As a writer, it’s a given I’m also an avid reader. I have a small black journal which contains a list of books I’ve read, starting from 2001. I am a deliberate reader, i.e. slow, and I hate to abandon a book I’ve started. My book lists show my reading selection to be all over the place – from contemporary American to world literature to classic and everything in between. The minute I set myself to read only South Asian women writers and immigrant writers (like this year), a comment about the greatness of Henry James leads me to listen to a recorded version of A Portrait of a Lady, which I loved. The truth is I have nothing against dead white men authors—I have learned so much from them— but I do feel passionately that women’s voices, black voices, native voices, immigrant voices, and those from around the world need a greater place on our bookshelves. As one of those voices, I feel a particularly strong bond with my fellow diasporic writers. That said, I accept that my reading habits will be gloriously arbitrary.
I wish had taken notes over the years on each book and what my response to it was. This blog is the beginning of that enterprise. It invites me to think deeper about each book I read and articulate my thoughts on it. So here we go!
The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas (1963) This book came highly recommended by (former)Diesel Bookstore owner John Evans. I had never heard of Vesaas – he’s Norwegian and was a prolific author who was consistently up for the Nobel Prize in Literature. The book lived up the recommendation. It’s the story of two young girls, Siss and Unn, who form a brief friendship before Unn disappears into “the ice palace” – a frozen waterfall deep in the forest where children are forbidden to go alone. The book is dreamlike, and the descriptions of the landscape, and the ice, are stunning and mesmerizing. Vesaas captures the heart of these two girls, one as she disappears into the ice palace and the other as she enters a long nightmare of searching for her lost friend. Reading Vesaas I was reminded by how much landscape carries the mysteries of the human heart – the fantastic ice is a metaphor for how complex the world of children can be, how the adult world can be frozen out of the inner workings of the child’s heart, and how the imagination can be both tantalizing and dangerous. I have The Birds, another Vesaas book reissued by Pushkin Press, on my reading list.
Rental House by Weike Wang (2024) – I started off the year listening to Rental House on audio. (Full disclosure: Weike Wang selected as Sutra Americana as the runner up finalist for the new American Press contest back in 2022 and she wrote a great blurb for the book.) But that’s not why I read her. I read her because she is one of the boldest writers I’ve read, unafraid to step into the hard territory of racial and cultural conflict. She describes the extreme alienation of the second-generation immigrant with chilling effect. Rental House is about a mixed race couple – Keru, Chinese American and Nate, white from a working class family and their English sheep dog Mantou. The rental house refers to two houses they rent, first on Cape Cod, and then one in a suburb outside of New York City. Both sets of parents visit them in the Cape Cod rental house, and Nate’s delinquent brother visits the other. What should be relaxing vacations turn into both characters suffering through their own sense of displacement, while we the reader follow the complicated paths of their upbringings and how their parents’ lives shadow them. Keru is angry, so angry she throws things at people. Nate is so passive he doesn’t report a leak in his university office. They are united in their unspoken desire to escape their pasts—Keru, her parents unrelenting drive for success in America (who cares about happiness), and Nate his parent’s unquestioning adherence to American family values (coded Trump supporters) to find refuge in something that is completely new. Their individual loneliness could be a source of bonding, but Wang keeps them on such far sides from the room from each other. Heartbreaking. If only they could love one another the way they love their dog. This is the third novel of Wang’s that I’ve read, and I look forward to her next.