Reading Wednesday
Feb. 19th, 2025 08:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
troisoiseauxRead Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou, a satire that feels like a game of absurd-plot-point chicken until the moment it slips into sincerity and then just as quickly blazes past, onto the next bonkers twist. What starts out with the garden-variety academic angst of a Taiwanese-American grad student at the end of her rope over her PhD dissertation about the work of a celebrated Chinese-American poet she didn't particularly want to study in the first place escalates quickly into:
1. A series of events that starts with a mysterious note in an archive and ends with Ingrid (the PhD student) breaking into the house of a guy that she and her friend theorize to be the secret gay lover of the Chinese poet (who had been a professor at Ingrid's university until his death a decade+ earlier— the poet, not the guy they're stalking).
2. When Ingrid breaks into the guy's house, she discovers that ACTUALLY, this guy IS the Chinese poet?? Like, the Celebrated Chinese Poet was actually a white man in literal yellowface makeup/costume until faking his own death.
3. Ingrid unmasks the not-dead, not-Chinese poet via anonymous website, plunging her university into chaos. Among other things, her PhD advisor immediately pivots from "white guy who is a little too ~appreciative~ of Chinese culture" to alt-right huckster.
4. It turns out that ACTUALLY the whole fake Chinese poet scheme had been spearheaded decades ago by the advisor in order to secure funding for the East Asian studies department but also to minimize the amount of actual Asian people in East Asian Studies (e.g., "Look! We already have a Famous Chinese Poet in our department!").
5. Ingrid's dissertation defense turns into a full-on physical brawl when she uses it as a platform to denounce her PhD advisor's role in the aforementioned conspiracy.
AND SO MUCH MORE!!! (In between these plot points, mostly, rather than a number of additional major plot points after #5.) So, yeah, this book was nuts. Shades of R.F. Kuang's Yellowface meets Jean Hanff Korelitz's The Devil and Webster.
Read The Wicked Day by Mary Stewart, atosprey_archer's recommendation, because I love a woobie/sympathetic Mordred. It turns out that it's possible for me to find a retelling to be a little too sympathetic to Mordred, though— in something of the Cherith Baldry "Kay can do nothing wrong" vein (although not nearly as bonkers), everything hinges on maybe just one too many Tragic Coincidences...? I did enjoy this, overall; it was interesting to see Stewart's variations on the details of Arthurian legend, and her very Fantasy Adventure Coming-of-Age Novel take on Mordred, who starts out believing himself to be a fisherman's son and gets not one but two "you're the illegitimate son of royalty!" reveals and apparently holds the singular brain cell in the Orkney clan.
1. A series of events that starts with a mysterious note in an archive and ends with Ingrid (the PhD student) breaking into the house of a guy that she and her friend theorize to be the secret gay lover of the Chinese poet (who had been a professor at Ingrid's university until his death a decade+ earlier— the poet, not the guy they're stalking).
2. When Ingrid breaks into the guy's house, she discovers that ACTUALLY, this guy IS the Chinese poet?? Like, the Celebrated Chinese Poet was actually a white man in literal yellowface makeup/costume until faking his own death.
3. Ingrid unmasks the not-dead, not-Chinese poet via anonymous website, plunging her university into chaos. Among other things, her PhD advisor immediately pivots from "white guy who is a little too ~appreciative~ of Chinese culture" to alt-right huckster.
4. It turns out that ACTUALLY the whole fake Chinese poet scheme had been spearheaded decades ago by the advisor in order to secure funding for the East Asian studies department but also to minimize the amount of actual Asian people in East Asian Studies (e.g., "Look! We already have a Famous Chinese Poet in our department!").
5. Ingrid's dissertation defense turns into a full-on physical brawl when she uses it as a platform to denounce her PhD advisor's role in the aforementioned conspiracy.
AND SO MUCH MORE!!! (In between these plot points, mostly, rather than a number of additional major plot points after #5.) So, yeah, this book was nuts. Shades of R.F. Kuang's Yellowface meets Jean Hanff Korelitz's The Devil and Webster.
Read The Wicked Day by Mary Stewart, at
osprey_archer's recommendation, because I love a woobie/sympathetic Mordred. It turns out that it's possible for me to find a retelling to be a little too sympathetic to Mordred, though— in something of the Cherith Baldry "Kay can do nothing wrong" vein (although not nearly as bonkers), everything hinges on maybe just one too many Tragic Coincidences...? I did enjoy this, overall; it was interesting to see Stewart's variations on the details of Arthurian legend, and her very Fantasy Adventure Coming-of-Age Novel take on Mordred, who starts out believing himself to be a fisherman's son and gets not one but two "you're the illegitimate son of royalty!" reveals and apparently holds the singular brain cell in the Orkney clan.
