april 2022 reading wrap-up
If you’ve noticed that I didn’t write any newsletters at all in April (besides the March wrap-up), well… that wasn’t on purpose. I completely forgot about the newsletter for the second week, remembered on the third week but forgot to actually write anything until it was late Friday and I was too tired, and was too busy in the fourth and fifth weeks due to me working all weekend for a Hanna Alkaf event, and being in Melaka for Raya hols, respectively. I missed last week because I was still in Melaka, and only got back on Saturday, after which I immediately had to go to Shah Alam. But I’m properly back in KL now, yay?
Anyway, I was going to write about Raya and family dynamics, and then I was going to write about Doctor Strange, but this is the first newsletter of May, so I guess it’s time for my April reading wrap-up.
BOOKS READ IN APRIL 2022
- The Fire Never Goes Out: A Memoir in Pictures by N.D. Stevenson
- The Feeling of Falling in Love by Mason Deaver
- Moonflower by Kacen Callender
- The Song of Aglaia by Anne Simon
- Sensor by Junji Ito
- Melt With You by Jennifer Dugan
- The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang
- Alice Austen Lived Here by Alex Gino
- Heartstopper Volume One by Alice Oseman
- Heartstopper Volume Two by Alice Oseman
- Heartstopper Volume Three by Alice Oseman
- Heartstopper Volume Four by Alice Oseman
- My Aunt Is A Monster by Reimena Yee
- My Brain Is Different by Monzusu
I feel like I hardly read in April, but I guess this isn’t bad at all. It’s just that of the 14 books, only 4 are from my ARC TBR stack, and only 5 are prose novels. So even though I did read a lot, it didn’t feel like I did.
I’ve read most of The Fire Never Goes Out - in bits and pieces every time I flip through it, and online as they were being posted. But I haven’t read all of it, in this order, until last month. I guess the fact that I’m subscribed to their current webcomic (I’m Fine I’m Fine Just Understand) and reading new comics weekly that just REALLY RESONATES DEEPLY, made me want more, and so I ended up pulling my copy out and reading it all in one sitting. I can’t wait for I’m Fine I’m Fine to be collected into a book, honestly. I want so badly to hold these stories in my hands.
The two YA books I read, The Feeling of Falling In Love and Melt With You, were so similar and so different. Both are enemies-to-lovers romances, although Melt With You is really best friends-to-enemies-to-lovers which I usually like even more… except in this case, I guess. But more on that later.
The Feeling of Falling In Love has a transmasc MC who is probably one of the most infuriating characters I’ve ever read and yet I love him so much. He is a proper dumpster fire, honestly, and if I knew him for real I would probably be mad at him almost all the time, but I loved his growth in this novel and was rooting for him by the end. The love interest was sooo sweet, and I enjoyed the romance, but I was really more invested in his relationship with his brother and mother, and the rest of his friends.
On the other hand, Melt With You just annoyed me more than not. It’s a pity because there aren’t a lot of sapphic YA that I really love out there, and I was hoping to love this one. But I wanted to give the MC a good shake throughout most of the book, she was such an idiot. And the romance felt a little toxic to me, tbh. The love interest was so flaky and unreliable, this was one of the few romances I read where I wasn’t rooting for the couple to get together at all.
Both my April MG reads were EXCELLENT. First, there’s Kacen Callender’s Moonflower, which, well. It’s Kacen Callender. Of course it’s superb. This one took me by surprise, and when I was starting on it, I kind of worried I might not like it. It’s weird (in a good way) and magical and way more depressing than I thought an MG book is allowed to be, but it felt so cathartic by the end? It’s a book about depression, with an enby MC, and I highlighted so many passages that resonated with me I couldn’t choose which ones to share with friends (I have a habit of sharing passages I love while reading).
Alex Gino’s Alice Austen Lived Here is a lot lighter, but it feels more serious than her other books that I’ve read (Melissa, previously titled George, and Rick.) Rather than being one of those “introduction to [insert identity here]” books - which I appreciated for being what they are - this book had more depth to it. The MC is an enby kid working on a school project requiring them to write a report on a local person of note, and they wanted to find someone who isn’t another cishet white dude. Thanks to their neighbor, they ended up researching on Alice Austen, a photographer who used to live in the apartment they now live. I just love reading books about queer history, and books about kids learning about the history of their community (I’m thinking of Shaw Kuzki’s Soul Lanterns and Robin Talley’s Pulp here), and I love intergenerational queer found families, and this is all of it and my heart felt so full reading this book.
[Side note: despite my general dislike of historical novels, I also love historical novels focusing on queer history - like Abdi Nazemian’s Like A Love Story, and Robin Talley’s Music from Another World]
Breaking my ARC streak, I then read Helen Hoang’s The Heart Principle because it’s been on my TBR for awhile now and because reading the Sensory graphic anthology last March made me crave more ASD rep. I loved Helen Hoang’s first two books in the Kiss Quotient series, but The Heart Principle is easily my favourite - because it’s the most relatable to me, and the one that felt the most personal. Like with Moonflower, I ended up taking pics of soooo many paragraphs - although I only shared a few of them with some friends. I don’t think I can talk about this one too deeply without getting depressing and discussing burnout and my own experiences with it, so I will just say this - this book has excellent ASD rep and I loved it and also I gave @times.read a write-up on it but they edited out the bits where I briefly discussed the autism rep so I’m totally side-eyeing them forever now. (This is the same distributor that stuck “Unsuitable For The Young” stickers on MG-friendly autism memoirs, after all.)
And now… the graphic novels. The Song of Aglaia caught my eye quite awhile back, and I’ve read it in bits and pieces, but this time I read it all in one sitting and liked it enough to get it for a friend’s birthday. It’s weird in a good way and I like the drawings and it has Beatles and Bowie references. I love it.
On the other hand, I’m still not entirely sure why I decided to read Junji Ito’s Sensor. It’s one of his weirder works, and I’m not even really a fan of his. But I was flipping through it and before I knew it I was reading the whole book? I don’t dislike it, but I’m not sure if I liked it either. It’s interesting, and I think late teens-early twenties Mari would’ve liked it a lot more.
I don’t think I need to explain Heartstopper - obviously, I watched the Netflix show in one sitting and ended up rereading the comics the next morning. It’s still one of the best, most wholesome series I’ve ever read.
Reimena Yee’s My Aunt Is A Monster will be her second book from RH Graphics, and it’s just as fun and cute as her previous comic, Séance Tea Party. She makes up fun worlds that I enjoy spending time in, which is to say, MOAR!
Finally, I read Monzusu’s My Brain Is Different, which is both very good and kind of frustrating. Good because it focuses on stories of adults with neurological disorders (mostly ASD/ADHD, and a couple of LD) with just a tiny fraction of stories about children, by caregivers. I like that it includes various perspectives and focuses on the adult perspective, because too many books about neurological disorders focus on children. I like how several of the stories talk about how much easier it is to mask while in school and why this is the reason some adults don’t realise they’re on the spectrum until they’ve burned out from working.
The things I didn’t like mostly stem from the fact that awareness and knowledge about these disorders, even among professionals, is pretty dismal in Japan. While there are many accounts of masking throughout the graphic essays in this collection, none of them named masking for what it is. And none of them truly highlighted how dangerous continuously masking can be - some even portrayed it as a sign of “success” in imitating neurotypicals - for neurodivergents in the long run. For neurodivergents thinking of reading this, I would first warn them that it’s full of potential triggers - there’s abuse, self-harm, suicidal ideation, and so on. It somewhat baffles me that in a couple of the accounts in here, masking had led the writers into suicide attempts or serious suicidal thoughts, and yet it was just portrayed as something like, “I thought I was high-functioning enough to mask well but I wasn’t that capable” (they didn’t actually mention functioning labels or masking by those names, but that was the impression that I got.) While I do think this is a good book for general info and to know about the diverse experiences of different people with neurological disorders, I would recommend it more to neurotypicals more than neurodivergents due to the triggering content.
And there you go - all the books I’ve red in April, not including picture books because I forgot to record those.
Stay Safe!