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1. A Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines by Anthony Bourdain
I will read anything Anthony Bourdain wrote and give it five stars, and that’s exactly what I did here.
A Cook’s Tour came out after Kitchen Confidential, and Tony has inked a TV deal that allows him to travel and explore food around the world on a mission to find the “perfect meal.” He, of course, discovers that there’s no such thing as the perfect meal, and it is instead about the people and the culture that surrounds you while you are eating the meal. I also love Tony’s reflections on the political background of where he travels. This book is the home of his now-famous line about traveling to Cambodia and wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death because of the destruction he caused, as well as wonderful reflections on the hometown of his line cooks, and the prominence and importance of South Americans in the United States economy and restaurant industry. I also recommend reading this in tandem with watching No Reservations, my ultimate comfort TV.
Come for the delicious descriptions of food, stay for the history and politics lessons, return for the Tony of it all.
2. Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
I gave Our Wives Under the Sea four stars. This book confused the ever-loving shit out of me, but it was good.
Leah, a marine biologist, is stuck under the ocean in a submarine that mysteriously is only broken to the point where it cannot move. Her wife, Miri, is stuck above ground without any information about Leah, unable to contact her employer, and joining online forums for people who have lost their spouses, including a hilarious one about women making up fake husbands who are lost in space. Leah eventually returns, but something is deeply wrong with her, and she and Miri are trying to work out how to go back to normal.
Come for the promise of a spooky time, stay for the unexpected humor of it all. Audiobook also slaps.
3. Daughters of Shandong by Eve J. Chung
I read this book as the September bookclub book, I can’t take credit, I didn’t pick it, but I ended up giving it four stars.
Daughters of Shandong follows a family escaping the Chinese civil war to Taiwan. Hai, the eldest daughter, is the main character and narrator, and we see how the preference for male children impacts her mother and younger siblings through her eyes. The group of women struggle their way to Hong Kong and eventually Taiwan, and you are just hit with the level of loss and violence over and over and over again.
I fully thought this book was nonfiction for the first 100 pages, but what you find out in the author’s note is that the story is pieced together from her own family history; however, because of the elder generation’s reluctance to speak about their experience, she has had to fill in the rest on her own.
Come for the history of China, stay for the familial bonds and resilience of young women.
4. Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith
I gave Build Your House Around My Body five stars.
The novel follows multiple different timelines that twist together into the story of a young Vietnamese-American woman moving to Vietnam because she’s at a loss for what to do, not feeling like she fits in anywhere she goes, from the suburbs of Baltimore where she isn’t white enough, to Saigon where she’s too white. She eventually moves in with a Vietnamese boyfriend and his supposedly haunted house. Her story line entwines with the ghost of a girl who is out for revenge.
I absolutely loved this book and its exploration of the violence of colonialism, racism, and the difficulty to find your way when you don’t fit into societal or cultural expectations.
Pick up this book for a spooky ghost story with a side of slight body horror, stay for the girl friendship revenge tour.
5. Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris
Black Butterflies received a solid two stars from me – I found that examining the beginning of the Bosnian War from the view of a, on the whole, extremely sheltered woman, did a disservice to the lives of the Bosnian Muslims who were slaughtered at Srebrenica.
This book follows Sora, a Bosnian Serb artist in Sarajevo who elects to stay behind when her husband evacuates, and tangentially the other people who live in her building who are Muslim and Croat. Honestly, I was much more interested in the story of her neighbors who seemed like fully thought out people, where as Zora was mostly concerned with her painting studio being inaccessible on account of the, you know, snipers.
Read this book if you are interested in a woman’s ideas about how inconvenient a war is for her, don’t read this book if, like me, you know even the slightest bit of the reality of the Bosnian War, it will not hold up.
6. Old Enough by Haley Jakobson
I gave Old Enough by Haley Jakobson four stars – but the missing one star is because I think parts of the book relating to trauma and PTSD could have been handled a bit better.
Old Enough is about a young woman figuring out her queer identity, and who she is outside of her hometown and as her own person separate from her co-dependent childhood best friend. That would have been enough, but she is also dealing with the PTSD of being sexually assaulted by her best friend’s older brother. The book explores the difficulty in becoming your own person while also trying to heal from a past trauma, and how that trauma invades every aspect of your life and your identity without conscious effort and support systems.
I really enjoyed this book. Read it for the Charlotte Snazzy Shelves experience of growing up in the lily-white suburbs of New York City and being a baby queer, stay for the friends we made along the way.
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