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My earliest reading memory
Asking my mom if she could stop reading my bedtime book to me and just let me read it on my own, since I felt she was going too slowly. The book was either Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or its sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, both by Roald Dahl.
My favourite book growing up
I loved Stuart Little, and all his small, clever things – his tiny canoe, his tiny sailboat. He had such a relaxed demeanor and was so dapper! I also loved Mary Norton’s The Borrowers series – tiny people living under the floorboards and improvising household goods out of “borrowed” safety pins and match boxes and so on. Clearly I had a thing for miniatures.
The book that changed me as a teenager
Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories, because he was having such a good time and seemed so so smart, but was also mischievous and irreverent. It may sound corny but these stories made me grasp the existence of a world of art and literature. And Barthelme lived in Houston, where I was growing up, yet he was a major world writer.
The writer who changed my mind
In the early 90s, while I was in graduate school, I read Sigrid Nunez’s short story Chang, which later became a portion of her first book, A Feather on the Breath of God. “Chang” had a seismic effect on me. Up to that point, I can’t recall having ever seen a multiracial character in fiction. I was so accustomed to the default whiteness of fictional characters that I didn’t even notice the absence of characters from other backgrounds. And even as I was trying at that time to write short stories about my father’s life in Korea, I would give those characters white-sounding, European-sounding names, as if I was hoping to disguise their specificity. It really pains me now to look back on this tendency in my writing, which proceeded directly from the sorts of writers I was taking as models, like Virginia Woolf and Henry James. When I read Sigrid’s story I was astonished that the narrator was the daughter of a white European woman and a brown Asian man – just like me! I hadn’t realised this sort of character was possible. It’s sort of heartbreaking that my thinking was so constricted, but the disruption to that thinking was thrilling.
The book that made me want to be a writer
I wanted to be a writer from such an early age it’s impossible to choose a single book to hold responsible, but the book that made me want to be a certain kind of writer was To the Lighthouse. I so desperately wanted to write the way Virginia Woolf does in that book that it made my writing insufferable for a very long time.
The book I reread
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald, which I despised at school, but now I’ve come to love the way I love certain comfort foods. It’s not the most nutritious and in some ways it’s repulsive, but the deep familiarity of it always hit the spot.
The author I came back to
Charles Dickens. For so long I associated him with unbearable Christmas television specials, so I didn’t actually sit down and try reading him until shockingly late, and then I was enthralled. I read Bleak House for the first time during the pandemic – it was one of the great reading experiences of my life.
The book I could never read again
Anything by Tom Robbins. Another Roadside Attraction, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Jitterbug Perfume: they seemed great in my teens but now even just the titles make me cringe.
The book I discovered later in life
Homer’s Odyssey. Obviously I’d heard of it and must have read it for the first time in college, but it wasn’t until recently that I became completely fascinated by it and started wanting to reread it in different translations.
The book I am currently reading
I recently finished JA Baker’s The Peregrine, which is one of the most extraordinary books I have ever read. It’s quite short, but the writing is so uncategorisable,immersive and transformative that I felt as if I’d been sucked into a different time-medium.
