#elisa yu

[nameification]

I think elisa would wear fully black-and-white striped clothing as like. either sleepwear or casual wear. yes this is based off the many times I have startled my mother by purposefully wearing identical striped shirts and shorts. yes I think elisa does it and then vienna or dehlia found out laughed abt it and one of them (cough. vienna) started imitating her

[nameificationart]

Elisa Yu, Secretarium Venal

"You know how Josephine is The Commander's right hand? I'm pretty sure it's the same for Ms Yu and Madam Selena, except the right hand is more secretive than the boss." -Ellesle May, regarding Elisa Yu.

[gmmtvactresses]

women of gmmtv for gmmtv 2024 part 2

bonus: non participants

names under the cut

from the top: jan ployshompoo, mook worranit, tu tontawan, godji tachakorn, jingjing yu, kapook ploynira, ciize rutricha, earn preeyaphat, prim chanikarn, piploy kanyarat, bonnie pussarasorn, emi thasorn, view benyapa, pahn pathitta, samantha ''sammy'' melanie coates, fah yongwaree, parn nachcha, myme nichapa, lookjun bhasidi & golf kittipat

bonus: milk pansa & love pattranite, pream nutnicha & jaoying krongkwan

[folkfreaks]

does anyone have any french contemporary lit recommendations for enjoyers of elif batuman mieko kawakami carmen maria machado etc etc merci beaucoup

[crabridgedart]

CR Abridged Art Masterpost

Because tagging posts is an art form.

By artist:

Hannah Friederichs (@agarthanguide)

Shaun Ellis (@shmaba)

Bree Williams (@larkspurns)

Lap Pun Cheung (@lappuncheung)

Wesley Griffith (@wesley_griffith)

Deven Rue (@devenrue)

Cris Trinci (galaxybandit)

Hampus Viklander (@spookystirfry)

Azraelion (@azraelion)

Mike Pape (@wingbuffet)

Elisa Serio (@ellinainthesky)

Clara Daly (@eldritchblep)

Nikki Dawes (@nikkidawes)

Ian MacDonald (@ian_macdonald_art)

Akane (@akanelogics)

David Rodrigues (@3rdclover)

Tyler Walpole (@tylerwalpole)

Hugo Cardenas (@takayuuki_art)

Jacob Grimoire (@jacobgrimoire)

Conceptopolis, LLC

Katarzyna Wrobel (@quietsphere)

Meg Simmons (@megzilla87)

Tori Bennet (victori_jane)

Jonah Baumann (@galacticjonah)

Jessica Scates (@jessmightwork)

Natalie de Corsair (@natalie_corsair)

Lyadrielle (@lyadrielle)

Chiara Papalia "Lia" (@iliadeleart)

Jessica Nguyen (jessketchin)

(if you’re one of the artists and I made a mistake or prefer a different credit or link, message me!)

By category

Characters

Monsters

Scenes

Locations

Objects

Maps

By character:

Annaline

Armand Treshi

Artana Voe

Ashton Greymoore

Birdie Calloway

Captain Xandis

Chetney Pock O'Pea

Cyrus Wyverwind

Dancer

Delilah Briarwood

Dorian Storm

Dusk

Evon Hytroga

Fresh Cut Grass (FCG)

Fearne Calloway

General Ratanish

Greenseeker Gus

Greenseeker Olly

Hondir

Imahara Joe

Imogen Temult

Ira Wendagoth

Jianna Hexum

Keyleth

Lady Emoth Kade

Laudna

Lord Eshteross

Milo Krook

Ollie Calloway

Orym of the Air Ashari

Otohan Thull

Pate de Rolo

Percy de Rolo

Pike Trickfoot

Planerider Ryn

Pretty the Ogre

Roe Estani

Sir Bertrand Bell

Vex'ahlia de Rolo

Yu Suffiad

By type

Episode

Spotlight

[rebeccadumaurier]

2023 Books in Review

a tiered ranking of all the books i read in 2023! originally i was going to write up my commentary on each one but then i was like hahaha.....no, so below the cut is just a list of the titles/authors in each tier instead.

changed my brain chemistry

The Idiot, Elif Batuman

Land of Milk and Honey, C Pam Zhang

The Borrowed, Chan Ho-kei (trans. Jeremy Tiang)

My Cousin Rachel, Daphne du Maurier

Vagabonds, Hao Jingfang (trans. Ken Liu)

The Membranes, Chi Ta-wei (trans. Ari Larissa Heinrich)

Under the Pendulum Sun, Jeannette Ng

Severance, Ling Ma

He Who Drowned the World, Shelley Parker-Chan

Vita Nostra, Marina & Sergey Dyachenko (trans. Julia Meitov Hersey)

Network Effect, Martha Wells

top-tier stuff

Our Share of Night, Mariana Enriquez (trans. Megan McDowell)

Brainwyrms, Alison Rumfitt

The Door, Magda Szabo (trans. Len Rix)

The Lover, Marguerite Duras (trans. Barbara Bray)

Fun Home, Alison Bechdel

Strange Beasts of China, Yan Ge (trans. Jeremy Tiang)

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Becky Chambers

Pachinko, Min Jin Lee

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, Kim Fu

Tell Me I’m Worthless, Alison Rumfitt

Bliss Montage, Ling Ma

How to Read Now, Elaine Castillo

Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer

The Fifth Season, N. K. Jemisin

If Beale Street Could Talk, James Baldwin

My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name, Elena Ferrante

The Jasmine Throne, Tasha Suri

good, well-written

Carmilla, Sheridan Le Fanu

Life Ceremony, Sayaka Murata (trans. Ginny Tapley Takemori)

Yellowface, R. F. Kuang

A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine

Assassin of Reality, Marina & Sergey Dyachenko (trans. Julia Meitov Hersey)

Witch King, Martha Wells

Tokyo Ueno Station, Miri Yu (trans. Morgan Giles)

Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler

Peaces, Helen Oyeyemi

Gingerbread, Helen Oyeyemi

Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir

The Pachinko Parlor, Elisa Shua Dusapin (trans. Aneesa Abbas Higgins)

All Systems Red, Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, Exit Strategy, Fugitive Telemetry, and System Collapse (Murderbot #1-4, #6-7), Martha Wells

Revenant Gun, Yoon Ha Lee

The Dry Heart, Natalia Ginzburg (trans. Frances Frenaye)

Gods of Want, K-Ming Chang

Paradais, Fernanda Melchor (trans. Sophie Hughes)

The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Tsing

Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency, Chen Chen

The Hurting Kind, Ada Limon

Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie

An Unauthorised Fan Treatise, Lauren James

Upstream, Mary Oliver

The Art of Death, Edwidge Danticat

Meander, Spiral, Explode, Jane Alison

alphabet, Inger Christensen (trans. Susanna Nied)

Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates

flawed, but enjoyable

The Wicker King, K. Ancrum

Exit West, Mohsin Hamid

Detransition, Baby, Torrey Peters

Flux, Jinwoo Chong

Bang Bang Bodhisattva, Aubrey Wood

The Murder of Mr. Wickham, Claudia Gray

Natural Beauty, Ling Ling Huang

The Monster Baru Cormorant, Seth Dickinson

Certain Dark Things, Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The Likeness, Tana French

The Cabinet, Un-su Kim (trans. Sean Lin Halbert)

The Kingdom of Surfaces, Sally Wen Mao

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, Franny Choi

good, well-written, but not my cup of tea

The Good House, Tananarive Due

The Transmigration of Bodies, Yuri Herrera (trans. Lisa Dillman)

Roadside Picnic, Arkady & Boris Strugatsky (trans. Olena Bormashenko)

The School for Good Mothers, Jessamine Chan

At Night All Blood Is Black, David Diop (trans. Anna Moschovakis)

Family Lexicon, Natalia Ginzburg (trans. Jenny McPhee)

The Empress of Salt and Fortune, Nghi Vo

The Kingdom of This World, Alejo Carpentier (trans. Harriet de Onís)

Against Silence, Frank Bidart

flawed, less enjoyable

Tenth of December, George Saunders

Counterweight, Djuna (trans. Anton Hur)

Authority, Jeff VanderMeer

Comfort Me with Apples, Catherynne M. Valente

Babel, R. F. Kuang

The Genesis of Misery, Neon Yang

Carrie Soto Is Back, Taylor Jenkins Reid

not ranking

These are nonfiction and they aren’t literature-related, so it just felt weird trying to rank them.

Visual Thinking, Temple Grandin

On Web Typography, Jason Santa Maria

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo (trans. Cathy Hirano)

[pbechormem]

I have wanted to write a blog forever…but as I have been sitting here, faced with the challenge of writ in my first one…I find myself stuck - wanting to perform - to myself, and the audience of no one that will read this. This picture I have in my head though plays out because of the documentary on the Cecil hotel and Elisa Lam. It is difficult for me to put the right words to, but the way they narrated her blog posts throughout really stuck with me in a way I would want to speak on my blog. So in honor of that, the pictures I posted are of myself and a long lost childhood friend who passed away in 2015. I always thought we would get to our “adult” years and get together and be able to reminisce and laugh about the past, but we never got to do that. I have only a few pictures of her, as we were not close in the years before her passing and I have been messing around with AI programs to see if I can make it look like we have an adult picture together.

I miss Kaitlyn every day…her story is one I hold close because our mental health stories were so similar and we could’ve so easily shared the same fate. I had sort of an inkling then, but later in life, I would realize she was my first childhood love. I just wanted so much to see her come out the other side and I broke a little the day I learned she died…

Yu gonplei ste odon Kaitlyn kom Aikru. Reshwe and may we meet again.

So here’s to you, Elisa Lam, thank you for giving me the courage to write my first blog post!

[tachikoma-x]

Thanks for the tag, @methpring! <3

Here are 10 songs that I’ve listened to recently that remind me of yuumori characters

William:

Into the Fire - Acoustic by Thirteen Senses

Astronomical by SVRCINA

Louis:

Birds by Imagine Dragons, Elisa

Without You by Ursine Vulpine, Annaca

Saturn by Sleeping At Last (Because of a Louis AMV on YouTube)

William/Albert:

Weight of the World / 壊レタ世界ノ歌 from Nier: Automata

地球之盐 by 华晨宇 (Hua Chen Yu)

Sherliam:

You’re the Storm by The Cardigans

Immortalized by Hidden Citizens and Keeley Bumford

離心力 by 楊乃文

Not sure who to tag, still new here and bad at social in general 😅 but if anyone comes across this and would like to share some songs from your yuumori playlist, please do!

[thelibraryiscool]

23 books for 2023

this could never be an exhaustive list, but I thought I’d jot down some books I’m excited to get to this year -- and we’ll see how many I really hit! as a side note, this doesn’t include any series I’m planning to continue/read from more, like tana french or cixin liu.

Corregiodora by Gail Jones

Hiver à Sokcho [Winter in Sokcho] by Elisa Shua Dusapin << read her Vladivostok Circus instead and enjoyed it, so just postponing this one for next year

Der Zug war pünktlich [The Train Was on Time] by Heinrich Böll << in progress

Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald

The Archive of Alternate Endings by Lindsey Drager << dnf. did not even get very far. great concept but could not get on with the writing

The Life of Arsenyev [Жизнь Арсеньева] by Ivan Bunin

The Old Woman With the Knife by Gu Byeong-mo 

Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith 

Marriage by Susan Ferrier

How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Saša Stanišić << in progress

Moshi Moshi by Banana Yoshimoto

Désorientale [Disoriental] by Négar Djavadi << in progress

The Lviv Saga [Львівська сага] by Petro Yatsenko

Bleu blanc vert [Blue White Green] by Maïssa Bey

A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople by Patrick Leigh Fermor

1919 by Eve L. Ewing

A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

A Home for Dom [Дім для Дома] by Victoria Amelina

Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz

Asia & Haiti by Will Alexander

Wound [Рана] by Oksana Vasyakina

Ghost Music by An Yu << read her Braised Pork and thought it was just ok, so will not be reading this one any time soon

Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys

and because there’s no rule that says you can’t start a tag thing if you weren’t tagged in one, i shall tag @dauen, @canonicallyanxious, @nonbinaryjomarch, @queenofattolia, @booksnpictures, @fluencylevelfrench and anyone else who wants to do the same xD

[treasuresofruinmybeloved]

Elisa, why are you doing this?

Chi-Yu!Elisa: 1. My name is Chi-Yu. 2. I’m doing this because my father left me.

[nameification]

OC brainrot made me do this

[nameificationart]

ELISA YU REDESIGN FOR ARTFIGHT !!!!!!

[shineatree]

花了可能有好幾週的時間把這裡搬空，雖然還沒完全搬完。那是很久儀前的事，現在幾乎放棄了。 昨天隨意點進去這一篇，突然好想念阿嬤，於是又到了這裡寫下這一段字。

疫情那一年夢到阿嬤要我回家，我坐船渡過黑水溝，阿嬤緊緊的握著我的手，說好擔心我。醒來後很開心，想著要告訴爸爸阿嬤來過，才反應過來阿嬤從來不知道我去了一個他不能想像的地方，因為他總是很擔心我們出遠門，忍不住哭了。

[tonin-terets]

The 59th Golden Horse Awards｜Nominations｜最佳改編劇本 from Bito on Vimeo.

The 59th Golden Horse Awards｜Nominations

Designed by Bito

Creative Director｜Keng-Ming Liu Art Director｜Weahao Shao Project Manager｜Wen-Hui Chen Account Manager｜Naiyun Peng

Ideation｜Weahao Shao Styleframe｜Weahao Shao, RouJia Liang, Chin-Ho Kao, Boris Hsieh, Lu-Wen Hou, Joe Yang, Derrick Liu, Binbin Lu 3D Animation｜Weahao Shao, RouJia Liang, Chin-Ho Kao, Boris Hsieh, Henry Chen, Yen Ke 2D Animation｜Johnny Yang, Binbin Lu, Pei-Hsuan Wang, Cheng Li Feng

【Film Production】 Director｜Weahao Shao DOP｜Joe Yang Producer｜Wen-Hui Chen, Wei-Ni Chen Special Effect Makeup Artist｜Elsie Wang Talents｜Hsien Chen Tsai, Chin-Ho Kao, Wei-Ni Chen, Boris Hsieh, Chung Chieh Yang, Liao Ching Wen, Hwang Sih Yu, Hao Che, Eric Hong, Chen Man Li Equipment｜Chung Chieh Yang, Hsiang Hsieh, Chen Ying Shan, Marbo Wu, Tunhsueh Liang Editor｜Weahao Shao, Joe Yang, Yeh Po Hsiu BTS｜RouJia Liang, Chin-Ho Kao

Music｜Luming Lu Sound Design｜Hsiao-Chin Lin, Szu-Yu Lin Production Assistant｜Li-Chin Chang Mixing｜Hsiao-Chin Lin (WinSound Studio) Coordinator｜Elisa, Yi-Hsin Lin

Voiceover｜Morning Tzu-Yi Mo Recording Studio｜V-Sound Music

[lligkv]

a starting point, not the sum total

The magazine Harper’s recently published a feature in which a bunch of writers talk about “life after Trump.” They cover various topics: reality, tabloids, movies, relationships, manners, imagination, gold, conversation, punctuation, apologies, golf, literature, and Trump himself. Some of the writers are covering their usual beats: “literature” is covered by the book critic Christian Lorentzen, “movies” by film critic A. S. Hamrah. And some writers cover topics that I know from Twitter they’re already interested in: I’ve seen a number of tweets from Jane Hu, for instance, with quotes on Adorno’s thoughts on punctuation, which also opens her Harper’s piece. Other writers speak to subjects that seem more random, like Liane Carlson’s examination of the decline of the public apology that we saw so often in the early 21st century (with Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner, and their like) or Yinka Elujoba on gold: the color, the substance, why it appeals to a certain brand of aristocrat in a certain type of declining empire.

A few of the pieces are inane—showing what can happen when you assemble a piece by giving a bunch of writers a topic to just do whatever they want; different people take mandates differently, and they won’t always be deep—they won’t always be hits. For instance, there’s not much to “Golf” by David Owen. Basically: golf was staid and boring when he first took it up in the early 90s, then it became kind of cool with Tiger Woods’s fame in the late 90s, or at least something people knew about and many people watched, and then all that was undone by Trump’s love of golf the last four years. And that’s well and good, but who cares. Ultimately, Owen’s contribution registers as a marginal blip in the midst of more robust discussions.

But the most inane entry might be Eileen Myles’s contribution to the feature. It’s ostensibly about “relationships.” What it’s actually about is Myles’s feelings. We’ve established before how much I’ve come to distrust writing about how we feel about major developments in politics or about disasters like climate change, rather than the developments and disasters themselves. And at least Elisa Gabbert’s The Unreality of Memory is a genuine attempt to explore something, even if there are moments when the essays in it drift into ponderousness or sentimentality. In fact, I’ve come to feel less harshly about Gabbert’s book as I’ve thought about the pandemic the last few weeks—how unreal a number like 400,000 deaths feels to me, and how I struggle to know whether this is a natural response. Is a pandemic, with its enormous scale of death, a hyperobject, a phenomenon so vast it can’t really be countenanced by a single human mind? Do large-scale tragedies ever feel real and not abstract to those living through them, when they’re this diffuse? Or is this flatness I feel unique, a sign of some special psychic damage in those of us who are alive today, from social media or the ubiquity of news in the times we live in? I’m more willing to grant that this, how to countenance disaster, is Gabbert’s question; she certainly engages it thoughtfully.

Myles is not thoughtful. It’s striking to read their contribution after you read, say, Hamrah’s brief, potent account of the streaming services’ ascendance in the COVID era, now that we’re all stuck at home and at the mercy of whatever pricing schemes the streaming giants want to set for the movies they release if we want any (legal) entertainment, and how this reflects similar moves last century by studios to force theaters and theater-goers to pay for shit movies as well as better ones. Or Mike Jaccarino’s recent history of tabloids: how Trump depended on them to inflate his image in the 90s and aughts, and how the dynamic reversed over the course of his presidential race and term, with the task of tracking changes in Trump’s image now sustaining them—revealing again the inversion of structures like the media over the course of neoliberalism’s evolution and aftermath. Myles’s piece, so focused on them and how they felt about Joe Biden winning the presidency in 2020, is just so narrow by comparison. Even Charles Yu’s account of the damaging effect the Trump presidency has had on (consensus) “reality” is more interesting. It’s flawed, to my eye, because it so often presents what Trump supporters or QAnoners believe as merely an inferior narrative, a fiction they’ve subscribed to at least somewhat consciously and don’t want disturbed, as though they were all ostriches sticking their heads in the sand rather than people inhabiting the same physical space as Yu himself. And you’re never going to succeed at changing someone’s mind if you’re just convinced they’ve subscribed to a false and inferior narrative—because, as Lauren Oyler notes in her contribution to “Life After Trump,” differences in opinion often come down to different interpretations of the same facts. But even Yu’s contribution is interesting, because it’s not just Yu talking about himself as though his own experience is ours.

Myles’s piece, on the other hand, is just “I, I, I, I, I.” “I was crossing lower Broadway to look at a show,” they write: “I’m a fan…of the work of the artist named Sky Hopinka,” “I had allowed that monster”—Trump—“into my body,” “I went inside the gallery,” “I could hear [the spoken parts of the Hopinka exhibition] pretty well,” “I was in Texas during the earliest parts of COVID and I stayed there for a while and I was keenly aware that this was the first true crisis I had missed in New York”—and on it goes.

And Myles is so irritatingly convinced that their “I” is heroic, or part of a heroic “we,” standing in opposition to Trumpists and to the people in Chelsea, bourgeois and apolitical, who aren’t happy when they see a friend of Myles’s, Joe, pumping up the crowd at the election celebration:

He put his Biden-Harris T-shirt on which was brilliant. Everyone cheers when they see him. He’s like a sign. He starts acting like a sign, saying yay to everyone. Women always say yay, some couples won’t. Or they say a little. Not everyone in Chelsea is happy. They’re doing their Chelsea thing. Shopping, getting some food. This is a disruption. It’s like they didn’t even know there was an election.

I’m not on the side of the Chelsea shoppers here. I’m not on the side of anyone who’s indifferent to their environment, or who sniffs at a public display of any kind of emotion, enforcing some arbitrary idea of seemliness. But how radical is an election, really? How much does this one ultimately change? It’s a minor fluctuation in a long interregnum. I see these lines of Myles’s and I think, If you were really radical, you’d know that. You’d know that, and you wouldn’t devote this piece that professes to be about relationships to celebrating yourself and your milieu as though it speaks for the Chelsea shoppers’ or for mine. You’d think about the world you were in. The whole world, not just your part of it.

Some of the frustration of reading “Relationships” in the larger context of “Life After Trump” is the frustration of watching someone practice a mode that’s been outmoded as though it were still revolutionary. It’s part of Myles’s project as a poet to write from their own perspective. And it was likely groundbreaking or at least interesting when they first began writing: a way to speak to the experience and subjectivity of artists and creatives in late 20th-century America and make that real to those who did not know that world. Or a way to speak to those who wanted to join that world. It’s a poor mode now, in this time. Artists have long been integrated into the mainstream and the market—they’re no longer a vanguard. They’re not even people whom the mass media organs of the culture consciously turn to for a reflection of what life looks like now and what it could look like in the future. (Here, I’m thinking Sontag, Mailer, Dwight Macdonald, whoever—a small and biased set of examples, but the ones that come to mind.) The work of artists now feels like just another kind of content you might prefer to consume, just another piece of fodder for an identity (say, “literary person”) that you can espouse—and the presence of even critical artists and creatives is a marginal one that you, again as an individual consumer, can pay attention to if you like or just as easily ignore.

What’s more, in a time marked by widespread use of social media, everyone’s a poet of Myles’s type today. Everyone’s a relentless “I,” broadcasting their feelings and impressions of situations and history, talking about what everything and anything that happens feels like for them and what it means for them. I’m doing it right now! And I read magazines like Harper’s and Bookforum and the London Review of Books and more for a break from that mode—or a practice of it in which the “I” is a starting point, not the sum total. That is, when it comes to writing about the culture, I’m looking for writing that goes beyond the “I” to say something genuine about the world we’re in. Something that helps me understand that world better and then to change it.

[rebeccadumaurier]

May 2023 Reading Review

yay it's that time of month again! i love writing these hehe. read a lot of good stuff this month <3

books read this month

Tokyo Ueno Station, Miri Yu (trans. Morgan Giles): I love the prose style in this, so vivid and imaginative but also easy to read. A sad story, but also so humanizing and sympathetic toward its characters.

Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir: This was a lot of fun! Andy Weir has clearly improved since The Martian (pretty good) and Artemis (terrible). I really liked the ending—The Martian was ultimately a fight to return to normalcy, and I liked that this book dared to imagine something new instead.

The Pachinko Parlor, Elisa Shua Dusapin (trans. Aneesa Abbas Higgins): A short, atmospheric read. Mixed feelings about the “introspective sad girl fiction” genre, but as an international school alum, I'm desperate for stories about members of the Asian diaspora that aren’t just “I’m a middle/upper-class Chinese person who grew up in America wishing I was white,” so I enjoyed Dusapin’s perspective as a Swiss-Korean writer writing about Koreans in Japan.

Fugitive Telemetry, Martha Wells (Murderbot #6): 10/10 no notes. Every Murderbot book, I’m like, “Murderbot is so good at being Murderbot. The platonic ideal of itself.” Sitting here waiting for System Collapse and thinking about Murderbot and ART every day.

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, Kim Fu: I need to read more short story collections! This was excellent. If you liked Her Body and Other Parties, you’d probably like this book.

The Monster Baru Cormorant, Seth Dickinson (Baru Cormorant #2): Kind of a slog for me. The cast expands dramatically and Baru has a lot less agency. It’s well-written, just not my cup of tea. Will pick up book 3 if I have time.

How to Read Now, Elaine Castillo: A good book of essays to read if you’re interested in media literacy and reading culture. I enjoyed this! Very accessible, great sense of voice.

Under the Pendulum Sun, Jeannette Ng (favorite of the month): Pachinko is the best written book I read this month, but this book is very near and dear to my heart, even though it’s not a book for everyone. Gothic fantasy. Missionaries trying to convert faeries to Christianity. Questions about identity and borders and what makes you human and what makes you all equal in the eyes of God and what does God even mean to you. YESSSS.

Carrie Soto Is Back, Taylor Jenkins Reid: I don’t expect TJR books to be high art or anything, but I’m outraged about the queerbait. Otherwise a quick fun read, but I cannot overlook that and I never will.

Pachinko, Min Jin Lee: Lives up to the hype and more. No skips no duds absolutely incredible from start to finish. Spent a lot of the book in tears.