crying in h mart x michelle zauner

Genre: Memoir

Length: 📖239

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

One of the better things to have come out of the literary world in the 21st century is books on grief and loss that are not rooted in religion. The most obvious example is The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, or a recent addition from fiction, Joan is Okay by Weike Wang. Michelle Zauner (lead vocalist of Japanese Breakfast!) gives her offerings to the genre with Crying in H Mart. A book of goosebumps down arms and chills up the spine. I found myself audibly repeating “Wow.” chapter after chapter, lost in Zauner’s lyrical storytelling.

There were strong connections to David Chang’s memoir Eat the Peach, both exploring deep connection to culture and memories through food. It makes sense. Food is a full sensory experience; hearing the sounds of voices, prepping food, or silverware/chopsticks on dishes. The taste and smells, richness and saturation of the colors of food, and feeling the textures of food, the weight of knives, dishes, and the heat or chill of the food, refrigerator, and frying pan.

Different to The Year of Magical Thinking, Zauner is grieving a parent, her mother, and has time with her before she passes. This results in grieving in real time, and watching her mother’s illness take over.

“Neither one of had ever watched Law and Order or even knew who this actress was, but it was as if we were watching my future play out, the pain I’d keep with me for a lifetime.”

A tale as old as time, it is also about mother-daughter relationships, in all it’s forms and transformations.

“To be a loving mother was to be known for a service, but to be a lovely mother was to posses a charm all of your own.”

As much as it is about Zauner’s grief over her mother passing away from cancer, it is also about the realities of adulthood, a different kind of grief. One over the loss of childhood, the change in dynamic between parents and child, the confrontation of who you were as a child. It is about becoming yourself, finding your identity, and affirming identities split between two cultures. I would try to put the book down but kept going back for more, even though I know the story won’t end well. Even though there is only darkness and heartbreak ahead.

the wonder x emma donoghue

Genre: Historical Fiction Thriller

Length: 📖291

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I am attending a book club at the end of the month and this was February’s read. I have decided to save most of my reflections, but will share a brief review as I enjoyed this historical fiction thriller (new-to-me genre alert🚨)!

On the technical side, it was a little slower to get into but the suspense was nicely distributed with increasing intensity. I felt the ending was worth the buildup. The relationship and character development was also strong.

On the story side, it is based in the late 1850’s Ireland, recently post-potato famine and very Roman Catholic. I love theology, and how it influences a person’s ideation and reason, and in particular when considering Catholicism, the influence and prominence of guilt.

If you enjoy psychological thrillers, historical fiction, or theology, this could be a book for you.

Other notes; good use of the word ‘quack’, even though it uses an older style of English it is not difficult, there is a movie out on Netflix starring Florence Pugh

sharp x michelle dean

Genre: Biography

Length: 🎧12/📖384

Rating: ⭐⭐

Like any good feminist, I wanted to like a book identifying women who were ahead of their time, one that is intended to recognize women for their prowess despite systemic and social challenges. This was not that book.

A charcuterie board of white women, Sharp is a taster platter of 10 literary figures who defied men and are identified by Michelle Dean for their “sharpness.” (The writers are Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, and Janet Malcolm) If you like any of these writers, it could be worthwhile to read their section. For example, I love Joan Didion’s writing and appreciated Dean’s commentary on the much looked-over Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

I was surprised to find myself enjoying the chapter on Susan Sontag, revitalizing my internal debate over camp, surrealism, and avant-garde. Notes on Camp is an essay Sontag has gained renewed attention for as the 2019 Met Gala theme, and it’s connection to the way Gen-Z dresses as caricatures in the plethora of “cores” (i.e. cottagecore and gorpcore), so I was interested to learn that Sontag "came to dislike the essay.” I sense she would have also disliked this new attention to the piece.

Dean does discuss the sexism and antisemitism that the women writer’s faced, though it was obvious that she was not going to discuss the racism that results in a book covering 10 American writers to only include white women. Where is Maya Angelou? Toni Morrison? 10 is a nice marketable number, but 12 or 15 could be as well.

Sharp also lacked cohesion; some chapters cut off for the sake of smooth transition between writers. It’s a neat party trick, but becomes disrupting when chapters don’t ease into each other.

The book was very well researched and has information and discussion points that could pair well with a brunch amongst well-read persons. It’s just that personally, I don’t care for long-form debate about the film Citizen Kane.

family wealth x james h. hughes jr

Genre: Finance

Length: 📖226

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I don’t want to bore you all, so I will keep this brief. Family Wealth is structured around the proverb “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations” and how to best avoid it. The other major motif is based on an anecdote about cooper beech trees; “We have no time to waste.” I liked this book, and can tell that James E. Hughes Jr is an absolute nerd.

How do I know this?

His discussion of family structures is deeply rooted in philosophy and government organization theory (References include Enlightenment thinking, John Locke, Aristotle, Joseph Campbell, Johan Huizinga, and Homer) that on the surface it may seem pretentious, but his analysis really goes straight into smart-person territory. Hughes even relates the expansion of families over generations to theories on the universe’s expansion. Again, nerd alert.

the checklist manifesto x atul gawande

Genre: Non-Fiction

Length: 📖208

Rating: ⭐⭐

I am an active user of lists. My lists have lists. I am not totally sure why I read this book other than that it was recommended to me, I suppose I wondered if there was something I could be doing to improve the efficiency or benefits of my lists?

Mostly written through a medical perspective, (Gawande is a surgeon after all) The Checklist Manifesto is less manifesto and instead, a history of checklists used in various professional industries, from aerospace to ICUs to civil engineers.

To save you the time, I will share the most interesting thing I learned while reading this book. Boeing nearly went bankrupt in 1935 due to their Model 299, which was significantly more complex to fly than previous airplane models at the time. Instead of being disregarded after a failed flight test, a checklist was implemented to ensure pilots didn’t have to hold all the steps necessary for successful take off, in-flight, and landing in their working memories. This model would be a huge contribution to the air-bombing war initiative during WWII.

It was a fine book, but I guess I don’t really understand the point of it and don’t know why it needed to be this long. It wasn’t what I expected, and I felt the title (and recommendation) were misleading.

the panic years x nell frizzell

Genre: Memoir-ish

Length: 📖272

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I have a hard time calling this a memoir because it is more than that; not necessarily a Call to Action, but maybe a proposal or case study for a new definition and way of talking about the gap between young adulthood and menopause. Nell Frizzell suggests naming the years “Flux” as a separately, definable period of time between the twenties to forties when there is biological and social pressure to have a child, particularly for women. The Panic Years is Frizzell’s story of not being ready to be a mother, wanting to be a mother, and becoming a mother, mixed with related statistics to her real time experiences.

Much of the analytic and even scientific reporting by Frizzell reminded me of Dr. Shanna H. Swan’s Count Down, about declining sperm count and changes to male and female reproductive systems, which I read in April last year. Overall I have learned there is a lot of myth-busting to be done around fertility, for both men and women, and lots of very bad data and poorly interpreted statistics. It’s encouraging that there are more books coming out raising attention to the issue and I hope it leads to further funding for women’s and reproductive health research, because right now its embarrassing. End rant.

Frizzell does a great job drawing connections between deeply personal and raw emotions and factual reporting without loosing resonance or pacing in the book. At times, she consults other journalists or writers to find resolve around the question of even having a child. She addresses the effects of existing birth control methods, and the lack of any on the market for men. She looks into the social conditioning of expectations, mindsets, and responsibilities towards making and raising a child.

I was surprised how emotional I became in the final few chapters and have much respect for her vulnerability in writing so intelligently and in-depth on something so personal. I really enjoyed The Panic Years, anyone of any gender considering having a kid should consider it required reading.