What We’re Loving: Summer Break 2021 Edition
Source: Amazon.com
This is a very special WWL for me, since it’s my very first WWL as a twenty year old! I turned twenty on September 3rd and, amidst picnics and celebrations, was gifted Ken Liu’s short story collection The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. The book includes fifteen stories that (according to the blurb but also to me, of course) “invoke the magical within the mundane.” Though I’ve just started reading the complete collection, I’m already absolutely in love with it. Ken Liu has a very special way of bringing to life characters that are, in the best way possible, just like you and me. His prose pulls you in and makes you feel like a part of the story, somehow creating entire worlds in no more than ten or twenty pages. “The Paper Menagerie” is actually one of the most well known and highly regarded short stories of the magical realism genre, and it’s safe to say every single one of the other stories lives up to expectations. Liu’s writing is intimate, powerful, and incredibly touching; every story resonates with the bittersweet struggle of yearning to fit in, struggling to understand who we are both within and without those around us. Somehow, however, no two stories are the same, and I can’t wait to read and reread every single one of them in the coming months. Though I know turning twenty is sure to bring its own set of lessons and challenges, old age doesn’t seem so terrible when you’ve got gifts (and, of course, generous friends) like these.
— Mariana Bravo ‘24
Source: Tianran Qu (Untitled, 2020, digital)
Tianran Qu is an artist who works with both digital and traditional media to depict colorful scenes from daily life, like skipping rocks at a lake, a cellist playing in a subway station, and wavering city skylines in the summer heat. Their art has a blocky, geometric quality and a mottled texture that conveys a sense of warmth and coziness. The looseness of the shapes and figures gives energy to each piece, without sacrificing precise attention to detail and shading, as seen with the foliage or the flooring in a room. Many of their pieces play with soaring overhead perspectives and faraway vantage points, like cityscapes or mountainsides.
Their art can be found at their personal website (qudraws.com), Instagram (qu.draws), and Twitter (QuDraws).
— Sydney Peng ‘22
Source: Wikipedia
My mom gifted me The Yellow House at the beginning of the summer, and it was a timely read since I spent the summer living in my hometown with my family. A memoir written in 2019, it is Sarah Broom’s debut, and it won the 2019 National Book Award and the 2019 John Leonard Award for Best First Book. In The Yellow House, Broom explores the space she was born into—the physical location, but also her place as the 12th child in her family. The narrative starts long before her birth by tracing the life of her great-grandmother all the way down through generations until it reaches Broom’s parents and the yellow house they buy for their family in New Orleans East. Broom asserts that the history of a place belongs not to its mythology but to the lives and experiences of its inhabitants. With great prose and a compelling story, she peels back the curtain on New Orleans’ glamor to expose the way it has repeatedly failed and marginalized its poorest inhabitants—usually Black service industry workers living in New Orleans East. Although it was a smooth read, some of Broom’s prose describing the house had a denseness and vividness that I usually only encounter in poetry. The Yellow House tells its stories well, and it has made me think about how I relate to my family and the places we come from.
— Liv Ragan ’24
Source: A July edition of “Maybe Baby” (screenshot from email)
Every weekend for the past couple of months, I’ve woken up to a strange feeling—actual excitement to open my email inbox!—thanks to the free Sunday issue of Haley Nahman’s Substack newsletter, “Maybe Baby.” The newsletter is self-explained as covering “hard to describe emotions,” which, aptly, both sums it up and does not. Nahman draws on relatable, mundane inspirations—from Instagram trends and quarantine fatigue to her cat’s recent illness—to make honest, incisive observations about the state of social media and modern adulthood that seem at once specific to her and broadly true to me as a fairly online American 20-something. (Nahman is a former editor and writer for the online publication Man Repeller, and now works full time on her Substack and freelancing.) At the bottom of each installation, Nahman includes 15 things that she’s consumed that week. The recommendations feel something like a friend curating the best of their internet finds to share with you, and have led me variously to a video of a dog tucking itself into bed, a podcast about French philosopher Simone Weil, a history of American drunkenness, and an exploration of the Dissociative Identity Disorder community on Tiktok—in short, down thought-provoking rabbit-holes which I might not have otherwise travelled.
— Batya Stein ‘22
Source: https://www.fatimafarheenmirza.com/
When I finished reading the final pages of Fatima Farheen Mirza’s A Place for Us, I could not bring myself to close the book. I found myself flipping back and forth, searching for answers and re-reading my favorite lines. I could not help but wonder what had happened to each of the characters beyond the contents of the book.
A Place for Us traces the lives of an Indian-American Muslim family in California as they navigate love, loss, and unbelonging. It begins with the wedding of Hadia, the eldest daughter of the family, and from there, works its way back and forth to weave together a complete image of the characters’ experiences in post-9/11 America. But more than anything else, A Place for Us captures the realism and emotions that come with everyday life. In this book, there is not a single day or experience that is mundane. Mirza subverts traditional plot structure by leaping through time and space, an artistic choice that connects life events more so by theme than by chronology. For anyone looking for a cathartic and poignant read, A Place for Us is the book for you.
— Uma Menon ‘24
Source: https://kirstinvaldezquade.com/
When my internship ended in early August, I grabbed the first book that had been resting on my desk at home for over 2 months. The book—The Five Wounds by Kirsten Valdez Quade, a professor at Princeton—featured a large, slightly hunched, set of golden palms on the cover. I first stumbled across this book when I read an excerpt from the book in The New Yorker. The scene in the excerpt follows Amadeo, an unemployed alcoholic father residing in a small New Mexico town, as he prepares for a sacred religious ceremony. Caught up in his devout preparations, Amadeo is frustrated by the return of his pregnant 16-year-old daughter, Angel. The characters, I quickly realized, are complex and textured—with rich histories, undisclosed pasts, and conflicting interests.
Much like the excerpt, Quade’s debut novel is narrated by different characters—Amadeo, Angel, Amadeo’s mother. Each section reveals unexpected secrets that characters choose to keep hidden from one another. Reading this novel, I kept comparing it to staring through a kaleidoscope. Turn it one direction and you get a quick glimpse of Amadeo preparing to play Christ in an annual reenactment of the Crucifixion. Turn the kaleidoscope another way and we learn that Amadeo’s mother is hiding a terminal cancer diagnosis while caring for Angel’s newborn. Despite the many surprising and shocking narratives that surface, the novel, at its core, is about the many wounds that scar the Padilla family—and the resilience, love, and power that each member demonstrates as a result.
— Aditi Desai ‘24
Back home in China, Remembrance of Earth's Past (or more commonly known as The Three-Body trilogy) by Cixin Liu has been a cultural phenomenon for the past few years. On the Chinese internet, people would compare the books’ characters to real life figures and use phrases from the books to comment on real life events. So of course, its fame has struck my interest and for the past summer, the trilogy had been my bedtime read.
The simplest way I can summarize the trilogy would be that “aliens are going to take over the Earth and human beings rise up to protect their homeland.” But that summary fails to do any justice to the trilogy. It is more akin to a thought experiment about human evolution and humanity. However, the author doesn’t achieve this by letting the readers empathize with his characters. In fact, his characters are quite “disposable” and tool-like in that they simply move the plot forward. He intends to show us something macroscopic in terms of both space and time and raise difficult questions for the readers.
One of these difficult questions arises from two lines from the book that still haunt me (which are in a way mistranslated in the English version as “Make time for civilization, for civilization won't make time”). The first is a tenet held by the human race in a certain period of time—“Bestow upon time the gift of civilization, instead of giving civilization more time”—and its counterpart, a tenet held by humans at a later period—“Give civilization more time, instead of bestowing civilization upon time.” If any of you reading this have the chance to read the trilogy, I’d be curious to learn which one of these tenets you hold truer.
— Briony Zhao ‘24
Compelled by a desire to understand how the pandemic has affected the screen usage of children, I stumbled across a fascinating article during my summer internship. This recent study, grounded in the field of child developmental psychology, sought to answer the question: Is there a difference in the way passive (TV) and active screen time (smartphones, tablets, video games) affect the phonological memory of children? Phonological memory deals with verbal inputs and establishes an important foundation for long term reading mastery. Performed on a group of preschoolers in Russia, the study assessed the change in phonological memory of the children over the course of one year. During the year, the children were exposed to varying amounts of passive and active screen time according to their family lifestyles. The results confirmed a trend that has enormous implications for parenting: more passive screen time as opposed to active screen time was correlated with worse phonological memory in the long term. Perhaps this can be explained by the fact that passive screen time activities lead to limited attention in tasks like parent-child conversations that promote phonological development. At the same time, the results showed that active screen time did not promote language development. This is because not all active screen time has the same benefits. After all, playing an educational game is different from using social media. The major takeaway from this article is that screen use is complex and affects the development of young children who are trying to navigate new intellectual territories in their lives.
— Colton Wang ‘23