The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu 📚
This book was another gift to me by my wife’s cousin (who has a sci-fi podcast), and I totally loved it. I started slow, and was not hooked at first… but I think that was just a result of me coming out of a reading slump. Which this book fixed!
I never really “got” short stories when we studied them in school. Whatever the lesson/moral of the story we were supposed to get out of the story always seemed pretty arbitrary. Like, how on earth was I supposed to pick up on what Flannery O’Connor was thinking? My teachers interpretations always seemed like such a stretch.
Because of this, I have kind of ignored the medium. But in the last few years, I’ve started a) reading the short fiction in the New Yorker with much more regularity and b) reading monthly comic books, which are essentially graphic short stories.
So I was primed, a bit, to open this collection — and I am glad I gave it a shot. Great stories, filled with heart. Ken Liu is a Chinese American, and his perspective is a total gift to both cultures. I learned a lot about Chinese and Chinese American culture. It also made me reflect on American values with wider perspective than I usually have… I don’t think I’ve ever read a sci-fi story that quotes Alexis De Tocqueville!
These stories were great. I recommend them to anyone who enjoys fiction.