📚
This book blew me away. I’d seen it all over the instagrams of bookshops in London (Daunt Books in particular promotes it like crazy) but even then I didn’t realise just how rich, nuanced, and self-analytical it would be.
Asako Yuzuki is raw and authentic in her depiction of female relationships, in a way that is so real, it’s piercing. From every angle she is able to analyze act of care, how it’s feminised, what it means to give and sacrifice, how that can result in self-negation — and how it ultimately affects all women from all backgrounds, shapes, and sizes.
And she *gets* food.
Related Recs
This surreal and existential Japanese novella packs a sensory punch that will leave you wanting more.
Oyamada crafts an eerie and frightening exploration into loneliness and the many holes it casts us into. We follow our dazed and dreaming narrator Asa who has just dutifully joined her emotionally distant husband back in his small hometown, where the cicadas drone like fighter jets and mysterious animals slink the streets at night. We join her as she tries to parse through her new reality, be it factual or a series of anomalies.
This one is for everyone who has ever felt like a stranger in their own life, and pairs amazingly with sidewalk cafes and springtime.
Mar 20, 2024
an effortless and universal depiction of emotions, this has been my favourite book for a really long time! the translation from japanese is beautiful, and if you get the right edition, there’s a novella included at the end.
Jan 11, 2025
📚
My flatmate lent me this beautiful, moving memoir by Michelle Zauner (the lead singer of Japanese Breakfast), which is all about her losing her mum to cancer in her 20s. Her prose is gentle, precise and insightful, as she tries to make sense of her mum, and her half-Korean identity now that her link to it has left this world, through their shared relationship with, and love of, Korean food. Highly recommend - I don't even listen to Japanese Breakfast; she's just a brilliant, soulful writer in her own right 🍳
Feb 9, 2024
Top Recs from @fanbeth
Dec 26, 2024
In fact they’re working against you, especially women of colour. 84% of Tinder users are men, Bumble’s earnings have gone down hugely since its IPO (thereby further increasing their need to make a profit off subscriptions), Hinge is hiding hot people behind a paywall. People are sick of getting lovebombed and ghosted.
But we don’t need them—there’s more to life than apps—and people are beginning to seek connections in person again.
Jan 3, 2025
Thanks to the Moomin Official YouTube channel I can heal my inner child 💓
Also love Heidi: Girl of the Alps (1974)
Jan 10, 2025