Book Review: TAIWAN TRAVELOGUE by Yang Shuang-zi

Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Even though I cannot open my heart, the feelings that I hold within this shuttered heart are, nonetheless, real."

Sometimes we meet people and possible futures open up, giving joy at imagining despite knowing it could never be.

This theme of longing for the unreachable sang through my first read from this year's International Booker Prize long list. It really should come with a warning on the cover: Only read while eating.

Our protagonist is a Japanese writer on a year-long visit to Taiwan in 1938, back when it was still Formosa and under Japanese colonial rule, as part of Nihon's Southern Expansion Policy.
She finds more than friendship in her female translator, and forms an attachment so strong and yet, on paper, so pure. Their affinity, however, is marred by a nameless tension hinted at in early chapters, then culminates in a reveal that shows how powerful historical/cultural forces can be in both shaping identities and tearing kindred spirits apart.

What I initially thought would be a food-filled travelogue turned out to be a meaty investigation of colonialism's many layers.

Not only will this whet your appetite for Taiwan's cuisine (there is a banquet scene that will linger in memory, filling the reader with phantom sensations of dining on crispy duck, bamboo shoots and pork belly, and dumplings filled with everything from diced winter melon to fried shallots and cilantro) and her many temples and trains, but it will also remind you of people who cross your path for a very short time, yet forever change your soul.

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Book Review: ALL THE BEAUTY IN THE WORLD by Patrick Bringley

All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“The picture is so beautiful, so tenderly flush with life that it seems to be itself living… it looks as whole, bright, irreducible, and unfading as I would wish the human soul to be.”

Patrick Bringley lost his brother to cancer. To cope with the grief, he became a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Then he wrote a book about it, which has now been turned into a one-man play.

Books truly find us at the right time.

I read “All the Beauty in the World” in bits and pieces through an incredibly busy, historic week. And if I had read it any other time with greater leisure, I suspect it would have had less of an impact.

But as it was, I took greedy gulps from its waters of calm and introspection, finding it both wise and urgent.

I am a teacher running out of time.

One of the subjects I have handled (for a decade now!) is Contemporary Philippine Art in the Regions (CPAR). There’s a chance I won’t be teaching it next school year, due to an impending curriculum change.

And honestly, I have not had time to mourn.

All I know is, on what could very well be the final semester that I am handling the subject, I am filled with a sort of urgency, bordering on despair, but overwhelmingly still aflame to prove that the arts matter. That studying the legacy of our National Artists matter. That bringing our students to the theater, that helping them sing and dance, and act in the annual school play matters.

Next week, I shall be with our school’s senior high students on a field trip to two museums, and I wish I had author Patrick Bringley’s knowledge to share. I hope love (and my own imperfect knowledge) will suffice.

For Bringley, art is “an Adoration… How useful a name for a kind of tender worship that arises in such a moment. We are silenced by such a vision, softened, made penetrable by what is vibrant and unhidden but felt only weakly amid the clamor of everyday life.”

He has a favorite kind of museum visitor, the “rare person, one who doesn’t pretend knowledge or fear ridicule, who throws the gates of his mind wide open and invites a battalion of new ideas to crash in.”

The memoir takes us through ten years of making a living being with art, and making a life and a family afterwards. Struggling with his newborn as a first time dad, Bringley writes: “I marvel at the moment’s vibrancy. Not only is this beautiful, I think, this is good, its goodness subsuming the struggles… I am building two little humans; and I am making the little world I would wish them to live in.”

He writes of what he reads the masters do, and takes heart that the great Michelangelo struggled with the Sistine Chapel, even writing down: “I am not in a good place. And I am no painter.”

When I think of the impact that great books, paintings, songs, and plays have had on me, I come away with a sense of gratitude, and an overwhelming desire to pass it on. To infect others with this deep, profound joy.

Why post about what we read or watch, or see? For this simple reason: to spread our immense happiness. The Lord knows the world desperately needs more of it.

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Book Review: THE BUFFALO HUNTER HUNTER by Stephen Graham Jones

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"What I am is the Indian who can't die. I'm the worst dream America ever had."

My first five-star-read-that-I-shall-try-to-shove- down-everybody's-throat book for 2026 is a historical novel that also happens to be literary fiction and horror. "Butcher's Crossing" meets Anne Rice in a Native American (specifically, Pikuni) revenge fantasy that rings true ... because it is.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a multi-generational tale of the white man's greed and cruelty, and the vengeance that takes the form of the Nachzerer, with a penchant for visiting Lutheran churches to confess to its pastor. Stephen Graham Jones has written, with masterful technique, a novel that I hesitate to call a "vampire thriller," though it is, decidedly, both thrilling and features the undead.

It is so much more than its marketing labels.

It is written in three different voices to match the three main characters, utterly convincing in their tone and word choice despite being apart culturally and in centuries. The novel is also a metaphor for the corruption of "America," from the time of Lewis and Clark, and reminds its reader of the true horrors of the Marias Massacre (also known as the Baker Massacre), and the Starvation Winter brought about by excessive killing of buffalo.

"In all of my stories I'm crying... This, I believe, is the story of America, told in a forgotten church in the hinterlands, with a choir of the dead mutely witnessing."

Despite its 450 page length, this is a rousing epic, with a story that will live inside this reader for years to come, that leaves one breathless with awe. Such is the power of the written word: to keep whitewashed history alive, using commercial literature to tell it to as many people as possible. In this way, the author has ensured that the great evil done to his forefathers will never be forgotten.

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