May is Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month and we will be participating in ReadWithCindy’s 2021 Asian Readathon to celebrate! The readathon is meant to be a very accessible and easy to complete event that promotes Asian and Pacific Islander author and protagonist visibility. There are five challenges:

1. Read any book written by an Asian author.
2. Read any book featuring an Asian protagonist.
3. Read any book written by an Asian author in your favorite genre.
4. Read any nonfiction book written by an Asian author.
5. Read any book written by an Asian author that’s not US-centric.

You can fulfill multiple prompts with one book, but if you read multiple books, each book needs to be by an author of a different Asian heritage, because diversity! Not sure what counts as Asian? Cindy has a list! She also has a directory of books by Asian authors on StoryGraph to help you choose! We usually don’t care about the author’s ethnicity or gender as long as the writing is good, so the database was very helpful.

We decided to make this extra challenging for ourselves by adding a personal rule that we can’t count authors we’ve read before. Of course, you don’t have to, but we think this gets into the spirit of stretching horizons! 😄

On to our picks!

To fulfill challenges #1, 2, and 5, we decided to read The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey. We already had this delicious-looking mystery in our Audible library, but haven’t listened to it yet. We were attracted by the pro-feminist narrative, which promises a strong female lawyer who champions the titular widows in the face of cultural tensions that escalate to murder. Add the 1920s Bombay setting, and we were sold! This book promises to tick many of our favorite boxes.

As delicious as The Widows of Malabar Hill sounds, if we were forced to pick a favorite genre it would be fantasy. So for challenge #3, we selected Black Water Sister by Zen Cho. Coming to Audible on May 11, 2021 and available now in paperback and Kindle, Black Water Sister looks like an exciting ride!

Reluctant medium Jessamyn Teoh returns home to Malaysia where her grandmother’s spirit contacts her, demanding Jessamyn take revenge on a gang boss on behalf of Black Water Sister, the diety her grandmother served. Of course, it’s a dangerous mission made even more perilous because grandmother and Black Water Sister may not be what they seem. We’re really looking forward to this book and just hope it doesn’t get too dark for us, since it is also marketed as a thriller.

Surprisingly, challenge #4, nonfiction by an Asian author, was the most difficult to find. We typically avoid memoirs because they are often too sad or dark for us, but we expected it to be easy to find a science book by an Asian author. Guess that’s one stereotype we didn’t realize we believed busted! This readathon has already succeeded!

We spent a lot of time perusing the nonfiction part of the directory. We really appreciated StoryGraph’s content warnings feature, which lets other readers warn you of potentially triggering material. We’d click on an interesting-looking title, check the content warnings, and nope on out of there. We eventually settled on a book, but after talking to our friend AdventuRyn, we’re saving that one for Pride in June. Instead we will be joining them in reading World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. The Audible version is read by the author, and from the sample she gives it a cozy, exciting bedtime fairy story feel! We’re hoping we are in for a book in the vein of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. In other words, a beautiful and poetic exploration of some of nature’s wonders.

Of course we will review these books as we read (or listen, lol) to them, so stay tuned to this blog for more!

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