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These are the top ten books I'm glad I listened to! I'm sure they would have nice to read too, but the narrators all these all added a little something to them.
Check out the rest of the Broke and Bookish's TTT Audio Freebie!
These are the top ten books I'm glad I listened to! I'm sure they would have nice to read too, but the narrators all these all added a little something to them.
Check out the rest of the Broke and Bookish's TTT Audio Freebie!
It's not very 
The book is written as a sort of memoir. The protagonist reminds the reader several times that it is both fiction and memoir. She goes travels between the present and the past and doesn't always let us know and that can be confusing at times. It lends to the feeling that the protagonist is haunted by her past, that she can so easily drift into memories and stop seeing the world as it is around her in that moment. I loved that it gave a bigger picture of the protagonist as a person, that these events of her past still had a hold of her, but that she was working to let them go.
There is something very powerful about taking deliberate time to work through what haunts us, to let go of the shame we feel in our past, to stop letting it hurt us.
I'll be honest, I listened to the audiobook, which was 13 hours long and read by Emily Woo Zeller. Zeller is amazing, giving the book a full performance, complete with the reverie that really let me know when she was drifting between times. Fortunately, having listened instead of read the book, I could hear the pronunciations of the beautiful names that I would have otherwise just butchered.
As far as the feminist side of things go, this is definitely one of those books that I picked it solely because of Women In Translation month and would not have found any other way. It's proof that setting out to find diverse books to read on purpose allows me to find books that would not have otherwise been in my path and to appreciate stories that I would not otherwise have the opportunity to hear/read. It lets me step into places and history that I was never aware of, such as a sweatshop in Korea during the last century. In that same vein, it's great to read the stories of ordinary women. I know we get caught up in the women breaking barriers and starting revolutions, but we need to remember the ordinary women too. We need to remember the ones who join unions and those who don't, the ones who can only go to school because of work programs, the ones who finish and those who don't, the ones who find their dreams and those who don't.
While the content keeps this from being the kind of story that I could recommend to anyone, this is the kind of book I wish they would include in curriculum for world or Eastern literature. To use her own words to explain the importance of this:
History is in charge of putting things in order and society is in charge of defining them. The more order we achieve, the more truth is hidden behind that neat surface... Perhaps literature is about throwing into disarray what has been defined... About making a mess of things, all over again.
If diversity or feminism or women's lives are among the things you like to read about, this is definitely a book for you. Also, check out the rest of Shin's books here.
Okies! So on I go. Here are the 10 debuts that I'm most excited to read in 2016.
The Loneliness of Distant Beings by Katie Ling
That cover is gorgeous and seems to indicate either a magical realism story or a literary, lyrical contemporary story, like Jandy Nelson's, where the metaphor is emphasized on the cover instead of the people within. The synopsis for the book is a little vague to the point where I'm not entirely sure what the book is about -- is Seren literally floating through space? Or is that a metaphor for her state of mind? And how do Dom becoming the Sun and Seren staying in his orbit play into loyalty to home vs. loyalty to each other? But regardless, I am intrigued, and looking forward to this book.
