Review: Wild Swans (by Jung Chang)

My Rating: 3 stars 

Even though I’ve had Jung Chang’s memoir Wild Swans on my TBR for a long time, I only recently decided to read it when I received an ARC of the sequel Fly, Wild Swans (which comes out later this month) due to the fact that I’m a bit of a stickler when it comes to reading books within a series in order.  My original plan was to read Wild Swans, then read its sequel right afterwards, but I faced a dilemma, as Chang’s memoir is long (500+ pages) and with all the other books on my list that I also wanted to get to, I wasn’t sure how I would be able to squeeze this one in.  But then I remembered my plan to incorporate more audiobooks into my reading life in 2026, so I decided to read this one on audio. 

Going into this book, I was excited at first, as it was a bestseller when it was first released back in 1991 and nowadays the book is considered a modern classic.  The reviews have also been largely positive and the book continues to maintain a high rating across multiple platforms.  So essentially, I had high expectations and was expecting to like this one as much as everyone else did.  It turns out though, that I’m one of the outliers who didn’t enjoy this book much and while I didn’t DNF it, I did end up skipping parts of it (more on this later). 

In hindsight, I probably should have done more research before choosing to go with the audiobook, as reading the book in that format contributed hugely to why the book wasn’t a good reading experience for me. Given the book’s subject matter and the knowledge that there would be a lot of untranslated Chinese words in the book, I was totally expecting the audiobook narrator to be Chinese or at least have a solid enough grasp of the Chinese language to be able to pronounce names, places, and other untranslated words/phrases correctly.  Since this was a minimum requirement that I took for granted (aka I thought it was common sense that you have someone who knows the language narrate the book), I didn’t bother looking up who the narrator would be and went straight into listening to the Introduction.  Twenty minutes in, when the narrator started butchering the Chinese pronunciations, I did what I should have done earlier – look up who the narrator was (turns out she is an American actress of Korean descent).  Of course I was disappointed but I decided to stick with it hoping that the narration would get better – unfortunately, it didn’t, as not only did the narrator fail to pronounce any of the Chinese words correctly (the pronunciation was so off that I had to switch to the actual book to figure out what word she was trying to say), her delivery was also robotic and emotionless. At some point, I realized what the narration reminded me of – one of those voices on a pre-recorded telephone answering machine (press.one.for.English, press.two.for.Chinese…).  It got to the point where I would cringe each time the narrator said something in Chinese (needless to say, the “skip forward by 30 seconds” button became my best friend for this book, lol) – after a while, I developed a strategy of starting each chapter in audio, then switching to the Kindle version halfway through the chapter so at least I could still get some of the audio experience and not have it completely go to waste.

Aside from the audiobook narration being a definite “miss,” the book itself was well-written, though way too long in my opinion.  Some parts were engaging, especially the earlier sections about Chang’s grandmother and her journey going from a warlord’s concubine to the wife of a humble doctor, but the later parts about Chang’s parents and herself – basically the chapters that described in detail what life in China was like after Mao took over – I found to be really tedious (and at times boring).  I’m thinking this is because I was already very familiar with everything Chang wrote about in these sections – being Chinese myself and having relatives who had lived through those turbulent (and horrific) Mao years first hand, I grew up listening to them recount nearly identical experiences, so none of what Chang recounted was “new” or surprising to me.  Halfway through the book, I realized I was probably not the target audience for this book – it seemed to me that this was written more for a Western audience that was perhaps less familiar with modern Chinese history and the atrocities that occurred under Mao’s rule (which makes sense considering this book came out in the early 90s, when China wasn’t too far removed from the isolationist policies that Mao had imposed on the country for nearly 3 decades, with the country only starting to “open up” a few years after Mao’s death in 1976). It was also because of this deep familiarity with the book’s subject matter that, ultimately, I ended up skimming larger swaths of the book, as it was getting to be too much to have to “revisit” those harrowing experiences in such excruciating detail – though admittedly, part of this was timing too, as many of us spent most of last year dealing with similar feelings of anger / frustration / grief over the divisive political climate in our country currently and I don’t know about others, but I don’t want to start my new year reading about people blindly worshipping horrific, delusional, god-like leaders and engaging in all manner of cruel behavior as a result, thank you very much.

At this point, I am most likely not going to read this book’s sequel as originally planned, as all indication so far is that the sequel is in a similar vein and I honestly don’t think I can take another couple hundred pages of the same kind of stuff any time soon (it also doesn’t help that the reviews of the sequel have been largely “not great” so definitely makes me less motivated to read it).

Since part of my less-than-enjoyable experience reading this book was more of a “it’s me rather than the book,” issue, in all fairness, I decided to go for the “happy medium” of 3 stars for the rating.  Those who are interested in this one should definitely pick it up, though I would suggest going with the print or e-book version instead of the audiobook if possible.

Review: Jane Austen's Bookshelf (by Rebecca Romney)

My Rating: 5 stars 

Happy New Year!

My first read of the year is actually a book I started during the last week of 2025.  Rebecca Romney’s Jane Austen’s Bookshelf was part of my December “Jane Austen read-a-thon” project to commemorate Austen’s (one of my favorite authors) 250^th birthday and my original intention was to finish reading it by the end of the year.  But that didn’t end up happening and I’m not sad about it at all because instead of rushing through the book, I was able to really savor it.

Romney’s central goal with this book is to understand and explore the women writers who came before Austen and, in many cases, not only had an outsized influence on Austen’s work, but were also counted among the author’s favorites (as per her own letters) -- yet over the years, these writers had largely been either “erased” or “excluded” from the Western canon.  Romney is very honest about the fact that, throughout her life, she regularly purchased and read books written by “authoritative” surveyors of literature who claimed that Austen was the “first great woman writer in English” – aka there were no female writers in English who came before her and even if there were, none of them lived up to her genius so they weren’t worth reading. As a rare book seller (and collector) and huge Austen fan, Romney decided to “right her wrong” so to speak by utilizing her “tools of the trade” to investigate why these women writers – almost all of whom are mentioned in either Austen’s novels or her personal letters -- had disappeared from most literary discourse (outside of dedicated academic scholarship). This quote from the book’s introduction perfectly sums up Romney’s project: “As repayment for what she had given me, I hoped I could offer Austen this in return: a collection that reunites the novels she read, and a book honoring her own favorite authors…I wanted to know who these women were, what they wrote, and why they were no longer part of the canon.  I would read their books and I would collect copies that appealed to me for their historical interest.  I would fill Jane Austen’s Bookshelf.”

This is a fascinating book that not only serves as a “primer” of sorts on 18^th century female novelists, but also a delightful glimpse into the world of rare book collecting (something which I had no knowledge of previously).  Romney begins the book with a chapter on Jane Austen (of course), then traces her “literary ancestry” with chapters on Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, Hannah More, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Maria Edgeworth.  Romney doesn’t just provide biographical details about each writer though – she also reads the works by each of these authors and teases out the connection to Austen (some are more obvious due to direct references that Austen herself made, while others are inferred though highly plausible references). Reading this book from the perspective of a fellow Austen fan and someone who had also studied British literature in some capacity, it’s obvious to me that Romney had done her research (and done it well!), as she situates each author in the historical period of their time while also incorporating important historical and literary contexts to support her arguments.  For me though, what makes this book stand apart from other Austen-themed literary-analysis type books is the way she incorporates her own personal experience – observations from her profession in the rare book collecting space as well as detailed analysis from her own extensive reading of both Austen’s works and each author’s – to convincingly argue why these forgotten writers should be more widely read.  More importantly, she does so in way that’s sincere, witty, relatable, and easily accessible – enough scholarly detail to put it at the same level as academic literary criticism, yet written in a down-to-earth manner where it doesn’t feel like I’m reading literary criticism at all.

Reading this book not only makes me see Austen’s works in a new light, it has also gotten me interested in reading these authors’ works as well.  The way Romney describes these works and her experiences reading them, as well as her observations of the connections to Austen’s works, honestly fascinated me to the point that I wanted to experience these “source texts” for myself (one of the things I did after I finished reading was to immediately put these authors’ novels on my TBR).  This book is one of the best modern-day analyses of Austen’s works that I’ve read so far and definitely a worthy entry into the canon (if there is one) of Austen scholarship.  With that said, the biggest takeaway I got from this book is the importance of reading something because we “want to” rather than because we “should” (i.e.: it’s part of the “classics” canon).  I absolutely love this section from Romney’s concluding chapter: “Building this collection led me to question the canon.  I did not throw it out, but I’ve learned the confidence to distinguish between the taste of ‘authorities’ and my own.  Look into the past and read whatever resonates with you, not what we’re told are the ‘best’ authors.  You don’t have to read any of the books I read in my investigation.  [Italo] Calvino argues that, outside of school, ‘we don’t read classics out of duty or respect, only read out of love’.”   Wonderfully stated words of wisdom that I know will stay with me for a long time to come.

P.S.:  Romney’s book inspired me to take a quick look back at the course I took a few months ago on 18^th Century British Literature for my English Literature degree – sure enough, there was only one female writer covered in that course (yes, you guessed it – Jane Austen).  This also led me down the rabbit hole of checking out syllabi for courses on 18^th century British Literature from various schools and indeed, there are few (if any) female writers covered in those (Austen is actually not in many of those syllabi either, as some consider her a 19^th century writer due to most of her novels being published after 1800).  From what I could see based on my own studies as well as glancing through these syllabi is that the “canon” when it comes to 18^th century British Literature consists mostly of Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Henry Fielding, Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, Samuel Richardson, and a rotation of other male poets/playwrights/writers – some more obscure and less prolific than the women writers discussed in Romney’s book.  All this tells me that Romney was definitely on to something with her project!