Archive | January 2025

Yellowface

Jan22

This book has been everywhere lately and I’ve seen lots of good reviews but it’s contemporary literary fiction which is not usually my kind of thing so I didn’t pick it up. When a friend recommended it and offered to lend it to me, I decided I would. Never turn down a free book!

Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang is the story of how a white author, June, steals a manuscript from her very successful Asian-American author friend Athena – on the night the friend dies. She takes a first draft of Athena’s next book and develops it and then it gets picked up by her publishers. It’s a success, much more so than her previous books. The publishers editing team supports her with the rewrites. I quite enjoyed the portrayal of how the edits suggested by the editor made the text more problematic – nuance and complexity being removed, foregrounding of white saviour characters – and how June is oblivious to the impact on the story. She’s more concerned with not being found out and being a ‘good’ author.

I also enjoyed the portrayal of the internet storm in a tea cup that develops around claims that June is claiming to be Asian when she’s not, through an ambiguous name change and author photo, and has plagiarized someone else’s work. It fizzles out and doesn’t matter much in the end, by June is thrown into depths of paranoia and guilt. But clueless and unself-aware as she is, June plows on and does it again. Under pressure to produce another book, June rifles through Athena’s notebooks and picks a short paragraph to flesh out into a novel. Unluckily for her, Athena developed this paragraph in writing workshop and the tutor remembers. June is also being haunted online by someone using Athena’s social media account, which adds a pleasing touch of mystery.

I liked it a lot. Enough to buy another of Rebecca Kuang’s books. It is perhaps not as deep and rigorous a critique of the publishing industry as it could be, and is not that literary after all (probably why I liked it), and belongs in that ‘trashy’ novel phase I’m having. It was a fun, easy read which was well-written and thought-provoking in places.

There is an interesting review of the book by @withCindy which I watched. It pulls out the complete lack of analysis around wealth and privilege that impacts success for all people that could have made this book more hard-hitting. I think the review is really on-point and worth watching. Yellowface is still a fun read.

2024 reading round up

Jan3

I didn’t set a reading goal last year. I’m studying part-time and working full-time and, while I wanted to read more, a goal seemed like far too much pressure. Also, I find having goals sucks the fun out of things. Since I read Is it Really Green? I’ve been tracking what books I read so I make sure I read more than 25 books on my Kindle, which meant I had a tally at the end of the year. I read 33 ebooks, and 32 print books making a grand total of 65. Which is pretty good going under the circumstances.

Obviously, I’ve only blogged about one of those books, the excellent Infomocracy, so I thought I’d do a round up and pull out some highlights. I read the second and third books of that trilogy, Null States and State Tectonics, which were both just as good. Highly recommend.

Right at the beginning of the year I finally read Dreamsongs by G.R.R. Martin. It’s been on my TBR shelf for years: as it’s in hardback, I’ve quite possibly had it since not long after it was published in 2006. It is a retrospective of his life’s work with short stories from all phases of his writing life. There are a handful of really good stories including ‘The Second Kind of Loneliness’, ‘Sandkings’ and ‘Portraits of his Children’. It is interesting to see how his style and career progressed. I’m very glad I read it, and pleased to move it from the TBR shelf to the GRRM shelf (yes, he has his own shelf). It’s definitely one for the fans though.

The most fun books I read were The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. I read the first two books in the series in 2023 and the remaining five last year. It is the story of a cyborg that has slipped the mental leash its owners had on it and gone rogue. Murderbot is trying to come to terms with the things it did in the past and to learn how to live as a free being, with the help of soap operas, a few progressive humans, and a similarly free AI transport ship pilot bot, Asshole Research Transport. It is very funny. Murderbot and ART are hilarious. It’s set in a dystopian future of corporate control of humanity and deals with some dark themes in a clever and entertaining way. Highly recommend.

In non-fiction, I read these excellent books, all recommended:

  • Masters of the Lost Land: Murder and Corruption in the Amazon rainforest, by Heriberto Araujo.
  • Show me the Bodies: How we let Grenfell happen, by Peter Apps.
  • Pompeii, Mary Beard.
  • Children of Ash and Elm, by Neil Price.

It was also a year of great exhibitions at the British Museum and the equally great exhibition catalogues, which offer far more than a paragraph on each object featured:

  • Legion, by Richard Addy. Exhibition.
  • China’s Hidden Century 1796-1912, edited by Jessica Harrison-Hall and Julia Lovell. Exhibition.
  • Hew Locke: What Have we Here? by Hew Locke, Isabel Seligman and Indra Khannal. Exhibition.
  • Silk Roads, by Sue Brunning, Luk Yu-Ping, Elisabeth R. O’Connell and Tim Williams. Exhibition.

There are two more from 2024 still on the TBR shelf. I was also inspired to pick up the exhibition books from a couple of past exhibitions I’d enjoyed before I got into the habit of always buying the book and I read:

  • Shunga: sex and pleasure in Japanese art, edited by Timothy Clark, C. Andrew Gerstle, Aki Ishigami and Akiko Yano. This one was back in 2013 apparently, so there’s no link to the exhibition.
  • Peru, A Journey in Time, edited by Cecilia Pardo and Jago Cooper. Exhibition.

I’m not setting a goal for 2025 – still studying, starting a new job in March, lots going on – but I’m interested to see if I can read even more this year. As I’m having a phase of ‘trashy’ novels, (i.e. easy, fun reads whether thrillers, spy stories, fantasy romance, or sci-fi, some of which will be good and some not-so-much), I think I might just do it.