A Promised Land by Barack Obama

Rating: ★★★★★★★★★☆ 9/10

I pre-ordered this book on November 20, 2020, a mere two weeks after the presidential election in which Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump. By this time, Trump had already voiced his intentions to fight his damndest to overturn the results of the election. Now, as I’m writing this on January 25th, two months after I actually finished reading the book, power has (not really peacefully) transitioned to a new administration. This memoir was a brief reprieve from the tumultuous hurricane that was the last couple months of Trump’s presidency: from bogus lawsuits to overturn a fair election to a surge in coronavirus cases and 400k deaths to the storming of the Capitol. It also served as a nice mental transition away from Trump and back to a saner period of American modern history — what may seem like eons ago — of 2008 to 2016.

Before I read the book I’d heard from many people, including Obama himself, that he was a very loquacious writer. Let the book speak for itself: it’s over 700 pages and it’s only the first of two volumes, and it goes through almost all of Obama’s first term in office. It starts with a brief introduction of himself and his family, how he grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia, how he succeeded academically and found his place in the law world in Chicago, how he and Michelle met, and how he transitioned his career into politics. As someone who has never read Obama’s other books, this was a concise little introduction that I appreciated very much. It gave enough background for me to completely understand his worldview and his base motivations, although he does expound on them throughout the book.

I remember listening to a podcast or watching a video where the host interviews Obama, and he says that he wanted this book to really give readers an inside look into what goes through a president’s head as he/she makes decisions that alter the lives of millions not only inside the United States but across the globe. Now, I’m assuming that that’s the goal of pretty much every president who writes a memoir, but I haven’t read any other ones, so I can’t say for sure. Nevertheless, Obama achieves that goal very well (there’s a pattern here.. Obama seems to achieve a lot of the goals he sets…). I especially loved when Obama pointed out specific moments in his Illinois Senate career or his stint as US Senator or during his first couple months in the Oval Office where he noticed specific changes in his perception of politics or realizations that the interior is vastly different from the exterior. They were always framed as moments of growth — I think they could also be framed as essential moments where the veneer of a naive idealistic approach is broken and one begins to approach the job with a hardened pragmatism. Perhaps they are one and the same. He is sure to remind us though, that throughout his presidency, Obama never lost hope in the American people (as an amorphous being). I found it endearing that he forced himself to read letters from constituents just to bring himself down to earth – that making policies that affected millions of people that he might never see in his entire life with a swift stroke of his pen could quickly desensitize him to suffering and injustice.

Since I’m writing this review two months late, I don’t have any specific passages to talk about or reference. Nevertheless, there were a lot of excerpts I loved, and if I ever have the time or motivation, maybe I’ll find them and post them here.

I gave this memoir a 9/10 because the only gripe I had was that Obama seemed almost apologetic at points about his policy. I get that he wanted the book to not be blatantly partisan, but sometimes his justifications for certain policy decisions were too much. A couple justifications got repeated over and over again, albeit in different situations, but repeated nonetheless. But let me be clear, this is an extremely minor gripe. If I gave out half points, I’d rate this a 9.5/10. Bottom line: I really really enjoyed this book, his writing style, and the content, and I’m going to preorder the second volume once it’s released!

The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang

Rating: ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ 7/10

This book was a gift from my friend Amanda, who loves fantasy and science fiction novels. If you know me, those aren’t my choice genres, although I do read them occasionally. Most of the time I read a fantasy novel and it doesn’t hit the same as Deathly Hallows the day after release – I’m a third of the way in and I can still put it down, go do whatever else, and then come back to it a day or two later without thinking constantly about it. There are only a couple (fantasy) books I remember literally not being able to do anything else until I finished, and some of these memories might have been altered by time and nostalgia, but: Eragon, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, The Lightning Thief, to name a few.

The Poppy War was somewhere in between. I read the first 100 pages, then took a week long break, then the remaining 400 pages in a string of continuous waking hours. Don’t get me wrong, it was insanely entertaining, and I have a lot of respect for R.F. Kuang (who is basically my age) for writing a book that, in many ways, was a slightly more adult version of the Percy Jackson series.

I was in awe at how Kuang was able to make these characters so complex (I’ve been hyperaware of how authors develop characters ever since attempting NaNoWriMo). Of course, I rooted for Rin for basically 98% of the book, but at the end, the reader really has to come to a reckoning: which character is right? Is there even a “right” and a “wrong” in this situation? It’s not so clear — and there’s this acute sense that what Rin sees and narrates might not be the truth, more so than in other third person omniscient novels. Even so, in a world with perfect information, decisions made during something as complex and vast as a war could not be divided into camps of “right” and “wrong”. It’s a sort of epistemological study at the end of the novel, studying the actions, reactions, and motivations of the Nikara and the Federation.

The pace was also great. Like I said, the beginning was a little slow to me, but that’s because I only like fantasy books when there’s a lot of fighting (the Department of Mysteries scene in HP5…), and there’s no fighting until later in this book. But after she gets to the academy and develops her little feud with Nezha and her friendship with Kitay, there’s more action that keeps the book chugging along at a nice pace.

Finally, I admired the nods to historical events Kuang inserted throughout the book. Obviously the title references the Opium Wars, and there are scenes, as Kuang writes herself, based off of the Rape of Nanjing and other battles fought in China. I am hopelessly ignorant about Asian history in general, so I suspect that if I knew more, I think I would have had a field day reading this book.

I’ve sung nothing but praises so far, so what brought this book down from a 10 to a 7? A couple things: there were some literary idiosyncrasies that I didn’t like, and there were a lot of characters I thought left undeveloped unnecessarily. For the literary idiosyncrasies, there were so many times where something was described using opposite synonyms at the same time, like “It was horrible. It was wonderful.”, or “she hated it. She loved it”. I didn’t really notice it until it happened twice in quick succession near the end of the book, and I thought it was a little lazy (?) because there definitely are more ways to describe a character having an internal conflict or holding two opposing opinions about the same thing/idea. As for the undeveloped characters, I really wish we had learned more about Jiang, the Empress, Venka, and Suji. They all made some important decisions in the book and it wasn’t always clear to me what their motivations were. Maybe they will be revealed in the next book!

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

Rating: ★★★★★★★★★☆ 9/10

I finished A Promised Land before Interior Chinatown, but I’m writing the reviews in the opposite order because Obama is …uhh.. kinda loquacious (but he also talks about a LOT, which is why it’s taking me a while to write this review). These two books could not be more different. Obama’s memoir is prosaic, matter-of-fact, and pragmatic; Charles Yu’s work is artistic, subtle, and idealistic. It’s a shame that I have to rate both of these books on the same scale, because to me it’s sort of like rating a gymnastics routine and a swimming race on a quarterback rating scale. But I enjoyed both books a lot, and that’s why both are 9/10.

Interior Chinatown is about an actor(?) named Willis Wu, who plays Asian Male, or Oriental Background Male or aspiring Kung Fu Master or Asian Dad, in a TV show called “Black and White”. (When I said subtle, I was referring to certain parts of the book; other parts, like the title of the show, and some paragraphs where he explicitly summarizes the plight of Asian Americans in America, are not as subtle). At it’s core, the show is a metaphor for the Asian American experience in a world that doesn’t seem to have a spot for us. Willis Wu is you and me and every other Asian who play some role in society that is created for us; some play roles at different levels of the hierarchy within the show, but at the end of the day, there is a ceiling to the roles allotted to us, and that’s just a fact of life.

While I don’t completely agree with all of Yu’s social commentary, I cannot help but admire the way he presents his arguments. Reading this book, written mostly as a script for a show, was an entirely new experience for me. It felt like I was drifting in and out of reality as the lines between acting and real life blurred. Willis’s lines that were on script or off script weren’t always marked, another metaphor for the Asian American experience.

Reading this book reminded me of the model minority argument, the idea that while it seems like Asians own their own little plot of land in the world of America’s socioeconomic/cultural sphere, it’s actually just granted to us generously by white people for the purpose of stifling, short-changing, diminishing other minorities. Yu doesn’t explicitly mention this argument, but some variation of it manifests in Yu’s declaration that Asians are in this racial purgatory (see my review of Minor Feelings): “[Asians] have not been and can never be fully assimilated into mainstream, i.e., White America…And on the other hand neither…feel fully justified in claiming solidarity with other historically and currently oppressed groups,” because “the wrongs committed against [Asian] ancestors are incommensurate in magnitude with those committed against Black people in America” (pg 232-233).

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. Do I think it should have won the National Book Award for Fiction? Errr, maybe. It was definitely well-written. But at the same time, I think it won because white people were just the right amount discomfited by the ideas put forth by this story formatted in a digestible way (disclaimer: I don’t actually know which authors were on the 5 person panel that decided the award, but this theory sounds good in my head). But as a piece of art, I loved it.

So: content wise, maybe not a 9/10. But overall, 9/10 it is.

The other day I was washing grapes (a bowl full of them), and when I wash any sort of fruit inside a bowl, I try to rub each of them at least once so I can get rid of whatever is on the surface. But since I don’t actually count each one and identify them, I’m never sure if I’ve touched all of them — and so I resort to just picking up a few, rinsing them off, replacing them and repeating for 30 seconds ish under running water.

So as I washed that day, I wondered about this problem: what is the optimal duration to wash grapes for to maximize my chances of washing each grape while minimizing the amount of water spent (because we need to be green, people)?

This seemed like an interesting problem, so I naturally sat down, watched an episode of Start Up while eating the grapes, and then began to think about it.

Let’s state the problem more formally: I have n grapes. Every second, I pick up one grape, wash it, and replace it. How many times do I have to do this before I expect to have washed every grape?

If , this is easy: the first grape I pick is the only grape present, and after one second, every grape is washed. So if I’m eating one grape, I’ll wash for one second.

Here, I’ll introduce some vocabulary: a grape is dirty if I haven’t washed it yet. If I have washed it, I’ll call it clean.

If , the first grape I pick will be dirty (and after one second, it will be clean). The second time around, I have a 50% chance of washing the dirty one, and a 50% of re-washing the clean one. Let’s make this a little clearer: at the beginning, I have two grapes; let’s call them and . Now let’s define two random variables, , which denotes the expected number of seconds (or tries) it takes to select , and , which denotes the probability that I select in the next second. So what I want to calculate is , or the expected number of seconds to select both and .

By linearity of expectation, . We know that because both grapes are dirty (either one can be ). We also know that , because after the first second, there are guaranteed to be one clean and one dirty grape, which means that the probability of choosing the dirty grape, or , is .

More generally, . The probability of selecting the th dirty grape is the number of dirty grapes over the total number of grapes. The number of dirty grapes is . Alright. That means the expected number of seconds to clean that th dirty grape is .

So let’s put this all together…

Rewriting it, we see…

The part in the parentheses is known as the th harmonic number, known as (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_number), so if you want a formula, check that out.

Anyway, back to the original problem: so how long should I wash my bowl of grapes for?? If I have grapes, then I should wash it for seconds (if I wash a grape every second). After this amount of time, I expect to have washed every single grape. The probability of this actually happening is still low, of course, but it’s the average. If you think about it, technically you could get lucky and wash it for seconds, picking up a dirty grape every second. Or you could go for a whole year if you get unlucky and pick the same grape every single time. But this is a good middle ground 🙂

Here are some numbers calculated for your edification:

: ~29.29s

: 71.95s, or 1m12s

: ~2m

If you’re eating more than 30 grapes at a time you’ve got bigger problems.

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

Rating: ★★★★★★★★☆☆ 8/10

I finished this book in September, but never really felt motivated to write the review until now, because I’m about to finish Obama’s memoir (and by about to finish, I mean I have 300/700 pages left to read), and writing reviews out of order just feels wrong.

A Man Called Ove was a modern twist on the classic feel-good story, cleverly employing the enemy-to-friend trope to keep the reader interested until the end. I must say that this is one of the most main character centric books I’ve ever read. By that I mean most of the other characters see little development – they are largely static, while Ove changes around them. All the subplots basically add supporting evidence to a minor character shift in Ove. But this is not to say that that’s a flaw! People relate to characters the most (duh, what else do people relate to?) and seeing the transformation of a character while simultaneously learning the motivations behind the character’s transformative actions is tremendously satisfying.

As I was reading, I remember thinking “a good author can describe a character in such a way that even though the character’s personality is SO unique and very few people truly share that personality, all readers nevertheless relate to the character and understand such a rationale.” As with palm readers and fortune cookies, a good author knows how to distill a small piece of humanity into an entity, and the reader can then readily take it and insert it into their own context. To say that good authors are potent retroviruses affecting character would be an understatement.

Anyway, in the month of October I was super busy working, and in the month of November I started and promptly failed at NaNoWriMo, and that’s why this blog has seen nothing but tumbleweeds and dust for the past few months. Now that the holiday season is upon us, I hope to write more reviews again and keep you all, whoever you are, updated with the thoughts of a brain cell.

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

Rating: ★★★★★★★★☆☆ 8/10

During this quarantine, I have often found myself alone with my thoughts of what my future was going to look like. I don’t think I was alone in this — many of my friends had similar reckonings: what did they actually want to do with their careers, with their lives? Coronavirus has paused all our lives, and it has forced us to spend unprecedented amounts of time alone or with immediately family. I think we’ve self-reflected so much during quarantine because the disease has cast a cloud of uncertainty over our futures, and we’re desperately trying to find that clarity again.

Paul Kalanithi writes about a similar, obviously much more life-altering, period of his life, in his memoir, When Breath Becomes Air. His meteoric rise in the field of neurosurgery and neuroscience was cut short by his diagnosis of lung cancer. He was just 35 when he was diagnosed, before he had even graduated residency at Stanford and before he even got a chance to start his “real” life. During this period, he needs to decide what he wants to do with the remainder of his time. The trouble is, he doesn’t know exactly how much time he has left: it could be two months, or twenty years, and nothing can prepare him for this. He had studied at the top schools, researched with the pioneers in his field, and worked alongside the best of the best doctors, and yet nothing could have prepared him for his struggle with cancer, groping in the darkness for meaning and purpose.

He writes a lot about death — how you don’t quite understand it (no matter how much you read about it) until you are at its door. The little peculiarities and nuances that simply can’t be verbalized or memorialized because words might destroy their ephemerality. And yet, as many other readers of this book have pointed out, this book is more about life. Paul is able to use the last years of his life to write the memoir, and in the last year, he and his wife have a daughter. Family and close friends are his world as he nears death. This is not a new concept, nor is it a call for everyone to put their careers second while they are still young and healthy. It is just a reminder that you can have everything, but when the realities of life strike, everything might not mean all that much.

Now obviously Paul’s experience with cancer is incomparable to what we’re experiencing during coronavirus. But just as he reflected more on his life than his impending death in his last years, we can also appreciate what we’ve had up until now, rather than focus on what the quarantine is taking away.

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I liked the writing the entire way through the book. I didn’t really enjoy the foreword, because a) the dude barely even knew Paul and b) it provided no substance to the book whatsoever. Paul was a great writer (he got an MA in English from Stanford after all), and his wife, Lucy, is also a great writer. In her epilogue, she describes Paul’s last months, and life after his death. It’s a great conclusion to this story.

The Martian by Andy Weir

Rating: ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆ 6/10

Wow, this is my first review in almost a month. I haven’t been reading as much because I’ve been busier at work, and the book that was in progress (this one) was only meh. It was entertaining, don’t get me wrong. I liked the ingenuity of Mark Watney and the twists and turns in the plot as he sought rescue. But holistically, this book was super underwhelming.

First of all, the characters are so shallow. All the characters pretty much have the same personality, which is smart and snarky. The only character who didn’t fit into that was the nerdy astrophysicist who came up with the plan to have Hermes return to Mars. And even he was a stereotype. I mean, come on…the disagreements the NASA scientists have with each other are half-hearted, and there is absolutely NO one who would speak to a 7-levels-above-you superior the way Mindy spoke to Venkat.

Second of all, the problems and mishaps Andy Weir started throwing at Mark became a bit contrived and artificial. That’s not to say that the actual problem itself seemed unrealistic, but that it was foreshadowed and laid out in a way that the reader would groan and be like “here we go again, Mark’s gonna say something like ‘Fuck me. I’m going to die on this planet’, and then hatch an ingenious plan to survive, and then complain about how many sols he has left”. It worked for the first couple of problems, but near the end, I wasn’t really a fan of it.

Finally, I didn’t particularly like that there was only one storyline in the entire book. I get that other plots could have detracted from the overall story, but I mean, there could have been something. There was the main plot of getting Mark Watney back home, and then side plots (if you can even call them that) of the politics at NASA and some romance between crewmembers of Hermes.

This was a straightforward read, sort of like a modern, sci-fi version of an Agatha Christie novel. In that sense, it was a nice “on the beach with nothing to do” read. But I think I’d enjoy a book like Ready Player One or Sharp Objects better — they provide equal (or more) entertainment, and it feels a lot less predictable.

The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho

Rating: ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆ 4/10

Can’t talk, need to pursue my personal legend and follow my heart….

Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong

Rating: ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ 7/10

During a hike with Charlie and Catherine, I was asked what Minor Feelings was about. I couldn’t verbalize an answer. After a long string of “umm”s and “it’s like”s, I eventually forced out a vague description: “it’s an examination of being Asian in America”. That wasn’t wrong by any means, but it was facile. It isn’t really an examination, because that connotes some cold, detached perspective, which this wasn’t. It’s also not only about Asians in America; it’s about Asians outside of America, and other POC in America. I think that’s why it took my pea brain so long to conjure up this tiny sentence; I had never read anything that was similar to Minor Feelings, and I was trying to summarize a book that was entirely new to me.

I’m not saying that the topics Hong talks about are entirely new; anti-Asian sentiment is nothing new to me, and I (try to) read about the Asian American experience quite often. I think what was new to me was the bluntness she uses to expose the sordid position of Asians in America’s social hierarchy. For example, one of the first anecdotes she relates is about a south Asian man being exceedingly polite to a flight attendant. She wonders if his graciousness was genuine or borne from caution? I see this in my life also: Asians being super polite because it’s engrained in American society that Asians are docile and non-confrontational, so if we want to ask for something, we need to inquire with all niceties included in order to maintain that stereotype. Or is it because we are simply well-cultured and kind people? Is it even possible to form this dichotomy? (I think it’d be really interesting to examine how polite Asians are in Asia vs. America)

Another novelty for me was her hyperawareness of the white supremacist status quo. She says that as a writer, she’s been raised an educated to please white people, and that has been ingrained in her consciousness. She notes that telling her own racial story would play into white people’s desire to find the best “single story”, a trial by capitalism to find the minority story that resonates the most with America (read white people). Yet if she doesn’t write about race, then she essentially lops off the part of her writing identity that makes her unique — and white people win again. It seems like a lose-lose.

This leads into her definition of minor feelings, which “occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance. You are told, ‘Things are so much better,’ while you think, Things are the same. You are told, ‘Asian Americans are so successful,’ while you feel like a failure.”

The concept of minor feelings isn’t specific to Asian Americans, but she writes about how these feelings are amplified in Asian Americans because of their immigrant history. The Asians who immigrated to America were selected for their intelligence by the immigration laws of the 1960s. The “model minority”, the antagonistic feelings between Asians and other minorities, can all be traced back to this or generally some white person making a selfish decision. It’s also amplified because of the confluence of the American racial environment and Asian culture. Asians have a big culture of indebtedness. Hong writes that “being indebted is to be cautious, inhibited, and to never speak out of turn. It is to lead a life constrained by choices that are never your own…If the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America, the child thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering.” I think that’s true to some extent, but this topic is extremely nuanced. I agree with the general idea, but I also think there are also incongruences in this theory that have been paved over by Hong. It’s a little too simplistic.

Nevertheless, I think this was a good read. I give it 7 stars because Hong doesn’t really offer a “solution” to the Asian American peril in racial purgatory. Maybe I shouldn’t dock stars from her review because of this, because it’s a nastily difficult question to even ask, let alone answer. She ends the book by posing the question: “If the Asian American consciousness must be emancipated, we must free ourselves of our conditional existence. But what does that mean? Does that mean making ourselves suffer to keep the struggle alive? Does it mean simply being awake to our suffering?”

That’s a good question, Cathy, and I was hoping you’d answer it for me. But it’s an interesting thought experiment I’ll chew on for a couple hours before I start reading The Alchemist.

An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives by Matt Richtel

Rating: ★★★★★★★★★☆ 9/10

Matt makes the science of immunology extremely accessible in this book. It’s not perfect by any means — there are, for example, no citations (??) in the entire book — but it’s enlightening and educational nonetheless. I kept my laptop close at hand while reading the book so I could look up molecules he mentioned, or terms that were only superficially defined.

To me, this book is a combination of Mukherjee’s Emporer of All Maladies, the great book on cancer and oncology, and a memoir of Richtel’s friend Jason. He injects anecdotes about his life periodically throughout the novel, and his voice is present all the time. I think this fits well for the type of book this was, because if this book were told through a cold, uncompromising, scientific lens, the connections he draws between the immune system and society/life in general would not have been as poignant.

Obviously this book is extremely relevant today. Dr. Fauci features quite heavily in the book, which is really cool, since I see him doing coronavirus briefings at the same time. I never knew that Fauci was such a big name in immunology, either. I knew he was a big shot, because he was the director of NIH, but the book really highlighted his contributions to immunology and oncology. Learning about the immune system was really enlightening for me, because it answered a lot of questions I had about getting sick: why did I get fevers when I got sick? Why did I feel tired and unmotivated to even leave my house? Why does my body react the way it does when I eat something I’m allergic to, and why do I even have these allergies in the first place? I’ve been lucky enough not to have any major injuries or diseases, but the answers to my questions, as well as the answers to heavier questions like why some people get cancer, or why some people are asymptomatic carriers of HIV, all have a common thread, which is the immune system.

The symptoms of a cold or the flu are usually not caused by the virus; they are caused by the ensuing immune response that tries to defend your body from the virus. When we see people on ventilators or dying from coronavirus, it’s because of a cytokine storm which causes inflammation our body simply can’t handle. Our immune system walks a very fine line between being too aggressive and destroying our own body, and being too passive and letting the virus overrun and destroy our body.

Richtel also gives some practical advice for the reader to keep their immune system in balance. There is a lot of evidence that managing stress, maintaining a healthy sleep schedule, exercising regularly, and eating healthy foods all help the immune system orchestrate the perfect response to any foreign cells, harmful or not. It’s not new advice, obviously, but understanding the science behind it makes it a hell of a lot more compelling. Finally, he also talks about the hygiene hypothesis, which states that our immune systems are much weaker nowadays because of our ultra-clean environments. We aren’t exposed to as many pathogens when our immune system is developing, which causes our immune system to overreact to certain harmless objects (which indeed are allergies). It’s weird to think about, but it makes sense. The 5-second rule that we all obeyed in elementary school? That probably helped strengthen our immune systems. It’s also just another example of human vs. nature, and why such a delicate balance needs to be found.