Ocean Vương’s début novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, is 256 pages. His follow-up novel, The Emperor of Gladness, is almost 400 pages. Whereas Briefly Gorgeous is brief and poetic, Gladness is attentive and emotional. His writing is still poetic and his characters come to life. As an immigrant from Việt Nam, I can relate to the protagonist Hải.

His description of HomeMarket reminds me of Homestyle Country Cooking in Park City Center in the 90s. I started out as a cashier, but wanted to learn how to cook homestyle country dishes. When I switched to the kitchen, my job was to put pre-made food on the plates and hit the bell to tell the servers to serve their customers. The food was not homemade at all.

I must confess. Trying to read a 400-page book these days is not easy. It takes patience and concentration. I tried to slow down my pace a bit so I could understand the stories. With Gladness, it was worthwhile to slow down so I could stay with stories a bit longer. Since I had read pretty much anything Vương had published, I find this book to be his best work up to date. It is a beautiful, soul-searching, and sweeping read.

After watching all the seasons of Cobra Kai, Xuân wants to take up karate. I let him try out Vovinam last Sunday and he seemed to want to go for it. Xuân is athletic and when he commits to something he will stick with it.

Now that he’s taking summer break from school, he swims every morning and competes every Saturday and Monday. He wants to take up Vovinam on Sunday too. Even after swimming, he wants me to take him to the skatepark so he can ride his scooter. My rollerblade skills are stagnant, but his riding skills continue to progress. He keeps trying out and picking up new tricks. I am just in awe to see how much he has improved.

In the winter, we both skied and snowboarded. He picked up snowboarding fast. Last season alone, he progressed from the green trails to the double-black terrains. He might drop skiing and just stick with snowboarding, but I encouraged him to stay with both. We’ll see.

He still takes piano lesson every Wednesday. After the lesson, we would hit the skatepark for an hour before heading home. Xuân and I do many things together. He keeps my old-ass active and I appreciate him for that.

His older brothers think I am favoring him, but I am not. My invitation is always open for them to hang out with us, but they rather spend time on their digital devices. I cannot force them to do things they don’t want to do. The days of all of us hanging out together were long gone. Of course, I missed those days, but I had come to term that not everyone had the same interests.

While excelling at physical activities, Xuân needs help with his academics. Then again, he listens to me when I ask him to blog everyday during the summer to practice his writing. He is doing it. I will also need to help him with reading as well. If he is willing to make the commitment, I am sure he will catch up quickly.

Joshua Rothman writes for the New Yorker:

Today, the nature of reading has shifted. Plenty of people still enjoy traditional books and periodicals, and there are even readers for whom the networked age has enabled a kind of hyper-literacy; for them, a smartphone is a library in their pocket. For others, however, the old-fashioned, ideal sort of reading—intense, extended, beginning-to-end encounters with carefully crafted texts—has become almost anachronistic. These readers might start a book on an e-reader and then continue it on the go, via audio narration. Or they might forgo books entirely, spending evenings browsing Apple News and Substack before drifting down Reddit’s lazy river. There’s something both diffuse and concentrated about reading now; it involves a lot of random words flowing across a screen, while the lurking presence of YouTube, Fortnite, Netflix, and the like insures that, once we’ve begun to read, we must continually choose not to stop.

This shift has taken decades, and it’s been driven by technologies that have been disproportionately adopted by the young. Perhaps for these reasons, its momentousness has been obscured. In 2023, the National Endowment for the Arts reported that, over the preceding decade, the proportion of adults who read at least one book a year had fallen from fifty-five per cent to forty-eight per cent. That’s a striking change, but modest compared to what’s happened among teen-agers: the National Center for Education Statistics—which has recently been gutted by the Trump Administration—found that, over roughly the same period, the number of thirteen-year-olds who read for fun “almost every day” fell from twenty-seven per cent to fourteen per cent. Predictably, college professors have been complaining with more than usual urgency about phone-addled students who struggle to read anything of substantial length or complexity.

I must also confess. It is hard for me to read a long book these days.

Ocean Vương talks to Björk for Bomb magazine about his new novel:

I was really frustrated by people telling me I had to create drastic change at the end of my fiction, à la Aristotle. That payoff felt closer to commerce: the way you buy a washing machine and it promises to change your life. The boy gets the girl. They find the killer in the end. Rags to riches. When I looked at my life, my family, the people in my community, I realized nobody lives like that. My aunt has worked the same job and driven the same car and lived in the same house for twenty years … That’s not a bad life. That’s a decent life. People aren’t failures because they’re “stuck.” Most of American life is a kind of stuckness, and so much of our culture wants us to make all of that into a winsome, sanguine hope. Optimism for optimism’s sake. And yet the majority of history is filled with people who did not start revolutions, who didn’t break out of the abusive relationship, who got stuck fighting in wars that they didn’t believe in. Most of history consists of people who are trapped by what they are but who still try their best. I wanted to write about kindness without hope, where people know that kindness will make no significant change in their lives and yet they commit to it anyway. I knew that no character would get a better job or have a grand epiphany at the end of this book. They end exactly where they started, but they are transformed, internally, because of each other.

I told my editors that this is my slump book. (laughter) I don’t know if it’s going to do well. It doesn’t do any of the things that American fiction usually depends on to sell units. There’s no thing to grab at the end. When you buy a bag of potato chips, you at least know you’ll get sixteen ounces of potato chips, whereas I can’t promise that anybody will get anything from this book.

I am almost done with the book.

Yesterday, I bid farewell to an acquaintance for the last time. I hadn’t seen him for a few years and he was hardly recognizable in his coffin. Cancer had eaten him up. Just a push of a button and he was nothing but ashes. He was 69 years old and barely had a chance to enjoy his retirement.

These days, everything seems to be uncertain. I can’t get a grip of my anxiety. Everything I care about seems to be drifting away. As I am aging, the people around me are dying from cancer, stroke, or diabete. Some form of terminal illnesses would catch up to me.

I sound morbid, but I accepted death. I can’t cheat death. When it is time for me to go, just put me in a carton box and press the button. Let me return to ashes. No need for a fancy coffin. No need for any services. No need for visitation. No need to shed a tear for me. Just let me go.

For now, I need to make peace with myself. I need to stop worrying and start living. I don’t have control of anything else, but my own mind. People who hate me, let them hate me. Nothing I can do about it. When my oldest sister decided to sever ties with me, I granted her wish. Even when we had to meet at family gatherings, I just looked the other way. Fuck her. I don’t have any obligations left for her.

I do have obligations with my kids. They are still under my supervision. Once they grow enough feathers and wings, I won’t stop them from flying away. Though I am always here for them until I am no longer on this earth.

My oldest son chastised me for making him write 500 words a day during the summer. I believe the more you write, the better you will become. I am not asking him to become a professional writer. I just want him to practice writing as a communication tool. Furthermore, I wanted to get him into a routine and take responsibility.

Besides, he does nothing in the summer. He doesn’t want to do anything around the house. He doesn’t want to get a part-time job. He doesn’t want to volunteer. He doesn’t want to play any sports. Asking to him to help his younger brothers with reading, he gets all grumpy. Asking him to tutor them Spanish, he groaned. What does he want to do all day long? Playing video games with his friends and created some 3D graphics. Basically, he just wants to spend most of his waking hours on screen.

Writing 500 words for him takes less than an hour. He still has about 15 hours a day to play video games and doing 3D modeling and yet he doesn’t have enough. Maybe I should just limit his screen hours, but I wanted him to take the responsibility for himself. I wouldn’t ask him to write if he has something else to do other than being a screen addict.

It breaks my heart to see my kids don’t do anything else other than spending time gluing to their screens. They are wasting their time away. Maybe I don’t know how to be a father, but I don’t want to raise spoiled kids who don’t have any aspirations. At 16, he shows no sign of responsibility and independence.

He has everything provided to him. When he asked for a laptop, we gave him a laptop. When he asked for a better laptop, we gave him a better laptop. When he asked for a phone, we gave him a phone. When he asked for a better phone, we gave him a better phone. It was my fault for placing my trust in him. I thought he would do better when he has what he needs. I thought he would control himself, but he didn’t.

At times, I am so fed up that I should just let him do whatever he wants. Deep down in my heart, I care too damn much to see him ruing his life. I get nothing but hate and disrespect for loving and caring. I don’t think I am being to hard on him. In fact, I think I am fairly flexible. He can do whatever he wants as long as he does something, but spending all day on screens is not acceptable. Then again, maybe I should let him make his own decisions. I should let him live his own life and don’t even say a word. I don’t expect anything from him. I just want him to be able to stand on his own feet. If he doesn’t need my guidance, I am fine with it. If he messes up, that’s on him.

Dear Khandice & Henry,

Congratulations on your big day! From reading your story on your wedding website, we can tell that you two are madly in love with each other. The wedding is just the beginning. The journey ahead will fill with joy, but also challenges—take it from our 17 years of experience. What had helped us weathered the storm was two bars from a Vietnamese timeless ballad written by the great late Lê Uyên Phương:

Rồi mai đây đi trên đường đời
Đừng buông tay âm thầm tìm về cô đơn.

Later, on the journey through life,
Don’t let go of my hand to seek your quiet solitude.

When things get rough, just hold on and don’t let go of your hands.

Love,

Auntie HaiDung & Uncle Donny

In her latest Netflix special, Sarah Silverman turned grief into comedy and she delivered it brilliantly sentence by sentence. Her stories were deeply personal and you can feel in authenticity in her telling. I didn’t know her parents at all, but their humors had stuck with me even after the special was over. Dying is not a joke, joking on dying takes tremendous risk. Fortunately Silverman pulls it of. I was watching it for about 10 minutes during my lunch breaks. I felt interrupted. I am going to have to dedicate the entire hour rewatching it.

Writing an entire book on an album is no easy feat, and yet Emily Mackay pulls it off with Björk’s Homogenic. Mackay delves into the technical details of making the album and Björk’s thought process and her vision. The materials were also drawn from Mackay’s interviews with Björk and the musicians who lent a hand in making this album. As a music appreciator, particularly Björk music, I enjoyed reading this book immensely. I’ll definitely look for more of the 33 ⅓ for more music writing.

Lệ Quyên tiếp tục chinh phục dòng nhạc bolero với giọng hát chín muồi. Khi cô cất lên, “Tuổi đời chân đơn côi / Gót mòn đại lộ buồn / Đèn đêm bóng mờ nhạt nhòa”, phong cách rất Lệ Quyên hiện ra rõ rệt tuy ca từ của nhạc sĩ Tô Thanh Tùng đã quá quen thuộc. Và đó chính là vũ khí bí ẩn của cô khi hát nhạc trữ tình. Ngoài giọng hát, Lệ Quyên còn chịu đầu tư vào phần hoà âm phối khí. Ca khúc “Thương hoài ngàn năm” của Phạm Mạnh Cương được dàn nhạc orchestra đệm cho tiếng hát của cô. Lệ Quyên không phải là một ca sĩ sáng tạo để đem đến người nghe những gì mới lạ. Cô chỉ muốn làm tim người nghe nhạc Việt rung động và đến Khúc tình xưa 6 cô vẫn thành công.