all of you is inherited

I miss reading/sleeping at Morrison Library between classes

My mum likes to tell this story of how when I was less than a year old and we were living in Wyoming, my favorite thing to do was pull out books from the bottom shelves at bookstores and libraries when she set me down to look for books for her psych class. I didn't learn how to read for another few years, but once I did I never stopped. My childhood and early adolescence was filled with weekend afternoons spent at Borders or Barnes & Noble reading a book or two in one sitting and copying down titles for a dozen more to put on hold at the local public library; I had my 14-digit library card number memorized by the time I was six, and when my parents tried to limit my reading time during the day in favor of practicing piano or doing Chinese homework in my elementary and middle school years, I would alternate between staying up and hiding in my walk-in closet to read at night or getting up at dawn to read beneath the giant skylight before school.

I don't think you can be much of a writer if you're not also a voracious reader. If I was going to take a break from writing the least I could do was read more; by the end of 2015, I started actively using my Goodreads account to track my progress and set a goal of reading 50 books in 2016. Even though I fell spectacularly short, I tried again in 2017, and I'm happy to say that as of two weeks ago I surpassed my goal and will be upping the ante to 60 books in 2018.

Here's a list of some of my favorite books I read this year:

1. OVERALL FAVORITE: The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

"Bang bang was the sound of memory's pistol firing into our heads, for we could not forget love, we could not forget war, we could not forget lovers, we could not forget enemies, we could not forget home, and we could not forget Saigon."

Viet Thanh Nguyen's debut and Pulitzer Prize winning novel is absolutely brilliant, and this is one of those rare books that I would recommend to just about anybody. This novel is a war story, a spy story, a commentary of America and the American Dream, a contemplation on moral philosophy or the origins of theories on political economy (because theory is where practice fails: we say we want to save the world but in the end we really desperately want to save ourselves), a revelation on what it means to belong to places and people, and an exploration of love, identity, loyalty, and deception.

The prose is beautifully written—rich without being decadent—even though I had to pause and resume again sometimes because this isn't the kind of book you can devour in one sitting. I think my only qualm is that this book makes me wish I knew more about the world going into the one Nguyen creates: I lost track of the allusions I felt like I should have known (as a student of American foreign policy and political theory at Berkeley, as someone whose best friend wrote her college honors thesis on the Vietnamese immigrant experience and legacy), but that said, I'm in awe by how many hard and important questions this novel is able to comment on.

2. MOST THOUGHT-PROVOKING: Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk

I couldn't think of a non-profane way of expressing this, so let me just get this out there: Invisible Monsters is the most f*cked up book I've ever read (so far) and I love it. This writing is bold, the characters are provocative, and the plot structure is non-linear; it's presented in a way that makes you feel like you were told to trace a line connecting incongruous points to reveal a linear plot after all, only to look down and see you were drawing circles the whole time.

I have a particular fondness for stories about people who have everything before losing it all and Invisible Monsters is no exception: the unnamed narrator was a model with an enviable career, boyfriend, and best friend before getting her face blown off in a freak highway accident. This book is about what it means to be beautiful and to be seen when you're a material girl in a material world until one day you wake up and suddenly you're not anymore; to love and be loved and more importantly to belong in romantic, familial, and platonic relationships and why we hold on to people when they hurt and betray us; to take control over your own identity and subsequently your life and to live it on your terms and not anyone else's.

"I'm only doing this because it's the biggest mistake I can think to make. It's stupid and destructive, and anybody you ask will tell you I'm wrong. That's why I have to go through with it...we're so trained to do life the right way. To not make mistakes. I figure, the bigger the mistake looks, the better chance I'll have to break out and live a real life."

This book shocked me, made me laugh, and took me on one hell of a ride I can't wait to get back on again. I dare you to read it. If you do, let me know: I've been dying to talk about it with someone since finishing it in March and I'm looking for an excuse to reread this again sometime.

3. MOST PERSPECTIVE-CHANGING: Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

Azar Nafisi's memoir about the secret lessons on forbidden Western literature she gave to seven of her most committed female students in the Islamic Republic of Iran is a breathtaking love letter to literature itself. This was one of five books my favorite high school English teacher recommended when I got in touch last month, and reading this reminded me of being back in his classroom five years ago and studying so many great works for the first time and was just starting to piece together why we read fiction at all.

My mum and I have very different ideas about what books we should be reading and why; she reads almost exclusively nonfiction to learn about anything and everything she's wanted to know, from personal finance to wine to studying Romance languages, while I read almost exclusively fiction to be fascinated and escape the mundanity of my own life for a glimpse at another world. My mum and I also come from very different worlds: she grew up to the extreme censorship of the Cultural Revolution era in China, while I had the privilege of growing up with limitless access to any story I wanted to engage with in the suburbs of Seattle. For her, literature was a luxury she rarely afforded; for me, literature has been a passion I've hungered for for as long as I could remember.

"A novel is not an allegory. It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing."

Nafisi's memoir is inadvertently a story about what a privilege it is to be able to engage with and understand great works by Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Austen, and other greats of the Western canon, especially if you live(d) in a world that will go to extreme measures to stifle the questions and perspectives these works offer up, like Iran in the mid-1990s or China in the mid-1970s. When I was telling my mum about the nonfiction books I read this year, I realized I would have a hard time selling this one to her because it requires familiarity with Lolita or The Great Gatsby or Pride and Prejudice to appreciate the relevance of Nafisi's commentary, and that maybe my affection for this book comes from a love of literature I've taken for granted.

Half a year after graduation and I'm again left with questions (but not answers) about education, what it means to continue to learn and grow, and how to empathize not just through reading and but also through engaging with people from dramatically different perspectives and experiences in life.

4. MOST HEARTBREAKING: Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman

"We had found the stars, you and I. And this is given once only."

Everything about Call Me By Your Name is beautiful in the way Abraham Van Beyeren's banquet still life paintings are: decadent, vibrant, sensual, ephemeral. This love story between Elio, a seventeen year old boy, and Oliver, his father's graduate student, set to the backdrop of a cliff-side mansion on the Italian Riviera is achingly picturesque, and I'm not sure if it's the intimate stream-of-consciousness writing style perfumed with obsession or its haunting and deeply unsatisfying answers to questions of love and happily ever afters that get to me more.

Aciman's attention to detail builds tension in a painstaking and breathless pace: from the very beginning, this novel makes you aware of the passage of time, every click of a ticking clock and every soft breeze sighing through peach tree leaves in the still heat of summer on the Italian seaside. The eroticism in this novel isn't so much in the acts themselves but the extent to which Elio and Oliver must lay themselves bare to each other in order for the spark of intimacy to truly ignite.

This book devastated me because it asks: how do you deal with knowing you risk your heart breaking when summer ends and this space between us can no longer exist or be recreated like this ever again? How do you rationalize that the pain will be worth the remaining time we have left? Call Me By Your Name reminded me that you have to say yes anyway, even when you risk breaking your heart, because it's those moments of sheer bliss that are ultimately our raison d'être.

5. MOST HEARTWARMING: Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang

I have big, complicated feelings about Jenny Zhang's Sour Heart, a collection of stories about six Chinese American daughters of immigrants growing up in New York in the 1990s. I've been following Jenny's writing since her Rookie Mag days six years ago, and Sour Heart is the only book I actually bought for myself this year. Her writing is sharp in that tangy, juicy, flavorful way akin to sinking your teeth into a firm green grape, and although her stories are at times vulgar and downright disturbing, they are also remarkably poignant and genuine and real.

"How did we end up with such a sour girl? How did we get so lucky? they'd say, clearing away the frantic voices of who I thought I was supposed to be, and though I knew it wouldn't last forever, I stayed between them until I remembered who I was again and no longer felt lonely."

It wasn't until I got to the final story "You Fell into the River and I Saved You!" that I started feeling like I was reading a story about my life. Or more accurately: here is the story of my life that I never thought that people would ever care about, the small, awkward, intimate experiences of growing up in an immigrant family and the diasporic community built on family friends and relatives few and far between, finally validated by a writer, a publisher, and booksellers who decided that these stories are important enough to leave their imprint on the world.

I think the crux of how I feel reading Sour Heart is a sense of relief that every story, but especially my story—the life I've lived so far—is worth telling. As a teenager I was so terrified I wasn't living enough for a life worthy of being storied. Now I'm starting to understand that it doesn't make me a better (or worse, or less worthy) person that my past was exactly what it was, even if sometimes it feels boring or small or unremarkable: it simply makes me me, and if I'm going to use my voice I have to also embrace who I am and not discount my own experiences.

Sour Heart is a book on my forever shelf, the one I wish I had six years ago when I first announced that I am a writer, the one that gave me hope and strength to be a writer of my own stories, and the one that inspires me to write with empathy and honesty. Stories matter because people matter, and I will never forget that quiet moment of validation I felt by my own possible significance in this world as I did in that waiting room in Virginia when I finished this collection of stories for the first time in September.

xoxo, vivian

PS: Leave me a comment with a book (or two, or three, or ten) you love and why. I'll add it to my 2018 list and send you a message when I get to it so we can talk then.