“MUST READ” ASIAN BOOKS – HAPPY LUNAR NEW YEAR!
Tomorrow February is “Lunar New Year” or “Chinese New Year”, which “is the beginning of a calendar year whose months are Moon cycles, based on the lunar calendar or Chinese calendar. It is particularly celebrated in countries within East and Southeast Asia (ESEA), being influenced by the Chinese lunisolar calendar.” (source)
So, today I wanted to share some of the most popular books by Asian authors and about Asian culture, starting with my all-time favorites. As usual, the list includes a variety of genres and categories for all tastes and reading moods.
Happy Lunar New Year and Happy Reading!
YOUNG ADULT | MAGICAL REALISM | FANTASY MYTHOLOGY
Leigh Chen Sanders is absolutely certain about one thing: When her mother died by suicide, she turned into a bird.
Leigh, who is half Asian and half white, travels to Taiwan to meet her maternal grandparents for the first time. There, she is determined to find her mother, the bird. In her search, she winds up chasing after ghosts, uncovering family secrets, and forging a new relationship with her grandparents. And as she grieves, she must try to reconcile the fact that on the same day she kissed her best friend and longtime secret crush, Axel, her mother was taking her own life.
Alternating between real and magic, past and present, friendship and romance, hope and despair, The Astonishing Color of After is a novel about finding oneself through family history, art, grief, and love.
“The Astonishing Color of After” is one of THE ABSOLUTE BEST books I’ve ever read! When trying to solve this mystery and understand why her mom committed suicide, Leigh goes on an incredible journey to Taiwan to reconnected with her roots and, ultimately, with her own self! It’s a mildly ghostly story about death, loss, grief, depression mental health, family, friendship, heritage, identity… and all the sad but wonderful tings! So precious!
ADULT | SHORT STORIES | MAGICAL REALISM | FANTASY
Leigh Chen Sanders is absolutely certain about one thing: When her mother died by suicide, she turned into a bird.
Leigh, who is half Asian and half white, travels to Taiwan to meet her maternal grandparents for the first time. There, she is determined to find her mother, the bird. In her search, she winds up chasing after ghosts, uncovering family secrets, and forging a new relationship with her grandparents. And as she grieves, she must try to reconcile the fact that on the same day she kissed her best friend and longtime secret crush, Axel, her mother was taking her own life.
Alternating between real and magic, past and present, friendship and romance, hope and despair, The Astonishing Color of After is a novel about finding oneself through family history, art, grief, and love.
This was a magical realism gem. “The strange is made familiar and the familiar strange” says the blurb, and I can’t think of a better way to describe magical realism!
Writing short stories that are satisfying and engaging is an art in my opinion and Kim fu is a VERY GOOD artist! This is the kind of book I would grab when I need to get out of a reading slump. Ten pages. The end. Story’s over. Loved it. Ready for the next. PUFF. BYE READING SLUMP. MAGIC!
And the title is PERRRFECT! Because the topics of these stories are indeed the modern monsters that plague our nightmares: insomnia, social media induced loss of boundaries and empathy, sense of inadequacy. Relevant and Entertaining.
ADULT | SHORT STORIES | MAGICAL REALISM |
“Haunting and luminous, How High We Go in the Dark orchestrates its multitude of memorable voices into beautiful and lucid science fiction. An astonishing debut.” —Alan Moore, creator of Watchmen and V for Vendetta
“Epic . . . Sequoia Nagamatsu is a writer whose imagination is matched only by his compassion, the kind we need to light our way through the dark.” —Chloe Benjamin, New York Times bestselling author of The Immortalists.
Recommended by New York Times Book Review • Los Angeles Times • Entertainment Weekly • Esquire • Good Housekeeping • NBC News • Buzzfeed • Business Insider • Bustle • Goodreads • The Millions • The Philadelphia Inquirer • Minneapolis Star-Tribune • San Francisco Chronicle • The Guardian • PopSugar • Literary Hub • and many more!
For fans of Cloud Atlas and Station Eleven, a spellbinding and profoundly prescient debut that follows a cast of intricately linked characters over hundreds of years as humanity struggles to rebuild itself in the aftermath of a climate plague—a daring and deeply heartfelt work of mind-bending imagination from a singular new voice.
Beginning in 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work of his recently deceased daughter at the Batagaika crater, where researchers are studying long-buried secrets now revealed in melting permafrost, including the perfectly preserved remains of a girl who appears to have died of an ancient virus.
Once unleashed, the Arctic Plague will reshape life on earth for generations to come, quickly traversing the globe, forcing humanity to devise a myriad of moving and inventive ways to embrace possibility in the face of tragedy. In a theme park designed for terminally ill children, a cynical employee falls in love with a mother desperate to hold on to her infected son. A heartbroken scientist searching for a cure finds a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects—a pig—develops the capacity for human speech. A widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter embark on a cosmic quest to locate a new home planet.
From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead to interstellar starships, Sequoia Nagamatsu takes readers on a wildly original and compassionate journey, spanning continents, centuries, and even celestial bodies to tell a story about the resiliency of the human spirit, our infinite capacity to dream, and the connective threads that tie us all together in the universe.
“Wondrous, and not just in the feats of imagination, which are so numerous it makes me dizzy to recall them, but also in the humanity and tenderness with which Sequoia Nagamatsu helps us navigate this landscape. . . . This is a truly amazing book, one to keep close as we imagine the uncertain future.” —Kevin Wilson, New York Times bestselling author of Nothing to See Here.
If you find yourself in this reading mood and craving another character-driven literary dystopian like Station Eleven . Then this is the book for you! You’ll love these slow-burn, character centered stories that explore the human dimension and the “what if”s of apocalyptic events.
What happens to our consciousness or our souls when we are in a coma or suspended animation? what happens humankind deep down when faced with the possibility of the end of “life as we know it”? What are our deepest fears and how do we cope with them? What kind of people do we become? How far are we willing to go to survive? Would you grow and harvest organs from animals if it meant to save your loved ones? Would you help your loved ones end their lives to end their suffering?
YOUNG ADULT | PARANORMAL HORROR| MYTHOLOGY
You may think me biased, being murdered myself. But my state of being has nothing to do with the curiosity toward my own species, if we can be called such. We do not go gentle, as your poet encourages, into that good night.
A dead girl walks the streets.
She hunts murderers. Child killers, much like the man who threw her body down a well three hundred years ago.
And when a strange boy bearing stranger tattoos moves into the neighborhood so, she discovers, does something else. And soon both will be drawn into the world of eerie doll rituals and dark Shinto exorcisms that will take them from American suburbia to the remote valleys and shrines of Aomori, Japan.
Because the boy has a terrifying secret – one that would just kill to get out.
The Girl from the Well is A YA Horror novel pitched as “Dexter” meets “The Grudge”, based on a well-loved Japanese ghost story.
This book is just so awesome! One of the most imaginative ghost stories I have ever read, told from the ghost’s perspective is a gritty, dark and unputdownable tale of revenge and the afterlife.
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Have you read any of these books? How did you like them? What books should I add to this list? Let’s chat in the comments!
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