Monthly Reading Review: February 2025
Recommended books and articles from the past month.
Dear friends,
I am delighted to share my next Monthly Reading Review, covering the best books and articles I’ve read over the past month. Scroll down to read my review of Real Americans by Rachel Khong (
) — plus some must-read articles from writers I love!
Real Americans by Rachel Khong
It is a little-known fact that the seed of the lotus flower can survive dormant for generations, sometimes for thousands of years. Rachel Khong’s second novel, Real Americans, begins with one such seed that purportedly belonged to Qin Shi Huang — the first emperor of united China, who was believed to have snatched the seed from the mouth of a dragon. Vested with magical powers, the seed was prized for centuries until it vanished during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, along with every vestige of China’s ancient history.
From there, Khong goes on to tell the story of three generations of a Chinese American family, whose DNA may (or may not) feature aspects of the seed’s magic. There is the matriarch, May — a gifted geneticist who escaped Mao’s China, trading true love for a stable life in the United States, albeit with the “wrong man.” Her only child is Lily, whom we meet in 1999 as an unpaid intern living in New York, where “every encounter [is] a transaction, requiring money.” Like Lily’s boyfriend and future husband Matthew — the WASP-y scion of a business empire — Lily has been formed like a stone in a river, “washed over by [her] parents’ expectations.” Neither fully American nor fully Chinese, she finds it difficult to talk to her parents, or even tell them that she loves them. Later as a mother herself, she strives to break this cycle, though her son Nick feels suffocated by the pressure of being his “mother’s precious only son.”
Through May, Lily, and Nick, Khong asks whether love is a “sturdy enough scaffolding for life” while interrogating our impulse to “relentlessly” want more, even when we have everything we’ve ever wanted. In doing so, she compels us to contemplate the ethical bounds of consumerism, nepotism, and scientific discovery, poking holes in the American ethos that enables us to “value certain lives over others.” In the end, what emerges is a novel about our human quest for control. Sometimes, this control resembles communism, and other times it resembles capitalism; sometimes it resembles love, and other times it resembles hate. But it is control, nevertheless.
Real Americans is the kind of book you fall asleep with, hugging, because you can’t bear the thought of it ending. In it, Khong manages to do the impossible, delivering both a page turner and a heart-piercing saga that’s sure to make anyone fall in love with reading again.
Must-Read Articles
Kids Aren’t Commodities by
(The Atlantic)No One Holds a Grudge Like Taylor Swift by E. J. Dickson (The Cut)
Should You Be Religious by Joshua Rothman (The New Yorker)
That Pandemic Drowning Feeling Is Back by
(The Cut)
Must-Read Articles on Substack
I Want to Be a Mom One Day But I Haven’t Written a Book Yet by
(Liminal Space)Read This When You’ve Lost Faith in Humans by
(The Quiet Life)The Loneliest Decades of Our Lives by
(Culture Study)Going to War on Humanism by
(Meghan O’Rourke)
Happy reading!
Your friend and fellow traveler,
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