Erica I. Staff Picks
Choo Choo! All aboard the dark academia anti-colonialism magical realism train. Next Stop. Oxford University Royal Institute of Translation. Let's burn this f*cker down.
If you define yourself by what you are not, if you are a true hater, if you love your friends more than life itself, if your friends ARE life itself, if you find yourself drowning in crippling nostalgia for 10 minutes ago... here you are.
If your favorite literary trope is "childhood best friends" to "love does not begin to describe what I feel for you" then this is precisely the book that will break and make your heart.
My podcast did an entire episode based solely on one chapter of this book. You can read this book, or listen to us regurgitate it wherever you get your podcasts. Seaweed Brain: A Percy Jackson Podcast, Special Episode 2: Queering the Classics.
The Great Gatsby the way it was always meant to be-- frightening, magical, swimming in otherness. Also, blatantly gay.
Like a Black Mirror for plague times. Sci-fi/Cli-fi at its best. I don't normally make it through sad books, but these stories taught me so much about grief, I owed it to them to feel all the way to the end.
I think half the staff has staff-picked this already but trust me, you cannot overhype N.K. Jemisin, she's just. that. good.
All of history is written by faulty humans. How do we go about refilling The Great Hole of History?
Required reading for all young adults, middle adults, and old adults :) Funny, tender, burning coming of age. My all-time favorite YA.
OW, CHARLES! OUCH!!!
How did you write somethign so entirely original, and aldo violently familiar? How did you know I've always wanted to be Kung Fu Guy and how io sometimes cry when my dad sings at karaoke and how much it sucks to try being importat on television? Probably because of your own experienced career climbing from "Generic Asian Man." I'll be rereading this.
The aching beauty of an Ozeki Book (this one with a capital B) lies in its ability to knot together more and more people, spaces, and perceptions, until you can't help but feel the inter-being of all things! This is the sort of Book you wish you wish would never end, so you'd never have to stop seeing the world through Ozeki's eyes.
Kim's debut novel (the first installment of a planned trilogy) is jam-packed with delightful mythological world building, sisterhood, and epic Korean-American foods. Weeks later, this story STILL has me thinking about transnationalism, mixed identities, and what makes a community.
The HEIST novel to END ALL HEIST NOVELS. Set in the deliciously grotesque seaport town of Ketterdam, featuring a witch, a witchunter, an acrobat, a sharpshooter, a scientist, and a 17-year-old criminal mastermind. Also featuring one of the greatest YA ships of all time #KANEJ
God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!"
"See all I've made," said God, "the hills, the sea, the
sky, the stars."
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look
around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God.
Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly
couldn't have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to
think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and
look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honor!
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!
Good night.
I will go to heaven now.
I can hardly wait...
To find out for certain what my wampeter was...
And who was in my karass...
And all the good things our karass did for you.
Amen.
