
Memorias from the Beltway / Mauricio Novoa / 2020
This is a hard-hitting poetry collection with lines that will dagger and snipe like a battle rapper. An heir to the styles of John Murillo and Quique Aviles, Mauricio Novoa reps DC Salvis well. With references to Romero and Roque, poems that are raps with an easygoing fluency in rhyme, this book is everything I love about poetry. Here, Novoa writes about his upbringing in the Beltway, rapping about basketball, police violence, poverty, yes, but also touching poems about his father’s tenderness on Novoa’s first day of school or “Muthafuckin’ Trees,” which is a city boy’s ode to nature. I’m especially grateful for this gift and look forward to tracing Novoa’s sure to be exciting literary career. I recommend this book to anyone interested in Salvi lit, Central American lit, Hip-hop, contemporary poetry, rhyme, and men of color. 5/5