
Clam Down was too singular to NOT win August.
The Wedding People also gets high honors…but not high enough to replace Eight Bears as the Wild Card.
…Bears, and clams, and Moomin. Oh my!
#ReadingBracket2025
#2025ReadingBracket
Clam Down was too singular to NOT win August.
The Wedding People also gets high honors…but not high enough to replace Eight Bears as the Wild Card.
…Bears, and clams, and Moomin. Oh my!
#ReadingBracket2025
#2025ReadingBracket
At first, my feelings about this book were as inconstant as the tides: did I hate it? Did I like it? My opinion came in, and went out. I landed on glittering, phosphorescent love.
Chen says she‘s interested in form and it shows. Her memoir (?), in which she transforms into a clam in the aftermath of a divorce when her mother tells her via typo to “clam down,” is wholly unique. She writes about herself (“the clam”) in third person,…👇🏻
Chen processes her divorce, the perceived failure of her early intellectual promise, and her father's professional downfall all through shell metaphors precipitated by her mother's mistyped directive to Clam Down. This experimental memoir is excellent; it's a meditation on ambition and legacy that's as innovative as it is profound. Chen weaves memoir, metaphor, history, just all of it. The soup of life is here (and it's a chowder).
#two4tuesday @TheSpineView 😊
1) No idea! They just seem to keep arriving. Sometimes multiple copies. Someone yeeted the tagged book over my fence the other day. No recollection of ordering it! (Cool cover though)
2) Both. All the books. Probably preorder more standalones... a lot of the series' I'm reading have been completed and I'm working my way through already.