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#SummerSouls Day 22: The cover of tagged book is bursting in full #Bloom - our Emirates Literature Foundation book club pick for July. Paired with my quinoa avocado salad. Yum.

Like many short stories, I will not remember most of them after a month or so. I love the writing. Many of the stories are centered around Chinese women living in the U.S. 3.5 🌟

More books I finished before Christmas! #catchup

I was not a fan of last year‘s #tob23 choice The Book of Goose, but I wanted to give Li another shot. I‘m glad I did because I was quite impressed by these stories, many of which appeared in The New Yorker. (I love New Yorker collections because the stories are such a consistent length!) Based on this, I think I just hit the wrong book first, so I‘m interested in her backlist now. Any recs?

I really enjoyed the first half, I thought the stories were interesting and nicely written. After that, the themes seemed to get too repetitive and I found myself confusing the last few stories because there was so much talk of death and suicide. All the stories were pretty melancholy, and I ended up feeling drained 🫠

Picked this up at the library a couple of days ago! I‘m about 4 stories in, and they‘ve all been so interesting! The author writes about complex feelings, and makes everything sound so natural. One of the stories so far is about a young mother suffering from postpartum depression, and having taboo feelings - she writes about it so matter of factly that you‘re just along for the ride no matter the outcome. I‘ve been so invested.

Everything in Li‘s stories has a meaning, even the mundane and her stories are sad. I‘m not sure why her writing is described as funny or perhaps the humour is so gentle that I miss it. I didn‘t love all the stories in this collection but I appreciated the seemingly effortless, beautiful writing of every single one. My favourites are Wednesday‘s Child and Alone.