Celebrate Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month in May with Teen Fiction Titles!

Here is a link to a book list I created for Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month at the Harold Washington Public Library (Chicago) this year (May 2018). All the annotations are my own: Celebrate Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month in May with Teen Fiction Titles!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Libidinal Economy" by Jean Francois Lyotard (published 1970)

Image
For a philosophical text translated from French to English, reading Lyotard's Libidinal Economy (1970) wasn't too difficult, albeit requiring, of course, ample time and concentration. And for the book having been published a little over fifty years ago, the text remains significant today as a commentary on those forces that drive us, either towards death or into life, passionately, lovingly, flailingly, pathetically, skillfully, terribly, hatefully, so on and so forth... enmeshing us within Lyotard 's concept of the libidinal band - that kind of mobius strip exemplifying the only kind of economy we'd want to be a part of - one that knows no difference between the revealing physical exteriors and the inner, innate, structures that define what lies within. Much of the fascinating aspects of this text ride on the socio-cultural manifestations concerning how the libidinal economy flourishes (as opposed to an economy purely political or purely religious). Sexuality, Marxis...
Read more

"The Secret History of Twin Peaks" by Mark Frost (published 2016)

Image
Twin Peaks, that quaint, quiet small town in Washington State that went a bit off the rails after the death - murder, to be more precise - of the town's sweetheart, Laura Palmer, is, as we know, a *fictional* place created from the minds of David Lynch and Mark Frost at the end of the '80s and early '90s. What Mark Frost ingeniously presents us with in  The Secret History of Twin Peaks (published 2016) is a slew of documents from diaries, reports and transcripts from the FBI and CIA, detective photographs, military (especially the U.S. Air Force and Navy) notes and letters, psychiatric files, newspaper clippings, and all sorts of other case files which locate Twin Peaks in a larger, global arena, with the intent to show how this small town is linked to the bigger picture in myriad ways. The whole of Secret History is written by an unknown Archivist, whose footnotes and endnotes, prefaces and epilogues throughout help us uncover the mystery surrounding Laura Palmer, her ...
Read more

"The Girl Who Drank The Moon" by Kelly Barnhill (published 2016)

Image
“The Girl Who Drank The Moon” by Kelly Barnhill (2016), winner of the Newbery Medal, is one of the best books I’ve read this year. Although “The Girl Who Drank The Moon” is geared towards kids in about fifth grade, I, at thirty, loved reading this book and was fully engaged with the story, racing towards the end to find out the fate of the characters within the book. Barnhill mixes bits of alchemy, folklore, politics, romance, psychology, adventure, and horror in her fairy-tale, which is all wonderfully expected. But, as New York Times reviewer Diana Wagman has put it, “Many books we read when we’re young want to teach us lessons about life. True, the things we learn in them can stay with us forever. But lessons can be so dull. Luckily, Kelly Barnhill’s wonderful fourth novel, ‘The Girl Who Drank The Moon,’ educates about oppression, blind allegiance and challenging the status quo while immersing the reader in an exhilarating story full of magical creatures and derring-do.” The gir...
Read more