English – Koba English

A Little Life

This one was an absolute beast. Not only is A Little Life incredibly long (814 pages!), but Hanya Yanagihara doesn’t relent when it comes to some really viscerally awful stuff, described frankly and in detail.

I remember the hype around this book, the Man Booker and National Book Award shortlists, the actual Kirkus Prize, the mentions in book blogs (it was released during the peak of my book blog consumption), and thinking, “Okay, I’ll give this one a shot at some point.” People whose taste I trusted—including the friend who sent it to me—had loved it.

And well!

I might have picked a bad time to read it. I don’t mean only because my brain has been absolute mush lately, and not up to the task of an 800+ page doorstopper. I also mean that I might have put it off for too long, that in some ways A Little Life was a hype book of its time that seems irrelevant or outdated in 2026. Either way, by the end of the book I was just so frustrated that I was hate-reading, occasionally hate-skimming; it came with me on vacation so I would feel obligated to finish it to save myself from having to schlep it back home.

A Little Life follows a friend group that is, at least in part, based around a mysterious young man named Jude St. Francis. Yanagihara drops hints about a traumatic, impoverished childhood for Jude straight away, but we don’t find out the whole story until somewhere around maybe 75% of the way through? They meet in college (maybe grad school? time is fuzzy in this book) and their friendship continues until their early 50s, when the book ends. They also all become incredible successes in their fields: Jude as a lawyer, his friend and later partner Willem as an actor, Malcolm as an architect, and JB as an artist.

That long timeline is itself one of the things that doesn’t sit right with me. I did the birthday math; if we assume that the most recent years in the story are contemporaneous with publication, the characters would have been born in the early 60s. Maybe, at best, the early 70s: apparently the first-person chapters are set nine years in the future from a specific incident in the book. But the setting always feels like a perpetual now because there is absolutely nothing in the background to mark the passage of time. Vietnam? Reagan? AIDS? The Cold War? The Internet? Star Wars? September 11th? The Matrix? Smartphones? The Gulf War?

The discussion about how much or how little the real world should turn up in novels will never be settled; how one should balance the risk of sounding dated or aging like milk versus coming across as unrealistic or just plain weird. For the sake of taking the most charitable stance possible, I’ll assume that Yanagihara specifically chose the more detached, unspecified timeline so that A Little Life could slowly drift through various turmoil and upheavals and remain more or less ageless, focused on the relationships between the characters rather than historical specificity and accuracy.

But the result is that characters live through historical moments without ever commenting or even reflecting on them. Gay men during the 80s not once mentioning AIDS? Black characters not reckoning with the LA riots in the early 90s, or Obama’s presidency from 2008 through 2016? Queer characters not discussing the same-sex marriage debate of the early 2000s? New Yorkers and 9/11? Beyond those very obvious omissions, the characters seem to have perpetual mid-2000s liberal sensibilities even as college students in the late 70s and early 80s, which makes them feel kind of flat.

The downside to that choice, also, is that the Trump era put a hard stop on the timeless plausibility of A Little Life. While it’s entirely possible to imagine the last years of the book being, say, 2003 or 2008 as easily as being 2015, the aforementioned political indifference that was already a hard sell becomes impossible to countenance in 2016 or beyond. It’s no fault of Yanagihara’s, of course, but it’s still a consequence of the “fuzzy timeline” choice. The relentless march of history thwarted whatever Yanagihara’s aesthetic goal may have been in making it timeless, so she might as well have not.

I don’t think I would have such a quibble with the timeline weirdness if I didn’t think it was wholly unnecessary for what the book seems to be about (i.e., Jude). There is the very, very slow evolution of Willem and Jude’s relationship as they move from friends to lovers, which could have possibly been interesting, but I don’t think Yanagihara conveys it very well. Speaking to those perpetual mid-2000s liberal sensibilities, Willem is very chill and blasé about entering into a homosexual relationship with his best male friend. I have the advantage (if you can call it that) of being twenty years younger and growing up in very different environment, but even so I don’t think I would be half as chill and blasé about fundamentally altering such an important relationship, never mind rethinking my entire sexual identity—but then again, I’ve always joked about being the world’s straightest woman, so maybe that’s a me problem.

Nevertheless, if you’re not going to use such a long timeline to your advantage and grapple with some soul-searching, then you might as well just chuck it in the bin and start the story way, way later. You have 800 pages of material! You’re going to hit your wordcount minimum!

I’d also like to ask men who read A Little Life what they thought about it, or rather specifically how they felt about Yanagihara’s portrayal of male friendships. While I’m always going to struggle with how friend groups are written and idealized because they don’t seem to reflect my own friend groups (such as they were, or rather weren’t), the dynamics of this group were especially odd. The story goes out of its way to mark the four of them as special, something like a clique or some kind of aspirational guy gang that the world at large has declared Important. All of their classmates and friends instantly recognize the four men as some kind of unit, like they’re broadcasting BFF radiation for everyone to pick up on, and I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I’ve never detected that radiation from a friend group I’m not in. I don’t think this is Yanagihara doing anything subversive or clever here; I think she’s just using that as a sort of shorthand for saying, “See, these guys really are great and close friends!” The dynamics of whether people keep just one central group of friends their entire adult lives is also complicated; in my own experience I have a few different “friend groups” as such, but just as important to me are the individual friends who only have a one-on-one relationship with me. All of that is without bringing the question of gender into it—it’s no secret that emotional vulnerability and intimacy between (mostly) straight men is a complicated topic.

And, finally, the topic of Jude, who really seems to be the whole point of this story. Given all of the implausibility I just mentioned about the nature of these men’s friendships, I have to add: and what in the hell did they ever see in Jude? In each other, arguably: they don’t necessarily have a lot in common, we don’t see them go through any bonding experience or anything like that; their journey to mutual deep and abiding friendship is as quick and glossed-over as a children’s cartoon.

(Aside: I hate that I’m using shows like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic or Magic Knight Rayearth to make this point. I’m sorry these particular pop culture touchstones live in my head rent-free. But Yanagihara’s writing in that regard is genuinely that shallow and I can’t find any better comparison. “I just met you ten minutes ago but you’re my friend for life!”)

Jude in particular might stand out in that regard because we spend the most time with him, I don’t know. Or maybe because he has the most problems, or gets into the most trouble. JB and his drug addiction come in second place; Willem and Malcolm are, by contrast, very normal and drama-free. Jude is certainly incredibly gifted—he’s absurdly good-looking, as Yanagihara never tires of reminding us, and he’s a talented singer and cook and baker in addition to being a world-class litigator—but the gifts that make a genius are not the same gifts that make a good friend. There’s an off-hand remark from Willem at some point about what a good listener Jude is, I think, but not much more than that. He might have tutored them in math occasionally? Nonetheless they go to the ends of the earth for him. And it’s not just his Hood Hall crew! As an adult, nearly everyone he meets decides to descend upon this very special boy and shower him with attention and help and care! He finds a doctor who treats him at no cost for his entire adult life; one of his professors, aware of Jude’s status as an orphan, adopts him; randos who do pro bono legal work with him adore him and provide him with a fashionable, handicap-accessible living space.

(Exception made for the abusive boyfriend Caleb, but he’s cartoonishly evil to the point of melodrama and dies from pancreatic cancer anyway.)

Who in the history of anything gets that much attention and support and validation with so little effort except nepobabies?

Of course, the problem with disliking Jude as a character is that he’s the trauma sponge of the book, and disliking him feels like kicking a sack of puppies. To be clear, it’s not the character I dislike so much as Yanagihara’s use of him. His life at the monastery, and even the later child prostitution with Brother Luke, was within the realm of possibility for me. Even the continued sexual abuse at the orphanage and the perpetual horniness of long-haul truckers. I’m familiar enough with that sort of thing—between volunteering at a non-profit that used to facilitate international adoptions and later working on reports for similar child-focused NGOs—to know that vulnerable children, especially ones without safe adults in their lives, can suffer years of sexual abuse and exploitation. It’s a hard pit to get out of.

But the final destination in Philadelphia, with the pure sadism of Dr. Traylor, made it all too much. It’s unclear to me what that final episode is even supposed to add to an already-traumatized character. If it was important for Jude to have a physical disability, he could have been born with one, or been injured while hitchhiking. Why Dr. Traylor’s “Most Dangerous Game”? It was also just lazy writing: Yanagihara does the literary fiction version of “a wizard did it” and “somehow,” “eventually” Jude ends up in Traylor’s car after collapsing by a bush or along a road or something somewhere. Somehow, Palpatine returned. What is the point of heaping misery upon misery on a character? Is she trying to build the case that really, Jude was justified in taking his own life? I don’t know.

I always do a little bit of Internet sleuthing after I finish a book to get a sense of what other people thought about it; I’m curious like that. The Internet suggests that there is at least one interview with Yanagihara somewhere, maybe several, where she describes her intention with A Little Life as an explanation, of sorts, for the loved ones of suicide victims: it’s not your fault, she purportedly wants to say. Some suffer, and have suffered, so much that there’s nothing anyone can do to save them, and suicide is a sympathetic and valid option. I haven’t found the interview(s) in question, and I don’t care to, but I’m willing to take that as a possible explanation for why the book is the way it is. I can’t say that it improves my opinion of it at all.

I also wanted to dig up whether or not Jude and his trauma was inspired by some kind of real-life incident I hadn’t heard about. I’m not sure that writing a story inspired by those kind of events should end in the survivor killing themselves, but on the other hand, if the real-life person had done the same the story choice could maybe be justified. The People in the Trees, for example, was based on Daniel Carleton Gajdusek; this wouldn’t be her first roman à clef. (Though, a bit weird to do back-to-back books about child molestation, maybe…)

Nope, not this time. Everything in the story seems to be fabricated wholecloth from Yanagihara’s imagination.

Okay then. Did Yanagihara have any past experience as something like a social worker, or in child protective services or similar, to give her familiarity with the kind of horrors that can befall children like Jude who fall between the cracks?

Wikipedia is hardly an exhaustive source, but it only mentions that she worked as a publicist after college alongside writing and editing jobs at Condé Nast Traveler; I think it’s safe to hazard a guess that no, she hasn’t spent any time working with young people in Jude’s position.

Nor was there, after all the tragedy and misery, any indication at all of research on Yanagihara’s part when it comes to trauma, childhood sexual abuse, grooming, mental health, hell even Jude’s complex medical problems. Literature is allowed to be fiction, and to take liberties and poetic license; I’m not about to demand over-the-top Soviet-era realism in every story. But I think when you mine human misery so extensively for the sake of writing a book, you owe it to your readers and to anyone who’s gone through anything remotely similar to be able to prove some kind of…familiarity? respect? due diligence? That you’ve done your homework? There is an entire afterword in Jag heter inte Miriam where Axelsson gives at least some of her sources and recommended further reading, for example, even as she makes it clear that the specific story she told about the Holocaust and the 1948 Jönköping riots is entirely fictitious. And this included historical research as well as as sources on trauma and PTSD.

I’ve lived a life blessedly free of anything even remotely resembling what Jude endured, so I’m not about to make proclamations about what Jude’s characterization means for abuse survivors (or anyone with similar mental health struggles or physical disabilities). I can only say that as a reader, I find Jude’s character to be a cheap ploy for emotional manipulation and that there’s nothing I despise more in books (or movies, or TV shows) than cheap ploys for emotional manipulation. It’s lazy, hack writing and it diminishes real-life suffering.

Livet måste ha mening

I won’t be spending too much time* on Viktor Frankl’s Livet måste ha mening (translated from German and English by Margareta Edgardh), and that will more be focused on how the book is discussed in a broader context than the content of the book itself. Bluntly put, I’m not diplomatic enough to feel confident leveraging criticism against a Holocaust memoir. It feels more appropriate to discuss the context around it.

I usually hear this book described as Frankl’s account of “psychological discoveries” that he made while in a concentration camp, usually given as Auschwitz, and the best historical evidence seems to suggest this was not the case. It’s more likely that he had already refined his idea about meaning and logotherapy as a civilian, and that it was a pre-established framework for dealing with the horrors rather than an inspired response to them.

While Frankl refers to Auschwitz several times, he was only held in depot there a few days before being sent to Dachau (he also spent time at Thereseinstadt). The bulk of the testimony he provides, therefore, comes from those two camps and not Auschwitz. It feels petty to name this, because it’s not like any of the concentration camps were luxury resorts, but neither Dachau nor Thereseinstadt were built to be the kind of murder factory that Auschwitz was designed to be. This isn’t to say that people didn’t die there, because they absolutely did—but Auschwitz was next level. Indeed, one of the few (perhaps only) times Frankl brings up Dachau, he specifically describes the relief of himself and his fellow prisoners at being sent there because they know their chances for survival will be much greater than at Auschwitz.

If you go into the book knowing this facet of Frankl’s biography (which I did), you can’t help but be struck by his presentation of things. He’s certainly honest about being sent away from Auschwitz, like I mentioned, but the timeline is quite muddied and Dachau itself can’t be mentioned by name more than once or twice; in a couple of other places he only makes oblique reference to “the camp where I was freed.” Auschwitz, on the other hand, comes up over and over again. A dozen, two dozen times at least.

(Timothy Pytell goes into this in detail on his blog as well as his biography of Frankl, Viktor Frankl’s Search for Meaning.)

Given that, I think the takeaway people have from this book is that the horrors of Auschwitz led Frankl to develop his theory. That’s the context I was referring to earlier, and I think it’s a misunderstanding of what the book is. I also think this misunderstanding is a driving factor behind Livet måste ha mening‘s perennial, perpetual success. A therapist recommended it to me, for crying out loud.

I also don’t think Frankl’s idea of logotherapy, with meaning as the underlying driver, is as universally applicable as he presents it. First of all, his biography seems to flatly contradict his main thesis. Frankl periodically comes back to his drive to recover his lost psychology treatise as the “meaning-maker” (my word, not his) that fueled his will to live, that allowed him to survive the camps. But in just as many places he mentions how the favor of the barracks capo had saved him from certain doom, or how sheer dumb luck kept him from ending up in the wrong shipment, wrong train car, wrong work detail, etc. Neither of those had anything to do with his meaning, or even anything under his control.

The tension between meaning and luck aside, meaning according to logotherapy rests on three pillars, or rather is derived from at least one of the following options: accomplishing a great feat, experiencing something sublime (it seems to be love for another person, but sometimes the language Frankl uses, at least in translation, makes it sound like “an experience” could count), or suffering. The first two seem harmless enough (though I wonder, does a stalker in the throes of obsession have a sound, morally acceptable meaning to their life, when the object of their focus might well be living in terror? hm), but telling my loved ones with chronic pain to find some vague, muddy “meaning” to their suffering would land somewhere between insulting, condescending, infuriating and ignorant. I would never dream of it. It doesn’t help, either, that Frankl is very vague on what “meaning” is. Fair enough that we all have to find it for ourselves, but it would be nice to have a definition or examples or guiding prompts or something.

He throws us a couple bones, at least, when it comes to suffering. One example is a young man who becomes paralyzed after a diving accident at 17 and decides to study psychology as a result, obtaining a degree and son. According to Frankl, the young man assured him that he would have never pursued psychology otherwise, and that he found his life so much more rewarding and enriching than it was before. To my mind, that doesn’t seem like meaning in suffering, but meaning from a great feat. The great feat just happened to be preceded (and perhaps caused?) by great suffering. The other example is a grieving rabbi who survived the Holocaust, while his wife and children did not. According to Frankl, the rabbi came to therapy distraught at the idea that he would be unable to be reunited with his loved ones in the afterlife because they died a martyr’s death, elevating them above whatever death he can hope to achieve.* Frankl then suggests that surely the suffering the rabbi is experiencing now on Earth is something that will purify him and make him worthy of seeing his loved ones again. The rabbi thanks him and leaves Frankl’s office with a new framework for his grief (so we are told). While I think this is a much better example of meaning in suffering, it’s still meaning predicated on particular religious ideas, including about the afterlife. It was the right answer to suffering for a religious Jewish man, and Frankl was wise to make that connection, but there’s no way pointing to the afterlife or God can be the right answer for everyone. Obviously it doesn’t work for atheists; it also doesn’t work for belief systems where memories and consciousness don’t survive death.

So in addition to being uncomfortable with the popular misunderstanding of Livet måste ha mening‘s factual origins, I also have to admit to being uncomfortable with the advice and life philosophy Frankl advocates for, since it seems to me they can easily be irrelevant, or even do as much harm as good. Indeed, a member of my philosophy study group found a study suggesting that meaning, even as Frankl describes it, might in some cases be a net negative:

The findings have demonstrated that search for meaning appears to be uniformly harmful with relation to overall burnout and its composite dimensions.

I’m glad I read it, I guess, because now I can say that I have. Now I know what one of the twentieth century’s most popular self-help books contains, for whatever that’s worth. Mostly it reminded me that we read Elie Wiesel’s Night in ninth grade, and that I don’t remember much about it except that I didn’t like it. I wonder if I might feel differently about it now.

*The final wordcount of this blog post determined that this statement was a lie.

**This is my memory of Frankl’s description. I’m not read up enough on Jewish theology to know exactly what I’m talking about or to know if Frankl’s getting it right, either.

Filterworld

If I find myself somewhere bored and bereft of a book, I like to dig back through my TBR and find something I can get as an ebook from one of my libraries. This is how I came to be sitting in my favorite neighborhood haunt, drinking a beer and reading Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld. In brief, Filterworld is a snappy history of how recommender algorithms have come to shape our Internet, and our broader cultural, experience. It covers a lot of the same territory as Chokepoint Capitalism, though with less pissed-off creator-side rage in favor of a more anxious user-side perspective. “Do I actually like the things I like?” is Chayka’s recurring question.

Chayka’s proposed solution to The Algorithms, to the extent it is a workable solution (and to the extent he even calls it a solution), is to slow down our focus:

If there is a simple answer to breaking down Filterworld, then it might be something like a version of the slow food movement, as it was popularized in the 1990s, but for culture…We need to bring that same understanding of sustainability and specificity to the way that we consume and support culture online, too. Resistance to algorithmic frictionless requires an act of willpower, a choice to move through the world in a different way. It doesn’t have to be a dramatic one.

He then gives the example of visiting a local cafe that he’s always passed but never visited because he didn’t find it appealing; in his own words, it wasn’t “Instagrammable”:

I felt both bemused and sad that this was a rare experience, something like visiting a museum. Our phones and feeds absorb so much of our attention and dominate so many of our preferences that stepping out of their conveniently predetermined paths and choosing an experience not immediately engaging feels somewhat radical. This applies to fashion choices as well as food, which television shows we watch, which books we read, which furniture we buy, where we travel. If we shift our priorities away from the space of algorithmic digital platforms and once more to the physical world, in which everything is not instantly evaluated in terms of engagement, we might find ourselves building not only better culture but better communities, relationships, and politics as well.

I’m cutting to the chase partly because that’s what struck me most about the book. Chayka is describing an experience that I know a lot of people have, and yet that I don’t (not entirely). I only begrudgingly acquired a Twitter as a means of freelance self-promotion, but never became hooked on the platform and stopped Tweeting as soon as I no longer needed to promote myself. I’ve never used Spotify as my primary music library or my means of discovering new music. My partner periodically subscribes to Netflix, and we’ve been known to occasionally bingewatch particular series or short docuseries, but the last one was An American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders back in 2024. I never rely on Yelp or similar to find cafes, or online travel agencies to plan my international vacations. I post to Instagram but am not really invested in comments or hearts or followers. Only posts, no reels, maybe the occasional story. Admittedly, I can get sucked into watching a comedy reel about Philly if the feed finds me in a moment of weakness, but I have no desire to follow those accounts. I do not, and will never, have TikTok. The only thing I will cop to is a YouTube history that is probably wildly schizophrenic, since I use it for background music while I’m working and my tastes run from symphonic to techno to “this song popped into my head when I woke up and now I need to listen to it on repeat all morning or I won’t get any work done.”* And while I never sign into my Google account on either of my work computers, I’m sure that nonetheless the algos have managed to connect my legal person to those dozens, possibly hundred or so plays of “Takin’ Care of Business” that one day last February.

Every time Chayka observed his algorithmic behavior or reactions in a state of what I’d call “vaguely befuddled despair,” I couldn’t help but think, “But you could just…not.” So in the end, when his solution is to, indeed, “just…not,” I didn’t find it much of a revelation.

Chayka has an art history background, so it’s no surprise that what I found most compelling (and what he spends the most time on) is how once again the medium has shaped the message: “BookTok” and the proliferation of autofiction in literary bestsellers, the lack of key changes in pop music, art exhibits so specifically designed for Instagram selfies that they become meaningless otherwise. Chokepoint Capitalism outlines the structural inequities of such recommender systems, but Filterworld also reminds us that they’re also having direct influence on the culture itself—one that exists for all of us, regardless of whether any given one of us subscribes to Spotify, Netflix, etc.

It with immense satisfaction, then, that I can wrap up this post by pointing out that the algorithms weren’t the ones to bring me to this book. A guest on a podcast recommended it; that podcast in turn had been recommended to me by a friend. It was human connections all the way through, made specifically and deliberately by people to make a point. The podcast guest was on to talk about social media generally, and felt it relevant to mention; my friend recommended the podcast because the show often touches on things that he knew we both were interested in. I think Chayka would be happy to hear that.

* Here I have to say that I’m grateful to Chayka for highlighting the streaming service Idagio as a better alternative than Spotify for classical music. The platform detects and counts plays differently, using calculations more appropriate for longer classical pieces than three-minute pop hits, and recommendations are picked by human experts with care and deliberation rather than statistically driven recommenders. I might go ahead and subscribe once I’m back from vacation, since this post is going live while I’m at a cabin in Kiruna.

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.