#The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu

[mthollowell-writes]

Judging The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu: A Book Review

The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu is a fascinating weird western which serves vengeful violence alongside lyrical prose detailing the natural majesty of the Old West.

Ming Tsu is a Chinese American assassin on a mission to seek vengeance on the men who ambushed him and stole him away from his true love, Ada. After freeing himself from his sentence of laying tracks for the Central Pacific rails, he makes his way back to Sacramento, taking out his enemies along his trek. Along the way, he picks up an old blind clairvoyant and runs into a traveling troupe of performers who can perform strange miracles on their way to Reno. But trouble is never far on their heels with a bounty on Ming’s head.

I’ll be honest: I haven't read or watch many westerns. I’m not sure this book exactly qualifies as a Western in the traditional sense. Traditionally, their main characters may be morally gray but their actions are always framed as justified. There is a right and a wrong side in the strange world of the frontier, and the protagonist is usually on the right side of that line. That isn’t so clear cut in this book—at least in how I interpreted it. Everyone is painted in that gray brush, which I find is more true to how the West was. How most of human history truly is. Though I found myself rooting for Ming, I also found myself questioning him as he starts to question himself the further along his journey he goes. If it wasn’t obvious, one of the things I found most compelling about this book was its characters. Another is the long winding sentences that force you to slow down and really take in what you’re reading. To pay attention to how the sunlight shifts on the wide plain to the careful actions of the characters as they build their fire and travel along. The touches of the supernatural throughout seem both out of place and of its time. Taking on the perspective of a Chinese American character who was part of the essential fabric of the people who built the US—both seen and unseen, a perceived menace and a tool—was something I also really appreciated. I enjoyed the story for what it was and wholeheartedly recommend it for the Western reader who wants something a little weird and out of bounds.

[lobster-tales]

Books Read in 2023:

The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin

“To sing at all is to labor, and it is only by labor that men living recall the shadows of men passed. This is what it means to remember.” At this the prophet turned and was swallowed up by the darkness.

[gidionkeep]

Dragon Book Cover Makeover: THE THOUSAND CRIMES OF MING TSU

Every Monday, my grumpy dragon Windsor takes over my blog to give books a much needed dragon makeover. This week, Windsor is giving one of my favorite books from 2021 a makeover: The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin. As I’ve said, this is one of my favorite books from 2021. It starts off as a straightforward “Old West” novel, but not far into the story, things take more of a “Weird West”…

[bsaka7]

finished my book but it's too early to go to bed like what do i do now :/

[petalpetal]

okay books I've read since the beginning of 2024 (also note I only complete books I like if I don't like I drop it and move on so these are all good according to me)

also some of these are new and some are not I randomly choose what to read next through a generator

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories by GennaRose Nethercott

Our Hideous Progeny by C.E. McGill

The Scholomance Trilogy by Naomi Novik

Starling House by Alix E. Harrow

Red Rabbit by Alex Grecian

Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher

Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas

The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin

The Tatami Time Machine Blues by Tomihiko Morimi

Penguin Highway by Tomihiko Morimi

The Tatami Galaxy by Tomihiko Morimi

Once and Forever: The Tales of Kenji Miyazawa by Kenji

Night on the Galactic Railroad & Other Stories from Ihatov by Kenji Miyazawa

The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl by Tomihiko Morimi

Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit by Nahoko Uehashi

Moribito II: Guardian of the Darkness by Nahoko Uehashi

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura

Joan by Katherine J. Chen

A History of Wild Places by Shea Ernshaw

Menewood by Nicola Griffith

Hild by Nicola Griffith

The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo

The Beast Warrior by Nahoko Uehashi

The Beast Player by Nahoko Uehashi

Delicious Monsters by Liselle Sambury

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed

The Sundial by Shirley Jackson

The Road Through the Wall by Shirley Jackson

Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson

Dark Tales by Shirley Jackson

The Bird's Nest by Shirley Jackson

Anime Supremacy! by Mizuki Tsujimura

After the Forest by Kell Woods

The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi by S.A. Chakraborty (okay I read this in decemeber BUT ITS SUPER GOOD I MEAN HELLO ITS A PIRATE ADVENTURE)

[bleachbleachbleach]

Reading Update

Not Bleach-related, but since this is where I've been putting my writing updates, in my mind it's also where my reading ones should go. I basically only get to read things May-August, so I've been on a tear. But I keep reading things I don't end up liking? Which, HELP. WHY.

It makes me feel like such a hater, or someone who's too closed-off to things outside of my expectations that I automatically, anti-intellectually hate it, but then I'm like, okay, but I have not picked up a single fanfic this year that I did not think was brilliant. I have seen three movies this year I thought were brilliant (Fancy Dance, Evil Does Not Exist, and the Haikyuu movie, the last of which is definitely 100% like the other two)! I have read a lot of really fantastic article-length creative nonfiction that I also found brilliant!

MAYBE I JUST DON'T LIKE BOOKS.

Books I Really Liked

The Souvenir Museum - Elizabeth McCracken

Flux - Jinwoo Chong

Run Me To Earth - Paul Yoon

Shadow Life - Hiromi Goto

I know I just said "not Bleach-related," I actually think some Bleach folks would be into a lot of these, depending on where your specific interests within Bleach lie.

The Souvenir Museum had fabulous character work, and I love what I'm beginning to feel is something signature about McCracken, in that most of these stories were realist New England fiction and then out of the blue she slid one in there that was sorta-supernatural and also about cannibalism. Love that for her! Love that for me.

Flux is a speculative time travel thriller, but where it stands out is how much trust it places in its audience to follow along and hop in medias res with all these characters and premises. There's no extraneous exposition or explainers; it just drops you in the deep end and it's so much fun. There's also a lot in this book that is about TV and fandom and while I usually find it hard to buy into depictions of these things this book gets it so, so right for me. And the dialogue is fantastically tight and snappy and so full of life--I loved Part 1 in particular, and the book is worth it just for that!

Run Me To Earth is beautiful. Trenchant, haunting. Each character feels like a small poem, living and breathing and doing their best to avoid unexploded ordinances while riding a motorbike. And bonus Inuzuri vibes for me

(And Shadow Life I already talked about here. That's the one where a lady traps Death inside of her vacuum cleaner.)

Books I Am Actively Annoyed By

All That’s Left Unsaid - Tracey Lien

Your Driver is Waiting - Priya Guns

The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu - Tom Lin

AKA "maybe I just don't like genre fiction." These were a mystery, lesbian thriller, and western, respectively, and the whole time I was basically like, "we're really just doing this, huh?" In each of these, the character work wasn't strong enough to make the story, and I guess from each I expected more critical engagement with the genre? And not "we're going to un-self-consciously depict and then slaughter a bunch of bloodthirsty Indians because THAT'S WHAT WESTERNS DO." These were all books that sounded theoretically interesting to me but in practice were very not.

Nonfiction That I Wish Had Been Better

Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals - Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Dear Elia - Mimi Khuc

What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape - Sohaila Abdulali

Mott Street - Ava Chin

How to Read Now, Elaine Castillo

Eating Wildly - Ava Chin [DNF]

I think I'm just a pop nonfiction hater, because my issue with all of these is that they often felt like too-superficial treatments of their subject or seemed extremely (sometimes intentionally) undercited. Multiple of these kept making assertions about having developed an original thesis/practice or never having seen X in the world, when that's simply not true. These just make me think about all of the stylistically brilliant, incredibly thoughtful creative nonfiction being published online/in magazines, and how pale these book-length treatments feel in comparison.

(Almost) Everything Else

River East, River West - Aub Rey Lescure (this is the Naruto hentai book)

Our Missing Hearts - Celeste Ng

I Would Meet You Anywhere - Susan Ito

Tea: History, Terroirs, Varieties - Kevin Gascoyne

Bowlaway - Elizabeth McCracken

Book I Could Not Physically Read Because I Hated it So Much I Couldn't Stand It

The Leftover Woman, Jean Kwok

Future Reads

Four Treasures of the Sky - Jenny Zhang

Pnin - Vladimir Nabokov

Miko Kings, LeAnne Howe

A Bestiary - Lily Hoang

[cosmicthrillseekers]

yay omg im so excited to finally post my list!!

books i read this year:

dumb luck by vu trong phung

not out of hate by ma ma lay

dancing in cambodia by amitav ghosh

a country doctors notebook by mikhail bulgakov

the house of the dead by fyodor dostoevsky

we by yevgeny zamyatin

notes on the underground by rosalind williams

metazoa by peter godfrey smith

it's lonely at the centre of the earth by zoe thorogood

the man who mistook his wife for a hat by oliver sacks

you feel it just below the ribs by janina matthewson and jeffrey cranor (this book sucked !)

joe death and the graven image by benjamin schipper

at night all blood is black by david diop

indiana jones omnibus volume 1 by various authors

the thousand crimes of ming tsu by tom lin

a registry of my passage upon the earth by daniel mason

life between the tides by adam nicolson

black foam by haji jabir

my heart is a chainsaw by stephen graham jones

the snow leopard by peter matthiessen (beautiful and lifechanging book!!)

on earth we're briefly gorgeous by ocean vuong

unmaking the bomb by shannon cram

roaming by jillian and mariko tamaki

barefoot gen volume 1 by keiji nakazawa

solenoid by mircea cartarescu

the lightness by emily temple

the power of the dog by thomas savage

the lives of animals by j.m. coetzee

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

saturday again no problem (a tuesdaypost retrospective)

sort of mixed feelings about this one bc, as we have previously chatted about, the august 2021-august 2022 period was one of the worst twelve-month periods of my life.

however! this year brought like six new tuesdaypost initiatives from other people (please shout at me in the comments or by DM bc my brain is broken and i don't remember all of you) and i DO want to take a look back at some media i enjoyed.

the normal format + some misc. stats below

listening

here are all the tuesdaysongs plus Permanent Peace by Jack de Quidt, who is not on spo/tify. this year gave me albums by: joywave, alt-j, unloved, scene queen, new doja cat, a bunch of junie and the hutfriends singles, and the gleeful insanity of the mcr tour. VERY good musical year imo

-

reading

this historically has been one of the more fallow categories, bc there is a level of background pain where it is quite difficult for me to read and viddy gaem is a better distraction.

could have sworn i read three cowboy novelizations this year but i can only find evidence that i read the sabata and red river novelizations. i have mixed feelings about the execution of Tom Lin's The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu and Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Gods of Jade and Shadow but do not regret reading either.

no particular comics or manga stand out in my fallible, forgettable brain this year. i am excited for the ongoing light novel and manga adaptation of Otherside Picnic but that's just from watching the anime

-

watching

happy that letterboxd is doing part of the thing i wanted (getting me to watch more movies) deeply annoyed i have fallen into the trap i was afraid of. this trap is: I Want To Make The Number Go Up and am now reluctant to watch tv bc i can't log it on letterboxd and it doesn't "count". fucking hate to gamify my own leisure like this!!!!

the very good thing about letterboxd is that my friends have excellent taste, and letterboxd reminds me which of the eight billion django knockoffs i have and have not seen.

GOD was january a good movie month. the below screenshot is movies i watched for the first time this year and really liked/have stuck in my head in some way, and 3/8ths were from january. thank u library streaming service kanopy

see letterboxd has taken such a big chunk of my Moving Images time that it was hard to remember that both peaky blinders and killing eve ended this year!!! and i rewatched several seasons of adventure time! and most of the first season of DS9! and i am now in the process of watching the vampire interview show with my sister!!!

-

playing

got a handmedown switch!

this year was mostly big open worlds that didn't require a lot of complex thought from me, or if they did require some puzzle solving it was in really short bursts. lion's share of the hours this year went to fallout 4, breath of the wild, and pokemon scarlet. i really loved junk shop telescope, depanneur nocturne, and card cowboy.

honorary mentions to phone games that kept my anxiety to a low simmer while in a lot of doctor's offices.

game im most hype for is probably the spooky fishing game Dredge, but i don’t think we’ll get that until early 2024. if anyone says the words "fallout 5" next year i will lose my mind bc i would like another one of these stupid motherfuckers before i die.

-

making

i think i'm going to mourn the old lair until i die.

i am deeply, deeply unhappy with how this year went both personally and professionally. made an apartment cozy. lost the cozy apartment. cleaned a whole bunch of metal. framed a lot of things. bought a whole bunch of furniture. still have moths.

hate to leave this post on this note however i really should have died twice this year and didn’t. so im trying to be nice to myself about the rest of it.

-

bonus stats

47/52 weeks posted

moves: 1 (assisted with two)

recipes failed: many

postcards sent: many

number of 1040s i will receive next month: 4

overnight trips: 2

day trips: 3

covid: +1

serious covid scares: 9

combined hospital and doctor's visits: don't worry about it

number of lamps: also don't worry about it what are you a cop

cats: +1

[mediaevalmusereads]

The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu. By Tom Lin. Back Bay Books, 2021.

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

Genre: western, historical fiction, magical realism

Series: NA

Summary: Orphaned young, Ming Tsu, the son of Chinese immigrants, is raised by the notorious leader of a California crime syndicate, who trains him to be his deadly enforcer. But when Ming falls in love with Ada, the daughter of a powerful railroad magnate, and the two elope, he seizes the opportunity to escape to a different life. Soon after, in a violent raid, the tycoon’s henchmen kidnap Ada and conscript Ming into service for the Central Pacific Railroad.

Battered, heartbroken, and yet defiant, Ming partners with a blind clairvoyant known only as the prophet. Together the two set out to rescue his wife and to exact revenge on the men who destroyed Ming, aided by a troupe of magic-show performers, some with supernatural powers, whom they meet on the journey. Ming blazes his way across the West, settling old scores with a single-minded devotion that culminates in an explosive and unexpected finale.

***Full review below.***

Content Warnings: violence, blood, gore, racism, animal suffering and death

Overview: I haven't read a lot of books set in the Old West, so when I happened upon this one in my local bookstore, I figured I'd give it a go. The premise looked interesting, and I was curious to see what a western story would look like with an East Asian protagonist (especially given the history of Chinese immigrants and the railroad in the West). Overall, I was impressed by this book; I think Tom Lin has a talent for writing atmospheric prose and he holds back just enough to keep the reader guessing. While I do wish a couple of things had been done differently, I also think this was a solid debut novel, and for that reason, I give this book 3.5 stars.

Writing: As stated above, Lin's prose is very atmospheric, conjuring up vivid pictures of the desert and endless stretches of dry heat with an economic style. I very much appreciated how much atmosphere and action Lin could convey in sentences, paragraphs, and chapters that weren't very long, and I loved how Ming's reticence turned the protagonist into a fairly moody character.

I also appreciated the tension that Lin wrote into Ming's ethnicity and his cultural identity. Ming is a Chinese man by birth, but speaks no Mandarin (or other dialect) and has no ties to Chinese culture, yet the world keeps trying to forge an association between him and the Chinese immigrants who are working for the railroad. What I found interesting about this tension was just how complicated it made questions regarding race, ethnicity, and culture, and though I wish Lin had more fully explored what life for a Westernized Chinese man might have been like, I think putting Ming out there for readers to grapple with was a smart move.

Lastly, I liked the blend of Western and magical realism throughout the novel. While I think it would have been easy to make this book a full blown historical fantasy, I felt like keeping the magical elements understated enhanced the overall mood.

The only thing that I think bothered me about the writing was the pace. Lin seemed interested in progressing fairly slowly, showing every detail that other writers might have glossed over or edited out. As a result, the journey west felt slow, but maybe that was the point. Maybe Lin wanted readers to feel sluggish, especially since the travel was across a desert.

Plot: The plot of this book follows Ming Tsu, a former criminal who seeks revenge on the people who wronged him. Ming was the protégé of a notorious criminal named Silas Root, who taught Ming how to kill. But Ming decides to leave all that behind when he meets Ada, the daughter of a wealthy railroad baron. Ming and Ada elope only for the baron to hire a bunch of men to break them up and send Ming to work for Central Pacific Railroad, trapping him there by threatening to murder Silas. Once Silas dies, however, Ming escapes and starts his revenge journey.

On his way West, Ming teams up with a curious cast of characters, including a prophet who can only "see" forward in time and a band of traveling magic-show performers, all of whom have uncanny abilities.

What I liked most about this plot was the way the characters came together. Not all of them get along, but when they do, it's varied and interesting enough to keep me invested. I wouldn't quite call them a found family, but there are definitely some relationships that feel deep and meaningful.

I also liked the general arc of Ming's revenge journey, as it followed a trajectory that one might expect out of a Western. I'm all for playing with tropes, but sometimes, sticking to the classics works just as well, and I think it worked well here.

I do think, however, that Lin could have made his plot more compelling by getting the reader more invested in both the character dynamics and the revenge plot. As it stands, it seems like Ming is largely unaffected or not invested in his relationship with the magic show performers, and though he comes to like Hazel and Hunter, those bonds aren't quite strong enough to make him seriously question whether or not revenge is the most important thing in his life. As for the revenge plot, I did enjoy the list of people Ming wanted to kill, but to me, each of his targets were just names. When he finally killed someone, I didn't quite get a sense of relief or fulfillment, and perhaps this is because we are told about Ming's past but aren't invited to feel his feelings. Maybe Lin did this on purpose; maybe he wanted killing to feel emotionless and empty, but if so, I wish that had been balanced by pouring emotion into something else.

The members of the traveling sideshow are varied enough to be interesting, and I think Lin differentiated them well. I also liked how each one of them had their own relationship to Ming, so some connections felt more familial while others were businesslike or even hostile. I especially enjoyed Ming's relationship with Hunter, the deaf-mute boy who could "talk" inside people's heads. The disability representation was appreciated, and I was touched by the way Ming strove to protect Hunter while also learn to communicate ate with him.

Characters: Ming, our protagonist, is fairly compelling as a protagonist in that he has a checkered past and a fair bit of trauma. Not only does he have a criminal history, but in true Western fashion, he was done wrong by a powerful man and is now on a quest for revenge. I sympathized a lot with Ming's desire for revenge, and I wish Lin had leaned a little more into the psychological effects of his various experiences. As it stands, Lin seems most interested in showing us Ming's hang ups around his wife, Ada. These parts were very well-done, and I wish we had flashbacks to other points in Ming's past.

The prophet was a compelling character in that his prophecies gave shape to the overall plot. I liked that Ming and so many others came to rely on him, and his prophecies were useful for creating suspense and narrative tension. The prophet also had some insightful things to say, and I was charmed by the way he lived in the present.

TL;DR: The Thousand Crimes of Min Tsu is an incredibly atmospheric novel that blends Western with magical realism in a compelling way. Though I think Lin could have done more to help invest the reader more in the plot, this book was a fairly solid debut and I look forward to seeing more from the author in the future.

[rattlinbog]

Books Read in 2022

January

The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit by Patricia Monaghan 

The Unpassing by Chia-Chia Lin

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine 

February

The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

The Beauty and the Terror: The Italian Renaissance and the Rise of the West by Catherine Fletcher

The Desolations of Devil’s Acre (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children #6) by Ransom Riggs 

Eifelhelm by Michael Flynn 

The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England by Ian Mortimer 

March

The Wives of Henry VIII by Antonia Fraser

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley (reread)

The Lost Future of Pepperharrow by Natasha Pulley

April

The Parted Earth by Anjani Enjeti 

Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar 

Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy 

The Last Blue by Isla Morley 

Lone Stars by Justin Deabler 

All the Young Men: A Memoir of Love, AIDS, and Chosen Family in the American South by Ruth Coker Burns

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

May

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro 

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (reread)

As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock by Dina Gilio-Whitaker 

LaRose by Louise Erdrich

A History of Native American Land Rights in Upstate New York by Cindy Amrhein 

June

Four Treasures of the Sky by Jenny Tinghui Zhang

Member of the Family: My Story of Charles Manson, Life Inside His Cult, and the Darkness That Ended the Sixties by Dianne Lake and Deborah Herman

These Silent Woods by Kimi Cunningham Grant

Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil by W.E.B. Dubois 

Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez 

A Marvelous Light by Freya Marske 

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow

July

No Exit by Taylor Adams

The Wanderers by Meg Howrey 

A Tall History of Sugar by Curdella Forbes

Peach Blossom Spring by Melissa Fu

Calypso by David Sedaris

My Antonia by Willa Cather 

The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660-1700 by Elizabeth Howe

English Animals by Laura Kaye

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

August

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson

Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang 

The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street by Susan Jane Gilman (reread)

The Latecomers by Helen Klein Ross 

Unlikely Animals by Annie Hartnett

The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd

September

The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak 

The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd

Country Roots: The Origins of Country Music by Douglas B. Green

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

Golden Gates: The Housing Crisis and a Reckoning for the American Dream by Conor Dougherty

Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson (reread)

J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys: The Real Story Behind Peter Pan by Andrew Birkin

The Lost Ones by Anita Frank

October

A History of Wild Places by Shea Ernshaw

When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole

The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares by Joyce Carol Oates

The Reddening by Adam Nevill

My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

November

It Happened in the Smokies... A Mountaineer’s Memories of Happenings in the Smoky Mountains in Pre-Park Days by Gladys Trentham Russell

Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey by James Rebanks 

Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres 

I Was Told There’d be Cake: Essays by Sloane Crosley

The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin

December

Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait by Bathsheba Demuth

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter (reread)

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte (reread)

Mrs. Death Misses Death by Salena Godden

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice

[coffeeastronaut]

12 13 and 24 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🇮🇹🇮🇹🇮🇹🇮🇹🇮🇹🇮🇹🇮🇹

12. What was the most unexpected book you read this year? Im not actually sure what this means im assuming its like, what i personally expected FROM it or that i didnt expect to read it? for the former its gotta be Mapping the Interior by Stephan Graham Jones, which was just fantastic and not at all what i expected. for the latter its gotta be The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin which was also really great, and i didnt expect to find a western that i could properly enjoy without drowning in racism

13. The funniest book you read this year It's not supposed to be funny and was mostly miserable but. the metal gear solid 1 book adaption. for a book that was actually SUPPOSED to be funny, i really enjoyed Unseen Academicals and Witches Abroad, both by Terry Pratchett

24. The book with the best title Definitely I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy. definitely an attention grabber. My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite was also a great title

[mthollowell-writes]

“For a time it had ceased to trouble him to kill.”

- Tom Lin, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu

[nprbooks]

"There's a lot to love in this expansive debut novel from Tom Lin," says our critic Fran Wilde. It's the story of a Chinese American gunslinger bent on revenge against the men who snatched his wife away and set him to work on the railroads as punishment for marrying a white woman. Check out her full review here.

-- Petra

[forasecondtherewedwon]

The sun hung huge in the sky, like a yolk in suspension for an eternity, until at last some distant peak pierced its envelope and the light dribbled down below the plane of the world, plunging the sky headlong into blue evening.

The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin

[mylifeinfiction]

The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin

"'How long?' Mind asked. 'Until they die.' 'How long until anyone dies?' replied the prophet."

Tom Lin's debut novel, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, is a gripping existential revenge western; a brutally violent exploration of memory and the curse of mortality. Lin's prose is often richly philosophical, and while I do believe sections throughout (especially those that find Ming on his own) could have been tighter, Lin otherwise delivers an extremely satisfying tale of revenge and destiny that's as exciting and violent as it is thematically resonant.

8.5/10

[petalpetal]

list of debut novels (aka its the authors first book) I've read and loved

The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands by Sarah Brooks

Catfish Rolling by Clara Kumagai

Girls Who Burn by MK Pagano (the description say enemy to lovers buts thats a lie more like childhood-enemy-lover)

The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim THIS IS GRAPHIC

Our Hideous Progeny by C.E. McGill (ALSO GOOD CHRONIC PAIN REPRESENTATION)

Yume by Sifton Tracey Anipare (addresses the racism that foreigners/mixed raced who live in japan face especially those of African decent)

To Break a Covenant by Alison Ames

The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin

The Rathbones by Janice Clark

The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins one of my top 5 books maybe top 3 favorite books of all time sadly this is the only fiction book him

The Last One by Alexandra Oliva (basically what if you were on a survival type game show and during it the apocalypse happens but you think its all apart the show)

The Book of Speculation by Erika Swyler

The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean (what if vampire ate books instead and what if some ate minds)

The Bone Snatcher by Charlotte Salter

The Bees by Laline Paull