There's a lot going on right now! My fiancé and I are in the final 30 days before our wedding, the world is full of conflict and change, and I'm trying my best to continue to read as much as I can. And avoid deep time sinks. And occasionally (often?) failing…

It's Saturday morning and the house is quiet, the road is quiet, the trains are (somewhat) quiet, but outside I can hear the springtime calls of the birds. Their excited chirruping heralds the true arrival of Spring! The cats are intrigued by the birds return and have spent much time staring out the windows, with their heads on swivels. 

In February, I wrote about the non-fiction I had been reading and hinted about the two more substantial novels I had read. I'll add to the non-fiction list below, in a more "capsule" approach than typical:

• "Careless People" – Sarah Wynn-Williams was a former New Zealand diplomat and international lawyer. Her memoir is centered around her experience as an early member of Facebook's public policy team. I had heard that this book was incisive, painful, and revelatory. That's an understatement. Like Jacinda Ardern, the former New Zealand PM whose memoir I read in 2025, Sarah Wynn-Williams blends humor, pathos, frustration, horror, and almost polemic. She deftly paints an incredibly rich, revelatory picture of power, greed, id, ego, and ignorance that exposes the flawed surreality of rich and powerful people around the world. Her view from within Facebook is incredibly valuable for understanding the base mechanics of attention and money and fear of irrelevance that motivated, often to ill ends, that organization, but also apply more broadly to the world. I laughed, winced, and gawped as I read, often putting the book down to shake my head and mourn.
• "The Unseen Truth" – Sarah Lewis, an associate professor at Harvard University, comes to interrogate the racial regime from a completely unexpected perspective: visual. This book, like the academic works from last month, was challenging to read, especially due to its very specific language. Dr. Lewis points the reader to what was, and is, left out as evidence of the false foundations of racial hierarchy, stretching back to wars in the Caucasus and the U.S. Civil War. What does the term Caucasian even mean? How did it become synonymous with White? This book explores that and art, maps, photography, seeing, ignoring, conditioning, and more. An incredible synthesis of history and visual representation that exhibits some of the problems of academic writing but overall delivers the reader to a place of questioning and realization.
• "The Beginning Comes After the End" – Rebecca Solnit, a long time environmental and human rights activist, delivers a punchy, eloquent, and tight 131 page reflection (and partial paean) on the past 60-70 years of slow-but-fast transformation and societal change. Her core thesis is that the current rise of authoritarianism is a reaction to the stunning progress in rights for more people and environments. By the end of this book, I felt:
  Hopeful
  Recognition that our own commitment to justice and equity is important, no matter how "small" it feels
  Inspired to be present
  Excited to build a better future together!

So, what about those two novels I read? When did I even read them? What were their titles? Listing them below as a reminder… (I don't use a book review/book logging website right now, even though I tried to use The StoryGraph last year.)

1. "Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution" by R.F. Kuang
2. "Pachinko" by Min Jin Lee

I'll write about these two (around 1000 total pages) later. But I've already started reading the next six hundred page honker just yesterday evening. 

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It's been a particularly full several weeks of reading, but before going into the two novels that dominated the time, I thought it'd be good to set down some thoughts about the non-fiction I've been reading. Both works are by academics, professors that are experts in their fields, women, and great storytellers.

First up: "Nature Behind Barbed Wire" by Connie Y. Chiang. I picked this book up when visiting Bowdoin College's art museum last year. It was on sale and the subtitle ("An environmental history of the Japanese American incarceration") caught my eye. This book is the first I've read where the term "incarceration" was used in relation to the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans. The author wrote this book using the environment as a way to explore the trials and travails of Japanese-Americans during the carceral programs that forced them off their leased land (typically the farmers) and away from their livelihoods. Drawing from oral histories, statistical reports, memoranda, and public information, Chiang expands her thesis and humanizes the often rough interface between man and nature. Very impressive work.

But, not as impressive as Pamela Bannos' "Vivian Maier: A photographer's life and afterlife." This remarkable tale of Vivian Maier, famed "nanny street photographer", is far more educational than I expected. Exceedingly well sequenced, this work tells the story of Maier in great detail, alternating between the reconstructed historical record and the modern day fervor that surrounded Maier's "discovery". What truly put this book in a different league is just how well Bannos integrated the broader historical context, both globally and in the minutiae. I feel like I could read the book again and learn even more about the U.S. in the '40s – '90s. Maier was prolific in her photography and film, as well as excessive in her somewhat obsessive collections of other material, and the story of her in the broader cultural context is well told through careful sequencing and understanding of the photographic record. I think Bannos' insight, which is that Maier was photographer first (nanny second), changes completely how we understand Maier and is likely truer to her than other media (movies and otherwise) that followed the hype cycle.

Standout works for their academic importance and compelling narratives.

It often takes a while to be ready to read a new book. I'd been picking away at "Nature Behind Barbed Wire" for more than two months, reading tiny increment by tiny increment, and finally finished it. It's an academic work that explores incarcerated Japenese-Americans relationship to their environment during World War II. My next book would have to be radically different in tone, energy, and theme — I needed a quick, powerful read.

That next read was in my to-be-read pile where it had hidden since I found a copy at Sidequest Books & Games in Somerville, MA. Originally, I heard about it via Instagram, a "bookstagram" account belong to esje, a Filipino-Chinese who lived in Bangkok and recently moved to Amsterdam. This debut novel of Gerardo Sámano Córdova, Monstrilio, consumed my reading time the past several days with an intensity I've not felt in a while. Published in 2023, Monstrilio is difficult to categorize — it's not simply horror or queer lit or folklore. I've never read anything like it.

The novel is broken into four major sections, each from the perspective of a different character and mostly chronological. The core of the story, the root from which the complexity grows, is the death of Santiago, Magos and Joseph's 11-year old son, from complications from pulmonary agenesis (unilateral) — the condition of being born within one developed lung. Magos and Joseph are a bi-national couple, spending time between Mexico City and upstate New York, while living on Joseph's trust fund. Upstate New York was easier for Santiago and his condition, but it's where Santiago ends up dying at home. 

In an inexplicable act, Magos, driven by a desire to "learn one last secret from her son" excavates a chunk of that defining lung with a paring knife.

From this gory scene, Magos' section is first and builds her character from an unknowable corpse mutilator into almost (just almost) a sympathetic player in the story. The world surrounding the characters is powerfully insular, where the real world's intrusion for fact finding and plainly deserved prosecution is kept at bay through chance, personality, or perhaps some powerful magic. It's folk magic that animates the lung chunk after Magos takes it, and herself, to Mexico City and hears a story from her mother's housekeeper of a child reborn from a piece of heart. Bending herself, and her family and close friends, into collaboration, Magos feeds and grows the Santiago-chunk into something… a monster… that represents her rejection of loss and concentration of grief.

It's through this lens of loss and grief that the story develops, slowly and then with desperate speed. Grief colors each character's internal monologue and external presentation, but it's far from a black hole. Much springs from the grief core of Monstrilio from Jonathan's bottoming out, avoidance, and connection with a new love to Monstrilio (M) himself finding his own way through a claustrophobic, constraining existence to freedom in the end.

The writing, the sense of unique voice, here is beautiful and alive. I am so impressed with how Sámano Córdova uses word choice, sentence and paragraph structure, and variations in descriptive character to give each main character their unique voice on the page. The book cries out for re-reading, a closer reading, after the first hanging-on-for-dear-life read. Sometimes dark, and occasionally bloody, this book has a heart (or lung??) that beats (breathes) with familial love and hope for understanding. 

I unabashedly recommend this book. It's powerful and inspires consideration of complex and simple themes. Certainly one of the best books I've read in the past year.

Disclosure: This post contains an affiliate link. I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

Side Note: I tend to write chronologically, because first this happened, then that happened, and I fret that it's a trap/framework/habit that is immature or constricting. When writing a travelog, chronological is the default and I'm trying to challenge that habit, because I aim to write more and differently.

I haven't been reading as much as the middle of last year (although, it's only January). A standout that straddled '25-'26 is "The Old Garden". A political prisoner, Hyun Woo, is released after 18 years and reenters South Korean society to find that his lover, strong-willed artist Yoon Hee, has died. She wasn't allowed to visit him while he was in prison, but wrote her story expecting his release. The book incorporates his perspective as a pro-democracy activist around the Gwangju Uprising and her perspective as artist and instructor (including her time in Berlin during the fall of the Wall). The story spans twenty years and, despite it's time breadth, maintains propulsive energy underneath the contemplative, intimate, and reflective prose.

I knew a little bit about South Korea's history and the anti-democratic, autocratic forces that ruled it for decades but this book opened my eyes to the struggles of regular people in our lifetimes to advance pluralistic and democratic societies. While I was visiting Chongqing earlier this month, I visited the site of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea which operated in China during the Japanese occupation of Korea. When in Taipei, the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall had an exhibition called "Flowers of Freedom" which portrayed the Gwangju Uprising in the broader historical context of the ongoing fight for democracy. These two places informed how I read the book and emphasized that twenty years is a blink of the eye!

This book gave deeply personal (fictional) context for the fifty years that followed the liberation of Korea in the 40s. Together, the book and the visits to Korean historical sites in China painted a nuanced picture of an 80 year period of turmoil and change. The writing in the book, originally in Korean by Hwang Sok-yong and translated by Jay Oh, is beautiful and sometimes strange. The voices of the main characters are distinctive, which allows the characters — separated by time and the veil — to be in conversation in a way I hadn't experienced before. Quite a worthwhile book, packed with moments that force a pause to reflect on one's own values, understanding of self, and understanding of historical context.

Disclosure: This post contains an affiliate link. I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

My friend Trent taught English in Taiwan for many years and consistently reiterated how LGBTQ+ friendly and amazing Taipei is, so visiting has been on my Asia to-visit for many years. 2025 was the year for the visit. This is the second big Asia trip in the past two years and every one has been emotionally powerful, challenging (due to jet lag and long flights), and educational.

The journey to Taiwan from the east coast of the United States can be onerous, with very long flights. This time, we went west, from Boston to Seattle and then onward after a reasonable layover. Chasing the sun, there was an endless sunset ahead of us as we cross the United States. There’s a certain magic to watching those colors shift from above the clouds as I drifted in and out of sleep.

I slept well the night of our arrival in the city and the morning of the first full day in Taipei was dominated by a visit to the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall. Set in a large park, the memorial hall is imposing and beautiful, but almost austere. As we went down into the body of the building, we found it was full of historical and modern galleries encompassing key artifacts from Chiang’s time, exhibits that explored democratic movements across the world, and works from modern artists. This multi-use nature is far more appealing than a monument solely dedicated to one man and his complicated legacy.

Outside the hall, every hour from 0900 to 1700, there is currently a military honor guard “changing of the guard” ceremony. This is a change since 2024, as in the past the honor guard was stationed inside the memorial hall itself. The Ministry of Culture initiated these changes to reduce the so-called “cult of personality” aspects of the Memorial Hall and surrounding complex. I’m hopeful the U.S. will be able to do the same thing after the current administration turns over; to me, one of the most touching and important military honor guards is at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It shows the importance and power of the people, the unknown, and rejects cult of personality of the powerful, the monied, and the proud.

In Flowers of Freedom, I learned far more about freedom, democracy, and free speech movements in Taiwan and across the world than I had expected at a monument to a former military and autocratic leader. The most resonant message was that freedom is fragile and that it takes ongoing struggle and sacrifice to retain and expand the freedoms that people have fought to win. Every person must fight for these things, the struggle is ours, not theirs. The story of Nylon Cheng, editor of Freedom Era Weekly, and his struggle against the KMT authoritarian bent is told most poignantly accompanied by a reconstruction of his office where he self-immolated. His self-immolation connected me to the freedom movements of South Korea, which I had been reading about in The Old Garden by Hwang Sok-yong, and elsewhere in the exhibit the Gwangju Uprising from 1980 was incorporated as an example of horrifying events that were part of repressive state responses to democratization and freedom movements.

Sam Enright wrote in more depth about the complex interplay of movements, language, culture, and more and touched upon similar topics in his reflections.

In the U.S., there are many museums and monuments that celebrate freedom of speech, the freedom of peoples (via the Emancipation Proclamation, the Freedom Riders, and more), and the other freedoms enshrined in the Constitution. Right now, it feels like those stories are told as distant past, as recognition of accomplishments, and less like stories of an ongoing struggle. The Flowers of Freedom exhibition truly felt like now, where every person is invited and required to participate in the ongoing work of fighting for freedom.

I wrote earlier this year about staying open to connection, and part of this trip was an overlap with our friend David, who was coming back from mainland China and Vietnam. We met up for lunch, then headed into a period of wandering — from bookstore (Whose Books) to coffeeshop (Modish) to bookstore to Ningxia night market. Along the way, David invited his friend David to join us… And we all connected via our mutual interests, our excitement on being in Taiwan, sharing bits of our histories, and more.

At Ningxia night market, I tried stinky tofu (the Taiwanese kind) for the first time. I tried it two ways (fried and in a spicy soup), stealing a bit from David’s bowl. My key learning from the fried stinky tofu: don’t keep chewing, just swallow it. The stinky tofu in spicy soup was tolerable, but not enjoyable. My palette will take time to mature. And maybe never develop a taste for it. Who knows!

David II (he told us to call him Jamaican David) had recently moved to Taipei to teach English after a stint in government and in the private sector. Similar to Trent’s time in Taipei, David II is teaching in a private “cram school” and adjusting to the reality that he knows a tiny amount of Mandarin. As a new arrival to Taipei, he was certainly still using his tourist eyes and exploring the city and the country as much as he could.

I have much more to write about night markets and the type of built environment that exists (and is seemingly encouraged to exist) in the Asian cities I’ve visited.

We had plans for the next day, though, and said goodnight to the Davids and headed back to Beitou to rest.