Strange Pictures

Uketsu

This one's cover pulled me over to it at the bookstore. I'd never heard of Uketsu before, which kinda surprises me because I love creepy internet things. I guess Uketsu's whole thing is horror + mystery, and I was so invested in the story that unfolded over the course of this book that I read it in 3 hours. Could not put it down! Per the name, there are a few illustrations throughout this book that get analyzed and they all relate to the big mystery at hand. I loved feeling the dread and anxiety that was building in me as I read on. And, I was actually surprised at how it all turned out in the end!

There are a few gruesome/upsetting moments in here, but it wasn't too much for me and I'd say my threshold for gore is low.

this book gets 4 out of 5 candies // 🍬🍬🍬🍬

There There

Tommy Orange

It took me a while to get through this one because it made me pretty emotional. I had to take breaks from it.

⠀

This book is about Native American lives, 12 different characters who all end up being intertwined by the end. It touches on a lot of things like trauma and survival, and identity and being caught between what you are supposed to be and what you are…and honestly this book really tore me up and I had to take breaks because I would just get really sad. It really hurt to read sometimes, but I also felt like that's why I wanted to finish it and why I think it was an amazing book.

The whole thing doesn’t revolve around mixed-race identity specifically, it’s only one part of some of the character’s Native experience, but that’s where I found myself most drawn to because I’m white and part Native Hawaiian. “Just” a “quarter”. Blood quantum stuff comes up in the book at one point, and that’s a painful and complicated thing for many mixed folks. It gets confusing. Growing up with my white mom and my brown dad, I know what it feels like to be confused about race.

Some memories of mine:

One time when I was in elementary school, I wore a plastic grass skirt and lei to do a report on Hawaii, and some kids tore pieces of it off and made fun of me. I remember crying my eyes out in the guidance counselor's office cause I couldn’t understand why they did that. Some white kids would ask if my "daddy was a Mexican" like it was a bad thing to be Mexican somehow, bc my hometown was and probably still is in some ways, pretty backwards and shitty like that.

When I got older, people often asked me “what are you?”. Creepy men would ask me what I was and then spew the word “exotic” at me. I remember one telling me I looked “oriental” and how he wanted an oriental wife. Once there someone who would lift up their hand and say "How" at me in high school, like a certain stereotype of a Native American. Someone else wanted to cast me as a Chinese character in their student film...why? Because my hair was dyed black at the time, maybe? I really don't know. One boy told me he could tell I wasn't fully white because of my nose. Someone else told me it was because of my eyes.

And yet there's also always been others who say I look totally, completely white and they'd never guess I was mixed at all. My skin is light but I tan dark if I let myself, which I do not because I love being on my computer more than frying in the sun, plus it's bad for your skin to try to tan anyway, isn’t it??

And I never know wtf anyone is talking about cause I’m really not sure what I see in the mirror, tbh. How am I supposed to know what my nose or my eyes look like to someone else?

Anyway, last year I went to Oahu with my partner and it was a dream of mine since I was little. I was always hoping to feel something there, though I still can’t articulate what exactly I wanted to feel.

I visited my grandfather's old neighborhood, which looks nothin like what he knew before leaving to escape pineapple plantation labor and join the army which is ultimately how I ended up being alive and from New Jersey, you know. I looked for my great-grandmother’s grave only to find out it was unmarked, which made me so miserable but I appreciated that the kind woman working at the office there knew where she was buried, at least. I remember feeling a little bit happy that she said my last name the correct way without me having to explain it.

And while I was having fun being with my partner and enjoying the beauty of the place all around me, I simultaneously felt like…a slight feeling of emptiness. Maybe that’s because Honolulu is just a city like Philadelphia is a just a city, and I might have been naive to expect that some magical feeling of “Hey, you’re Hawaiian enough to say that you are Hawaiian” would wash over me the second my feet touched the sand.

I will say though, while we were hiking in Makiki Valley it rained really softly on us and I think I did feel the elusive something, there. I don’t love rain but I really loved that rain. It felt like mist hugging you, more than just rain. And it felt welcoming somehow. I can’t explain it that well. It made me cry in a good way. But anyway, I’m getting to talking about the book, I promise.

SO…reading about blood quantums and the experiences of the few mixed characters in There There brought all this back up to the surface. There’s a line in here that hit me really hard:

"as for your whiteness, there's too much and not enough there to know what to do with. You're from a people who took and took and took and took. And from a people taken. You were both and neither. When you took baths, you'd stare at your brown arms against your white legs in the water and wonder what they were doing together on the same body, in the same bathtub."

That fucked me up. But you know, there’s a lot in this book that will fuck you up if you have a heart. Besides the identity stuff, there’s also the poverty many of the characters are facing (which you know, there’s reasons those two things can be linked.) The desperation of having to survive, and maybe you don’t even have time to think hard about what you are and who you’re supposed to be because you have the big problem of just getting by to deal with.

And that also deeply resonated with me. I’m not gonna write about all that here too, because my "review" of this book has already turned into a personal essay somehow lol. But then again, this isn't really a place for me to give proper reviews I guess...it's more about what books I read make me feel, and this one made me feel a LOT!

I’m glad I read this. I think everyone should give it a chance, but be warned that there’s a lot of heavy stuff going on. I was saying to my friend who lent it to me that I think sometimes it is ok for me to be triggered by things because it helps me feel less alone about certain stuff I’ve been through. I found myself wishing things could be better for the characters in the book, and I wish things could be better for real.

this book gets 5 out of 5 candies // 🍬🍬🍬🍬🍬

Paradise Logic

Sophie Kemp

I LOVED THIS - just gonna put exactly what I texted the Book Club group chat I'm in:

this book gets 5 out of 5 candies // 🍬🍬🍬🍬🍬

The Three-Body Problem

Liu Cixin

My partner got me this for my birthday! It took me a while to get through. The parts of the story that took place during the Chinese Cultural Revolution were interesting, I also really liked the sections that took place in a virtual reality world. It takes quite a while imo to get to the "Big Reveal" and once we're there, I feel like it picks up the pace significantly.

One thing I will say is that I feel like our main character Wang isn't super fleshed out here, he's less interesting than some of the others like the cop Da Shi or the astrophysicist Ye Wenjie. I don't wanna spoil anything, so I'll just say I think it is a very thought-provoking premise and I enjoyed a lot of the physics stuff (even if I didn't totally understand all of it and had to look up what a proton was again.) - and it did leave me wondering, what would I have done in if I were in Ye's shoes?

this book gets 3 out of 5 candies // 🍬🍬🍬

Mood Machine

Liz Pelly

Liz Pelly's got a ton of good ideas in here. I particularly was interested in some of the ways she outlined how DIY music communities could work together to find solutions to help us deal with the issues that the streaming empire has caused. This book makes me think - what makes a music scene a scene?? Have each other's back, to start!!

this book gets 5 out of 5 candies // 🍬🍬🍬🍬🍬

10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

Jaron Lanier

My partner found this on the FREE table at their job. I'd already deleted my socials by then, but I'm interested in this topic. Plus, it is short. I found the author's tone a lil annoying but I appreciated his conviction, and it seems he was heavily involved in the Silicon Valley scene so I guess he knows a thing or two about the wicked world of tech monopolies.

I was soooo tired of the acronym BUMMER '(Behaviors of Users Modified and Made into an Empire for Rent)' that appeared hundreds of times throughout the book but, you know, I get it. Preaching to the choir here, anyway. It may be worth picking up if you're a little on the fence about social media. Even if it doesn't change your mind, there's some stuff in here worth considering!

this book gets 3 out of 5 candies // 🍬🍬🍬

Filterworld

Kyle Chayka

I really appreciated this for making me think more about the media I consume. Human curation and curiosity can lead you to interesting ideas...the fun of just picking something up randomly because the cover looks interesting (which is how I almost always choose a book at a bookstore or library these days) is worth chasing imo. Algorithms presenting stuff in an endless scroll are not as random as IRL, and that's p boring. It's too contained. It's too on the phone or whatever. I want to go outside and find stuff and have stuff find me.

Kyle brings up boring but safe coffee shops a lot. Safe meaning like, you know the coffee will be acceptable. Also, it inspired me to delete Spotify for good.

this book gets 4 out of 5 candies // 🍬🍬🍬🍬