American Born Chinese

I really enjoyed this book, which is a sort of braiding of three plotlines, one a fable, one a farce, one a diary, all of them on the topic of finding one’s identity as an Asian person in a predominantly white society.


The only thing I will say by way of critique (and maybe this is sort of like someone at a restaurant critiquing small portions rather than quality, BUT…) is that the diary portions were so clever and subtle that I found myself rushing through the other segments. The other parts were there for a reason, and certainly were important to the building of the story and the ultimate coalescing of the different narrative melodies, but… I feel like I could have easily enjoyed three or four hundred pages of the more realistic portion of the tale.

American Born Chinese (Yang)

The Wild Party

Wow. What an incredible poem and story. I wasn’t able to put it down after I read the first stanza.

This book was written in the 1920s, but didn’t get much of a print run, mostly due to the sex and murder, one suspects. Anyway, it is a great story told with incredible melody. Here’s a stanza, selected more or less at random:

The candles flared: their flames sprang high:
The shadows leaned dishevelled, awry;
And the party began to reek of sex.
White arms encircled swollen necks:
Blurred faces swam together: locked
Red hungry lips:
Closed eyes:
Rocked.
White shoulders burst their ribbon bands;
Rose bare to passionate, fumbling hands:
White slender throats curved back beneath
Attacking mouths that choked their breath.

In short: DANG. Wow, what a book. The version I got was a re-issue with very pretty artwork by Art Spiegelman, author of Maus. He apparently happened on the book by accident, due to finding it in a used book store, having a beautiful cover. The illustrations are an excellent reason to re-issue the book, but the star here is really the words. I won’t go so far as to the pictures take away from the poem – they, in fact, have this wonderful Art Deco gruesomeness that I assume was in part inspired by Ward’s book “Gods’ Man” – but part of me regrets having not read it first without pictures.

The Wild Party (March)

The Game-Players of Titan

I would have to call this a failed Philip K Dick novel. Like all of his bad novels, there are strands of pure beauty here and there. But, somehow nothing seems to come together in this book. It feels very rushed and slipshod. The universe of the book really doesn’t make a lot of sense. And, just in terms of showmanship, the game that the Game-Players of Titan play appears to be some variant on The Game of Life. I mean, if you’re going to have an alien game be a major plot element, at least make it cool, no?

The Game-Players of Titan (Dick)

Dr. Bloodmoney

What a great Philip K Dick novel. I’d put it up there with his best work. It is meandering and strange, and yet very beautiful. Like all good Dick novels, I can’t really explain it by trying to describe it. It’s a post-apocalypse book, but it’s really not like any other such book. It’s more of a poem in a certain sense. Anyway, go read it.

Incidentally, the title is quite unfortunate. Apparently, Dick’s editor changed the title to sound vaguely like Dr. Strangelove. It’s a bit sad that, this late in his career, Dick was still subject to that sort of thing.

Dr. Bloodmoney (Dick)

It Can’t Happen Here

This book by Sinclair Lewis has been recommended online a lot lately (since it has to do with the idea of a sort of populist fascist coming to power in America). I’m a bit torn on it.
On the one hand, there’s some cleverness in the portrayal of the leader’s rise. And, given that the book is from 1935, in some sense it predicts the nature of fascism as it rose, at least in other countries.

On the other hand, it’s about as subtle as an Ayn Rand novel. Generally speaking, the characters are simplistic and predictable, and (it seemed to me) there was very little cleverness in explaining exactly how the fascist leader character was able to dismantle all the other centers of power and bureaucracy in Washington.

It Can’t Happen Here (Lewis)

Humpty Dumpty in Oakland

I’m getting to where I can’t take any more Philip K Dick non-scifi works. They’re not bad, they’re just all the same. Narcissistic men and flighty women have difficulty getting along in a post-war consumerist society. It’s not bad, and the characters and scenes are good, but there’s just no core here. In fairness, most of these books weren’t released in Dick’s lifetime, so there wouldn’t have been a public to get tired of him repeating the same plot elements. But, as I try to read his entire corpous, it gets a bit tiresome.

Humpty Dumpty in Oakland (Dick)