What Book Are You Currently Reading? (2.0.)

[pikachu]

Highlights of q1 were:

The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng
Shadows At Noon by Joya Chatterji
The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream by Patrick Radden Keefe

Honorable mentions to The Leavers by Lisa Ko, The Quiet American by Graham Greene, and All This Could be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews.

I don't think it was a great book, but s/o to Gold Diggers by Sanjena Sathian for uncannily depicting the world that I live in better than anything else I've seen.

(Fwiw I do read stuff which isn't related to Asia in some way or form.)

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

Highlights of q1 were:

The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng
Shadows At Noon by Joya Chatterji
The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream by Patrick Radden Keefe

Honorable mentions to The Leavers by Lisa Ko, The Quiet American by Graham Greene, and All This Could be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews.

I don't think it was a great book, but s/o to Gold Diggers by Sanjena Sathian for uncannily depicting the world that I live in better than anything else I've seen.

(Fwiw I do read stuff which isn't related to Asia in some way or form.)

Rachel Heng is an interesting choice, Singaporean authors don't get read much outside of Singapore. I've actually met her and had my copy of the book signed by her, but haven't been able to find the time to sit down and actually read it. Her previous was a bit of a dissapointment that wasted it's premise.

[pikachu]

Highlights of q1 were:

The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng
Shadows At Noon by Joya Chatterji
The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream by Patrick Radden Keefe

Honorable mentions to The Leavers by Lisa Ko, The Quiet American by Graham Greene, and All This Could be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews.

I don't think it was a great book, but s/o to Gold Diggers by Sanjena Sathian for uncannily depicting the world that I live in better than anything else I've seen.

(Fwiw I do read stuff which isn't related to Asia in some way or form.)

Rachel Heng is an interesting choice, Singaporean authors don't get read much outside of Singapore. I've actually met her and had my copy of the book signed by her, but haven't been able to find the time to sit down and actually read it. Her previous was a bit of a dissapointment that wasted it's premise.

Yeah, I heard about it on a Japan Times podcast out of all places and picked it up bc the premise was right up my alley. Had never heard of before. This was actually my second Singaporean book - I read The Inlet by Claire Tham last year and liked it also.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

Highlights of q1 were:

The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng
Shadows At Noon by Joya Chatterji
The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream by Patrick Radden Keefe

Honorable mentions to The Leavers by Lisa Ko, The Quiet American by Graham Greene, and All This Could be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews.

I don't think it was a great book, but s/o to Gold Diggers by Sanjena Sathian for uncannily depicting the world that I live in better than anything else I've seen.

(Fwiw I do read stuff which isn't related to Asia in some way or form.)

Rachel Heng is an interesting choice, Singaporean authors don't get read much outside of Singapore. I've actually met her and had my copy of the book signed by her, but haven't been able to find the time to sit down and actually read it. Her previous was a bit of a dissapointment that wasted it's premise.

Yeah, I heard about it on a Japan Times podcast out of all places and picked it up bc the premise was right up my alley. Had never heard of before. This was actually my second Singaporean book - I read The Inlet by Claire Tham last year and liked it also.

Interesting glad you enjoy Singaporean literature; was there anything specific about it that you enjoyed ?. I'm in the process of setting up my local literary magazine so hopefully it'll have some global appeal

[pikachu]

Highlights of q1 were:

The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng
Shadows At Noon by Joya Chatterji
The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream by Patrick Radden Keefe

Honorable mentions to The Leavers by Lisa Ko, The Quiet American by Graham Greene, and All This Could be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews.

I don't think it was a great book, but s/o to Gold Diggers by Sanjena Sathian for uncannily depicting the world that I live in better than anything else I've seen.

(Fwiw I do read stuff which isn't related to Asia in some way or form.)

Rachel Heng is an interesting choice, Singaporean authors don't get read much outside of Singapore. I've actually met her and had my copy of the book signed by her, but haven't been able to find the time to sit down and actually read it. Her previous was a bit of a dissapointment that wasted it's premise.

Yeah, I heard about it on a Japan Times podcast out of all places and picked it up bc the premise was right up my alley. Had never heard of before. This was actually my second Singaporean book - I read The Inlet by Claire Tham last year and liked it also.

Interesting glad you enjoy Singaporean literature; was there anything specific about it that you enjoyed ?. I'm in the process of setting up my local literary magazine so hopefully it'll have some global appeal

I feel like Singapore as a setting lends itself to two themes that I find interesting. First, and probably owing to my background, I find immigrant stories and how different cultures clash in urbanized setting to be compelling. Singapore lends itself well to that obv.

Second, and this applies more broadly to developed East Asia, is how compressed history is. I really enjoyed this about The Great Reclamation - it's crazy the amount of change that a Singaporean born in the 1920s or 1930s would've seen in their lifetime! Ofc this happened everywhere in the world to an extent, but the rapid transition from colonial outpost to developed economy was most notable there and it's interesting to see its effects on the individual character.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Not written by a native of the city, of course, but The Singapore Grip is always a good read.

[Middle-aged Europe]

I recently finished the Bhagavad Gita.

[Meclazine for Israel]

Richard Flanaghan

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

[Mexican Wolf]

It's been an unusually long stretch between reading books for me, so I'm diving back into the bookish waters with William McKeever's Emperors of the Deep, a nonfiction book all about sharks.

[Benjamin Frank 2.0]

To be sure, I've just started reading it, but I hope to read the three volumes that make up the series "Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century" by Fernand Braudel. This is possibly the most ambitious set of books ever attempted, as it attempts to describe the economy (in the full sense including resources, human capabilities and ideas) that existed over the entire world pre Industrial Revolution (which ultimately set the stage for the Industrial Revolution, at least in England.)

For an example of the sweep, Braudel starts off by trying to calculate what economists now call 'the production possibilities frontier') which is the total possibility of all potential output (or what non economists refer to as capacity.) Of course, it's a 'frontier' because there isn't one single potential output but higher and lower amounts of different things depending on where resources are allocated - i.e where tradeoffs are made.

I don't know if Braudel is the first to develop the idea of the production possibilities frontier, but it's incredibly ambitious.

Apparently Braudel's underlying thesis is that the markets as they existed over those 300 years were as dominated by monopolies and oligopolies as they are now.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Oh, Braudel is very good.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

Not written by a native of the city, of course, but The Singapore Grip is always a good read.

Hmm maybe old Singapore; there's something very alienating about reading those books given how divorced the environment is from the one I live in.



Recently finished Nazi Literature in the Americas and The Last Evening on Earth

[John Dule]

Reading Moby Dick right now. The descriptions of Ishmael and Queequeg's friendship are so sweet. They remind me of my experience living with roommates from foreign countries in undergrad-- there's a line in it where Ishmael says that in "savages," there "lurk no civilized hypocrisies or bland deceits." This is an 18th Century way of saying something I've thought for a long time: that it's easier to befriend and speak candidly with people from other cultures, because they speak more bluntly in their adopted languages.

[Schiff for Senate]

Thomas Barfield's Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (inspired to read it after reading Khaled Hosseini's mind blowing A Thousand Splendid Suns for my English class)

[Mexican Wolf]

I finished reading Emperors of the Deep last night. McKeever did a fantastic job explaining the biology, behaviors, and habitats of numerous different shark species; highlighting the tantamount importance of sharks as apex predators and oceanic custodians; and warning about how aggressively hunting and fishing sharks has threatened and will continue to threaten the health of the oceans without stronger protections in place.

I also appreciated McKeever's investigations into human trafficking on fishing vessels on the high seas and his detailed arguments about how shark conservation is mutually beneficial to sharks, coral reefs, seals, fishes, and humans. (And I'm thankful he discussed the positive impacts that reintroduced wolves have had on Yellowstone's ecosystem as an analogy for the similar benefits of shark conservation.)

Now I'm reading Tony Birch's novel The White Girl, about an Aboriginal grandmother in 1960s New South Wales trying to prevent her mixed-race granddaughter from being taken away by state authorities.