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| photo: Cacá Santoro | |
Elaine U. Cho is associate editor at Shelf Awareness and a former bookseller at Seattle's Elliott Bay Book Company. She has worked as a film critic and has an MFA in Flute Performance from CalArts. Her debut novel is Ocean's Godori (Hillman Grad Books/Zando), and she has a sequel coming out next year.
On your nightstand now:
I tend to have poetry, essays, short stories, or manga/manhwa on my nightstand--books I can consume little by little. Currently I have There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib, a collection of essays tied together with the theme of basketball, which I know very little about, but I'll read anything by Abdurraqib. He's so wise and witty, and his writing brims with joy. And this was totally unplanned, but I also have Garbage Time, Volume 2 by 2sajang, which is a manhwa (or maybe it's a webtoon-turned-book?) about an underdog high school basketball team. I'm basically learning a lot of very specific basketball terminology in Korean I'll probably never use.
As for what else I'm reading, I just finished The Last Rhee Witch, which is a Korean folklore-infused middle-grade novel by Jenna Lee-Yun about a girl who goes to a summer camp that's haunted by a gwishin. It's creepy, sweet, and heartfelt. I'm currently in the middle of Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham. My interest in Maugham was recently re-piqued by Tan Twan Eng's The House of Doors, a captivating novel that touches on Maugham's time in Penang.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine still holds up, I promise. And I also recently reread the Animorphs series by K.A. Applegate (but only up to #32, which is around when the books started getting ghostwritten). The first few books have recently been adapted to graphic novel by Chris Grine, who does such a fantastic job of capturing the sheer grossness of the morphing sequences. You'll laugh at this, but I still think about those pivotal moments: The David trilogy! The Cassie butterfly episode! The Tobias/Ellimist book!
Your top five authors:
Alexander Chee--Alexander Chee forever. He writes truthfully in a sympathetic and gorgeous, but never maudlin way. And in writing about finding a space for himself to belong, he created a space for so many of us to belong, too. He's the best example of how when you write specifically for yourself, others will find themselves in you.
E.J. Koh--Whenever I read Koh, I'm so grateful that she exists, not only for her generous and elegant writing, but also for the personal warmth that comes across the page.
Ursula K. Le Guin--Le Guin's wisdom shines through everything she's written. There is always a sense of the humanity present in her characters, even as the work simultaneously handles the weighty and philosophical.
Clarice Lispector--My personal experience with Lispector's writing has been that some of it is so opaque that you have to wrestle with it, and some of it immediately rewires your brain. She's constantly surprising. I'm obsessed with Benjamin Moser's afterword in The Hour of the Star that talks about how editors and translators repeatedly tried to "correct" her prose and how Lispector assured them, "I am fully aware of the reasons that led me to choose this punctuation and insist that it be respected."
Marilynne Robinson--Her work is luminous. I wish I could live in her words.
Book you've faked reading:
I would be too afraid I'd be found out. Besides, although there are obviously wonderful discussions to be had when you've both read a book, there are also really lovely conversations to be had when you haven't read something, and you get to hear why someone loves or loathes it. It can bump something up on my TBR, incite a trip to the bookstore to pick it up, or lead to brave new worlds!
Book you're an evangelist for:
The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez is truly astonishing and one of the best books I've read in the last few years. It juggles first, second, and third person narrations and when you start it, you think, "There's no way this will hold up," but Jimenez blows all expectations out of the water. When I finished it, I thought, "everyone needs to read this."
I also have not shut up about Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park since I read it last year.
Anyway, I should stop there.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I buy books for their covers all the time! Or sometimes I'm dissuaded from buying a book because of its cover (sorry!). But rather than give you a few stellar covers, I'll share some cover illustrators/designers I love:
Na Kim is an illustrator and art director for Farrar, Straus and Giroux and you might have seen some of her stunning work on covers like I Hold a Wolf by the Ears by Laura Van Den Berg or Luster by Raven Leilani.
I'll pretty much pick up any book that has a cover illustrated by Tran Nguyen (her work's immediately recognizable and has been seen on Zoe Hana Mikuta's Off with Their Heads and Wesley Chu's The Art of Prophecy).
The immensely talented Will Staehle has done some iconic work with V.E. Schwab's Shades of Magic series and the Sister Holiday mysteries by Margot Douaihy (which pairs so perfectly with the iconoclastic, utterly cool books), to name a few.
Book that changed your life:
Into the Land of the Unicorns by Bruce Coville turned me into a reader. Until then, my mom despaired at how much TV I consumed. This was the very first book I had to finish, and I got up early in the morning so I could get back to reading it. My mom was so surprised when she found me in the living room with it. It also heavily influenced the first story I wrote. So, thank you, Bruce Coville. For this book and dozens of others, including Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher.