Elaine Hsieh Chou

Slotting it into my humor shelf as a satire, but like... it also feels deeply niche to me? And maybe a little bit made for me, [b:The Enigma of Amigara Fault|18129124|The Enigma of Amigara Fault|Junji Ito|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1372145963l/18129124._SY75_.jpg|25463758]-style? As in, it's very sharply barbed towards:
* Academia, particularly humanities
* That awkward divide between white scholars in the Asian department vs Asian American studies (is it about you or for you?)
* Boba liberalism (and is it meaningful to protest depiction in media vs other action or are these all different gradations of oppression, etc.)
* MRAzns and the overall obsession with policing dating history (in addition to the also legit problem of fetishization)
* the pivot of allegedly progressive white dudes towards shouty rightwing extremism for clicks and $$$
* the "bootstraps; America is a meritocracy and affirmative action is garbage" shitty asians who tend to be friendly with the previous bullet point
* internal self-hatred or never thinking about one's identity until adulthood and looking back at alllllll the times as the token non-white in the friend group
* (putting behind spoilers as it's the main plot driver even though you find out at the end of the first quarter) white people pretending to be POC for the clout/perceived gains!

anyway *I* really liked it, but I'm also extremely online and could recognize elements from what I've read through Asian American twitter/reddit discourse (heck: I actually read the author earlier this year in a piece she wrote for Vanity Fair earlier this year about how white women write hypersexualized Asian women in media, and the conversations around it triggered a thread of additional notes on her article) so part of me wonders if that'll be new or go over the heads of other readers orrrrr if the litfic crowd is used to that kind of thing from campus novels (I don't read contemporary as often, usually in my historical or scifi/fantasy wheelhouse). I feel like nuances are going to get lost in the adaptation, but perhaps no more than either version of Dear White People? eh, if the people who get it get it, great and the cover blurbs are a good indication that they're already in the know (almost a who's who of authors to read: [a:Alexander Chee|158735|Alexander Chee|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1577467423p2/158735.jpg], [a:Cathy Park Hong|228167|Cathy Park Hong|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png], [a:Raven Leilani|19238247|Raven Leilani|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1589984892p2/19238247.jpg], and [a:Aravind Adiga|810254|Aravind Adiga|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1315250024p2/810254.jpg])… (altro)

So, yeah... no. This just wasn't for me. The novel is billed as "outrageously hilarious," but I don't think I cracked a single smile while reading it. The author tried for a mix of drama and comedy, but neither element really worked well together - instead creating a strange juxtaposition that derailed the story's momentum.

The writing style was also a letdown; the prose often came across as forced, with heavy-handed metaphors that dragged down my reading experience.

While I appreciated some of the ideas presented in the book, overall, it was a frustrating read that left me unsatisfied.… (altro)

Ingrid is a Korean-American PhD student, writing (or, more accurately, procrastinating writing) her dissertation about the poetry of a famous Chinese-American poet. She's happily engaged to a white man, and her dissertation advisor tells her she has a promising career ahead of her. In her desperation to find something to say about her topic that no one else has said before, she ends up making a horrible discovery that upends the entire field of Chinese-American literature. Ingrid is painfully naive, but along the way, she learns a lot about racism and comes to understand how much racism has impacted her life.

This is a satire about academia, and it keeps getting more and more bizarre and contrived. Somehow I think the author didn't quite get the tone right: the tone was a little too serious for some of the extreme hijinks that happen: maybe if the prose had been more playful, the book would have felt more coherent.… (altro)