PicoBlog

My last days in New York were lazily spent: people-watching at my favorite neighborhood cafe, taking long walks during golden hour, reading and writing and talking for hours with friends.

Leaving was bittersweet, but coming home was perfect. I always love the feeling of coming home after a long time away. While travel invites us to romanticize life elsewhere, returning to your own life feels like slipping on your favorite pair of pajamas. And oh my god, did I miss sleeping in my own bed! (Though I shall certainly miss having a fire escape right outside my window, and feeling like the main character in a romcom.)

As one might on lazy days at the local cafe and a cross-country flight, I read a lot this week. Also, I bought a bunch of books and could barely zip my suitcase…but it was not overweight. So, I bought the exact right number of books. That’s what that means, right?

I read…

• the most perfect encapsulation of a New York City summer in a novel, Happy Hour follows two best friends scraping by in the city by sheer force of charisma, connections, and odd jobs. It reminds me of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, except instead of being sad and disillusioned about partying and staying out all night, this book is about enjoyment and glamour for no other reason than because it’s fun, and there is something quite radical about that in a culture that elevates work and ambition above all else. Amid the Party Girl vignettes, the book also explores race and class in a way that’s never forced, yet incisive in its subtlety.

  ALSO, I want to wear every outfit described in this novel. It’s so rare to read a book where the author can articulate good, enduring style!

• R. F. Kuang’s latest, Yellowface, about a white author who plagiarizes an Asian author’s manuscript. This was propulsively readable; I finished in two days. The entire time my jaw just kept dropping further and further, because the main character is truly delulu!

  It was a funny and scathing satire of the publishing world, white entitlement, and cancel culture, but ultimately I did feel that there wasn’t enough of a character arc to make this a great novel. IMO, it’s a book that could have achieved the same effect as a short story or novella.

• a dragon rider smut book that went viral on BookTok, lol. Because I’ve seen both extremes of the hype cycle, from the first glowing reviews to the later jaded critiques of readers who went into it having only seen said glowing reviews, my expectations were tempered. It is neither as good nor as bad as people have said. But I genuinely had a lot of fun reading it, even if I have my critiques (just don’t do the audiobook…trust me on this one).

  
  This fictional universe for me has the potential to become the next Twilight, with two kinds of fans: people who unapologetically love it, and people who love to hate on it (but also love it). It has all the makings: clunky but robust enough worldbuilding to spark both earnest and ironic discussion, plus toxic monogamy and masculinity masquerading as love…but it also has casually queer and BIPOC-coded characters, a female main character who is equally if not more powerful than her male love interest, more appropriate ages (he is not a hundred years old, thank god), and disability representation in the main character.

  Like Stephanie Meyer, the author, Rebecca Yarros, is Mormon, which certainly contextualized a number of things in the text for me. But unlike Twilight, this book is less sexually repressed. Make of that what you will.

  Anyway, this is basically what happens in the book:

I bought…

• seven (7) used books from my now favorite bookstore in New York, Unnameable Books in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. Everything there is priced so reasonably! $8 for an almost new hardcover??? I don’t know how I’ll buy full-priced books ever again.

  • 3 of the Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, Autumn, Spring, and Summer (just missing Winter)

  • Real Life by Brandon Taylor: his books have been on my TBR for ages!

  • Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri: another one on my TBR

  • Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au: I saw this in London when I was there and have been wanting to read it since

  • The Secret Talker by Geling Yan: I want to read more translated Chinese contemporary writers!

Okay, time to read all the books I already have because now I have seven more lol. Until next week!

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