April 2, 2022

march 2022 reading wrap-up

BOOKS READ IN MARCH 2022

• Outside In by Deborah Underwood, illustrated by Cindy Derby
• Fireworks by Alice Lin
• The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison
• Cold by Mariko Tamaki
• Queen of the Tiles by Hanna Alkaf
• Barakah Beats by Maleeha Siddiqui
• Reign of X Vol. 9 by Zeb Wells, et al.
• Reign of X Vol. 10 by Leah Williams, et al.
• K-Pop Revolution by Stephan Lee
• Sensory: Life on the Spectrum by Schnumn, et al.
• Harley Quinn Vol. 1: No Good Deed by Stephanie Phillips & Riley Rossmo
• Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman
• Miles Morales Vol. 6: All Eyes On Me by Saladin Ahmed, Christopher Allen & Carmen Carnero
• Amazing Spider-Man: Beyond Vol. 1 by Zeb Wells, et al.
• From Bad to Cursed by Lana Harper

15 books: 1 picture book, 1 poetry collection, 6 comics (5 of which are superhero comics), 6 ARCs, and 1 book that I just felt like reading. I say this like I didn't feel like reading the others, but I guess you know how it is - I did select the others out of a list of books I already wanted to read, but they may not be the ones I was most in the mood for, or that I was anticipating the most. ARCs can be like that.

I did write about Queen of the Tiles a couple of newsletters ago, so all I will say here is I liked it a LOT, and if you want to know why (or if you're curious about which bits bugged me) you can just go back and read that.

Two of the books I read were K-Pop related, which is turning more and more into a thing I enjoy reading, despite not at all liking K-Pop (or K anything else really). But I do enjoy celebrity/normal person romances so there is that, and also I kind of like reading about people stuck working for companies that exist just to drain them of everything they've got, because these companies also allow them to do the thing they love. And! I love reading about people who have special interests, regardless of what the interest is. I guess you can say that's one of my special interests.

Alice Lin's Fireworks is more of the former - a celebrity/regular person YA romance, where the MC's childhood best friend had gone off to become a trainee and debuted with a popular K-Pop group. In her final summer of high school, he came back for a short "mental health" break, and the two of them reconnect. I don't think this book is particularly memorable, but it is really sweet and would make a good summer/holiday read.

And then there's K-Pop Revolution by Stephan Lee, which is in the latter camp - Candace Park, the protagonist, is definitely a K-Pop fan. She loved it so much she became a trainee in the last book (K-Pop Confidential), and this book sees her finally debuting in a new girl group under a huge company. I was a little concerned with the synopsis that claimed the main conflict would come from having a rival group that seemed to be even more "K-Pop Warrior"-like than Candace could ever be, since she's working with such a huge corporation. I'm not interested in girls vs. girls. But! Refreshingly, this isn't really the main conflict - I'm not going to share more than that because of spoilers. I'm just happy that despite perfectly normal jealous feelings, Candace is the sort of protagonist who would support others who want the same things as her.

What I find kind of hilarious, though, is this rival group is supposed to be "revolutionary" in how they were being managed - they could do normal school things! They were allowed to eat regular food! They weren't imprisoned in an apartment they had to share, that they weren't allowed to leave unless it was for work! They could live in their own places/with their families instead! They were allowed to have phones instead of only using a staff's phone during filming/photoshoots to appear like they have some semblance of freedom! Instead of having to be perfect, they were marketed for their flaws! They didn't have to practice to the point of never sleeping/eating, and instead had simpler choreography and were allowed to not be perfectly in sync!

If any of this sounds familiar to you... yep, they're basically a J-Pop group that happens to be Korean. Obviously, I liked them a lot.

Recently I read a pretty cool J-Pop related middle grade novel, Generation Misfits. I wish there are more J-Pop books, tbh. But I did read a book that is perfect to read alongside Generation Misfits - Maleeha Siddiqui's Barakah Beats. The music in this MG novel seems to be r&b/hip hop, but both books feature previously homeschooled kids who are attending middle school for the first time, and finding their first real friends through a music group that they had to hide from their parents. In this case, because the MC's family believes that music is against Islamic teachings - which the text and author's notes explain differs from person to person and how they would interpret things. I do remember people debating on whether music should be "allowed" for muslims, when I was younger. I don't seem to hear as much of this debate now, but perhaps it's because I'm running with a more liberal crowd? I'm not sure. Anyway, the book never portrays this (and the MC's beliefs) as good or bad - it just is, which I think is pretty cool. Even though I myself am nonpractising, I really liked how this book approaches religion and the microaggressions the MC gets from her non-Muslim "best friend", that she didn't realise was bad until she had friends who accepted her as she was. I really wish I could listen to the song the kids wrote and performed.

Witness For the Dead and Cold (and I guess Queen of the Tiles) were murder mysteries, although all of them were different from one another. I did think it was funny that I read three whole books that qualified as mysteries this month, as this is one of the categories that I generally enjoy watching but rarely enjoy reading. In each case, I probably wouldn't have picked up the book if I didn't already like the authors.

Witness For the Dead is set in the same world as The Goblin Emperor, which is probably one of my all time favourites. I love Katherine Addison/Sarah Monette's writing, and The Goblin Emperor is a fantasy that is just so hopeful and wholesome when more and more new books in the genre are leaning towards the "gritty realism" bit where "realism" is just an excuse to put characters through all manners of terrible things (I'm looking at you, Game of Thrones.) Patricia is currently reading it for the first time so we sometimes talk about it, and the last time we did we talked about how it's a political intrigue, kind of, but also not really, because it isn't one the way the Queen's Thief books are - it's just so much gentler and the vibe is very slice-of-life where you follow a young half-Goblin learn to become an Emperor.

Witness is a very different kind of book.

It follows Mer Celehar after he left the Capital, once again becoming a Witness for the Dead in an official capacity. In some ways, it is also a gentle sort of book following this young Elf in his daily life as Witness, but because part of his job is solving murders, this is what occupies a lot of the book. I don't have much to say on the mystery bit as they obviously aren't the bits that interested me the most - instead, again, I love the writing, the language/cultures of this world, the depiction of Celehar trying to stay in the closet because of systemic homophobia, and his mental health taking a toll from not even being able to grieve his dead lover (his back story, detailed in Goblin Emperor, is only briefly mentioned in this book.)

I do ship him with another character, who seems to be good for him, and I hope that they become closer in The Grief of Stones, which is coming out this year (and is in my list of ARCs to read, yay!) And the little friendships that he seemed to be forming with some of the other characters - I like what each character enrich Celehar's life a little more, and help with his healing in that sense. I feel happy to know that he's going to get by, with a little help from his friends.

Georgia in Mariko Tamaki's Cold? Not so lucky. I guess this book is a LOT more realistic, although thankfully not in the way that some fantasy novels supposedly are. It is a contemporary YA, after all. This book alternates between two POVs - one is of Todd, a teenage boy who happens to be dead. The other is of Georgia, a teenage girl who doesn't know Todd, but can't stop thinking of him when she heard of his death. The thing that connects the two is the fact that they're both outcasts at their school, and they're both queer.

I think it probably doesn't come as a surprise when I say that this is a book about homophobia.

I find it interesting going through the reviews on GoodReads, where most of the cishet readers were like "this didn't make me feel sad but I like the lgbtq commentary" or "the characters were flat" while other readers were mentioning how authentic and nuanced the voices were.

I side with the latter camp, although I'm not so sure if this "authenticity" is still true for teenagers today. I do know that as someone who was a teen in the 90s, this entire book felt truer than most YA I've read the last few years. Georgia comes off as "flat" to some readers because she is so numb from depression. Her observations about the other kids in her school, the way she couldn't stop thinking about Todd, it made me recall my own thoughts when I first heard about Matthew Shepard, and unlike her I didn't even come from the same town as him. In the 90s, being queer is isolating in a way that I don't think teens these days could imagine. There were no tumblrs and social media outside of Livejournal (although I guess Livejournal is still superior than any current social media afaic), or affirming YA novels (Francesca Lia Block's books were the only non depressing queer books I read until David Levithan's Boy Meets Boy was released in 2003, when I was already in college), and even if there were, books were so much harder to access or even know about back then. I had to stumble my way to Francesca Lia Block, which was basically a miracle, and found a community among the Witchbaby email group - an online community of kids and young adults who were all alone and isolated in the "real world".

The coldness as described by Mariko Tamaki felt so real, but the chill of Georgia and Todd's isolation - and how big a part that isolation played in Todd's death - is what will haunt me for a long time to come.

On a MUCH lighter note, I ended the month with Lana Harper's From Bad to Cursed which is a fun witchy romance. This is the second Witches of Thistle Grove book - the first, Payback's A Witch, was fun and full of queer joy. From Bad to Cursed is a m/w enemies-to-lovers romance featuring Isidora Avramov and Rowan Thorn, which was already kind of hinted at in the first book. Really, I have nothing much to say other than it is a fun, happy making book, which is probably the kind of book I need to read more of these days.

Other books I read:

Amanda Gorman's Call Us What We Carry is really good and sad and hopeful and reminds me of why I used to enjoy reading poetry, before it was all er Lang Leav and Rupi Kaur. The Marvel/DC comics were all perfectly fun, but mostly more of the same - I didn't really read anything particularly groundbreaking, although some of the single issues (not listed as they haven't been collected into books yet) I read recently were very good.

And then there's Sensory: Life on the Spectrum which is an anthology by autistic artists released on Kickstarter (thank you Patricia for getting me a copy!). I didn't expect to relate to so much of it, as every autistic person experiences autism differently, but I did. And a LOT of the comics are great introductory stuff for those who just want to read more or know more about #actuallyautistic people, because as revelatory as some of the articles/papers I've read are, most of those were written by NTs and these comics explain things so much BETTER. I wish there's a version of this book I can order in for the store because more people need to read this.

And.. that just about wraps it up! Stay safe!