English – Koba English

Yellowface

R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface was big and splashy in my circles when it debuted. It was one of the few new releases that I actually noticed, though it appears I didn’t take the step of adding it to my TBR. Alas, it won’t count for that goal!

Someone in my Swedish book club floated the idea of R. F. Kuang, though torn between this one and Babel. I’m a bit ashamed to say that I pushed for Yellowface out of the two, based purely on the opinions of other bookish friends whose taste I trust implicitly. I say “ashamed” because I’m not sure I liked Yellowface all that much and wonder if Babel would have been more interesting.

Juniper “June” Hayward is a struggling White author with one flop of a novel under her belt; her Chinese-American Yale classmate Athena Liu is a literary rockstar. When Athena chokes to death on a pancake after the women go out for drinks, June takes the opportunity to steal her latest novel about Chinese laborers in Europe during World War I. June revises the manuscript and sends it off to her agent, passing it off as entirely her own work. The final product, The Last Front, is a runaway bestseller—maybe in part because June capitalizes on her connection to Athena, blowing their ambiguous frienemyship entirely out of proportion. Her publisher, meanwhile, decides to publish under the name Juniper Song and shoots some new, racially ambiguous author photos. June becomes a darling of the literati and the online AAPI community, setting up scholarships, mentoring aspiring writers, getting retweeted on Twitter and liked on Instagram.

The facade doesn’t last, of course, and accusations of plagiarism eventually make the rounds, but rather than come clean June doubles down. She rides out the scandal in the short term, but after she publishes a follow-up novella called Mother Witch that opens with a line she gleaned from Athena’s old notebooks, there’s no way out. While she struggles to revise and rewrite the novel without the plagiarized lines, spooky messages on social media convince June that she’s being haunted by Athena’s ghost. The campaign continues until June spirals out into a mental breakdown that ends with her recorded confession being released to the public. Her reputation now in tatters, June ends the book by plotting her literary revenge: a tell-all confessional memoir where she frames the publication of The Last Front as an elaborate hoax to expose how misogynistic and racist the publishing industry is.

Yellowface feels like a punching bag of a story for the sake of a few moments. By that I mean, it feels like Kuang had some points she wanted to make, and built the premise of the novel and the entirety of June’s character around creating the opportunity to make those points. The result is that when Kuang gets to have those moments in the story, the criticism is sharp, on point, and biting, such as her account of June and her editor—two White women—revising a story by a Chinese-American woman to include more (good) White people, or the fickle nature of the Twitterati. But the only reason those moments can happen is because, after the initial (understandable if morally icky) theft, June continues to make incredibly poor choices that defy all logic or sense of self-preservation. She flatly refuses to send The Last Front to a sensitivity reader for no other reason than it might delay publication; she keeps the plagiarized opening line in Mother Witch. Maybe this speaks to my own risk-averse nature, but if I knew I was already skating on thin moral and artistic ice, I would do everything I could to cover my ass.

All the while, since this is from a first-person perspective, we’re getting June’s unfiltered inner monologue, and it really seems like the point of the perspective is to make it clear to the reader how entitled and clueless she is, even as a White woman with “good” politics. (“I even voted for Biden!” she assures us early on.) I won’t say these people don’t exist, because they do, but June feels more like a low-effort caricature of them than anything else, which she has to be for the story to work. Without giving away too much of a plot twist, refusing the sensitivity reader is a plot-essential event that contributes to her downfall. But then there are other scenes where Kuang really, really nails what it’s like to struggle with a passion, an art that used to bring you joy but is now just DOA. She also makes it clear that June has some real mental health issues, with a past that includes sexual assault and (it sounds like) childhood bullying. If these scenes are meant to humanize June and provide some depth to the caricature, they feel weird next to the scenes where Kuang’s disdain for people like her just radiates off the page. June doesn’t feel like a more complex character for it; she just feels inconsistent.

I have to admit, for a minute I was hoping that the third act twist would be the slow reveal that Yellowface itself, the book you’re reading, is the tell-all confessional that June was planning to write. A meta ending like that would have done a lot to gloss over the failings of the filler. But Kuang doesn’t go there (I don’t think? maybe I missed some subtext) so I was left disappointed.

Obviously, a lot of the plot rides on June skirting the moral line of presenting as AAPI, or at least AAPI-adjacent. The title alone makes that clear. But I’m racking my brain to think of any equivalent scandal in recent literary news, of a White author passing as some flavor of AAPI to sell their novel because of its connections to AAPI culture. Expanding the field a bit, you get noteworthy racefaking cases like Rachel Dolezal, CV Vitolo-Haddad, and the “Gay in Damascus” blogger, but none of them are masquerading specifically as AAPI or to sell a novel. If you start from the published author angle instead of the racefaking one, James Frey made up a whole bunch of stuff for A Million Little Pieces, but he never pretended to be anyone other than James Frey. There was the big plagiarism brouhaha over Jumi Bello’s The Leaving in 2022, but again no racefaking. The only case I can think of that resembles June’s literary yellowface is from over a hundred years ago: Winnifred Eaton writing as Onoto Watanna, producing books like A Japanese Nightingale. Still, her writing was her own work, even if it she was still a British-Chinese woman writing about Japan, a country she had no personal connection to or had ever visited. Am I just out of the loop?

A Brief History of Seven Killings

There is a lot of discussion about A Brief History of Seven Killings in the translation world because the first and biggest decision to make when translating it is: how do you render Jamaican Patois in other languages? It isn’t used incidentally, like in other Caribbean literature I’ve read before, for snippets of dialogue or occasional idiomatic expressions; Marlon James employs the dialect for the overwhelming majority of this 600+ page book. Putting aside the question of sheer weighty wordcount majority, the shifts between Patois and standard English are important pieces of characterization. Each perspective character has their own voice, of course, but even a single character will slip from one to the other depending on who they’re talking to and how they’re feeling. An educated middle-class character sometimes switches to Patois for her inner monologue under extreme emotional duress; others play it up as a racial performance in order to appeal to powerful white Americans and get what they want. These are deliberate choices by the author to convey…something…that falls flat if you were to make it literal or textual.

I don’t know to do it! I won’t pretend to know! But that makes A Brief History one of the rare books published since 2000 that I’m actually vaguely aware of, and so I was excited to see this book proposed for my international WhatsApp book club. I fell behind, however, and only finished this sometime in mid-June even though it was May’s book—probably because I was still making a heroic effort to finish Jag heter inte Miriam.

A Brief History of Seven Killings is a fictionalized account of the assassination attempt on Bob Marley, or maybe to put it more precisely, Marlon uses the assassination attempt on Bob Marley as a framing device for a story about Jamaica, Jamaicans, and their relationship to the United States that spans the course of fifteen years. Getting into any more plot than that would miss the point, because it’s less what happens and more how characters develop and inadvertently shape their destinies over the course of the book. In a way, plot is only incidental and is an excuse to bring together a particular ensemble cast that would otherwise have nothing to do with each other.

Friendaholic

Elizabeth Day’s Friendaholic was mentioned somewhere in my social media relatively soon after its publication in 2024. Was it LitHub? Was it a podcast? I can’t quite remember. But it came into my life at a time when I was reflecting on my own (dysfunctional) friendships and relationship patterns, and a title like Friendaholic spoke to my preferred method of integrating into Swedish society. It ended up on my TBR, which is how it turned into an impulse purchase at The English Bookshop February last year, which means by the time I read it in May it had been in my library for over a year. In terms of my annual reading goals, it’s a grand slam.

Friendaholic is a squirrely little beast in terms of genre. It’s non-fiction, it’s self-help, it’s memoir. Day takes us through some of her own friendships, both successes and failures, with a dash of some light research and interviews. Whether or not there’s a confessional aspect to it for Day isn’t for me to say, but the main thrust of the book seems to be that by reflecting on her friendship patterns and what research suggests, she can help a reader in a similar situation or with similar hang-ups.

Overall I enjoyed reading it, but I’m not sure if there was much in Friendaholic that was new to me in any meaningful way. The drawback of Day’s memoir approach is that if you don’t relate to her personal narrative, there’s really nothing of interest. I could have probably just as well skipped the chapter on infertility, for example, because that’s not a factor in my life.

By reader request, Day has shared the questions she used for the interviews sprinkled throughout the book. I don’t know if I have the nerve to sit my friends down and ask them about (our) friendship, but maybe you do?

Philadelphia: Holy Experiment

I rescued this battered old Maxwell Struthers Burt hardback from the collection of books that my dad seemed to have inherited from his own father. I suppose something about moving across an ocean makes you sentimental for the place of your birth, especially since I’m forever explaining to people that I’m from “north of Philly.”

I had a grand time reading it. The footnotes and commentary alone are pure entertainment, if not necessarily the strictest history. Published in 1945, the most important niche that Philadelphia: Holy Experiment fills is as a World War II era time capsule. How were Americans thinking about themselves and their history while they were fighting Nazis abroad? Also, it includes a recipe for Fish House Punch in the endnotes. Amazing.

När Hitler stal den skära kaninen

In the wake of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, I asked my Jewish friends which Holocaust novels and movies they would recommend. The topic has a tendency to get mined for sentimentality and melodrama by lazy hacks, after all. One of the books that came up was Judith Kerr’s When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, a title that I recognized from elementary school reading lists but that I had never read myself.

A few years later, I noticed a Swedish translation (När Hitler stal den skära kaninen) by Ingegerd Leczinsky on the book swap shelf at the local arts center and decided this was my moment. It took another year or so, and then in my year of reading history I decided I should finally make good on my previous inquiries.

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit is an award-winning classic of children’s literature so any review in 2026 is redundant. Given the state of things in the world—in the US, mainly—it’s probably worth revisiting these classics. It’s also worth understanding the ripple effects of the camps: what it was like for the families who left as refugees, people who would have otherwise never had a reason to leave the only country they’d ever known, people who had to get by with intermittent updates about the friends and family who had stayed behind, people who had to live with the uncertainty of whether it would ever be possible to return or if they would ever want to.

My only gripe is specific to this particular hardback edition from Berghs: Kerr also provided her own illustrations for the book, and her art often (though not always) appears on the covers. But my edition (pictured above) has an extremely grimdark and dramatic oil painting aesthetic that doesn’t at all match Kerr’s simpler, lighter pen-and-ink illustrations inside. Other publishers are also guilty of this choice, though, so it’s hardly controversial. But it’s certainly a choice to feature Anna, Judith’s stand-in, holding the pink rabbit that never left Germany with her.

Orbital

Still reading books, bad at posting here!

Samantha Harvey’s Orbital won the 2024 Booker Prize, which was a significant factor in its selection for my monthly Swedish book club. There is a Swedish translation, but we all read it in English.

We all hated it, too! Gratifying!

Orbital gives us 24 hours in the life of astronauts on the International Space Station. Cool concept, but since Harvey spends most of the book describing Earth from space instead of really getting into anyone’s heads, or dissecting any relationships or examining any characters, it’s just pretty blah. It feels like reading an Instagram account: each chapter its own post, with a meticulously described view over the Earth and then an accompanying “caption” in the form of a crew member’s thoughts, always too short to plumb any depths.

The orbital perspective—the fact that we are constantly presented with the image of the Earth as a whole, as a single planet out in space—suggests profundity, but in the end goes no farther than suggestion. Nothing is asked of the reader. If you find the constant descriptions of Earth repetitive and uninteresting, skimming over them does nothing to diminish your experience of the book. If you instead find the internal narrations and thoughts of the astronauts repetitive and uninteresting, skimming over those parts likewise changes nothing. The super typhoon that the astronauts track throughout the book, whose damage Harvey occasionally zooms in to describe, doesn’t actually have personal repercussions for any of the characters since we never find out if loved ones lived or died. The omniscient narrator informs us of a crack in the hull, but nothing comes of it.

The judges have their reasons, I suppose, but I wonder if one of the most important reasons was their sheer exhaustion with the world. If I were still in academia I might be tempted at this point to write a monograph on the concept of the “burnout novel,” with a nod to my boy Byung-chul Han. That’s the new genre to which I’d say Orbital belongs: the burnout novel. Every day we are inundated with crises and catastrophes that demand our attention and our empathy, and maybe it turns out those are not boundless resources. Likewise it seems our ability and our means to renew those resources are becoming increasingly stunted. In that context, Orbital is a book that can gently wash over a passive reader with no effort whatsoever. There is no urgency, no message. How easy to read a book that makes no emotional demands. How relaxing.

How pointless.

Baby Driver

Finally, I’ve finished writing all my dorky little book reports for the books I read in 2025 and can move on to 2026! While this entry is backdated to January, I’m writing it in May. It’s just been that kind of year.

Jan Kerouac’s Baby Driver came into my life by way of a massive tome of Beat literature, Beat Down to Your Soul, that I’d lugged around with me totemically since I bought it in college. I didn’t actually read it until 2020 and it was one of those books that spiraled out of control in terms of additions to my TBR, full of names and titles that I’d never heard of before but that also sounded fascinating. In particular, all of the women who had been part of the Beat movement but who have been sidelined and forgotten, if not by academics then certainly by popular culture. Kerouac and Ginsberg are household names; not so Diane di Prima.

My TBR at this point is several hundred books, most of which I’ve outsourced to the Storygraph app instead of remembering myself, but I always had Baby Driver ready at hand. It’s a catchy title and an amazing promise of a novel: Kerouac’s own daughter! One essay in the Beat Down to Your Soul collection, maybe by the compiler herself, also painted a striking picture for me of Jack Kerouac as an absentee father and the overall tragic arc of Jan’s life, which probably helped further fix it in my memory. Imagine my surprise when, on the tail end of my Christmas visit to my family, I stumbled on Baby Driver at the local bookstore! Perfect. I’d already picked up The Extinction of Irena Rey as a gift from my mom, but this one was it: Baby Driver was THE book of the trip.

I don’t have much time for Jack Kerouac, to be perfectly honest. I read On the Road on a Greyhound trip to Chicago in my early 20s (points for pretention, I suppose) and even then I couldn’t match the literary idolization of Jack Kerouac the person to the Sal Paradise of the novel. While there are moments of exquisite, ecstatic prose, beautiful wordsmithing alone isn’t enough to fully paint over or transform an uninspiring truth. Here’s a guy just constantly mooching off his aunt (read as: mother), and that’s supposed to be heroic and admirable and even a bit manly? As the kids probably no longer say, the math ain’t mathin’.

I also feel a bit bad framing this review of Baby Driver within the context of Jack Kerouac, perpetuating as it does a tendency to situate women writers in relation to the famous men in their lives instead of presenting them on their own terms. See also: Save Me the Waltz. But whatever! It’s clear that J. Kerouac fille very much engaged with, and was inspired by, J. Kerouac père in the best possible way. Baby Driver has a similar picaresque structure and literary style, except with a better narrator.

“Better” is certainly a loaded word here. What makes Jan superior to Sal? I suppose it’s a matter of taste, at least partially, but the word that keeps coming up when I try to describe it is awareness. Jan Kerouac, the author, has a distance and an awareness about Jan Kerouac the character, the Jan of several years ago, that her father seems to lack about Sal Paradise (and by extension, himself?). Kerouac fille can see, with the advantage of hindsight, how destructive and tragic some of her choices are and the ways that her situation, interpersonal relationships, and status shaped and limited her. Kerouac père, on the other hand, mostly seems nostalgic. No reflection over what enabled or supported those adventures, just the mad rush of a good time.

To point to that in the text, Baby Driver ends with Jan reuniting and reconciling with her mother. They sit in the kitchen and talk about restoring some antique furniture her mom has in storage, as well as the possibility of reuniting their broken-up family. Jan has come full circle and has, at least temporarily, restored one of the primary relationships in her life and acknowledged its importance for her. In fact, she’s grown and matured enough now to offer support of her own. On the Road ends with Sal sitting alone, daydreaming about Dean and Dean’s father. Not even his own family, but someone else’s. The hero ever apart from the crowd, never acknowledging his own past.

More than all that, though, Baby Driver is just a good book. It’s a wild ride full of characters and adventures and beautiful language and it’s just good. I’m not sure how it managed to get lost down the memory hole, but it doesn’t deserve to be forgotten.

The Extinction of Irena Rey

Does it count as professional narcissism if I want to read a book because it’s about translators?

I first saw an ad for The Extinction of Irena Rey in LitHub, though another bookish friend later mentioned enjoying it. But the only thing that made me add it to my list was translators! mystery! The author, Jennifer Croft, is also a translator of renown (Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, among others) and that only made the prospect even more tempting.

At its most basic, The Extinction of Irena Rey is about the search for missing Polish author Irena Rey. She’s always been very idiosyncratic about how her translators work, we learn, so this time is no different: she invites them to her house for a summit (as she calls it) and everyone works together to translate her latest work into their respective languages. They can’t talk about the weather, they can’t use their names, they can’t translate any other Polish author. There’s certainly a cult-like element to everything. This time around, however, the cult leader has mysteriously vanished. What to do?

This straightforward series of events is wrapped in multiple levels of metatext. The novel you as a person in the real world are reading is in English, of course, but within the world of the novel this is a translation into English from Polish that was (again, in the world of the novel) originally written by an Argentinian woman. Who just so happens to absolutely despise the translator. Oh, and the imaginary Polish original text is supposedly a fictionalized account of actual events!

This is where I have to regret that I fell so behind with my dorky little book reports here because I know there are a lot of things about the book that I’ve forgotten, in addition to the little scraps I remember but can’t find a place to shoehorn in here. It’s been several months now since I finished it. But I remember that I enjoyed every minute of it: it was weird and unhinged and just incredibly smart.

Gabi: A Girl in Pieces

The third and final part of my Fat Triptych was Gabi, a Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero.

This one didn’t make the rounds quite as much; I think I only saw it on one blog, but that one review was enough to get me intrigued. And then my US library had an ebook copy!

Gabi, a Girl in Pieces focuses on Gabi Hernandez’ senior year of high school, told in the form of her diary. On the one hand, I could summarize it as high school drama, and that would be way more glib than the book deserves. On the other hand, I could summarize it as an Issues Novel tackling things like racism, addiction, body image, teen pregnancy, sexual assault, and family trauma, and that would be far more of a downer than the book actually is. Really, in the end, the story is about a year in the life of a very particular human who is going through very particular things, and that’s what keeps Gabi from becoming an overwrought or anvilicious After School Special. I’m pretty sure that high school me would have respected Gabi and related to her; grown up me wanted to protect and encourage her.

No surprise then when I say that Gabi was a welcome palate cleanser after Dietland. Where Plum was an absolute blank void who only served as an excuse for Walker to lecture her readers, Gabi is an actual character. She has a personality, she has strengths and weaknesses, she has opinions, she has interests. Gabi isn’t a manifesto, and Quintero doesn’t have an axe to grind. She just has a character—people—that she cares about.

It’s also refreshing to read a YA novel that isn’t a stealth attempt to sell books to fully adult readers looking for a bit of lazy, easy escapism. Gabi is actually for young people, and I mean that as a compliment and in the best way possible. It’s not up to me to say that Quintero understands the readers she’s targeting, but it’s clear that she respects them.

Dietland

The second part of my Fat Triptych from Christmas 2025 (yes I’m writing this in May 2026) was the splashy and much-lauded Dietland by Sarai Walker.

I had been so excited to read this one back when it was first announced. All of the book blogs I was following at the time loved it and kept comparing it favorably to Fight Club and it just seemed like it would be a really fun and life-affirming read!

It was not.

I wonder if I would have liked it better if I’d read it on first release—when I was a different person, when the world and The Discourse was different as well—or if that wouldn’t have made any difference at all. It left such a disappointing taste in my mouth that I had to immediately schedule a meeting with the other member of the Bad Reads Club to give vent to my spleen.

Dietland just comes across like Walker’s own personal airing of the grievances: with Weight Watchers, with Victoria’s Secret, with unattainable beauty standards, with anti-depressants, with advertising, possibly with a few blind dates that went spectacularly poorly. That’s not the same thing as social commentary, even if her grievances touch on social or cultural phenomena.

Obviously a book that includes a radical feminist underground that carries out vigilante justice on behalf of sexual assault victims and kidnaps British media moguls as a response to Page 5 Girls is not realistic in any sense, much as nothing about Fight Club is realistic in any sense. But there is a lack of emotional? psychological? realism in the small moments that made it impossible for me to connect the book to real life in any sense. People are absolutely cruel, but in Dietland everyone’s top priority seems to be going out of their way to make fat women (namely Plum) suffer. And I do mean everyone. Plum herself is also nearly completely without self-insight or reflection, and this obviously has to be by design because the book isn’t about Plum, and it was never about Plum: it’s Walker’s manifesto. Plum has to constantly be lectured and explained to so that Walker can have a soapbox. On occasions when Plum turns it around and has an epiphany of her own, they’re full of secondhand embarrassment because they’re just so…shallow.

One that stuck with me and I think sums up the entire mood of the book: at some point near the end of, or perhaps right after, her anti-makeover (or “makeover,” complete with scare quotes, if you prefer) Plum is sitting on the subway and contemplating a fellow passenger. A man. And she thinks to herself that being fat has given her the superpower of seeing people’s true selves—selves that they would never reveal to thin, beautiful women. (By “people” here, she really seems to mean men in particular.)

My reading of the text is that Walker means this “I’m 14 and this is deep” kind of insight completely unironically and straight-faced. Plum doesn’t really evolve beyond that point or come to a more nuanced understanding. Walker doesn’t really criticize it or show Plum to be wrong in any way; none of the soapbox lecturer characters talk to Plum about this claim. If anything, it’s the enlightenment they were pushing her towards for the entire book.

It’s been ten years since Dietland. I hope Walker’s feeling better.