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what i'm reading wednesday 13/8/2025
A short post this week, since I was very, very busy this weekend.
What I finished:
+ Behind Frenemy Lines by Zen Cho, which I enjoyed despite the awful name. Whoever is naming the books in this series is doing them a disservice! I really like the cover art though, so kudos to the artist.
The books in this series (two so far, the other being The Friend Zone Experience) are ostensibly romances, but that's not really why I read them. The romances move too fast for my ace ass, just like 90% of romances, but this is a Me Problem. If you don't have the "you barely know each other!" or the "I haven't spent enough time with you to be fully invested in this relationship!" kinds of problems that I have with almost all romances, then I do not think the romance will seem rushed. It's a nice dynamic between two immigrant London lawyers (one from Malaysia, one from Hong Kong) who have a series of unfortunate encounters before ending up working together.
I really like both of the characters, but as I said, I'm not so much here for the romance as I am for the other stuff. In both of these books, the real appeal are a) the family backdrops and b) the moral quandaries. Zen Cho is fantastic at writing complicated family dynamics that feel so very real--suffocating in some cases, loving but fraught in others. Family, no matter how loving, is never easy in her books--it involves responsibilities, expectations, negotiations but it's no less precious for all that. I deeply appreciate this aspect of her writing because it feels very real and immediate, especially in a world that (at times) can encourage us to just break things off with any relationship that involves conflict.
She's also really good at placing her characters in situations where they have to make difficult choices and are torn by dueling loyalties or moral commitments. The choices these characters make matter in a way that's rare in the kind of frothy fiction that these books get shelved alongside. Obviously, I dig anything that involves people making difficult moral choices, so I eat this up.
Honestly, my only real complaint about the book is that I wanted to spend more time with the characters and their problems. I wanted to dig deeper into their family stuff, have them struggle with the moral choices for longer, etc. I personally felt like this book could have used more room to breathe. But if this sounds appealing to you, I recommend it!
Oh, another thing I dig about Zen Cho's contemporary books-- they give me a glimpse of Malaysia, a really interesting multi-ethnic society I know very little about. And Cho doesn't over-explain things--she'll throw words in there that she doesn't take the time to define, so you either figure them out from context or look them up if you really want to know what they mean. I like this a lot! It feels like I'm being treated as an adult and also it feels like she's pushing back against the exoticizing that can happen in books published in Anglophone countries. For the characters, these aspects of their life are normal and not to be commented upon, and the specter of the white reader doesn't intrude through too much handholding by the text. It's great!
What I'm currently reading:
+ I'll be finishing up The Dawn of Everything for the last week of book club. As always, this book makes me want to write a dozen different anthropologically-focused fantasy novels a la Le Guin.
+ I read the lovely forward to Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine and I'm looking forward to reading the book. Shockingly, I've never read anything of his besides Fahrenheit 451.
What I finished:
+ Behind Frenemy Lines by Zen Cho, which I enjoyed despite the awful name. Whoever is naming the books in this series is doing them a disservice! I really like the cover art though, so kudos to the artist.
The books in this series (two so far, the other being The Friend Zone Experience) are ostensibly romances, but that's not really why I read them. The romances move too fast for my ace ass, just like 90% of romances, but this is a Me Problem. If you don't have the "you barely know each other!" or the "I haven't spent enough time with you to be fully invested in this relationship!" kinds of problems that I have with almost all romances, then I do not think the romance will seem rushed. It's a nice dynamic between two immigrant London lawyers (one from Malaysia, one from Hong Kong) who have a series of unfortunate encounters before ending up working together.
I really like both of the characters, but as I said, I'm not so much here for the romance as I am for the other stuff. In both of these books, the real appeal are a) the family backdrops and b) the moral quandaries. Zen Cho is fantastic at writing complicated family dynamics that feel so very real--suffocating in some cases, loving but fraught in others. Family, no matter how loving, is never easy in her books--it involves responsibilities, expectations, negotiations but it's no less precious for all that. I deeply appreciate this aspect of her writing because it feels very real and immediate, especially in a world that (at times) can encourage us to just break things off with any relationship that involves conflict.
She's also really good at placing her characters in situations where they have to make difficult choices and are torn by dueling loyalties or moral commitments. The choices these characters make matter in a way that's rare in the kind of frothy fiction that these books get shelved alongside. Obviously, I dig anything that involves people making difficult moral choices, so I eat this up.
Honestly, my only real complaint about the book is that I wanted to spend more time with the characters and their problems. I wanted to dig deeper into their family stuff, have them struggle with the moral choices for longer, etc. I personally felt like this book could have used more room to breathe. But if this sounds appealing to you, I recommend it!
Oh, another thing I dig about Zen Cho's contemporary books-- they give me a glimpse of Malaysia, a really interesting multi-ethnic society I know very little about. And Cho doesn't over-explain things--she'll throw words in there that she doesn't take the time to define, so you either figure them out from context or look them up if you really want to know what they mean. I like this a lot! It feels like I'm being treated as an adult and also it feels like she's pushing back against the exoticizing that can happen in books published in Anglophone countries. For the characters, these aspects of their life are normal and not to be commented upon, and the specter of the white reader doesn't intrude through too much handholding by the text. It's great!
What I'm currently reading:
+ I'll be finishing up The Dawn of Everything for the last week of book club. As always, this book makes me want to write a dozen different anthropologically-focused fantasy novels a la Le Guin.
+ I read the lovely forward to Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine and I'm looking forward to reading the book. Shockingly, I've never read anything of his besides Fahrenheit 451.
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I too love it when authors do this! Few things throw me out of a story faster than a character doing the equivalent of explaining what the Internet is to the friend they're texting. (And figuring it out isn't just for adults: how do children learn the meanings of words and how to speak, if not through context?)
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So true! My niece just discovered the word "disgusting" this past week and she is having great fun with it, and I know she figured out its meaning by context.
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I absolutely agree. They never give me strong shippy feelings, but I always like them very much as individuals!
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I read the lovely forward to Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine and I'm looking forward to reading the book.
I used a quote from that book in the summary of a fic, but never actually read the book itself... I should do that. Also, did you mean 'foreword'? Or is 'forward' like a forwarded recommendation? /curious
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I meant foreword! Just misspelled it!
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I hear ya. And if I am caught up in a writing project I can't focus on reading, so it's mostly either-or.
I meant foreword! Just misspelled it!
LOL. I was like 'Is this a fancy librarian term or a typo?'