aweekinthelife's reviews
488 reviews

appreciate that the textbook provides the main passage text in both simplified + traditional but the content about "a changing china" is pretty outdated, even 10 years since the textbooks were first published. the content is also very china specific, but good for learning cultural and societal tidbits. 

pro tip: there's audio recordings available on the publisher website! you just have to fill out a form and the downloads will be available. 

stumbled upon this one in a bookstore and read the ebook on my phone. provides a lot of context and explanation for how a lot of current narratives have been shaped. a lot of the essays are adapted from speeches, so it feels like the author is sitting down with you to explain his insights and viewpoints. 

having followed Brown Girl Therapy for a little bit of time, I was excited to see that she was writing a book! i really appreciate the nuance she brings to understanding the immigrant experience and all that she shares about her own relationships with her parents. she is specific in her own experiences but then is able to bring out insights that she has observed from her time with clients and running Brown Girl Therapy. 

picked up on audio after the National Book Awards. appreciate this ethnographical account of some of the smugglers leading people north to the US border and the complicated reasons people end up in that line of work. 

this is focused on the lives of the smugglers that he gets to know, would be interesting to read a memoir by the author at some point too. 

pairs well with: Everyone Who Is Gone is Here (Jonathan Blitzer)

academic investigation into how language policy is shaping the status of the Shanghainese dialect. was a good follow-up to Last Boat out of Shanghai (Helen Zia) where i have the historical development and growth of Shanghai then a leap forward into more modern day. 

the Chinese language class I took this semester was also a China-based curriculum and through the class, I learned about some of these policies and the ways that the Chinese government views things which bolstered my understanding of the context. 

an interesting piece of the immigrant experience is that what media you know is often based on when your family arrived. i first heard of Connie Chung from Connie Wong's New York Time piece (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/05/11/opinion/connie-chung-named-after.html). 

now in her late 70s, it was fun to listen to Connie describe her experiences growing up and getting into the news business. there's definitely strategies about the news business that makes me a little uncomfortable, but it is still helpful to think about how the stories that make the news are created. also got me thinking about how Vietnam was the first war Americans experienced on TV and how the current Israeli invasion is the most prominent aggression we are witnessing in real time on social media.

started out a little slow for me but really picked up in the second half as i got more invested in the people and Emezi's life. having read a few of Emezi's novels, i appreciated getting to learn about the author outside the novels and how the books intertwined with their life. haven't read freshwater yet, and now that's bumped higher on my list!

alright on audio, but maybe i would've gotten more into it in print. 

highly recommend, i think everyone should read this. might be the first book i buy on audio (all my other audio book reads have been from the library) and maybe also in print. 

my first Castillo but i want to go back to pick up her first book (and she has a new one coming out aug 2025!). love that on the audio, she reads through the whole annotated bibliography (also, makes sense, given the book's title + content). 

the book discusses various media and pop culture pieces in depth. it may be a little less relatable if you haven't seen/read the shows/books but i'm always out of the loop on pop culture references anyways so it didn't bother me. Castillo does a good job describing enough context that readers/listeners can still follow along and readily understand what she is talking about even if you've never seen the media piece. 

pairs well with: how to hide an empire (for historical context that impact so much of this book) 
reminds me of: trick mirror by jia tolentino 

i found this informative and gave me some insight into some of the famous Chinese works like Journey to the West (西遊記), Golden Lotus (金瓶梅), Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢) but the writing was dense and not the easiest to read/get through. 

i don't remember how this ended up on my to read list exactly and i'm not necessarily mad about it but also not a standout. the book is well written from the perspective of an aging butler reflecting on his life and service to Lord Darlington, an old fashioned but quite influential english lord. 

the structure is a constant cycle of Stevens (our narrator) mentioning something that recently happened, going into something in the past, then revising some stuff he told you prior. good for fans of (maybe reluctantly) unreliable narrators.

kinda matches time period and very high level theme of When We Cease to Understand the World but very different writing styles and approaches.