It often takes a while to be ready to read a new book. I'd been picking away at "Nature Behind Barbed Wire" for more than two months, reading tiny increment by tiny increment, and finally finished it. It's an academic work that explores incarcerated Japenese-Americans relationship to their environment during World War II. My next book would have to be radically different in tone, energy, and theme — I needed a quick, powerful read.

That next read was in my to-be-read pile where it had hidden since I found a copy at Sidequest Books & Games in Somerville, MA. Originally, I heard about it via Instagram, a "bookstagram" account belong to esje, a Filipino-Chinese who lived in Bangkok and recently moved to Amsterdam. This debut novel of Gerardo Sámano Córdova, Monstrilio, consumed my reading time the past several days with an intensity I've not felt in a while. Published in 2023, Monstrilio is difficult to categorize — it's not simply horror or queer lit or folklore. I've never read anything like it.

The novel is broken into four major sections, each from the perspective of a different character and mostly chronological. The core of the story, the root from which the complexity grows, is the death of Santiago, Magos and Joseph's 11-year old son, from complications from pulmonary agenesis (unilateral) — the condition of being born within one developed lung. Magos and Joseph are a bi-national couple, spending time between Mexico City and upstate New York, while living on Joseph's trust fund. Upstate New York was easier for Santiago and his condition, but it's where Santiago ends up dying at home. 

In an inexplicable act, Magos, driven by a desire to "learn one last secret from her son" excavates a chunk of that defining lung with a paring knife.

From this gory scene, Magos' section is first and builds her character from an unknowable corpse mutilator into almost (just almost) a sympathetic player in the story. The world surrounding the characters is powerfully insular, where the real world's intrusion for fact finding and plainly deserved prosecution is kept at bay through chance, personality, or perhaps some powerful magic. It's folk magic that animates the lung chunk after Magos takes it, and herself, to Mexico City and hears a story from her mother's housekeeper of a child reborn from a piece of heart. Bending herself, and her family and close friends, into collaboration, Magos feeds and grows the Santiago-chunk into something… a monster… that represents her rejection of loss and concentration of grief.

It's through this lens of loss and grief that the story develops, slowly and then with desperate speed. Grief colors each character's internal monologue and external presentation, but it's far from a black hole. Much springs from the grief core of Monstrilio from Jonathan's bottoming out, avoidance, and connection with a new love to Monstrilio (M) himself finding his own way through a claustrophobic, constraining existence to freedom in the end.

The writing, the sense of unique voice, here is beautiful and alive. I am so impressed with how Sámano Córdova uses word choice, sentence and paragraph structure, and variations in descriptive character to give each main character their unique voice on the page. The book cries out for re-reading, a closer reading, after the first hanging-on-for-dear-life read. Sometimes dark, and occasionally bloody, this book has a heart (or lung??) that beats (breathes) with familial love and hope for understanding. 

I unabashedly recommend this book. It's powerful and inspires consideration of complex and simple themes. Certainly one of the best books I've read in the past year.

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Side Note: I tend to write chronologically, because first this happened, then that happened, and I fret that it's a trap/framework/habit that is immature or constricting. When writing a travelog, chronological is the default and I'm trying to challenge that habit, because I aim to write more and differently.

I haven't been reading as much as the middle of last year (although, it's only January). A standout that straddled '25-'26 is "The Old Garden". A political prisoner, Hyun Woo, is released after 18 years and reenters South Korean society to find that his lover, strong-willed artist Yoon Hee, has died. She wasn't allowed to visit him while he was in prison, but wrote her story expecting his release. The book incorporates his perspective as a pro-democracy activist around the Gwangju Uprising and her perspective as artist and instructor (including her time in Berlin during the fall of the Wall). The story spans twenty years and, despite it's time breadth, maintains propulsive energy underneath the contemplative, intimate, and reflective prose.

I knew a little bit about South Korea's history and the anti-democratic, autocratic forces that ruled it for decades but this book opened my eyes to the struggles of regular people in our lifetimes to advance pluralistic and democratic societies. While I was visiting Chongqing earlier this month, I visited the site of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea which operated in China during the Japanese occupation of Korea. When in Taipei, the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall had an exhibition called "Flowers of Freedom" which portrayed the Gwangju Uprising in the broader historical context of the ongoing fight for democracy. These two places informed how I read the book and emphasized that twenty years is a blink of the eye!

This book gave deeply personal (fictional) context for the fifty years that followed the liberation of Korea in the 40s. Together, the book and the visits to Korean historical sites in China painted a nuanced picture of an 80 year period of turmoil and change. The writing in the book, originally in Korean by Hwang Sok-yong and translated by Jay Oh, is beautiful and sometimes strange. The voices of the main characters are distinctive, which allows the characters — separated by time and the veil — to be in conversation in a way I hadn't experienced before. Quite a worthwhile book, packed with moments that force a pause to reflect on one's own values, understanding of self, and understanding of historical context.

Disclosure: This post contains an affiliate link. I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

My friend Trent taught English in Taiwan for many years and consistently reiterated how LGBTQ+ friendly and amazing Taipei is, so visiting has been on my Asia to-visit for many years. 2025 was the year for the visit. This is the second big Asia trip in the past two years and every one has been emotionally powerful, challenging (due to jet lag and long flights), and educational.

The journey to Taiwan from the east coast of the United States can be onerous, with very long flights. This time, we went west, from Boston to Seattle and then onward after a reasonable layover. Chasing the sun, there was an endless sunset ahead of us as we cross the United States. There’s a certain magic to watching those colors shift from above the clouds as I drifted in and out of sleep.

I slept well the night of our arrival in the city and the morning of the first full day in Taipei was dominated by a visit to the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall. Set in a large park, the memorial hall is imposing and beautiful, but almost austere. As we went down into the body of the building, we found it was full of historical and modern galleries encompassing key artifacts from Chiang’s time, exhibits that explored democratic movements across the world, and works from modern artists. This multi-use nature is far more appealing than a monument solely dedicated to one man and his complicated legacy.

Outside the hall, every hour from 0900 to 1700, there is currently a military honor guard “changing of the guard” ceremony. This is a change since 2024, as in the past the honor guard was stationed inside the memorial hall itself. The Ministry of Culture initiated these changes to reduce the so-called “cult of personality” aspects of the Memorial Hall and surrounding complex. I’m hopeful the U.S. will be able to do the same thing after the current administration turns over; to me, one of the most touching and important military honor guards is at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It shows the importance and power of the people, the unknown, and rejects cult of personality of the powerful, the monied, and the proud.

In Flowers of Freedom, I learned far more about freedom, democracy, and free speech movements in Taiwan and across the world than I had expected at a monument to a former military and autocratic leader. The most resonant message was that freedom is fragile and that it takes ongoing struggle and sacrifice to retain and expand the freedoms that people have fought to win. Every person must fight for these things, the struggle is ours, not theirs. The story of Nylon Cheng, editor of Freedom Era Weekly, and his struggle against the KMT authoritarian bent is told most poignantly accompanied by a reconstruction of his office where he self-immolated. His self-immolation connected me to the freedom movements of South Korea, which I had been reading about in The Old Garden by Hwang Sok-yong, and elsewhere in the exhibit the Gwangju Uprising from 1980 was incorporated as an example of horrifying events that were part of repressive state responses to democratization and freedom movements.

Sam Enright wrote in more depth about the complex interplay of movements, language, culture, and more and touched upon similar topics in his reflections.

In the U.S., there are many museums and monuments that celebrate freedom of speech, the freedom of peoples (via the Emancipation Proclamation, the Freedom Riders, and more), and the other freedoms enshrined in the Constitution. Right now, it feels like those stories are told as distant past, as recognition of accomplishments, and less like stories of an ongoing struggle. The Flowers of Freedom exhibition truly felt like now, where every person is invited and required to participate in the ongoing work of fighting for freedom.

I wrote earlier this year about staying open to connection, and part of this trip was an overlap with our friend David, who was coming back from mainland China and Vietnam. We met up for lunch, then headed into a period of wandering — from bookstore (Whose Books) to coffeeshop (Modish) to bookstore to Ningxia night market. Along the way, David invited his friend David to join us… And we all connected via our mutual interests, our excitement on being in Taiwan, sharing bits of our histories, and more.

At Ningxia night market, I tried stinky tofu (the Taiwanese kind) for the first time. I tried it two ways (fried and in a spicy soup), stealing a bit from David’s bowl. My key learning from the fried stinky tofu: don’t keep chewing, just swallow it. The stinky tofu in spicy soup was tolerable, but not enjoyable. My palette will take time to mature. And maybe never develop a taste for it. Who knows!

David II (he told us to call him Jamaican David) had recently moved to Taipei to teach English after a stint in government and in the private sector. Similar to Trent’s time in Taipei, David II is teaching in a private “cram school” and adjusting to the reality that he knows a tiny amount of Mandarin. As a new arrival to Taipei, he was certainly still using his tourist eyes and exploring the city and the country as much as he could.

I have much more to write about night markets and the type of built environment that exists (and is seemingly encouraged to exist) in the Asian cities I’ve visited.

We had plans for the next day, though, and said goodnight to the Davids and headed back to Beitou to rest.

It's been a busy couple of weeks on the media front. I'm no longer using Instagram, but I haven't yet seen a diminution of iPhone use — most likely this is due to a week of being miserably sick with what turned into bacterial sinusitis. 

First, I finished reading A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall. While I was reading this book there were times when it felt like fiction, but this 2024 Pulitzer Prize winner for non-fiction delivers a deeply connected, intimate exploration of the most painful day in a family's history. On the way to a field trip, five year old Milad Slama was killed in a school bus-semitrailer collision in terrible weather on a dangerous road. In the minutes and hours that follow, Milad's father Abed attempts to find his son but is caught between physical and logistical walls that have been built between Palestinian and Israeli controlled disputed territories. Thrall does not tell this story linearly, nor simply, and the inciting incident is like a hammer strike on a taut web of steel wires through history, people, families, politics, and nations. I could barely put this book down, so powerful were the stories.

Second, Tár. I had heard that this movie, helmed by Cate Blanchett, was a standout, but I was not prepared for how disturbing and beautiful it was. One should not read about this movie, but set aside the two hours and just watch it, listen to it, and sit with it. We're lucky that we have a good sound system at home and this movie takes full advantage of surround sound and Atmos, with extremely well done environmental and storytelling sound. The acting is stellar. The end of the movie, however, is weak and plays into an orientalist frame.

We've been watching Plur1bus and Murderbot. The former is a standout concept and I am eager to see how it plays out in its first season.

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I wrapped up my graduate studies in May of 2025, after around nine years of being a part-time student and full-time wage earner. I had started a defined path toward an undergraduate degree by enrolling in the University of Maine at Augusta (UMA) in 2016 as a Cybersecurity major. The program had just begun in 2015, lead by Henry Felch, and I was excited to take advantage of the educational reimbursement program of my then employer. I had dabbled in 2006 and 2008-9 with going back to college, but it never seemed to stick. The UMA program was a good fit and I stuck with it until I graduated in 2022. The school was the right place as the faculty understood the needs of non-traditional learners, career switchers, and those with extensive work and life experience.

Before I graduated, I thought that I should consider continuing on into a graduate program because I had built up tolerance, wanted a "capstone" to my undergraduate experience (as it wound down during the first part of the pandemic), and imagined my future employers would value a graduate-level degree. Starting in late 2021, I researched options, winnowed them down, and, luckily, was accepted at The Fletcher School and Tufts University.

It is not easy being a graduate student. The amount of reading, synthesizing, and writing is substantial and quite different than corporate or personal efforts. I certainly struggled and had hours of frustration, with myself primarily, as deadlines arose and had to be met. Part of what kept me stable and focused during the school year(s) was trimming or removing social media systems from my daily life. Going into the start of the semester, I'd log out of and delete Facebook, an environment which, over time, became more and more toxic and distraction even while the core connection to community grew in importance. But the reality of the swirl of the former kept me as disciplined as I could be…

Now it's been six months since I received my Master's and the noise of the swirl, deeply amplified by the broader political scene in the United States, is too much again. There are too many stimuli driven through algorithmic forever scrolling. It's time, again, for a break. Time to spend time in creative, productive, and personal activities. Time to control my own time, something that is so valuable, constrained, and so easily disappeared for no direct benefit to self, family, or society.

Should I gamify this? Should I track and quantify a vague commitment to a certain old-as-new freedom? That's a second order question with which I shall wrestle, next.

It's nearly the end of October as I write this and I'm plodding slowly toward a reset. 

This year started with my first trip to mainland China (Chengdu), my first visit to Vietnam (Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City), and my first time in Hong Kong. Never have I had such a remarkably easeful time traveling internationally. I think the combination of an extended travel window (nearly 20 days), local and familial guides, and a substantial time disconnected from work was the "magic" needed. Of those three factors, I think the second was the most important.

In China, I met my future parents-in-law and my fiancé's best friend. We based travel in Chengdu, an amazing city that's connected to a great region. Chengdu did suffer from "sun behind the smog" periods, but all-in-all the city is dazzling – visually, artistically, and aurally. The last is due to the incredible density of electric vehicles. Chengdu streets, at busy periods, are a quiet hum. I was reminded of how quiet New York City can be when you get deep into a neighborhood, it's like that but everywhere in Chengdu.

Every time I mention visiting China to someone, they remark at how they'd likely eat too much! No. Such. Thing. The food, and food culture, in this UNESCO City of Gastronomy, exceeds expectation and the smells beg you to try something new, something barely visible in a sea of chili peppers… It felt like we could go anywhere and find amazing food that was priced well, served with polish and care, and told the story of the Sichuan region.

The city is, like all cities, in a constant state of flux. The Chengdu Sports Centre, above, opened in 1991, hosted sport for two decades, and then closed to transform into an archeological site. Chunxi Road developed from a 1920s commercial block with arcades into an almost obscene celebration of commerce, retail, and transformation. However, many buildings from earlier periods have been preserved and enhanced such that one can walk several hundred meters and go from modern glitz to republican-era structures.

Chengdu has a depth of culture and history that are sometimes in opposition to modern development pressures, but often embraced and enhanced as national cultural treasures. From monasteries to parks to Du Fu Thatched Cottage, it's easy to slip out of the big city flow and into quieter, more reflective spaces. As I wandered through the park that surrounds Du Fu Thatched Cottage I connected the reverence of that place to Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond , which is around a half hour drive from my home in Massachusetts. Both were identified by their respective national government organizations as important national heritage sites in the early 1960s and preserved thereafter. Both writers thought deeply about place, habit, connection, and more but in very different times. Du Fu was active in the later part of the 700s, where Thoreau was active 1100 years later. 

Outside of Chengdu, to the north east, is ‎⁨Sanxingdui Museum⁩ in ⁨Guanghan. I wish I could write more eloquently about the site, the museum, and the cultural importance of all of it. 2400 years before Du Fu, circa 1700 – 1150 BC, during the Bronze Age, a unique culture developed in the region. The museum displays an incredible bounty of artifacts, interpretations, and historical context of the exploration of this unique culture/civilization. I could have spent more hours at the site and the new exhibitions, expanding into the 2023 new building, are presented so well.

Sichuan has such a great beating heart of culture, complexity, and connection to natural spaces. Beyond what I noted above, giant pandas are bred and supported in the region (so you can make a day trip to see them, if they decide to be mobile…). I really enjoyed Chengdu and I hope to explore more in western Sichuan in the future.

For many years I've been a subscriber of the Bangor Daily News and that has continued even after I've moved out of Bangor. The BDN is a robust, local paper that manages to cover the state of Maine (and it's many regions) quite well. I subscribed when I lived in Bangor as I wanted to support local journalists, including Emily Burnham, and I read most of the content via RSS.

In 2024, I read RJ Heller's brief review of Adopting Anton in the BDN. The author, University of Maine at Augusta (UMA) emeritus Robert Klose, sought to adopt in Ukraine in the early 2000s and grow his family. As graduate of UMA who is interested in adoption I immediately added this tight, focused memoir to my to-be-read pile. Adopting Anton is primarily set in Ukraine, chronicling the challenges and joys of international adoption. The Russian war of aggression in Ukraine was two years deep, with Russian forces advancing and international funding (via the US) delayed, when this book was published in 2022.

Robert recounts how he and his first adopted son, Alyosha, came to the conclusion that they'd be okay to grow the family through a second adoption. Working through an adoption agency, single-father Robert prepares for the vetting, travel, red tape, and more… then had one more thing to worry about: the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which shut down air travel and threw the air transport world into disarray. On busses, planes, trains, and automobiles, across states, countries, cities, and towns, the reader is pulled in and alongside Robert as he is propelled through the complexity and physical spaces he must inhabit in order to achieve his objective. 

I loved how we are brought into the journey and how Robert describes the whiplash between the poles of control and surrender. Particularly touching is the support of communities all along the way, but especially in the home town of Anton, the orphanage, and the agencies. To say "it takes a village" is understating the work and investment of time and care.

A lot has changed in the twenty years since Anton came to the United States. After the recent war started, Ukrainian refugees made it to Maine and were resettled officially and through community networks. Mainers and Bangorians volunteered to aid Ukrainians "in theater" as they traveled closer to the conflict zone. Now, with the current US Presidential administration, it's hard to tell what's next for Ukraine and Ukrainians both in the US and around the world. International adoption is a fraught thing and I have friends who are strongly against it. It seems likely that in the near future, Ukraine will face signifiant resource and familial challenges that could drive international adoption issues.

Adopting Anton is well written, cohesive, emotionally powerful, and I recommend it. The book can be obtained, signed, through The Briar Patch in Bangor, ME. A small, independent, and passionate bookstore, The Briar Patch is operated by a great friend and all around excellent person Gibran Graham. Gibran and I met through Twitter through a "tweetup" over a decade ago and he is a standout in the community. I miss curling with him and the crew that formed through Twitter during that time.

This year has been full of a continued wrestling with the positives and negatives of social media, particularly Instagram. For the past three years, during the spring and fall semesters, I would log out of Facebook and Twitter and save my brain from both of those social media networks — knowing full well that having excessive "content" would cause me to waver from my school commitments. However, I would remain logged into Instagram. At the end of August 2025, I'm realizing just how much time has gotten sucked into that endless scrolling blackhole. I resent my own weakness for the dopamine scroll.

That resentment is moderated by some of the good that comes from discovering new connections and new ideas through social media. I don't think I would have been connected to Ethan Tapper through a blogroll or news article, but I was through Instagram's algorithm. Ethan is a Vermonter and a forester who has found a way to communicate his vision of involved, active, and restorative environmentalism (roughly) through short form video and his book, How to Love a Forest, published in 2024.

How to Love a Forest takes the reader through a forest from top of the crown to deep in the ground. Ethan explains why his views on forests have changed over the years (away from a prescriptive, protective approach and toward an expansive, active involvement approach) and how much humanity needs to change in order to ensure the long term survival of our species and the ecosystems on which we depend. Over ten chapters, I was introduced and reintroduced to the minute and large parts of a forest, their interactions, the mysteries of how plants communicate, the opportunity to make a difference, and the beauty of what was, is, and can be. 

I can tell this book was a challenge to write and shape into a cohesive, clear narrative. The ideas and actions are plainly shared, at times, and then bulked out with beautifully visual language that transports the reader a Vermont hillside. The simplicity of the key messages occasionally get lost in repetition and rework of language. There is more that Ethan can share as his writing skills develop further and his message strengthens and deepens.

This book constitutes book eleven of my ten book reading commitment for the summer. It's a tight book, less than 220 pages, and complemented Things Become Other Things as memoirs that share a bigger idea or a call to action.

Yesterday evening I apparently reached the point in Hammajang Luck where all the planning and preparation for the heist of the millennia was complete, the top of the roller coaster, and all that was left was action, action, action before denouement. In Makana Yamamoto's debut, Edie returns home after a stint in prison and finds that in the far future at Kepler Space Station corporate power has grown even stronger, distorting the lives of regular people.

Edie finds that regular employment is impossible to find when you've made it onto the blacklist of Joyce Atlas, the trillionaire leader of Atlas Industries and beneficiary of that concentration of corporate power. Confronted by the impossibility of quitting crime, Edie is recruited into the plan for the heist of a lifetime which just so happens to target the same individual who blacklisted them – Joyce Atlas.

Christina at All She Wrote Books suggested this potent exploration of motivation and chosen family set in a sci-fi heist setting. I quite enjoyed the set up and execution of the heist, which was complicated and required many different characters to deliver on their expertise. Some of the characters were not deeply developed. I think there's room to give more heft to each, perhaps that's planned for future stories in the author's universe. As a summer read, Hammajang Luck delivers a reasonably paced caper story with queer characters, strong influences of Hawaiian culture, and a little spicy content.

If you're interested, take a look at The StoryGraph's entry for the book.

I had set myself a reading goal of ten books over the summer and this book makes a nice, even ten. Technically, there are several more weeks in summer here in the northern hemisphere so I may exceed my target!

Disclosure: This post contains an affiliate link. I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

I'm midway through a two week break between jobs and, somehow, my reading pace has slowed considerably. If I step back and look at the situation, the primary cause for the slowdown is a confluence of multiple factors: a relaxation of constraints, new commitments, and the winding down of summer activities. I'm making pretty short work of my current read — it's relatively lightweight and an action story, so it flows quickly.

The summer activities have been anchored in my future parents-in-law staying with us for the summer. Earlier this year, they told my fiancée that they wanted to visit and escape the heat of southern China. After a bit of negotiation, they flew in a week after my graduation in May. It's very hard for me to put into words the whirlwind of emotions that has accompanied their visit, but most of those emotions have been good — the overwhelming preponderance of them are great! Hosting long-term guests is hard work and it's been harder for my fiancée, because I'm monolingual. I'm supremely grateful that we've been able to spend so much time together.

The time has overlapped with an uptick in parent-care for me. While not as substantial as it could be, I've spent some time attending to my parents' transport needs. One of the lessons of my forties is that our time together is short. I knew this in my thirties as I worked through my undergraduate and graduate programs, but I sure didn't internalize it well. The arrow of time does not reverse, though, so I just have to make better choices now.

Since I'm not working, I have fewer constraints on my daily schedule. The practical impact of that is that bad habits can explode out of small and into large time consumers. Specifically, this time around, it's short-form video. I have to take very conscious steps to drive short-form out of my life as assertively as I can. Otherwise, I will lose hours into nothingness. Helping me in this effort is the external works of folks contributing to Craig Mod's "The Good Place", which is part of his Special Projects community.

In the coming week, I'll be finishing the current read and finishing the "prep for work" book that I picked up yesterday from the bookshelf. The latter is about preparing for the first 90 days of a new job or role and how to make best use of that time. I'm early into reading it, but it was part of Harvard Business School's "So you're graduating, here's some stuff" gift basket. 

If I write more often, will it become easier?