Năm trước tôi định đọc quyển Truyện ngắn Lê Hà Ngân nhưng ngưng khi thấy sách quá nhiều lỗi. Không phải trong chính tả mà trong cách gõ chữ Việt. Chẳng hạn như chữ ơ thiếu dấu móc hoặc hai chữ gắn liền nhau. Giờ đọc lại thì thấy cách viết văn của Lê Hà Ngân hay. Những câu chuyện về tình cảm và xã hội ấn tượng. Trong “Một khoảng trời mây trắng”, tác giả đưa vào hai câu châm ngôn mà tôi chưa từng nghe qua: “Ừ lành thì làm gáo, vỡ thì làm muôi nhé!” và “Sông còn dò được khúc nông sâu mà lòng người không ai dò hết được”.

I enjoy Jones’s personal poems. I appreciate his openness on racism and same-sex experiences, but I find the connection with him on the grief for his mother. Reading “Saeed, How Dare You Make Your Mother into a Prelude” and “The Dead Dozens” makes me miss my mother so bad. I loved this collection.

Reporter James R. Hagerty has written more than 800 obituaries for the Wall Street Journal; therefore, he knows what it takes to write a life story. No one is better at telling your story than yourself and you can start writing right away. On this blog, I have a goodbye category, in which I write brief tributes to the people I had known. I also have a personal category, in which I write about my life. This blog is my obituary as well.

I read Timothy Goodman’s corny-ass love in Paris in one sitting. He’s right. The love is corny as fuck, but his prose saved the story. His writing is concise and lyrical. The art part is hard to read though. I skipped that.

Simone Stolzoff’s The Good Enough Job comes at the critical moment of my own career evaluation. I fell into the conventional wisdom of following my passion. I believed that if I worked hard at what I loved to do, I would become successful. I spent over 20 years of my career from a web designer fresh out of college to work my way up to become a design director. Now I am on the brink of losing everything. A director title doesn’t mean anything. I have come to accept that money, power, and privilege overrules passion. I am in the process of separating my identity from my job and my self-worth from my output. Fortunately, I am not alone and Stolzoff has the proof through his interviews with people who have burned out, become disillusioned, and find meaningless in what they do. It is an essential book for anyone who wants to reclaim their life from work.

Reading Hua Hsu’s memoir gives me nostalgia. Hsu is 45, my age; therefore, we listened to the same hip-hop songs from the early 90s. We were raised by Asian-immigrant parents. We had similar experiences growing up. Hsu had Ken and I had Đức.

When I first met Đức in high school, he embarrassed me. His jokes, his accents, and his hustlings somewhat irritated me. He bought stolen TI calculators from the Black kids for $10 or $20 a pop and resold it for $50. He sold me one for $30 so I was part of the problem. He was known for copying pre-calculus homeworks from our Vietnamese group. I often wondered how he would survive college if we were around to let him copy our homeworks. I would never find out.

Despite all of his flaws, Đức was a charming guy. Outside of the school, he was street smart. Our friendship grew. I welcomed him into our crew, which included my two Vietnamese friends I had known since middle school. To keep the story short, Đức drowned in a boating accident. He, his girlfriend, and I were in the same canoe. I can’t remember if there was a fourth person on it. The canoe flipped over when we stood up and clowning around. I was not a good swimmer; therefore, I grabbed a hold of the canoe. With the help of other friends from another canoe, we flipped the canoe over. His girlfriend and I got back on, but Đức was nowhere to be found. We thought he was pulling a prank at first. Two, three, four, five minutes later, we started to worry.

Like Hsu, I felt guilty about Đức’s death. It was also the first loss of someone so close to me. The incident haunted me many years later. Ken, Hsu’s friend, was tortured and brutally murdered. It is such a heartbreaking story.

Hsu won a Pulitzer Prize for this memoir. It’s a concise, heartfelt, page-turning read.

Airey’s Identity Designed delves into 16 different brands. My personal favorites are Ad Age and Rooster Beers. The book featured both texts and illustrations. The format is repetitive. The body text is set in Alegreya. The size is a bit too big; therefore, it doesn’t look as solid as it should. The text size should be a bit smaller. Avenir Next for big text is just fantastic.

Don Norman shifts his attention from The Design of Everyday Things to Design for a Better World. He challenges everyone, not just designers, to change from artificiality to humanity. We have the responsibility to design a meaningful and sustainable environment for ourselves as well as the future generations. Reading this book makes me want to move beyond designing for digital screens and into designing for a better world. As always, his writing is digestible, but my reading experience was quite slow—due to the typesetting. Gotham Book is a readable typeface, but I am not used to reading a 300-page book in a sans serif typeface.

The bulk of Daryl Fielding’s The Brand Book is on strategy. She only spent several pages on colors, logos, and typefaces. As a result, this book is more suitable for research than design. I didn’t enjoy the strategy part. Pizza United, the fictitious brand she came up with for the book, is lackluster. It is not the book I was looking forward to reading.

Seth Godin is a voracious blogger. He keeps his prose short and to the point. The Practice reads more like a collection of his blog posts randomly slapped together. I am 60 pages in and calling it quit. I just can’t retain any information from the book; therefore, I just can’t finish it. I am not sure why I had it on my Amazon wishlist when it just came out in 2020. Three years later, I picked up a copy in the library to give it a try. I removed it from my wishlist.