Now to change genres! I’d never read any mystery, other than a heap of Sherlock Holmes in my youth, but I was curious to check out the work of Agatha Christie. For those of you who don’t know, and this included me, she is the best-selling novelist of all time.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles was the first of her books to feature the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. A wealthy old British lady is fatally poisoned in her country estate, and the suspects include her husband, her two stepsons, various women in her house, and a doctor who is an expert on poisons. During Poirot’s investigation, a great number of clues and unusual details crop up, for which the explanations only come much later.

Back in 1921, The Times Literary Supplement had advertised this short novel as “the result of a bet about the possibility of writing a detective story in which the reader would not be able to spot the criminal.” I for one was unable to solve it, although the first night after I started reading, I did lie awake pondering the eerie circumstances (thereafter, I switched to only visiting this book by daylight). However, once Poirot spelled everything out at the end, I didn’t experience the frisson of satisfaction that I expected. It seems to me that the mystery cannot indeed be solved by the reader ahead of time, partly because its solution requires some arcane knowledge, and partly because some of the reasoning is a little unreasonable.

Still, it’s a quick and riveting read. I had actually wanted to start with And Then There Were None but chickened out when I read about how it gives people the creeps. What are your Christie recs?

Since I was on a romance-novel kick, and since I had greatly enjoyed the Bridgerton series on Netflix, a logical next step was to check out Julia Quinn’s Rokesby prequels to the Bridgerton novels, which take place one generation prior. The heroine of prequel #1, 23-year-old Billie Bridgerton, is the older sister of Edmund who will one day father the brood of eight alphabetically named siblings. Billie has grown up as an outspoken tomboy in the Kent countryside, where her childhood best friends were her neighbors, the second, third, and fourth Rokesby siblings. She has always considered their oldest brother, George Rokesby, Lord Kennard, to be a stick in the mud, whereas he has always found her to be a bit much. As they spend more time together as adults, though, they start to see each other differently.

My favorite moment in the book takes place a little over halfway through, during their game of pall mall (a precursor game to croquet):

*

Lady Alexandra let out a loud huff. ”Whose turn is it?”

“Mine, I believe,” George said smoothly.

Billie smiled to herself. She loved the way he said so much with nothing but a polite murmur. Lady Alexandra would hear a gentleman making a casual comment, but Billie knew him better. She knew him better than that pompous duke’s daughter ever would.

She heard his smile. He was amused by the entire exchange, even if he was too well-bred to show it.

She heard his salute. Billie had won this round; he was congratulating her.

And she heard his gentle scolding, a warning of sorts. He was cautioning her not to carry this too far.

Which she probably would. He knew her every bit as well as she knew him.

*

This passage was exquisite, not only as an illustration of intimacy between not-yet-lovers, but also for how it evokes George’s character. As W. Somerset Maugham wrote in Of Human Bondage, restraint can be just “as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion.” The eventual kissing scenes are pretty good too. I didn’t care too much for this cutesy writing style with sentence fragments and very short paragraphs, but for the most part it didn’t get in the way.

I’d known that author Julia Quinn graduated from Harvard and did a brief stint at Yale School of Medicine, but how cool that she also won $79,000 on the game show The Weakest Link!

Given how they say that every story has been told before, one clever approach is to retell one of the classics but in a new setting. West Side Story recast Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet amid warring gangs in New York; Clueless resurrected Jane Austen’s Emma in a Beverly Hills high school; and this year a Pulitzer went to Demon Copperhead, with its Appalachian twist on Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. Now, I was excited to get my hands on an Advance Review Copy of Christina Hwang Dudley’s Pride & Preston Lin, forthcoming in 2024, a retelling of Pride & Prejudice set in the present day among Chinese-Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Forget my earlier snobbish remark about genre fiction! This contemporary romance is smart, gripping, and a thorough delight. In the first chapter, when our waitress protagonist congratulates Preston on his immunology paper in Cell, he replies, “Are you a big fan of the journal?” — which is such a beautifully understated cut-down! Undaunted, the witty Lissie parries right back, and a couple hundred pages later, he still remembers her subsequent jokes about lychee pudding. The two get off on the wrong foot after their initial flirtation distracts her into making a consequential mistake. Fortunately, the bad blood, as well as their differences in personality and background, can eventually be overcome, thanks to the way that circumstances keep throwing them together. Her cooler-tempered premed older sister Jenny (because what Chinese-American circles don’t have someone named Jenny? or a premed?) starts dating his best friend, winkingly named Charles Bing. Then, through chaperoning her younger sister, Lissie gets ever more deeply involved in the world of competitive youth swimming (this is where the author’s research, or expertise, renders the scenes and jargon especially compelling), where former swim star Preston serves as a volunteer ambassador. Lissie’s riff off the two meanings of “ambassador” makes for one example of how clever the dialogue is:

*

It is hard to maintain a shell of cool reserve while eating a sloppy breakfast sandwich. Her first bite pulled one of the bacon slices clear out of its English muffin and onto her chin. “Ugh,” said Lissie, dabbing at her face with a napkin.

“I’m glad it happened to you first,” Preston chuckled.

“Me too,” returned Lissie. “Bacon sloppiness would be most unbecoming for a Youth Ambassador.”

“You’re not going to leave that alone, are you?”

“Leave what alone? I’ll be the first to applaud if you bring about the long-awaited détente between swimming and the youth of today.”

At that he actually laughed, and Lissie felt pleased with herself.

(page 103)

*

How succinctly the author captures two key truths about intelligent girls: that we absolutely love being able to make our crush laugh … AND using acute accents. Alongside these psychological accuracies, Hwang Dudley delights us with her twists on Austen — her version of Mr. Collins has some realistic layers to him, and meanwhile, we and Lissie are left constantly wondering whether her version of Mr. Wickham is sexually inappropriate or not. It gets quite fun when Lissie maybe has something going on with all three of these Chinese dudes at one point. Also fun is how current the book’s cultural references are: at a get-together of Stanford grad students, a mention of AI elicits “an informed-sounding question about LLM,” and I am told that Large Language Models only became big a few months ago.

I strongly recommend Pride & Preston Lin. Despite being a new mother who needs to get good sleep before her baby’s next wake-up, I stayed up late reading this because I couldn’t put it down.

Click here to pre-order the book!

A contemporary romance novel starring an autistic woman, Helen Hoang’s The Kiss Quotient had been on my radar for years, but what finally made me pick it up was that I needed something light to read during the early days of breastfeeding my daughter, when my mind would be addled and my attention spotty.

Right away, the writing bothered me. The very first paragraph goes: “I know you hate surprises, Stella. In the interests of communicating our expectations and providing you a reasonable timeline, you should know we’re ready for grandchildren.” This is an absurd way for anyone to talk, but even more ridiculous given that Stella’s mom knows full well that Stella has Asperger’s (as it was then called) and dating difficulties.

The book’s villain is even more implausibly drawn: when we first meet him, he’s “jauntily” “swinging” a box of condoms in front of her as a way of bragging about his upcoming weekend, then asks if she’s a virgin. People don’t act like that or talk that way! It’s just as implausible that Stella AND her parents actually consider him as a possible match for her (and it’s straight-up insane that she later asks him out to dinner even AFTER he has forced an unwanted kiss on her!).

I wanted to finish the book for the sake of its groundbreaking representation, so I pushed onward. The unique premise has Stella hiring an escort in order to get “training” in relationships and sex. He, like the author, is half Vietnamese, so we go on to see a lot of rare culturally correct tidbits, such as the love interest’s mother referring to herself in the third person, as indeed you do in Vietnamese. And Stella’s quite right that bún riêu looks like it contains scrambled eggs!

When I looked closely at the writing, I found countless phrasings that were elegant, faultlessly so, and yet on the macro level the prose felt thin. Is that what differentiates genre fiction (which I otherwise never read, giving me no basis for comparison) from literary fiction? The Song of Achilles, for example, also focuses on a romantic love story but feels so much richer and more gorgeous — more literary if you will. The sex scenes in The Kiss Quotient drag, whereas the consummation in The Song of Achilles will take your breath away.

I wanted to like The Kiss Quotient. But I just have so many issues with it. I don’t buy that an autistic woman, someone exquisitely sensitive to unpleasant sensations, would dress exclusively in pencil skirts and heels (when I personally can’t stand the pain of high heels!). I don’t like it when Michael calls her “my Stella,” even before they’re a real couple. I don’t like love that’s described in terms of how no one else could possibly fit or be desirable. Finally, I don’t believe that a profound self-esteem deficit could just evaporate when someone loves you. Maybe if you’re neuro-atypical, you’ll experience this book more positively?

One of Netflix’s “most-viewed original films ever.” It may be a teen rom-com, but don’t let that fool you into underestimating it. This was simply a really good movie, surprisingly so, and it thoroughly transcended its silly premise and left me elated and won over. I’m not just sanguine about it because the lead actress is Vietnamese-American, although that’s a big perk of it too. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before is repeatedly laugh-out-loud funny, but also gets deep and real. Maybe you, too, will find yourself urgently hissing “Kiss him, you idiot!” at the screen. It’s a little reminiscent of Never Have I Ever — both of which feature an awkward Asian girl who gets great grades and nevertheless more high-school-era action than I ever got — except I like this jock more than I liked the jock in that show. Also, the little sister has such a hilarious and winsome personality. I’m not pleased to know that this movie has sequels (being based, after all, on a trilogy of books), but I’m not surprised to hear the sister now has her own spin-off series!

Ifemelu and Obinze were high school and college sweethearts, but had to leave Nigeria when their futures became constricted by their country’s instability. A poignant tragedy ends their relationship, and for thirteen years they remain separated, she in the American Northeast, and he in London. Although her life in the U.S. comes to surmount its early struggles, she doesn’t fit in, and she is homesick. When she opts to move back home, he is now married with a daughter. What happens, now that they find themselves still so deeply in love, even after so much has changed?

I’m always a sucker for an epic romance, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 novel Americanah, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, evokes its central love story so palpably that I cried near the end of the book. The event that initially sunders the two protagonists is very compellingly written. The other strongest sections, for me, were the narrative about Ifemelu’s father’s cousin, Aunty Uju, and her ups and downs as the mistress of a powerful general; and the thoughtfully evolving connection between Ifemelu and Dike, Aunty Uju’s son and Ifemelu’s protégé.

You also can’t discuss this book without mentioning its commentaries on race. Ifemelu only discovers race — only becomes Black, as she puts it — after she immigrates from Nigeria to America. Her insights provide fruitful material for her blog on the subject. Neither with her first American boyfriend, a white man, or with her second American boyfriend, a Black American, does she feel quite at home. I especially enjoyed a minor episode in a department store where Ifemelu and her Nigerian-American friend are asked, by the cashier, which saleswoman helped them today: “Was it the one with long hair?” “Well, both of them had long hair.” “The one with dark hair?” Both of them had dark hair. Later, Ifemelu asks her friend, “Why didn’t she just ask ‘Was it the black girl or the white girl?'” The response: “Because this is America. You’re supposed to pretend that you don’t notice certain things.”

A few weaknesses kept this novel from joining my short list of all-time favorite contemporary novels (which, at this point, would be The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, And the Mountains Echoed, Cloud Atlas, and The Song of Achilles). Namely: Curt and Blaine, the American ex-boyfriends, are both implausible caricatures. Obinze’s character is never explored as three-dimensionally as Ifemelu’s. And the book’s length (588 pages in paperback) is filled out by a few too many tedious dinner parties.

I’m intrigued to check out Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, a classic 1948 novel which receives prominent tribute in Americanah and even leads to a plot-advancing kiss.

Isabel Allende’s 2019 novel A Long Petal of the Sea (originally, Largo Pétalo de Mar) follows two Catalonian refugees from the Spanish Civil War as they marry for convenience in order to secure priority immigration to Chile.  Although it turns out, after some years, that they have traded the dictatorship of Franco for the dictatorship of Pinochet, they surprise themselves by eventually falling in love with each other and by eventually coming to think of Chile as their real homeland.

A few chapters in, I stared openmouthed as I saw my husband’s and son’s last name on the page.  Del Solar is such a rare Latin American surname that most del Solars are related and there’s a del Solar genealogist, so it was wild that Allende had picked this name for several of her major characters.  Better yet, for me, the del Solar subplot was the most poignant and satisfying story arc in the book.

Also close to home:  resonances between the way Allende describes the fall of Barcelona in 1939, and the way I’ve seen the fall of Saigon described, when my parents escaped Vietnam in April 1975.  Our protagonist’s father foresees how brutal the postwar regime will be and insists that his family leave the country.  But here is where the parallels end:  when France finds “almost half a million Spaniards, in the last stages of confusion, terror, and misery, clamoring at the border,” their astonishingly cruel response is to arrest the Spanish refugees and detain them in camps on the French beach, exposed to the elements, without clean water, in such wretched conditions that nine of every ten children die. This actually happened in real life, and this sort of historical research makes the novel all the more powerful.

Dr. Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone takes you on a colorful, high-adrenaline adventure, mainly set in Ethiopia in the 1950s and 1960s, but eventually taking you to a violent part of the Bronx circa 1980. These 690 pages are rollicking with extreme events, mortal danger, and a touch of magic (such as when newborns communicate telepathically). An example of the voluptuous prose: “The decorative grille under the eaves had oxidized to a bile green, old corrosion ran down the brick like mascara, parallel to the drainpipes.” The motorcycle scene, in which the twelve-year-old twins must think on their feet to save their lives, took my breath away with its ingenuity and punch.

Verghese is a physician at Stanford, and his book is first and foremost about the challenges and beauty of medicine and surgery. Suspense often derives from not knowing if a patient will make it. Only a doctor could craft these scenes that I had never seen in a novel but that I delighted to recognize instantly: Ghosh bursting with pride after a successful operation and needing to tell someone about it; Stone “making himself small so as not to contaminate [the surgical] field”; a new cadre of young visitors in dark suits every week at the fancy academic hospital in Boston.

The novel is exhaustively researched, with a long bibliography, so that we learn about Ethiopian scenery and culture, historic political events in that country, and the creative practice of medicine in a resource-poor environment. You get an epic love story too, although perhaps not the one you think. One of the romantic storylines goes somewhere surprisingly unloving and unpleasant. Another, however, wraps up with such gorgeous writing.

Traveler of the Century, a luminous 561-page novel set in the 1820s in a small town in Germany, amidst horse-drawn carriages and oil lamps, follows a year in the life of Hans, an itinerant translator, as he develops two strong attachments in this town where he had thought he was only passing through. The first is a platonic bond with an old man who plays a barrel organ in the market square and who lives in poverty, yet can easily be contented watching the trees or listening to the wind. The second is a passionate love with Sophie, who wanted to go to university but who is constrained by the times and by her overbearing widowed father into settling for an engagement to a vacant aristocrat whose wealth and position will uplift her family. On Friday evenings, Sophie hosts a French-Enlightenment-style salon where guests discuss European politics and literature over canapés and tea brought by servants. It is here that Hans and Sophie’s romance takes root. It later blossoms as they jointly undertake a project to translate contemporary European poetry into German. For them, intellectual compatibility and sexual compatibility are two sides of the same page. But how can these progressives live out their dreams in a world where women wear corsets, where tongues wag, where excursions are chaperoned, and where the small town’s priest keeps a log book of every lapse of virtue among his parishioners?

Although I read the novel in translation (the author, Andrés Neuman, is an Argentinian-Spaniard), I think it’s still fair to say that the prose is original and beautiful, the vocabulary a delight. Here for instance is my favorite sentence in the book, from a description of Sophie’s family’s drawing room: “Other adornments had been added, mostly in Louis XVIII style, in a vain effort to conceal the fact that time had passed; the more modern furniture showed a different kind of sobriety, a metamorphosis, as though they were insects mutating unimaginably slowly towards rounded forms and paler woods (poplar, Hans suspected, or perhaps ash or cherry wood), as though the battles, treaties, freshly spilt blood and new round of armistices had undermined mahogany’s traditional stronghold, besieging it with inlays of amaranth and ebony, overwhelming it with rosettes, lilies, less weighty, more carefree crowns.” These lines are marked by a keen awareness of historical context—something that is ever present in the characters’ prolonged conversations about novels and philosophy. The triumph of this novel is that it manages to delight your mind with ideas while also crafting characters who wring your heart.

As a Vietnamese fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald (I preferred his other novels, Tender Is the Night and especially This Side of Paradise, but my middle school English teacher said I was too young when I read Gatsby), I couldn’t resist Nghi Vo’s 2021 retelling of The Great Gatsby from the perspective of a queer Vietnamese Jordan Baker and with the addition of magic and demons.

I had remembered Jordan as a golfer, but here, we never see her compete or practice on the green. She is instead a socialite, her energy spent on dishing out verbal parries and closely reading her interlocutors. She keeps a mental ledger of last names, family lineages, credentials. Everyone is having sex with everyone, and there is a blasé air to the promiscuity, which is what makes Gatsby and Daisy’s affair stand out in its naïveté.

Jordan’s one-note cynicism can be wearying. As Gatsby gives Daisy a tour of his mansion, Jordan criticizes the wonder in his voice, then tells him, “Just because I don’t like you doesn’t mean we can’t be friends.” Nick, exasperated, elsewhere asks Jordan, “Do you care about ANYthing?” She often resembles the way she describes the light at Gatsby’s, how “it burned without illuminating or warming.” However, we learn that her nature is the product of a loveless upbringing, having been plucked from Vietnam by a Louisvillian who then passed away. Probably the most compelling scenes in the book are when she interacts with other Asian people for the first time, allowing her to put a name to her vague feeling of difference, and when she learns to command the supernatural power that is the birthright of Asian folk.

Nghi Vo’s writing is lovely; for example, one of my favorite sentences goes, “Some love could survive being put on show like that. But almost every kind of love that I knew would wither through it— curl up from shame and exposure, and die.” The audiobook’s Asian-American narrator, Natalie Naudus, utterly excels at voice acting, imbuing Jordan with tart sass and a chilly world-weariness while bringing Nick beautifully to life as observant and wry. The Chosen and the Beautiful is a worthwhile reincarnation of an old classic from a fresh perspective.