Winnie M Li:

The funny thing about being a novelist is that by the time you’re releasing a new book into the world, it’s been at least one or two years since you’ve done most of the creative thinking around it. So, a few years ago, when I was working intensely on What We Left Unsaid, I was reading a lot about Route 66 and road-trip narratives.

Now that my novel’s about to come out, I’m revisiting that territory by reading some of the books I never got around to the first time. Currently, I’m reading Miles to Go: An African Family In Search of America Along Route 66 by Brennen Matthews (editor of ROUTE, the Route 66 magazine), which offers an interesting take on race and the all-American road trip.

Themes of racial identity, belonging, and the American West also play a big part in my novel, so Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl by Hyeseung Song has been an evocative read for me and often resonates with my own experience. Next on my TBR list is The Translator’s Daughter by Grace Loh Prasad, a memoir detailing her family’s sudden emigration from Taiwan to America and her relationship with her birthplace.

The well-known Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer has been a slowly savored revelation for me. It offers an Indigenous perspective on our relationship to the American land and the natural world. It’s a good lesson for me in my own sustainability as an individual and how hard I can push myself to “be productive.”

But wait: Don’t I actually write fiction? Weirdly, I often read multiple nonfiction books in parallel but can only handle one novel at a time. (Something to do with character and plot and appreciating the craft in a novel.)

For novels, I’m enjoying Bitter Sweet by Hattie Williams, a beautifully voiced debut about a young woman in the publishing industry and all the intersections of class, gender, and power. Next, I’m looking forward to reading Audition by Katie Kitamura, Chrysalis by Anna Metcalfe, and Ecstasy by Ivy Pochoda (gotta love those single-word novel titles!).

I probably have a broad, eclectic reading diet, but it all goes into the pot somehow and emerges — miraculously, inexplicably — in my own fiction. I have no idea how that process works, but it’s part of the delightful mystery of writing. We’ll see what comes out next.

[Photo by Eleanor Lindsay-Fynn.]

Winnie M Li is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Birmingham (U.K.). She is the author of three novels, Dark Chapter, Complicit, and her latest, What We Left Unsaid, which follows three estranged Asian American adult siblings on an unpredictable road trip down Route 66.