2024 Favorites: BOOKS

I love end of the year lists. In 1988, I remember feeling so seen by the top songs of the year: George Michael's "Faith" and INXS' "Need You Tonight," and for the past two days, I've been working out on Peloton a little more than usual in order to confirm my favorite song is there as well: Beyonce's "Texas Hold 'Em" tops that list. So this year, I'm sharing some of my favorites things, not in an Oprah, buy these things kind of way, but in a, "you might like to read these" kind of way. I'm starting here, with books I loved this year. 

BOOKS

nonfiction:

Falling Back in Love With Being Human by Kai Cheng Thom

This book of small essays pushes the capacity to love. From embracing your shadow, your imperfection, your worst moments, to embracing those who hate you and wish do you harm. This queer, trans voice expands the concept of love for self and others. 

The Book of (More) Delights by Ross Gay

It took me a good while to get through these delights mostly because I enjoyed sipping them and appreciating each one. Again, Gay brings us on trips to the coffee shop or hours on a trail. He shares moments in life and transform the ordinary into something profound. Like laughter. 

1000 Words by Jami Attenberg

These essays are wonderful bits of craft and motivation from the shared voices of a literary community that lifts one another up. I love the gentle pushes toward our craft and the many different ways into a project that Attenberg and her community provide. 

honorable mention: You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith, Not Yo' Butterfly by Nobuko Miyamoto, and On Palestine by Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé

fiction:

Yellow Face by R. F. Kuang

This anti-hero’s perspective on her friend’s death and the stealing of her manuscript is a lesson in the mental gymnastics people use to contort reality in order to live with themselves. It is not an easy read because it's narrator, Juniper is all kinds of awful, but the capture of a publishing industry’s racism and misogyny are laid to bare. 

Long Division by Kiese Laymon

After listening to a few espisodes of the Reckon: True Stories podcast with Kiese Laymon and Deesha Philyaw, I wanted more of Kiese, so I started the audiobook. Such a compelling narrator and the time travel caught me off guard. A smart and haunting book considering all of the multiverse and how the decisions we make each day impact the future. And the names: City Coldson, Lavander Peeler, Baige Shepard, Shalaya Crump. This novel maybe wasn’t really written for a West Coast multiracial Asian girl, but I enjoyed, nonetheless. 

Real Americans by Rachel Kuong

It’s been a minute since I found myself this compelled by a novel. I started reading it on my phone in a bout of insomnia and couldn’t stop for the entirety of a week. It's the story of Lily, Nick, and May, three generations connected by genetics but separated by family secrets and generational differences. Beautiful writing propelled me through a plot that kept me following these characters so much that when it ended, I wanted that last conversation so badly!

honorable mention: Danzy Senna's Colored Television and Percival Everett's Erasure, Rachel Kuong's Goodbye Vitamin. 

young adult:

We Are Not Free by Traci Chee

Really enjoyed this YA novel about the JA incarceration. Shifting narrators, all teenagers at the time of Pearl Harbor, take us from the streets of San Francisco to detention centers, concentration camps, off to war, and eventually back to the streets of San Fran. I liked the variety of experiences she captured and the many ways these friends saw one another through this tumultuous time in ways their families could not. 

The Truth About Secrets by Hazel Kight Witham

Who doesn't have a secret, or many, during middle school? In this memoir in verse, Witham captures the stress, fear, and anxiety that comes when the girl you are at school and the girl you are at home collide in a crowded hallway. What do you do? Well, first, you hide in the bathroom, and then, maybe then you can get free.  

The Aves by Ryane Nicole Granados 

This delightful read follows our narrator, Zora, her sister, Prose, and their protective and strict mother, Mercy, as she navigates her adolescent days in a South LA neighborhood. A rich cast of characters and beautiful prose captures this coming of age tale like we have yet to see chronicled in Los Angeles. A beautiful and stunningly written debut. 

Stories All Our Own by Tisha Reichle-Aguilera 

These cousins invite us to hang out with them. These five cousins, all distinct and named, are all unique  and universal. For these slim pages, we endure Sunday Mass, splash in the pool, ride bikes across town, and scratch at chicken pox while our Tías, for the most part, leave us alone. For these days, these years, these pages, we are reminded of the girls we once were, and “wish we could always be right here.”

honorable mention: FLAMER by Michael Curato and PELÉ: The King of Soccer by Eddy Simon and Vincent Brascaglia, and New from Here by Kelly Yang

Any recs for me, y'all? 

Culmination Address for the Class of 2016

Last year, after working with Lily, our school's speech and debate coach, I wrote a culmination speech for the class of 2015. We were using speech and debate guidelines and I like to model what I ask my students to do, so when we introduced the speaker competition this year, I started writing another sample. But I kept getting stuck. But when our eighth grade field day lined up with a shooting at UCLA landing my students and I in lockdown for hours, I sat down to write again.

I shared this with our speakers, and Lily paved the way for me to deliver this speech at our graduation. I wrote a graduation speech in 1988, when I graduated from eighth grade, but my speech wasn't chosen. This was my first opportunity to speak at a culmination and it was an honor to share the stage with our graduates.

To our students in the class of 2016,

I have been trying to write this letter to you for the last couple of months. I’ve started drafts, finished some, and even shared one with some of you, but here I am, once again, thinking about how to put our year into words.

What is the story of our year together?

At first I thought about writing about feminism, because this year more than any other, we have fierce young women who speak truth to power, and I have some young men who have learned about misogyny, privilege, and prejudice, and hopefully have thought about how to be advocates for justice. I thought about our study of refugees from World War II and the Vietnam War and the current refugee crisis. I thought about Black History Month and what you taught me about what it means to be an ally. And I thought about Harper Lee’s death and how with her passing we lost a mockingbird who used her voice to give us the story of Scout, Jem, Dill, Atticus, Boo Radley, and Tom Robinson. I thought about all of the poetry you penned where so many of you found your voice leaving me in awe.

I am writing about all of this, but I’m also writing a new story because now we had field day together.

This year’s field day is a day I will always remember. It was a day when all the work we’ve done together diminished in the face of a crisis.

As we sat together in silence, I called each of your names, or I skimmed over your name

if you weren’t on the trip with us, and in the quiet of that room, where the tension was still thick with not knowing, I wanted to say your names over and over again. I wanted to see each and every one of you. I wanted to hold each of you close and tell you that you were safe, and that I loved you, and your family loved you. And even though I couldn’t say it with 100% certainty, I wanted to tell you everything would be okay.

Instead, I simply called your names and hoped.

But that night, after field day, from the safety of my home, I realized we have shared something: we have shared the space of fear and it reminded me of Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien who wrote about truth and storytelling in The Things They Carried. He wrote, “By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others.”

And I think that is why it has been so hard to tell the story of this year because there is so much we have carried together. It is many stories and many truths. We have mourned Johnny and Dally in The Outsiders, and Ha’s Papaya Tree in Inside Out and Back Again. In To Kill A Mockingbird, we grieved for Tom Robinson and for Scout’s innocence as she stood on the Radley porch on Halloween night.

But more than just reading stories, we shared our own, in essays about poverty and taking a stand and in novels about friendship, family, immigration, and struggle. You have been funny, sentimental, ironic, and profound, and all of these stories have been ours.

Now we have a new story to tell. A shared story. And as each of you leaves for high school, college, and ... life, so many more stories will unfold for you: stories of perseverance and triumph, love and growth, and sometimes fear and death.

Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie says, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story, the only story. Stories matter. Many stories matter.”

So, as I send you off, as we read your names again, this time in a space of celebration, I hope you will tell your story. I hope you will share your truth. I hope you will share your many stories because your story matters. All of your stories matter.

I hope you will use the voice you found this year and that you will sing because the world needs to hear from you. You are our mockingbirds and the world needs your stories.

Tim O’Brien also says, “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, and hope that others might then dream it along with you.” Keep dreaming and your story will follow.