Filterworld

If I find myself somewhere bored and bereft of a book, I like to dig back through my TBR and find something I can get as an ebook from one of my libraries. This is how I came to be sitting in my favorite neighborhood haunt, drinking a beer and reading Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld. In brief, Filterworld is a snappy history of how recommender algorithms have come to shape our Internet, and our broader cultural, experience. It covers a lot of the same territory as Chokepoint Capitalism, though with less pissed-off creator-side rage in favor of a more anxious user-side perspective. “Do I actually like the things I like?” is Chayka’s recurring question.

Chayka’s proposed solution to The Algorithms, to the extent it is a workable solution (and to the extent he even calls it a solution), is to slow down our focus:

If there is a simple answer to breaking down Filterworld, then it might be something like a version of the slow food movement, as it was popularized in the 1990s, but for culture…We need to bring that same understanding of sustainability and specificity to the way that we consume and support culture online, too. Resistance to algorithmic frictionless requires an act of willpower, a choice to move through the world in a different way. It doesn’t have to be a dramatic one.

He then gives the example of visiting a local cafe that he’s always passed but never visited because he didn’t find it appealing; in his own words, it wasn’t “Instagrammable”:

I felt both bemused and sad that this was a rare experience, something like visiting a museum. Our phones and feeds absorb so much of our attention and dominate so many of our preferences that stepping out of their conveniently predetermined paths and choosing an experience not immediately engaging feels somewhat radical. This applies to fashion choices as well as food, which television shows we watch, which books we read, which furniture we buy, where we travel. If we shift our priorities away from the space of algorithmic digital platforms and once more to the physical world, in which everything is not instantly evaluated in terms of engagement, we might find ourselves building not only better culture but better communities, relationships, and politics as well.

I’m cutting to the chase partly because that’s what struck me most about the book. Chayka is describing an experience that I know a lot of people have, and yet that I don’t (not entirely). I only begrudgingly acquired a Twitter as a means of freelance self-promotion, but never became hooked on the platform and stopped Tweeting as soon as I no longer needed to promote myself. I’ve never used Spotify as my primary music library or my means of discovering new music. My partner periodically subscribes to Netflix, and we’ve been known to occasionally bingewatch particular series or short docuseries, but the last one was An American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders back in 2024. I never rely on Yelp or similar to find cafes, or online travel agencies to plan my international vacations. I post to Instagram but am not really invested in comments or hearts or followers. Only posts, no reels, maybe the occasional story. Admittedly, I can get sucked into watching a comedy reel about Philly if the feed finds me in a moment of weakness, but I have no desire to follow those accounts. I do not, and will never, have TikTok. The only thing I will cop to is a YouTube history that is probably wildly schizophrenic, since I use it for background music while I’m working and my tastes run from symphonic to techno to “this song popped into my head when I woke up and now I need to listen to it on repeat all morning or I won’t get any work done.”* And while I never sign into my Google account on either of my work computers, I’m sure that nonetheless the algos have managed to connect my legal person to those dozens, possibly hundred or so plays of “Takin’ Care of Business” that one day last February.

Every time Chayka observed his algorithmic behavior or reactions in a state of what I’d call “vaguely befuddled despair,” I couldn’t help but think, “But you could just…not.” So in the end, when his solution is to, indeed, “just…not,” I didn’t find it much of a revelation.

Chayka has an art history background, so it’s no surprise that what I found most compelling (and what he spends the most time on) is how once again the medium has shaped the message: “BookTok” and the proliferation of autofiction in literary bestsellers, the lack of key changes in pop music, art exhibits so specifically designed for Instagram selfies that they become meaningless otherwise. Chokepoint Capitalism outlines the structural inequities of such recommender systems, but Filterworld also reminds us that they’re also having direct influence on the culture itself—one that exists for all of us, regardless of whether any given one of us subscribes to Spotify, Netflix, etc.

It with immense satisfaction, then, that I can wrap up this post by pointing out that the algorithms weren’t the ones to bring me to this book. A guest on a podcast recommended it; that podcast in turn had been recommended to me by a friend. It was human connections all the way through, made specifically and deliberately by people to make a point. The podcast guest was on to talk about social media generally, and felt it relevant to mention; my friend recommended the podcast because the show often touches on things that he knew we both were interested in. I think Chayka would be happy to hear that.

* Here I have to say that I’m grateful to Chayka for highlighting the streaming service Idagio as a better alternative than Spotify for classical music. The platform detects and counts plays differently, using calculations more appropriate for longer classical pieces than three-minute pop hits, and recommendations are picked by human experts with care and deliberation rather than statistically driven recommenders. I might go ahead and subscribe once I’m back from vacation, since this post is going live while I’m at a cabin in Kiruna.

Grupp Krilon

Eyvind Johnson’s Group Krilon went on my TBR after I stumbled onto a panel about him at last year’s Stockholms Litteraturmässan. An anti-Nazi allegory and condemnation of Sweden’s policy of neutrality during WWII? Writing allegorical fiction to circumvent censorship in the press? Sign me up!

And yet, Grupp Krilon would have languished on my TBR for a good while longer if the Storygraph TBR challenge I signed up for in  January didn’t include a prompt about reading the first book in a series. Given the other prompts, and what seems to be fair assumptions to make about the reading habits of most of the people using Storygraph or Goodreads, this prompt seemed to be an acknowledgement of more recent popular fiction, seemingly endless series of novels as constant content. The total opposite of what I usually read, in other words—especially with the break up of the Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club, which had been one of the few tethers I had to new books. We read the first book in a few series that I either continued reading (A Memory Called Empire, Gideon the Ninth) or intend to continue reading (Ancillary Justice).

Did I have anything to fit the bill I had added to my TBR myself, though?

As I scrolled through, I saw in small text under the title that Grupp Krilon was labeled “Krilon #1”. Bingo! Not necessarily the kind of book the creator had in mind with the prompt, probably, but what did that matter for me?

On a plot level, Grupp Krilon circles around a group of friends in Stockholm during World War II. The original core of the group is the protagonist Krilon and Hovall, who meet on a streetcar and then strike up a friendship at the tobacco and newspaper stand. Other men are quickly drawn into their company: first Minning, a widowed carpenter who Hovall was on his way to meet when he crossed paths with Krilon; then the cousins Odenarp and Arpius, the builder Frid, and the surgeon Segel. They meet every Sunday to discuss heady and important topics, a rotating dinner club.

One Sunday evening, on the way home from such a meeting, Frid has a moment straight out of “Once in a Lifetime” (this is not my beautiful house! this is not my beautiful wife!) and decides to retreat to the summer cabin he’s been restoring to contemplate the anxieties of his ascendancy into the middle class. He sneaks out without telling his wife, she panics and calls Krilon. Not the police—she doesn’t want to involve them. Krilon calls the rest of the group and decides to organize a search effort.

The search effort is half-hearted at best. Things come up for some of the members: Arpius is out of town, Segel’s ex-wife Ann needs emergency surgery, Minning’s daughter has been kidnapped. Odenarp and Hovall make a search of different neighborhoods, while Krilon stays at home to call around, including (I assume) the private detective firm he’s hired. Frid, meanwhile, has two squatters living in his cabin. Even Odenarp and Hovall have such bizarre experiences on that first night of searching that their allegiance to Krilon is sorely tested.

Because Krilon, as it turns out, has enemies. And they’re not above trying to work through Krilon’s friends to get to him. (Remember the kidnapping?)

A few days go by, but Frid eventually sends a note to his wife explaining the situation, and the search is called off. Whether because of the rumors or personal crises, Krilon’s friends have just about decided they’re tired of this friendship, or at least his friendship. Even though Krilon can sense this, he tries to rally everyone again to intervene in the case of the wildly depressed Segel, who has just lost Ann. They refuse; Krilon tries on his own and is immediately rebuffed. A few days later Segel kills himself.

This news prompts Krilon to make a last ditch effort to get the gang back together. He writes Hovall, his first and oldest friend, to explain that the men should continue meeting, even if they vote Krilon out; but can’t they at least meet one last time to get this all straightened out? Hovall passes the message along to the other men, and they all agree for one more meeting at Krilon’s. One by one, the members of “grupp Krilon” turn up, telling Krilon not to expect anyone else. No one wants to admit to anyone else that they’re going to visit their old friend, it appears.

They hold a last meeting, where Hovall formally lays out their complaints and charges against Krilon. He’s been a busybody, he’s put them in uncomfortable or even dangerous situations, he’s refusing to change with the times, etc. Krilon responds to these charges and makes a plea for their friendship, and in the end the group resolves to meet without Krilon and take the matter of his membership to a vote. They promise to let him know by ten o’clock in the evening a following day (maybe the next day). In the very last scene of the book, Krilon is wandering around Stockholm in the early spring while he waits for the result of the vote, contemplating nature and noting topics for discussion “in case I am allowed back, otherwise I shall mention it to Hovall.”

What a cliffhanger!

Given that ending, and that the whole trilogy was published in a single volume in 1948, one wonders if there was a Lord of the Rings style publishing decision there. “No one’s going to read this huge tome in one sitting, Johnson. Let’s split it up.” Even Grupp Krilon, the first book, is 500 pages.

The above 600 word summary still only skates over the absolute surreal weirdness the story takes, the sheer paranoia. Krilon, it seems, has crossed paths with everyone in the book. Random strangers that Krilon’s friends meet during Frid’s disappearance have dramatic stories about this or that man they remember, who did this fantastic or horrible thing, and of course the big reveal is that this man’s name was…Krilon. In another book it might be too much to take, but because other things get so weird, it makes sense. Especially considering the extremely clearly allegorical nature of the book as well.

A screenshot from "Garth Marenghi's Dark Place," with Matthew Holness in yellow-tinted aviators and a leather jacket with slicked-back hair as his Garth Marenghi character. At the bottom is the closed caption text, "I know writers who use subtext, and they're all cowards"

The book definitely starts off slow, with a deliberate attention to details in Krilon’s appearance and landscape that I initially found to be a hard slog. Not because of the writing itself, since it has a rhythm and a lyricism to it; rather it was because books today (or at least books I’ve read recently) move at a snappy, breakneck pace. Where are the careful, lingering descriptions of yesteryear? But Krilon is the central figure, and it’s important for the reader to have clear idea of how moral, thoughtful, considered (even how lagom) Krilon is, so Johnson takes his time. While the urgency of the book picks up soon afterwards, I think my focus also reset early on and I was able to get lost in a slower, more thoughtful pace.

Grupp Krilon  was the “Stockholm Reads” pick in 2018 and came out in an appropriate paperback edition for the occasion, the cover you see in the image at the top with dark purple Stockholm landscape and the author and title in bright yellow. It also has this quote underneath that perfectly encapsulates what the book is driving at, what Johnson wants to say:

“The world is so dark now,” said Krilon. “It is of the utmost importance that people gather together in groups and speak openly with each other, without lying; that they seek the truth without giving any thought to the threat of punishment, or the tempting promise of rewards of gold and honor.”

It hits harder when you actually get to the quote. Krilon is begging Segel to see him, if not to talk about anything then at least attend a concert or otherwise spend some time together. But Segel can only think of Ann’s upcoming surgery, and Krilon’s plea goes unanswered:

“What’s everyone else doing, do you know? Do you know why they’re drifting away now, when the world needs them?”

“No,” Segel replied tersely, “I don’t know.”

Heartbreaking in 1941, heartbreaking in 2018, heartbreaking in 2026.

To my absolute astonishment, Grupp Krilon has yet to be translated into English. For that you’ll have to be content with Return to Ithaca (maybe timely now with Nolan’s version of The Odyssey in theaters?) and The Days of His Grace.

Vacation Reading List: Kiruna

By the time this post goes live, I’ll be sitting on a train to? from? Boden, en route to Kiruna for an eleven-day break from the grind. My plan is to visit the big hole in the ground, maybe take in a couple museums, and catch up on my reading backlog. To that end, my list!

Resan till Armenien, Osip Mandelstam

This was a recommendation from a book friend. I started it back in February but quickly realized I would want the time to really focus on it, in part due to lots of new vocabulary. That time has come.

Livet måste ha mening, Victor Frankl

A democratically chosen book for the philosophy reading group I’m in. Unfortunately I find that as the group grows larger,  the suggestions devolve into academically dubious pseudo-intellectual New Age claptrap. But I’ll still read this to see for myself! And to remind the group members who suggested this that Frankl was out there trepanning suicidal Jewish people from 1940 to 1942.

Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Marguerite Duras

I am far, far behind on my French reading goal for the year. Duras to the rescue! I’ll also be reading the Swedish translation.

Bastarden från Istanbul, Elif Shafak

The July pick for my international WhatsApp book club. It’s the longest book on this list, so we’ll see if I finish it or even get around to it.

Oxford Translates Summer School

Summer camps were a fundamental part of my childhood years. As far as “mandatory fun” activities go, I wasn’t miserable, but I also wasn’t particularly enthusiastic: camp was just a thing that I did because my parents seemed to want me to, some parts of it were kind of fun, other parts just tolerable or occasionally a slog. It wasn’t until the summer camp I attended offered specific niche interest camps that I actually became excited about going to camp. The one that held the most sway over me was jazz band camp, where some twelve or fifteen of us spent a week rehearsing a setlist to be performed as a concert for our parents at the end of the week. Some kind of alchemy happens when you throw a bunch of nerds together and give them a shared objective to accomplish on a tight deadline. I was obsessed; I felt like I had finally found my people.

But time passes, people grow up and change, you become an adult with responsibilities and worries and no one organizes nerdy summer camps for you anymore. You remember that something had been magical, once, but the memories have lost all the visceral feeling of the magic.

All of that visceral feeling came rushing back to me during the Oxford Translates Summer Camp. I’d applied on a whim, not knowing what to expect, purely on the recommendation of a member of the Emerging Translators Network mailing list. Staffing arrangements meant that there was no specific Swedish to English tutoring group, so I spent the week with seven other translators all working into English from various languages: Assamese, Bulgarian, Hindi, Korean, Mauritian Creole, Portuguese, and Slovenian. In between tutoring sessions focused on our own particular texts, we could choose from a generous buffet of panel discussions and workshops on topics like ethics in translation, writing reader’s reports, translating various mediums (theater, poetry, graphic novels), editing, translator organizations, contracts and more. The sheer wealth of information, in addition to the exciting and stimulating work with critiquing my classmates’ translations (and having my own critiqued), left my head spinning at the end of every day. Honestly, I don’t think the spinning has quite stopped yet.

There are a lot of lessons from the summer camp for me to reflect on and digest, but it’s safe to say that most of all, I’m struck by the incredible warmth and generosity of my colleagues in the field. Translation, much like writing, has a reputation for being a solitary vocation. True, much of it almost by definition has to be done by yourself, and anyone who isn’t comfortable with working in isolation will probably struggle. It’s no surprise the these careers attract a large number of introverts. But that same isolation also seems to, surprisingly enough, build a robust sort of solidarity; it makes people more eager to connect, to share tips and resources and commiserations, rather than less.

It’s a weird and worrying time to be a translator right now, but this opportunity to be among my people gave me the support and the encouragement I didn’t know I needed.

Kyra Kyralina

This was an international WhatsApp book club pick because Panait Istrati seems like an interesting guy, and Kyra Kyralina specifically occupies a niche as the first Romanian novel with a gay protagonist and the first novel in Istrati’s Adrian Zografi cycle. A landmark novel in many respects.

Landmarks aren’t necessarily a fun read, however, and it was a struggle to grasp what Istrati was trying to do. It’s a bildungsroman of sorts, but with a rather disjointed chronology and a lack of interiority. Despite the book’s inclusion in the Adrian Zografi cycle, here Adrian is only a side character. Kyra Kyralina is really the story of Stavro, né Dragomir, as told to Adrian on different occasions over the stretch of several years. The first section focuses on Stavro’s most recent past: the story of his unhappy marriage. The second section then goes all the way back to Stavro’s earliest childhood, and the third and final section fills in the gap between that childhood and the unhappy marriage. The first two sections are narrated rather close in time to each other, with only a few days in between. Adrian doesn’t hear the last section until several years later when he happens to meet Stavro in Egypt.

To put it chronologically: Stavro was born in Braila, Romania, and spent his earliest days with his mother and sister, the titular Kyra. They were wealthy largely due to his mother’s inheritance, though his father and older brother ran a very successful wagon business. The latter two eventually move to the other side of the city to be closer to the wagon workshop, but they periodically make visits to the other home. In their absence, Stavro’s mother and Kyra live the good life, dressing up and hosting parties full of dance and music, attended by young suitors. Young Stavro’s job is to keep a lookout for his father and brother, so the suitors have time to escape out a back window. During these visits home, and just about every day before relocating to the other side of the city, Stavro’s father beats his mother.

The turning point comes when Stavro’s mother decides to throw the party to end all parties, perhaps because she can sense that things are about to take a turn for the worse, or perhaps because she has some kind of death wish. Either way, it turns out as she expects and Stavro’s father beats her within an inch of her life, blinding her in one eye. Kyra is locked in a wardrobe and Stavro taken back to the other house by the workshop. He manages to escape and to rescue Kyra and his mother, and they flee Braila.

Stavro is around twelve years old at this point.

Stavro’s mother leaves him and his sister in the care of her brothers while she seeks medical treatment for her eye and disfigurement. That’s the last we see of her, and given her declaration that she was determined to kill herself if she ever lost her beauty or ability to enjoy life, it’s safe to assume that she takes her life at some point off screen.

Kyra, meanwhile, immediately spurs their uncles into avenging the violence enacted on the family, and the uncles agree. Their older brother is killed in the ambush, but their father escapes and Stavro and his sister are sent to a safehouse. It doesn’t take long for them (or for Kyra, at least) to get bored with their new life, and they are soon kidnapped. Their kidnapper sells Kyra to a harem (which is only mentioned in an aside), while Stavro remains with him as, it is heavily implied, a sex slave.

(So ends section two.)

He manages to escape after a few years and immediately sets about Istanbul looking for his mother and his sister, to no avail. It doesn’t take long for another creepy old man to abduct Stavro, luring him in with false promises of helping to find his family only to once again keep him as a sex slave. More years pass and Stavro once again manages to escape, get some papers (this is the point where he becomes Stavro rather than Dragomir), and then get robbed. One day he ends up in Damascus, and sees a cart pass with a woman who looks rather like Kyra. Stavro tries to get her attention, following the cart all the way to a villa. He’s denied entry, of course, and that’s where an elderly salep vendor finds him and takes him in. They spend many happy years together, even after Stavro serves a stint in prison and is exiled from the city, until the older man’s death.

(So ends section three.)

Stavro ends up in Bucharest, a sort of itinerant merchant and maybe still selling salep. He boards with a family for a while and becomes infatuated with their daughter, telling her stories of his travels. This escalates until they are engaged to be married, but tradition dictates that newlyweds are obligated to prove that the marriage has been consummated (by means of some bloodied sheets). Stavro cracks under the pressure to perform, and under the pressure of his own presumed homosexuality, and promptly faints and then falls ill. His wife is understanding and compassionate about it, and the community at first see him as an invalid, potentially the subject of a curse. But days, weeks, months go by without any sex, and their patience runs thin. Stavro is once again a prisoner of sorts. Neither he nor his wife are permitted to leave the house, and Stavro in particular has become persona non grata in their quarter of Bucharest. The couple makes plans to leave the city, since they’re still otherwise happy and fond of each other and can imagine a life together. Then, mere days before their escape, his brothers in law find an old traveling companion of Stavros, presumably also a lover, who immediately outs Stavro. (Every translation in the WhatsApp book club seemed to use an interrupted slur for a gay man in this reveal. In Swedish it was rendered as “b—”, presumably short for “bög.”) The escape plans come to nothing, Stavro is driven out of the house, and his bride drowns herself in the river.

(So ends section one.)

The framing device is Stavro’s invitation to Adrian to come help him and another man, Mikhail (I think) sell watered-down citric acid as lemonade in another distant town. Adrian has encountered Stavro somewhere out in town, and we get our first impression of the man: a tragic figure, a bit of a buffoon but intentionally so, someone who is hiding something. His scheme requires some kind of go-between and he thinks Adrian is right for the job. On their first night on the road, the three men spend the night in a hayloft and Stavro makes an attempt to seduce, or at least fondle, Adrian. Adrian is a bit naive, while the worldly Mikhail knows immediately what Stavro is trying to do and berates him for it. By way of apology, Stavro then begins his tale of woe, as if to explain why he has become such a creature so burdened with vice. (“Vice” is the specific word used in the Swedish translation, at least, and is used again and again by Stavro to describe himself and by others to describe him.)

Stavro is a tragic figure. Any joy, any pleasure, any human connection he’s ever had is almost immediately tainted with tragedy. That much is clear. But it’s hard to situate Stavro in a narrative. We don’t see a progression from naive to embittered, or ignorant to more worldly. The inside-out chronology means that the book ends in the middle of Stavro’s life, a very deliberate narrative choice that immediately invites speculation. Why does this episode have such an ultimate ring of finality to it?

Putting aside the larger question of the disjointed timeline, it’s hard to like Stavro. It’s hard to like any of the people we’re supposed to feel sorry for. Yes, Stavro’s father is a petty, violent tyrant, but his mother and sister come across as party girls with no interest in taking care of themselves. Of course I’m reading Kyra Kyralina through a different lens than the original audience, in a different social context, but the way that Stavro’s mother insists that she is a creature made to enjoy luxury, love, pleasure, and that she cannot be other than what she is hits a sour note for me. I managed to find an English translation of exactly the passage I’m thinking of:

I was made by the Lord for the pleasures of the flesh, just as he made the mole to live underground without light. And just as that creature has everything it needs to live in the earth, I was lacking nothing to enjoy my life of pleasure. I made a vow to kill myself if I were forced by men to knuckle under and live a life other than what my body and soul dictated. Today, I am thinking about that vow.

From the blog seraillon, who seemed to like Kyra Kyralina a lot more than I did.

Other places describe the story as a picaresque, but it’s hard to read consistently getting kidnapped and imprisoned by different abusers as a picaresque, since much of the time Stavro is confined and not meeting that many people or having that many adventures. Stavro himself isn’t particularly interesting, either. Things happen to him, but we only get surface level emotions in response.

There is also a question of version and translation: Istrati wrote the original in French, but then rewrote it and completely reworked it in Romanian. The Swedish translation, judging by the translator (Barbro Andersson), was from the Romanian version rather than the French. One wonders how much was different between the two versions.

Yellowface

R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface was big and splashy in my circles when it debuted. It was one of the few new releases that I actually noticed, though it appears I didn’t take the step of adding it to my TBR. Alas, it won’t count for that goal!

Someone in my Swedish book club floated the idea of R. F. Kuang, though torn between this one and Babel. I’m a bit ashamed to say that I pushed for Yellowface out of the two, based purely on the opinions of other bookish friends whose taste I trust implicitly. I say “ashamed” because I’m not sure I liked Yellowface all that much and wonder if Babel would have been more interesting.

Juniper “June” Hayward is a struggling White author with one flop of a novel under her belt; her Chinese-American Yale classmate Athena Liu is a literary rockstar. When Athena chokes to death on a pancake after the women go out for drinks, June takes the opportunity to steal her latest novel about Chinese laborers in Europe during World War I. June revises the manuscript and sends it off to her agent, passing it off as entirely her own work. The final product, The Last Front, is a runaway bestseller—maybe in part because June capitalizes on her connection to Athena, blowing their ambiguous frienemyship entirely out of proportion. Her publisher, meanwhile, decides to publish under the name Juniper Song and shoots some new, racially ambiguous author photos. June becomes a darling of the literati and the online AAPI community, setting up scholarships, mentoring aspiring writers, getting retweeted on Twitter and liked on Instagram.

The facade doesn’t last, of course, and accusations of plagiarism eventually make the rounds, but rather than come clean June doubles down. She rides out the scandal in the short term, but after she publishes a follow-up novella called Mother Witch that opens with a line she gleaned from Athena’s old notebooks, there’s no way out. While she struggles to revise and rewrite the novel without the plagiarized lines, spooky messages on social media convince June that she’s being haunted by Athena’s ghost. The campaign continues until June spirals out into a mental breakdown that ends with her recorded confession being released to the public. Her reputation now in tatters, June ends the book by plotting her literary revenge: a tell-all confessional memoir where she frames the publication of The Last Front as an elaborate hoax to expose how misogynistic and racist the publishing industry is.

Yellowface feels like a punching bag of a story for the sake of a few moments. By that I mean, it feels like Kuang had some points she wanted to make, and built the premise of the novel and the entirety of June’s character around creating the opportunity to make those points. The result is that when Kuang gets to have those moments in the story, the criticism is sharp, on point, and biting, such as her account of June and her editor—two White women—revising a story by a Chinese-American woman to include more (good) White people, or the fickle nature of the Twitterati. But the only reason those moments can happen is because, after the initial (understandable if morally icky) theft, June continues to make incredibly poor choices that defy all logic or sense of self-preservation. She flatly refuses to send The Last Front to a sensitivity reader for no other reason than it might delay publication; she keeps the plagiarized opening line in Mother Witch. Maybe this speaks to my own risk-averse nature, but if I knew I was already skating on thin moral and artistic ice, I would do everything I could to cover my ass.

All the while, since this is from a first-person perspective, we’re getting June’s unfiltered inner monologue, and it really seems like the point of the perspective is to make it clear to the reader how entitled and clueless she is, even as a White woman with “good” politics. (“I even voted for Biden!” she assures us early on.) I won’t say these people don’t exist, because they do, but June feels more like a low-effort caricature of them than anything else, which she has to be for the story to work. Without giving away too much of a plot twist, refusing the sensitivity reader is a plot-essential event that contributes to her downfall. But then there are other scenes where Kuang really, really nails what it’s like to struggle with a passion, an art that used to bring you joy but is now just DOA. She also makes it clear that June has some real mental health issues, with a past that includes sexual assault and (it sounds like) childhood bullying. If these scenes are meant to humanize June and provide some depth to the caricature, they feel weird next to the scenes where Kuang’s disdain for people like her just radiates off the page. June doesn’t feel like a more complex character for it; she just feels inconsistent.

I have to admit, for a minute I was hoping that the third act twist would be the slow reveal that Yellowface itself, the book you’re reading, is the tell-all confessional that June was planning to write. A meta ending like that would have done a lot to gloss over the failings of the filler. But Kuang doesn’t go there (I don’t think? maybe I missed some subtext) so I was left disappointed.

Obviously, a lot of the plot rides on June skirting the moral line of presenting as AAPI, or at least AAPI-adjacent. The title alone makes that clear. But I’m racking my brain to think of any equivalent scandal in recent literary news, of a White author passing as some flavor of AAPI to sell their novel because of its connections to AAPI culture. Expanding the field a bit, you get noteworthy racefaking cases like Rachel Dolezal, CV Vitolo-Haddad, and the “Gay in Damascus” blogger, but none of them are masquerading specifically as AAPI or to sell a novel. If you start from the published author angle instead of the racefaking one,  James Frey made up a whole bunch of stuff for A Million Little Pieces, but he never pretended to be anyone other than James Frey. There was the big plagiarism brouhaha over Jumi Bello’s The Leaving in 2022, but again no racefaking. The only case I can think of that resembles June’s literary yellowface is from over a hundred years ago: Winnifred Eaton writing as Onoto Watanna, producing books like A Japanese Nightingale. Still, her writing was her own work, even if it she was still a British-Chinese woman writing about Japan, a country she had no personal connection to or had ever visited. Am I just out of the loop?

2026 Reading Goals Check-In

At least 48 books:
Currently at 21 out of 24, but I’m usually behind this time of year. I have all summer to catch up.

At least 4 are in French:
Absolutely miserable so far: grand total of zero. I started Une rose seule by Muriel Barbery early in the year, when I randomly stumbled across it at the library, but I had to admit defeat in the face of mountains of work and other reading commitments. Now that things are calmer, I have another Barbery novel and some Marguerite Duras on deck.

At least 25% are in Swedish:
Knocking this one out of the park: 13 books in English, 8 in Swedish.

At least 12 are non-fiction:
Knocking this one out of the park as well. At 10 already:

At least 10 have been in my library for over a year:
Falling down on this one. Only 4 so far.

  • Jag heter inte Miriam
  • När Hitler stal den skära kaninen
  • Philadelphia: Holy Experiment
  • Friendaholic

At least 10 have come from my TBR (as of January 1, 2026):
Only 4 so far here.

  • Baby Driver
  • Jag heter inte Miriam
  • The Eagle and the Lark
  • Friendaholic

At least half are by women or enby authors:
Solid numbers here, with 14 out of 21.

At least 10% are by Black authors:
Lagging here. So far it’s only been Marlon James.

At least 1 new-to-me country (as of January 1, 2026):
Finally got around to Norway, and a bonus addition of Jamaica to the list. Done and dusted!

A Brief History of Seven Killings

There is a lot of discussion about A Brief History of Seven Killings in the translation world because the first and biggest decision to make when translating it is: how do you render Jamaican Patois in other languages? It isn’t used incidentally, like in other Caribbean literature I’ve read before, for snippets of dialogue or occasional idiomatic expressions; Marlon James employs the dialect for the overwhelming majority of this 600+ page book. Putting aside the question of sheer weighty wordcount majority, the shifts between Patois and standard English are important pieces of characterization. Each perspective character has their own voice, of course, but even a single character will slip from one to the other depending on who they’re talking to and how they’re feeling. An educated middle-class character sometimes switches to Patois for her inner monologue under extreme emotional duress; others play it up as a racial performance in order to appeal to powerful white Americans and get what they want. These are deliberate choices by the author to convey…something…that falls flat if you were to make it literal or textual.

I don’t know to do it! I won’t pretend to know! But that makes A Brief History one of the rare books published since 2000 that I’m actually vaguely aware of, and so I was excited to see this book proposed for my international WhatsApp book club. I fell behind, however, and only finished this sometime in mid-June even though it was May’s book—probably because I was still making a heroic effort to finish Jag heter inte Miriam.

A Brief History of Seven Killings is a fictionalized account of the assassination attempt on Bob Marley, or maybe to put it more precisely, Marlon uses the assassination attempt on Bob Marley as a framing device for a story about Jamaica, Jamaicans, and their relationship to the United States that spans the course of fifteen years. Getting into any more plot than that would miss the point, because it’s less what happens and more how characters develop and inadvertently shape their destinies over the course of the book. In a way, plot is only incidental and is an excuse to bring together a particular ensemble cast that would otherwise have nothing to do with each other.

Stargate. En julberättelse

The same Swedish book club that picked Dead Souls, Stacken, Svälten, and Orbital this year opted for Ingvild H. Rishøi’s Stargate. En julberättelse (Eng: Brightly Shining) for June, at the suggestion of the newest member. Behind as I am in my annual reading quota, it was nice to have something short—even if reading a Christmas story in June feels a bit…odd.

It’s getting on to Christmas, and sisters Ronja and Melissa are trying to make do, since their alcoholic father is having another rough patch. He manages to get a job selling Christmas trees, but after a few good days he blows it and is back to his bad habits. Melissa steps up and offers to take over the job, working in the mornings and evenings after school but for less pay. One afternoon Ronja, desperate to be anywhere but home, turns up at the tree lot and Melissa’s coworker Tommy gets the idea to use Ronja to sell wreaths and other decorations. Shoppers can’t resist a cute kid, he reasons, and offers to split his commission from the wreath sales with the sisters. This goes well until it doesn’t—the owner of the business isn’t thrilled about child labor going on behind his back—and Ronja is left to her own devices. Things spin out pretty badly from there into an ambiguous ending that takes a sharp turn into fuzzy magical realism.

Putting aside the Christmas-in-June element, overall Stargate was an ambiguous reading experience for me. Up until the ending, I was torn between enjoying Rishøi’s writing (in the Swedish translation by Maria Lundquist) and resenting what I felt was emotional manipulation. Unearned sentimentality immediately sets off my alarm bells when it comes to books and movies, and at times it felt like Rishøi was laying it on with a trowel.

The ending, however, is a choice that deserves its own commentary. While Ronja is certainly a daydreamer, the rest of the book is almost hyperrealistic. The title of the book even comes from Star Gate, an actual dive bar in Oslo where the father drinks himself senseless. Abandoning that kind of stark realism in the home stretch for the total opposite gives the reader a bit of mood whiplash, and it also makes me wonder if Rishøi opted for that because she felt like she had written herself into a corner. Namely: if she’s going to end with Ronja’s death, how is she going to actually write it?

Whether Ronja dies is, I suppose, up for some debate. The fuzziness from the magical realism filter provides solid plausible deniability, after all. Maybe Ronja and Melissa are walking home! Maybe they’re really walking through the woods! Maybe it’s Ronja’s fever dream while Melissa is carrying her home! But given how closely Stargate resembles “The Little Match Girl,” I’m skeptical. My take on the ending is that Ronja dies. It’s a weird choice for a Christmas story, but then “The Little Match Girl” takes place on New Year’s Eve so there’s a parallel there.

I found a few reviews of the English translation (Shining Brightly), and more than one of them gave the book demerits for profanity, specifically for using the Lord’s name in vain. Did this get marketed in English as the kind of Christmas story that would appeal to devout Christians? Unclear to me.

Friendaholic

Elizabeth Day’s Friendaholic was mentioned somewhere in my social media relatively soon after its publication in 2024. Was it LitHub? Was it a podcast? I can’t quite remember. But it came into my life at a time when I was reflecting on my own (dysfunctional) friendships and relationship patterns, and a title like Friendaholic spoke to my preferred method of integrating into Swedish society. It ended up on my TBR, which is how it turned into an impulse purchase at The English Bookshop February last year, which means by the time I read it in May it had been in my library for over a year. In terms of my annual reading goals, it’s a grand slam.

Friendaholic is a squirrely little beast in terms of genre. It’s non-fiction, it’s self-help, it’s memoir. Day takes us through some of her own friendships, both successes and failures, with a dash of some light research and interviews. Whether or not there’s a confessional aspect to it for Day isn’t for me to say, but the main thrust of the book seems to be that by reflecting on her friendship patterns and what research suggests, she can help a reader in a similar situation or with similar hang-ups.

Overall I enjoyed reading it, but I’m not sure if there was much in Friendaholic that was new to me in any meaningful way. The drawback of Day’s memoir approach is that if you don’t relate to her personal narrative, there’s really nothing of interest. I could have probably just as well skipped the chapter on infertility, for example, because that’s not a factor in my life.

By reader request, Day has shared the questions she used for the interviews sprinkled throughout the book. I don’t know if I have the nerve to sit my friends down and ask them about (our) friendship, but maybe you do?