#asian readathon 2023 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

hrbumga · 2 years

Text

Asian Readathon 2022!

Not to worry, I’m making really good progress on A Tree Grows in Brooklyn for my TIMES Best 100 YA Books Challenge, I actually finished reading that and I’m drafting the post now. However, I had to take a break from that challenge to take part in something really exciting: Asian Readathon 2022!

This is the first time I’ve ever participated in a readathon and honestly, it was such a blast. I had an amazing time selecting my books, interacting with the bookish community, and discovering new authors.

What is Asian Readathon?

Asian Readathon was created by Cindy Pham, or withcindy on Youtube. It takes place throughout the month of May to celebrate Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage month by reading books featuring Asian characters or are written by Asian authors, but preferably both! This year was the fourth consecutive Asian Readathon and I was so excited to join.

Check out this video for more information on the Asian Readathon! May 2022 has now concluded, so mark your calendar for May 2023!

My Selections

This image template was created by Julia Vogel, a fellow member of the bookish community.

Here are the books as they correspond with the challenge prompts:

Read a book written by an Asian author: Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So

Read a book featuring an Asian character who is a woman AND/OR older: The Stationery Shop by Marjan Kamali

Read a book by an Asian author that has a universe you would want to experience OR a universe that is totally different from yours: The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang

Read a book by an Asian author that has a cover worthy of googly eyes: Marriage of a Thousand Lies by S.J. Sindu

Read a book by an Asian author that has a high rating OR was highly recommended: Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

How It Went

Overall, I loved this challenge. The books I selected were varied in genre, tone, and perspectives, which I thought felt right. I really appreciate that Cindy Pham included the overall challenge of having each selection for the challenge be of Asians of different ethnicities.

I’m probably going to have spoilers below, be warned.

1. Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So

Ethnicity: Khmer Rating: ★★★½

My thoughts: This was a great collection of short stories from the Khmer diaspora in California. There was a lot of focus on generational trauma from the Cambodian Genocide in the 1970s, as well as the intersectionality of being queer in this particular community.

Being a collection, I thought the curation was very well done. The stories wove in and out of each other while still being their own contained units, I appreciated the nods between the stories that made both the community represented and the book as a whole feel cohesive.

That being said, some stories were certainly stronger than others. I thought the first story didn’t feel as deeply developed as some of the other, which was started the collection on a weaker note. There were also smaller things here and there that would be off, like a mention of a real-life school shooting in the final story. The protagonists mother explains that a bad man was the shooter, but it was a sixteen-year-old girl. The rest of the details of the event were extremely grounded in real-life events, I thought it was odd to misrepresent this part of the story, possibly to fit the profile of typical school shooters? It was a smallish detail, but I found it odd. There were others here and there, but this stood out to me, I think because the book spends a lot of time referencing real events accurately, that in the moments where they strayed it was a little jarring. Perhaps this was a creative choice, but in my gut I don’t know if that was the case.

Overall though, I liked it! I’m familiar with the generational trauma from the genocide from a Cambodian perspective, but I wasn’t familiar of the perspective of those who immigrated or were the children of immigrants, and I thought the variation in those viewpoints depending on who was narrating the story was interesting.

2. The Stationery Shop by Marjan Kamali

Ethnicity: Iranian Rating: ★★★★★

My thoughts: This was absolutely phenomenal. The writing was beautiful and heart-wrenching and the plot points throughout were extremely well established to where, in the end, everything fit neatly together.

The book goes back and forth throughout the events of the protagonist, Roya’s, life, from her time as a 17-year-old in 1950s Iran to her at age 77 in New England. As a teenager, she falls in love with a fellow poetry lover named Bahman at a stationery shop amidst the turmoil of the 1953 Iranian coup d'état. She’s going to marry him, but the night they’re going to meet up to get their marriage license, he ghosts her… or does he?

You follow her throughout her life as she hurts and heals, meets her future husband at college in America, has a family, moves around, faces hardship through miscarriage, job discrimination, and navigating being an Iranian immigrant. Then, in her late 70s, she reconnects with Bahman, who’s in an assisted living facility only a couple hours from her home in Massachusetts.

I listened to this on audiobook and the narrator, Mozhan Marnò, did a fantastic job bringing the story to life through vivid narration. I was actively crying at multiple points throughout the story, it was excellent and I can’t recommend it enough.

3. The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang

Ethnicity: Taiwanese Rating: ★★★★★

My thoughts: This was honestly just so delightful and wonderful. This YA graphic novel follows Frances, a seamstress in 19th century Paris who dreams of someday creating her own fashion line. After being commissioned to make a particularly bold garment for a local debutante, she catches the eye of a high profile client — the Belgian Prince! But wait, you may say, a prince can’t simply wear dresses, right?

I adored this look at gender and gender expression, it was absolutely charming and the end had me tearing up. I loved the prince’s alter ego, Lady Crystallia, I loved their department-store-owning friend, I loved the king and queen. Frances was also a lovely protagonist, you really rooted for her. Not to mention, the illustrations and overall art style were remarkable. My copy even had an appendix where Jen Wang laid out her artistic process, which was really cool.

4. Marriage of a Thousand Lies by S.J. Sindu

Ethnicity: Tamil Rating: ★★★★½

My thoughts: First off, I was surprised to hear this was a debut novel because it was so well written. The author is definitely a highly skilled writer and the story’s pacing and character development was well done throughout.

I will say though, Marriage of a Thousand Lies is not for the feint of heart. Lucky is married to Krishna, though Lucky is a lesbian and Krishna is gay, and furthermore Lucky is in love with Nisha, a childhood friend. Though Lucky and Krishna’s marriage is built on a mutual understanding, Nisha is betrothed to be married and won’t have the luxury of such an arrangement.

I say “luxury” kinda lightly, because Lucky and Krishna’s marriage is not the convenient grift of solidarity they necessarily set it up to be. In fact, Lucky and Krishna seem to put up with each other at best but overall despise each other. I guess I went into the story expecting their friendship to be either a little better established or for them to at least not mind one another’s company, but Lucky largely avoids Krishna and when they’re together they bicker and snipe at each other. I wasn’t the biggest fan of this choice personally, but that was just my subjective opinion.

In addition to this, as the book takes us through Lucky and Nisha’s relationship, it goes to great lengths to establish that this is not a romantic, star-crossed lovers story. Lucky and Nisha are toxic to one another, neither seems to want to attempt to see the other’s point of view and both bring their personal traumas in to the detriment of the relationship. I liked this choice though, I thought it was a nice subversion from the yearning-gays trope. Still, it was hard to read because of how much pain and tension was involved.

I really appreciated how much the novel was tied to its Tamil heritage too. There’s a point where a couple of more Western side characters ask why Lucky can’t simply leave her family and culture behind, and the novel very cleanly lays out why that’s not possible. Yet, the novel doesn’t dismiss the side characters’ points of view either. I liked this, because it created a nice foil between the Lucky/Nisha relationship, two characters from the same background who can’t meet each other halfway and the Lucky/friends relationship, characters who come from very different circumstances but are still able to respect one another.

Overall, a very well crafted novel that I highly recommend!

5. Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Ethnicity: Japanese Rating: ★★★★★

My thoughts: I loved this book and I cannot wait to read the sequel/companion novel, Tales from the Café, next. This is a story about a coffee shop where you can time-travel, but there’s some rules. (1) You can only time-travel to meet someone who’s been to the coffee shop before. (2) You have to sit in one particular chair while time-traveling, and you cannot leave that seat. (3) There’s a time limit to how long you can time-travel. (4) No matter what happens when you time-travel, the circumstances of the present will not change.

There’s a couple of little quirks to some of these rules. For one thing, there’s often a woman in a white dress in the designated seat, and she cannot be asked or forced to leave because she’s a ghost and will curse you if you try. Also, the time limit rule? You begin time-traveling when Kazu, the barista, pours a fresh cup of coffee. You have to drink it all before it gets cold, or else you become the ghost.

The story was told in a series of different scenarios. You had a young couple, an old married couple, a set of sisters, and a mother and daughter. I loved this approach to this particular story because it felt like the author was really playing with the magic system to see how things would change depending on who’s involved.

The story was also deeply human, which I’m a sucker for. You really could empathize with the different characters in the café, everyone in the limited cast was very well developed. The book was shorter, so you could tell a lot of work was put into editing it to make every detail matter.

It was quirky, often very funny, and at times deeply sad. I adored this book!

Final Thoughts

I loved participating in this readathon, it exposed me to a variety of stories and authors I might not have heard of or picked up otherwise. This experience has really got me interested in readathons overall and I plan to participate again next year!

0 notes