#both has little to no ties to old money American colonial wealth but ALSO has no ties to the new money European reclamation movement

[thebestpartofwakingup]

The trade off of Quaker heritage pride is losing out on the family re-claim visa like 75% of other white libs get

[brigdh]

What did you just finish? Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan. A shallow, wealth-porn, frothy bauble of a book, but one which is lots of fun. Rachel Chu and Nicholas Young are both new professors at New York University (Nicholas in history, Rachel in economics, which I have to say seems like a weird choice for a character who spends the whole book being shocked by wealth) and have been dating for about two years, when Nicholas invites Rachel to come to Singapore with him for the summer, so he can participate in his best friend's wedding and she can meet his family. Rachel does so, only to discover that Nicholas is not generically middle-class as she'd always assumed, but rich. And not, like, normal rich, you guys: crazy rich. The rest of the book consists of Rachel gawking at the possessions of Nicholas's family and friends: private jets, personal islands, hotel chains, uncounted maids and drivers and servants, clothes from every top-name designer you can image, antiques and art and mansions and skyscrapers and on and on. Not all is absurdly wealthy bliss, however: various unmarried women try to drive Rachel away so that they can claim Nicholas for themselves, and Nicholas's mother is determined to keep her out of the family. She's shocked enough that Nicholas would marry beneath himself when she assumes Rachel is one of the Taiwanese plastics Chus (such trashy new money!); you can imagine how she feels when she realizes Rachel is actually the daughter of a single-mother real estate agent from Palo Alto, California. Meanwhile, the wedding brings to town every cousin, aunt, uncle, old childhood friend, ex-partner, and business connection from around the world back to town (seriously, this book has an oppressively long character list), and Nicholas's cousin Astrid, who also fell in love outside of the Singaporean elite, is dealing with the breakdown of her own marriage. The whole thing is a bit of a forgettable guilty pleasure, the sort where most of the fun comes from watching people who have such a vastly different lifestyle than me or anyone I know, like Gossip Girl or that Downtown Abbey scene where Maggie Smith asks "What is a week-end?" – except for the fact that pretty much every speaking character is Asian. Still, even if it's silly, it's a fun, fast-moving read. I will confess that my favorite part ended up being the footnotes, where Kwan translates the occasional word or phrase in Mandarin, Malaysian, Hokkien, or other languages and explains references to Singaporean places and people. A few of the ones that made me laugh: Malay slang used to express shock or exasperation like “oh dear” or “oh my God.” Alamak and lah are the two most commonly used slang words in Singapore. (Lah is a suffix that can be used at the end of any phrase for emphasis, but there’s no good explanation for why people use it, lah.) Among Singapore’s upper crust, only two boys’ schools matter: Anglo-Chinese School (ACS) and Raffles Institution (RI). Both are consistently ranked among the top schools in the world and have enjoyed a long, heated rivalry. RI, established in 1823, is known to attract the brainy crowd, while ACS, established in 1886, is popular with the more fashionable set and somewhat perceived to be a breeding ground for snobs. Much of this has to do with the 1980 article in the Sunday Nation entitled “The Little Horrors of ACS,” which exposed the rampant snobbery among its pampered students. This led to a shamed principal announcing to stunned students (including this author) the very next morning during assembly that, henceforth, students were no longer allowed to be dropped off at the front entrance by their chauffeurs. (They had to walk up the short driveway all by themselves, unless it was raining.) Expensive watches, eyeglasses, fountain pens, briefcases, satchels, pencil boxes, stationery, combs, electronic gadgets, comic books, and any other luxury items would also be banned from school property. (But within a few months, Lincoln Lee started wearing his Fila socks again and no one seemed to notice.) The exotic Black and White houses of Singapore are a singular architectural style found nowhere else in the world. Combining Anglo-Indian features with the English Arts and Crafts movement, these white-painted bungalows with black trim detailing were ingeniously designed for tropical climes. Originally built to house well-to-do colonial families, they are now extremely coveted and available only to the crazy rich ($40 million for starters, and you might have to wait several decades for a whole family to die). Overall I'd really only recommend the book to someone in need of a mindless beach read. In particular the ending is left unresolved; I know there's a sequel, but even for a book in the midst of a series I'd expect more loose ends to be tied up than what we got here. That said, I haven't seen the movie yet, and I suspect it's the sort of story where good actors can make all the difference, simply by fleshing out these somewhat-cardboard characters. Driving to Geronimo’s Grave by Joe Lansdale. A collection of six short stories by an author mostly known for capturing the spirit of rural east Texas, both in historical and modern fiction. In the title story, a brother and sister run afoul of a bank robber in Oklahoma during the Great Depression. This one had an excellent first-person narrator and a great sense of humor. In the Mad Mountains is a surprisingly straightforward Lovecraft pastiche, with hints of the Titanic's sinking and Amelia Earhart's disappearance mixing with the cosmic horrors. There's no twists or revisionism here; you could almost mistake this one for actual Lovecraft, except that Lansdale is much better at writing well-rounded characters. Though that's a low bar. Robo Rapid is an old-fashioned, surprisingly cozy YA post-apocalyptic story – more Edgar Rice Burroughs than Hunger Games – with a girl heading out on an adventure across a vast and unknown desert. The Projectionist is darker than the other stories; a noir tale of mobsters and unrequited obsession. Everything Sparkles in Hell is probably my favorite of the six. It reminded me a bit of Django Unchained, having a similar sort of violent humor tucked into a revisionist Western. A black bounty hunter and his Native American buddy track down four murderers, at least until a man-killing grizzly bear and a massive snowstorm complicate matters. Wrestling Jesus is the only story of these that I'd before; it was published in the Dangerous Women anthology and I have to say that I really disliked it there. A bullied teen is semi-adopted by an elderly ex-wrestler, who teaches him how to fight in between preparing for his own big match – he and another man have a rivalry going back decades where they compete for the attentions of a beautiful woman. Read as a story explicitly about a 'dangerous woman' it's a disaster, since a) the woman only appears in one scene, where b) she's literally a prize to be fought over by men. Read by itself, it's a fine story about a father-son relationship. Or it would be, if Lansdale hadn't included a long afterword complaining about the bad reviews he got for the anthology. Don't write a story that so blatantly misses the point and then get upset when people say you missed the point, dude! I hate it when authors I like act like dingbats in their nonfictional writings. But with all that said, this is a very nice collection of stories, with a surprising diversity of tones and settings. I've long been a fan of Lansdale's Hap & Leonard series, but this book would make a good introduction for newcomers. I read this as an ARC via NetGalley. What are you currently reading? Jade City by Fonda Lee. This book has been described as "Hong Kong gangster movie, but fantasy". I just started it this morning so I can't say more than that, but really, what more do you need?