Hi guys! I’m up bright and early to tell you about the readathon I joined for May! May, as some might know, is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, and in honor of that Cindy from Read With Cindy has created a month-long readathon to get people inspired to read books written by Asian authors, includes Asian characters, or has some kind of Asian content.

Now more than ever with pandemic-fueled xenophobia and hate crimes happening all around, it’s important to show our Asian community some love and solidarity—which obviously should be happening on the daily and not just for a singular month—and this is a really great and fun way to not only support Asian authors, but also learn more about cultures and heritages that differ from our own, which is a huge reason why I gravitate to books written by POC in general. So when I found out about this readathon via Booktube, I was ALL IN. Henry and Chooch were like, “Oh my god, get out of her way.”

There are prompts/challenges that you can follow, or you can just be like me and compulsively add all of the Asian authors to your To Be Read shelf that are available!

I will post Cindy’s explanation video here, but I also wanted to list the books I chose, mostly to hold myself accountable to actually reading them but also to give some inspiration and recommendations to anyone considering maybe picking up one or two for themselves – come on, you know you want to get in on this!

The books that I currently have available, all queued up and ready to go:

• Miracle Creek – Angie Kim (Korean American; currently reading)
• Hotel Iris – Yoko Ogawa (Japanese; currently reading)
• Life – Lu Yao (Chinese)
• Braised Pork – An Yu (Chinese)
• The Girl in the Tree – Sebnem Isiguzel (Turkish)
• My Year of Meats – Ruth Ozeki (Japanese)
• I Believe in a Thing Called Love – Maurene Goo (Korean American)
• A Thousand Beginnings and Endings – multi-genre anthology of short stories by modern YA authors of Asian heritage.
• The Book of M – Peng Shepherd (Indian/American)
• Tiny Pretty Things – Sona Charaipotra (Indian)
• This Time Will Be Different – Misa Sugiura (Japanese American)
• Your House Will Pay – Steph Cha (Korean American)
• The Stationery Shop – Marjan Kamali (Iranian)
• Rebel Seoul – Axie Oh (Korean American)

Ones I have on hold:

• I Love You So Mochi – Sarah Kuhn (Japanese)
• Anna K – Jenny Lee (Korean American)
• Kim Jinyoung, Born 1982 – Cho Nam-Joo (Korean)
• Do Not Say We Have Nothing – Madeleine Thien (Chinese Canadian)
• In Order to Live – Yeonmi Park (Korean)
• Wrath & the Dawn – Renee Ahdieh (Korean American)
• Written in the Stars – Aisha Saeed (Pakistani American)
• Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line – Deepa Anappara (Indian, this one has like a 7 week wait so I likely won’t have it in time for the readathon, sadly)

Here’s a handy document of Asian authors and books that Cindy and others have compiled to give you that nudge you might need. 

And finally, here’s Cindy’s explanatory video:

If you’re thinking of participating, let me know! Maybe we can buddy-read one of these books together?!

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