Book Bingo 2025

[przed]

To motivate myself to read more and doomscroll less, I thought I'd borrow the book bingo card dorinda found on Tumblr.

My first book of the year is for the category I thought I'd struggle with: literary fiction. I've long since lost patience with a lot of books that fall under literary fiction. I've wanted to wing more than one Booker Prize-winning book across the room. (How Late It Was, How Late and Possession, I'm looking at both of you.) It's not that I don't like experimental fiction. Absalom, Absalom, as effed up as it is, is one of my favourite books. But there's a certain brand of self-serious fiction that just irks me.

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu is not one of those books. It's very experimental, but in a playful way, but also has a lot of ideas going on. It follows the story of Willis Wu, a Generic Asian Guy in the world of a TV cop show who just wants to be Kung Fu Guy. Sometimes the book is in screenplay form, when Willis is playing a role, and sometimes it's like a regular novel. And it digs into both the history of the Chinese in America, and what kind of representation Chinese Americans have been allowed. That makes it sound too serious, but it's also a lot of fun.

Taika Waititi's production company also made a mini-series of the book that's on Hulu/Disney+ starring Jimmy O. Yang, who is a standup comic I very much adore (I've got tickets to see his show in April!), so I'm curious to see what they've made of the book.