Introducing: Good Reads for Sheltering in Place

This month, Richard M. Cho, research librarian for Humanities and Literature at UC Irvine and contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books, recommends some of his favorite books. The readings are available digitally through the UCI Libraries, too!

His first recommendation: Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw

"Some time ago--I forget exactly when--I decided that I would one day be very rich. By this I mean not just comfortably well off but superabundantly, incalculably wealthy...," thus begins the novel Five Star Billionaire, which has been long-listed for the Booker Prize. It is a third novel by the Malaysian Writer Tash Aw, whose books portray socio-economic and political upheavals in countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and China. The novel is ingeniously presented as a self-help book, whose chapters are titled: How to Achieve Greatness; Pursue Gains, Forget Righteousness; and Move to Where the Money is. Scattered throughout those didactic pronouncements are subchapters entitled Case Studies that follow the lives of five protagonists who yearn for stability and meaningful human connection, attainable only after achieving a certain level of wealth, or so they think.

Readers meet Phoebe, a factory girl from Malaysia who arrives in Shanghai on the promise of a job, and Gary, a pop-singer whose meteoric rise and ultimate downfall reminds us of Icarus, and Yinghui, who abandons art for commerce, and Justin, an adopted son of a wealth family in financial collapse, and lastly the eponymous billionaire who is supposedly writing this very book. Even in his previous novels, Aw was especially adept at threading the multi-perspectives of an epoch, in this case the burgeoning of capitalism in Asia. Aw's unhurried prose was compared to that of Nobel Prize winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, and Five Star Billionaire is poignant, exotic, and suspenseful in its depiction of the human cost of progress.

Permalink to the ebook in UCI Library catalog
More reviews by Richard M. Cho