Year of the Asian Reading Challenge 2019: Sign-Up, Progress Tracker, my tentative TBR (feat. interactive polls + more!)

I love Asian books.

Shockingly, this comes as a surprise to … no one, lmao.

There have been so many great Asian books as of late, and even though I’ve been (in my opinion) really good at keeping up with the Asian books I want to read, there are still quite a few I still want to read.

So when I saw this challenge centering around reading books by Asian authors hosted by Shealea @ Shut Up Shealea, CW @ the Quiet Pond, Lily @ Sprinkles of Dreams and Vicky @ Vicky Who Reads (all of whom are amazing humans who you should all totally follow), I knew I had to participate.

This post is going to serve as three things: my sign-up post, my progress tracker and a tentative list of books I would like to read for this challenge. I was initially going to make this part of my 2019 Reading Challenges page, but I figured since this is a reading challenge near and dear to my heart, that it should get a separate post of its own.

I’m aiming for the Malayan Tapir level, which is reading 21-30 books. Look at that graphic! CW is so talented (also yay for fellow Malaysian bloggers!) I’d love to go higher, but since I’ve read the majority of the Asian books on my radar/TBR, it makes going higher even more ambitious. I was going to aim for the Giant Panda (31-40 books), but I think it’s pretty unrealistic (part of me wanting to aim for that was because of that adorable panda and my love of pandas, ngl.) As I’m writing this, I’m already doubting my ability to achieve this.

I Finally Posted A Review aka Girls of Paper and Fire by Natasha Ngan

★★★★½

The hype was right, you guys. This book is as phenomenal as everyone has been saying it is and I love this book so much. Do yourself a favor and pick it up now. If you’re one of those people that haven’t heard anything about this book, get hold of a copy (if you can, of course) and read it now. You will have no regrets.

Discussion: The Manon Ethnicity Drama and Representation of Marginalized Communities in S.J Maas’ Books

I normally love funny and light-hearted posts, but today’s post is not going to be that.

Today’s post is going to be about something very near and dear to my heart: diversity and representation in literature and how it is handled. But more specifically, I want to take an opportunity to rant about my thoughts on how  Sarah J. Maas (the author of modern fantasy classics such as Throne of Glass, A Court of Thorns and Roses among other white-centric, heteronormative fantasies) has handled diversity and marginalization with her characters in Throne of Glass. I’ve been wanting to do this post for a long time and to discuss the hypocrisy and the hurt that it’s caused to me, and other members of the community.

My First TTT – My Favourite Asian Bloggers

As I will never shut up about, I’m Asian. You guys are all-stars from repeatedly reading this sentence. Specifically, I’m Southeast Asian (Malaysian Chinese). I’ve wanted to do Top Ten Tuesday for ages (because, hype) and when I saw this prompt, I thought this post was not only a good way to spread the love for the book blogosphere, but also to make it the second article in my Asian blog series, I guess, where I talk about my favourite Asian members of the book community. No shade to people of other minorities and groups, but I just wanted to take a moment (meaning, a post) to commemorate Asian bloggers.

And being on brand as usual, I’m late with posting this. I literally had so much going on that my blog was being pushed to the backburner … is that a bad thing? So without further ado, here are some of my favorite Asian bloggers.

Celebrating Asians Everywhere- Start of a new blog series?? + Discussion

So if you all didn’t know, there was recently a fiasco on Twitter where an influential WOC author implied that she didn’t consider Asians WoC. To a lot of people, this probably doesn’t mean anything, but to me, and so many Asians out there, this is not only extremely upsetting and harmful, but it’s going to be problematic to Asians in the future. (Please look it up on Twitter, there are still records on what the author said but the author herself have simply erased these Tweets).