Two More Books

Over the past few days I've finished another two books, Relics by Tim Lebbon and Family Life by Akhil Sharma. Relics was a low fiction novel, part one of a trilogy, and centered around a woman trying to find out what happened to her boyfriend. It reminded me a little of Neverwhere because of the whole low fiction setting in London, but that was about it. Overall it was not a bad book, but I don't think it'll be very memorable. I'd rate it 7/10.

Family Life by Akhil Sharma on the other hand, was a much more remarkable novel. The book is about a boy and his family, who live in India and then migrate to the United States. The book however, touches on several other topics beyond a straight forward immigrant narrative: a child's selfish/narrow point of view, having a disabled brother, family dynamics caring for a disabled child, bildungsroman, the Indian immigrant experience in the United States. As a result of these topics, this novel felt definitely relatable to me and my experience and knowledge - having a disabled brother and the strain on self and family, and personally knowing the geographical region (Queens, then NJ) where the narrator lives with his family. For such a slim volume, 218 pages, this book has sucessfully achieved every one of the ambitions it has had. I'd rate it 8.5/10.

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Tonight I leave for a early Wednesday morning flight to Singapore. The airport shuttle is picking me up at 9:45pm. Because I forgot to early check in (though I'm a little confused as I thought I saw elsewhere that I couldn't check in until 24 hours before a flight anyway - which I did), I don't have very good seats on both legs of the flight. I am really not looking forward to being stuck on a plane for the next 24 hours, particularly because the very bad bout of hives that started last weekend has now become very bad eczema on my legs. I don't think I've had such a a bad bout of eczema before, and I worry it will become itchy or irritated during the flight. I've been stressing out over what to wear as a result, and even went to Old Navy over the weekend to try and find clothing solutions. Besides that I've also been worrying in general about what people will think - the patches on my legs are so big and red, that I worry that other people might think I have something infectious, or will merely be disgusted with me. For someone that generally has a middling self-esteem, this eczema flare-up is certainly not doing me any favours.

Fingers crossed that everything goes well for the flight.  

The Turner House

Last night in a bout of insomnia (I finally fell asleep around 4:30am), I ended up finishing The Turner House by Angela Flournoy. I had first heard about this book years ago, and had actually pre-ordered it for when it came out on paperback (I really dislike hardbacks, because they're far too big to hold comfortably in my small hands). I had heard it was about a black family in Detroit, and it had won a bunch of awards. Sounded good enough, but also like one of those novels that aren't brain dead, and so I put it off for when I felt mentally engaged enough to deal with the subject matter, which apparently happened to be this week.

Overall the book wasn't as wrenching as The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and the Book of Unknown Americans (God, these long novel titles!), and so was a relatively easy read. Last Summer in my American History class, I chose to review Thomas Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis - Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, and so had some degree of familiarity with the problems that plague Detroit, and I found myself continuously thinking of Sugrue's book as I read The Turner House. But beyond history (The Great Migration, Detroit in its industrial heyday, mentions of the 1967 riots, the state of Detroit in 2015, etc.), the book also talked about family dynamics of a big family - the Turner family has 13 children (the closest analogue I could think of was my Mum's family of 7 children, and the associated family dynamics that come with an extended working class family) and gambling addiction.

At the core of most of the stories is, of course, the Turner family home in a now rundown and slightly dangerous part of present day Detroit; at the end of the book the oldest son, Cha-Cha drives to the family house and realises that scrappers have stolen the whole garage to sell for scrap metal - this part made me laugh because of believable and  how ludicrous it was simultaneously. As a bonus I particularly enjoyed reading the Acknowledgements section when I finished the book, and saw that Flournoy credited Sugrue's book for helping her 'establish' Detroit. Academia props!

I liked this book enough, but not as much as the previous two books. I give it 7.5/10. 

Immigrant Narratives

I recently finished two books that featured the narratives of immigrants in the United States. As an immigrant myself, there were many things that I found myself relating to about my experience here, and I found the two books to be good reads. The books were The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henriquez and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu. I had bought both books at least a year before, and they've been hanging out on my bookshelf since. I picked them both up randomly, and I can't remember if I them back to back, or if there was a random trashy book that I picked up in between. Such is my vociferous consumption of literature during these summer months.

I enjoyed The Book of Unknown Americans a lot because it talked a fair amount about the American education system, and special education. I particularly enjoyed it because I felt like I knew exactly what was being talked about, like a chance to use the knowledge that I've gleaned from my current course at Hunter College. It also tried to incorporate many different voices of Latinx immigrants from different countries, socio-economic backgrounds, and ages, which I found interesting. I finished reading this book within 24 hours, because of how captivating I found the narrative. I give this book 9/10.

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears is the first published book by Dinaw Mengestu. I read his other book, How to Read the Air several years ago, I think when I was in between relationships. I remember that because of his excruciating depiction of the slow, dying intimacy between the couple in that novel, I felt glad to be single. Because of that memory, I was of course drawn to this novel when I saw it on sale at The Strand, but put off reading it for the longest time because I recalled how depressing the other novel I read was, and reading depressing stuff gets tiring, you know. Anyway this book was about a small group of male African immigrants living in D.C.. Besides the obvious theme of immigration, there was also the theme of gentrification, which has been quite a current topic, especially living in a pricey city like NYC. I give this book 8.5/10. 

Saturday evening, July 2018

Last night Jon and I went out for dinner with his friends. His med school friend Eric came early to hang out with us first, and so we went to a bar opposite Midwinter Kitchen, where we were going to have dinner. Upon reflection, and thinking about how fast the happy hour mimosa hit me ($5!), it was the first time I've drank since a disastrous booze-and-hors-d'oeuvres-only wedding reception I attended a few months ago with Jon (we were told beforehand to drink a lot to help make up the money for the reception rental, and didn't know there was no dinner served until about an hour and a half in; you can use your imagination).

At 6:30pm, we left the bar and went across the road to Midwinter Kitchen to meet the others. I felt a little excited as Jon and I walk past Midwinter Kitchen all the time, but never went in because we were usually en route to somewhere else. So finally after about 2 years of walking past, we were finally entering Midwinter Kitchen. We ended up waiting a little because Nuno had parking issues, and so he and Hannah were delayed. It was fine because the restaurant wasn't crowded at all, which was also nice because we could converse in normal, human, volumes when they finally came. I ordered the chicken, which came out really nice with crisp roasted skin, though it was a little dry on the inside in some parts. Jon and I also ordered a side of roman gnocchi, and when it came out as a slab like a cake, I wasn't super enthusiastic. I had envisioned normal gnocchi, and thought 'roman' was the style of cooking. I tried to hide my disappointment, though of course I probably didn't do a good job with it, and Nuno laughed saying, "She's not happy!". It didn't taste bad, but of course didn't have the texture I was looking forward to with normal gnocchi. Live and learn I suppose.

After dinner we walked over to Momofuku Milk Bar on 2nd Ave and E. 13th, and Jon and I shared a soft serve cereal milk ice cream with cereal topping. It was the first time Eric, Nuno, and Hannah had tried the place, and Nuno looked a little confused and overwhelmed in the packed and tiny store. I vaguely remember my first trip there when I followed Shirin a few years ago, but I don't remember looking at the menu because I didn't want dessert. I probably must have been as confused when I went there with Marina about two years later around 2016. We then started walking up 2nd Avenue, and Eric peeled off around E. 17th to walk to catch the subway at Union Square. Jon and I ended up reaching home around 9pm.

Overall, it was a really enjoyable night. Good conversation, food, and weather.

Perfectionism and procrastination

I'm one of those absurd people who is a closet perfectionist. By this I mean that I typically come across as a very relaxed and chilled out person, especially to people who don't know me that well. This is usually because it's too tiring to care. This also means that for me, the adage, "If you can't do it well, don't do it at all," means I often either end up not attempting to do the aforementioned thing, or  put doing it off as long as possible because it will be tiring/not to my satisfaction and hence eat away at my soul.

Case in point: cleaning the bathroom. It usually takes me ages to do because I really remove every single speck of dust and lost hair follicle, and so I don't do it very often and put it off for a time even when I realize the bathroom is getting dirty. Well, I finally did it today after telling myself several times that I really ought to clean it, and it took me close to 45 minutes and a lot of shed sweat - and the bathroom isn't even that big at all! It's debatable of course whether infrequent cleanings means more effort needs to be exerted during cleaning, but between our combined hair dropping everywhere (and boy do I drop a lot of hair), dust coming in from the open bathroom window, and the inky dark sediment coming from the African Black soap that I've been using for my easily irritated skin, the bathroom gets covered in a light layer of gunk very easily.

It boggles my mind how people with larger families and larger houses keep them clean. I'd probably need to hire a weekly cleaner to help me :/