aweekinthelife's reviews
485 reviews

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

challenging reflective medium-paced

4.75

a memoir of Coate's journeys to Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine. a writer's reflection on writing (reminds me of Chee's How to Write an Autobiographical Novel essays).

worked well on audio. 

Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant by Curtis Chin

emotional funny reflective fast-paced

4.5

a very enjoyable memoir about growing up gay and Chinese in Detroit in the 80s to parents who own a Chinese restaurant downtown. the book was surprisingly funny and written in a way that seems approachable for both adult + young adult audiences, especially since the memoir spans from birth to moving to NYC after graduating from college. 

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

adventurous reflective medium-paced

4.5

reminds me a bit of Braiding Sweetgrass, also ties well as a read after Smoke and Ashes. 

appreciate the nuance and realism - instead of looking to make everything pristine or new, the author explores how even "pristine" isn't always something real and how the world we live in, the people and environment (and mushrooms!) shape our views of the world. 

would re-read in a different format. (initially listened on audio).

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez

informative medium-paced

4.0

interesting statistics, mostly well presented (but very gender essentialist). the book highlights importance of paying attention to how using default humans can cause issues in health, economy, product design, etc. but i personally found then the heavy emphasis on "average" woman vs. "average" man to be just one step forward but still limiting. 

does beg the question, now that all of this information has been compiled and presented... what next?

Peach Blossom Spring by Melissa Fu

emotional sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

a little slow to start but then i got pulled into the story, especially the relationship between Meilin and Renshu. at times heart-wrenching in a very real way (loss of family in war, estrangement and separation due to resources and borders). 

wish Renshu/Henry would've been more open to sharing his life with his wife and daughter but the story also helped me to understand why some families lose information about their cultural heritage between generations

memorable quote:

In all these years of building his English, his Chinese has leaked away. There are phrases he no longer utters, syllables his tongue no longer pronounces, entire lexicons he no longer speaks. A language may be infinite, but a person is not. Henry cannot hold on to every word, thought, idea, memory. He would be so full that he wouldn't be able to move. 

Pet by Akwaeke Emezi

adventurous mysterious reflective fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

this was an artful exploration into what happens when a society claims there is no evil and then is not able to confront or recognize anything bad within their midst. Jam is a wonderful main character who is curious, has a desire to see justice, and also just a teenager navigating right and wrong with an unexpected companion from another world, Pet.

check the content warnings before picking up. the topics aren’t central or explicit, but still part of the story.

---

Content Warnings

Graphic: Child abuse and Violence

Moderate: Blood

Minor: Vomit

Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration by Alejandra Oliva

informative reflective medium-paced

4.75

appreciate this one for the discussions about language/translation, faith, and how it ties into everything else. may have been slightly better for me in print as there are untranslated spanish pieces and on audio, i just let the spanish pass me by but in print i'd be able to figure out what was being said/use translation on the written text better. 
pairs well with Everyone Who is Gone is Here.

Accordion Eulogies: A Memoir of Music, Migration, and Mexico by Noé Álvarez

emotional medium-paced

3.75

not sure why this one didn't resonate with me as much as other memoirs but still appreciated the author's journey to learn more about his family story.  

A Woman of Pleasure by Kiyoko Murata

emotional tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

i appreciated Aoi Ichi's perspective as a young girl from an outer island (diving family of Japan, like the divers highlighted in The Sea of Women by Lisa See). appreciated the teacher, Tetsuko's perspectives and that the women show remarkable courage in their collective action.

Smoke and Ashes: A Writer's Journey through Opium's Hidden Histories by Amitav Ghosh

challenging informative medium-paced

4.75

i often think of globalization as a more modern phenomenon but books and histories like this remind me how interconnected we (humans) all are and how historical events have shaped how the world is today. 

this isn't a strictly chronological recounting of historical events and the author makes comments about the novel series that sparked this book (personally, i thought it was good advertisement - i am now interested in checking out the novels). there's new england tidbits that i had no idea about despite having lived there for years. 

 

also overviews societal view on opioids and a history of judging addiction as a moral failure that non-white races are more suspect to and calling out colonial powers (mostly england + us but also others) as "colonial narco states". 

i don't usually take notes listening to books on audio but there were some points that were so good i went through the effort of constant rewind for transcription

1:45 

this is indeed one of the most astonishing aspects of the west’s involvement of opium in Asia. not only did the western colonizers succeed in using opium to extract incalculable wealth from Asia, they were successful also, in obscuring their own role in the trade by claiming it had existed from time immemorial because non white people were by nature prone to addiction and depravity 

 2:47 

It is in this sense that the opium trade was seen as a necessary evil, in that it provided the British empire with the funds that it needed to go about the business of converting its subject people to the worship of progress 

6:00

the staggering reality is that many of the cities that are pillars of the modern globalized economy: Mumbai Singapore Hong Kong Shanghai were initially sustained by opium. In other words, it wasn’t free trade or the autonomous laws of the market that lay the foundations of the globalized economy. It was a monopolistic trade of a drug, produced under colonial auspices by poor Asian farmers. A substance that creates addiction, the very negation of freedom. This as X [author name that i missed] notes is the fundamental paradox of the colonial system itself. A ruling power that took much pride in its laws and system of justice was dependent on an illegal and virtually totalitarian system of social control to maintain its tactics 

7:35 

what was truly different then was that it was not considered untoward for white men to inflict incalculable harm to other people, especially if it was done in faraway places. in a country where native americans were being dispossessed and slain en masse and millions of enslaved black people were toiling on plantations, selling opium to the distant chinese probably did not appear particularly reprehensible.