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So nice to be back in the clay studio! Here’s the finished nuthatch urn ⚱️ 🐦 I’ve come to realize that I prefer hand building to throwing, so I’m back to hand building. //#bookstagram #igreads #bibliophile #shelfie #手作 #読書 #読者 #本 #撮影
Sour Heart was so good! Zhang’s prose is so beautiful and direct, but what I was most impressed by was how she presented the difficulties of being an adolescent Chinese American girl in tough socioeconomic positions. The girls through the stories grapple with identity in terms of how they fit into American society but, more often then not, the struggles they go through are based in trying to understand how they fit within their own familial networks; how disasporic life is so often about coming and going and coming and going and how painful it is to oscillate so much between strangers and families. I particularly loved that she focused on the perceptions of young girls and how, over time, they come to understand their parents better. It was such a good balance between depicting children as living in the moment, believing the world to be a certain way because their parents hide so much about them and showing how they learn more about the world as they age. Loved this book so very much. Next is the latest @graywolfpress galley club book: Machine by Susan Steinberg—two fiction titles in a row! // #bookstagram #igreads #読書 #撮影 #読者 #本 #diversereads #readtheworld #asianamericanlit #jennyzhang #sourheart
Current read: Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang. I’ve been meaning to get back into fiction again as the last few months have been exclusively focused on non-fiction. Also pictured: two dogs that seem to have taken me for their sofa. // #bookstagram #igreads #bookish #読者 #読書 #撮影 #本 #jennyzhang #sourheart
I almost didn’t post about this because there’s so much (well-deserved) talk around it and I doubt anything I say would be useful to another person. Madden’s writing is sublime; I absolutely love her work and will be watching her writing much more closely from now on because I can only imagine good things coming. However, this book hurts. It’s a good example of how experience differs so greatly for many of us even when these fall under the same umbrella. So much of the situations she described with her father felt so familiar in many ways, save one overarching thing: what it was like to be loved. It’s amazing the difference love can make for a child; I always say that if my father had shown one inkling of a sense that I was worth something, that there was a capacity for love, somethings (not everything, of course) would have been easier. Still, it is good to see stories like this to humanize those who struggle with addiction. Just because my own experience was the way it was does not mean people will never get better or be unable to love. They just sometimes do and sometimes there is no happy ending. I think this is a fantastic book and I wholly recommend it. // #bookstagram #igreads #読書 #撮影 #読者 #本 #diversereads #longlivethetribeoffatherlessgirls #tkiramadden
Finished Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City and it was a little up-and-down for me. I like her prose, I like the way she weaves in multiple threads into her work (art, film, biography, memoir) to discuss the ways different people produce something out of their isolation and loneliness. In terms of form, I thought it worked really well. However, Laing definitely has noticeable writing quirks that once you see, you cannot unsee. For one, she LOVES the “x-cum-y” construction (artist-cum-lover, actor-cum-muse, etc) and uses it often enough that it starts to feel cheap. She even writes that easy joke, when discussing an artist-cum-lover, “emphasis on the come” and, reader, I screamed in the apartment alone because I hate that type of cheap wordplay — especially when we’ve already had to suffer through so many similar constructions until she hammers that last nail in the coffin. I also felt that the memoir bits were less effective than the moments where she is focusing on another artists’ life and output. I know her experience in NYC and her experience of loneliness is central to the whole endeavor but there were times where she made connections between her experience and the experiences of these artists and they just didn’t feel equivalent or truly similar in the way I think she believed they are. Overall I really loved the sections focusing on the artists/artwork she thought through but there were moments I struggled to get through. // #bookstagram #bookish #igreads #instaread #igbooks #読書 #撮影 #読者 #本 #thelonelycity
On the little sheet they give you post-surgery they tell you to to avoid doing things like operating heavy machinery (obviously), driving, or signing legal documents 24 hours after you go under anesthesia. At first I was laughing about that, but here are three things I bought during that 24 hour period after the surgery 😂 In my defense, these were things I have been WANTING for a while and I guess the residual anesthesia overcame my impulse control enough to buy them. That black-on-black leopard print shirt definitely sparks intense joy; good job to post-anesthesia Julia’s shopping tastes. // #bookstagram #igreads #読書 #撮影 #読者 #本 #tkiramadden #longlivethetribeoffatherlessgirls #jennyzhang #sourheart #longlivepostanesthesiashopping
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Month: August 2018

Posted on:August 21, 2018August 21, 2018books non-fiction recommended readings

nicole chung: all you can ever know

The way we sometimes define identity formation feels a little more like myth than an account of what we have experienced in life and how it led us to who we are now. For instance, I think that the way we come to be is seen as a linear or progressive process where one stage […]

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