The “Reading Rainbow” is officially back, with internet-famous librarian Mychal Threets at the helm.
Following the reboot’s premiere last Saturday, the new host responded to the audience’s wishes for a Latino lead in a recent social media post. He wrote, “You’re not going to believe this… I am [Latino]! My dad is Black, my mom is Mexican and white. I’m a mixed kid, homeschool kid, library kid, PBS kid, and @readingrainbow kid!”
Threets, who got his start as a Bay Area librarian, tells The Times that because he was home-schooled, he was able to learn about his heritage mostly through books. He says he was raised to be proud of his heritage and looks up to both his grandfather and mother as examples of what it means to be Latino. Much of his childhood was also marked by the sounds of Selena Quintanilla, whom he recently got memorialized in a tattoo.
“My heritage and being Latino will hopefully be reflected in my appearance on the show,” said Threets in a statement. “I hope people will see me and see a happy, jovial person who has the same heritage as them.”
Threets started to gain online popularity in 2020. He started posting short-form videos of himself reading and sharing stories from working in a library. Many of those videos garnered more than a million views and earned him several hundred thousand followers.
The original “Reading Rainbow,” hosted by LeVar Burton, first launched on PBS in 1983. For over two decades, Burton taught literacy skills and helped instill a love for reading in children across the country. The show ended in 2006, having earned a handful of Emmy and Peabody Awards. It ran for a total of 155 episodes and is recognized as one of the longest-running children’s programs ever.
At the time, the show was funded in part by the Department of Education. The reboot comes at a time when public media, including television, has been subject to sizable budget cuts. The revitalization will instead appear on the kids’ YouTube channel, Kidzuko, which is owned by Sony Pictures Television, as well as the Reading Rainbow’s website.
The reboot, which premiered over the weekend, has mostly stayed true to its roots with a new rerecorded theme song and a trivia segment. Celebrity guests will include “Dancing With the Stars” performers Rylee Arnold and Ezra Sosa, “The Bear’s” actor Ebon Moss-Bachrach, John Legend, Chrissy Teigen and Gabrielle Union. New episodes air every Saturday, until Oct. 24.
“Reading Rainbow seeks to make reading fun for everyone, all races, all backgrounds, all levels of reading! The reactions have been out of this world,” said Threets. “I am overwhelmed in the best of ways.”
HOUSEHOLDS need to take and submit meter readings ahead of bills rising for millions this autumn.
Regulator Ofgem confirmed last month that prices will increase by 2% to £1,755 a year from October 1.
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Ofgem’s price cap is increasing from October 1Credit: Alamy
Prices will rise by £35.14 per year for households, having reduced at the beginning of July when the price cap went down.
This will affect 22million households who are on the standard variable tariffs.
Those who don’t take their electricity and gas bill readings as close to October 1 as possible, and are on a standard variable tariff as opposed to a fixed deal, could be faced with higher bills.
Some providers will even give you an extra fortnight to submit your reading, but double-check what applies at yours.
COPS are desperately hunting a woman and an eight-year-old girl who vanished more than three weeks ago.
Sally-Jean, 37, was last seen with eight-year-old Ava in Tilehurst, Reading on August 25.
The pair were reported missing on Monday with a frantic search for them launched immediately.
Police said they are “extremely concerned” for the safety of the woman and the youngster and are appealing for the public’s help finding them.
Ava is described as black with an afro hairstyle while Sally-Jean is white, about 5ft 4in tall, with long brown hair, green eyes and tattoos.
Sally-Jean has links to Reading, Caversham and Tilehurst and has one large and distinctive tattoo on her right lower arm, cops said.
Anyone with information on the whereabouts of either Sally-Jean or Ava is asked to contact Thames Valley Police as a matter of urgency.
Inspector Iain Watkinson said: “We are extremely concerned for the welfare of Sally-Jean and Ava and we have been working hard to find them since they were reported missing on Monday.
“We are now appealing for the public’s help.
“Anyone with information on their whereabouts should call 101 or make a report on our website.”
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Sally-Jean, 37, was last seen with eight-year-old Ava in Tilehurst, Reading on August 25
Long Beach resident Ashley Likins was pages away from finishing “Onyx Storm,” the third installment in Rebecca Yarros’ fantasy book series, when a long-haired black kitten hopped into her lap.
Given the foster name Soup Enhancements, the cat was one of the rescues boarding at Cool Cat Collective, a cat-themed boutique at the eastern end of Long Beach’s Fourth Street Corridor. The store, which offers all manner of cat-themed merchandise from kitty treats to cat-printed coasters, doubles as a shelter for cats rescued by TippedEars, a local trap-neuter-return, or TNR, nonprofit.
These resident kittens at Cool Cat Collective spend most of their time in a luxury “catio” in the back corner of the boutique, but twice a month, they are released to roam about during after-hours fundraising events. A popular silent reading party, co-hosted by reading club LB Bookworms, mimics a cat cafe, and according to the book club’s founder, Martha Esquivias, the event has sold out nearly every month since its debut last November.
Deb Escobar reads a book as foster kitten Poolboy creeps around her during a silent reading night at Cool Cat Collective.
It was during the silent reading event in early August that Likins sat, second-guessing the decision she’d made a few days prior to adopt Soup Enhancements. She adored the cat; still, she worried she’d been impulsive and wasn’t truly ready for the responsibility of pet ownership.
But as she watched the kitten nod off in her lap, she glimpsed the future in which the pair would do this routine a thousand times over with Likins devouring a book and the cat sleeping soundly below.
“I’m not just in a kitten craze,” Likins recalled thinking to herself. “This is my cat.”
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It’s that kind of moment Jena Carr, 39, had dreamed of when she and her husband, Matt, 40, opened Cool Cat Collective last year.
Former Washington, D.C., restaurateurs, the Carrs moved to Long Beach in 2022 to be closer to Jena Carr’s family. Once they settled in, Carr threw herself into kitten rescue, a longtime interest. She started as a foster owner and kitten rescue volunteer before assisting TippedEars with its work tracking and capturing cats in Compton.
“Once you start realizing the extent of the cat overpopulation problem, you quickly realize that we can’t foster or adopt our way out of it,” Carr said, calling TNR “the solution that gets to the root of the problem.”
One day during peak kitten season, Carr was out with TippedEars co-founder Renae Woith when she was struck by the number of sick and injured cats on the streets and the challenges of understaffed rescues working to home them.
“It kind of got her wheels working, like, ‘What can I do as a business?’” Woith said.
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1.Foster kittens Bisque, Poolboy and Chauffeur play together during a silent reading night.2.Foster kitten Sesame walks around a display in the store.
Almost a year later, Cool Cat Collective was born.
It was still warm outside on an early September evening as the last of the daytime visitors left the cat boutique. Once they were gone, Carr made her final touches for the night’s silent reading party: laying cushions in store corners and scattering toy mice across the floor.
In the catio, Poolboy, a domestic shorthair, licked a Churu treat from a visiting reader’s hand. When he and his siblings — all named after blue-collar jobs — arrived in late July, they were timid. But at this silent reading party, they bounded about the room, crawling on attendees’ laps between wrestling matches.
“It makes me so happy when the shy ones become social,” Carr said.
A sign hanging outside the catio tallied good news: 93 adoptions since July 2024. TippedEars co-founder Vita Manzoli said that’s about double the numbers the rescue used to see before the boutique opened.
TippedEars’ partnership with Cool Cat Collective has been a boon for the nonprofit, which receives 100% of the proceeds from the cat boutique’s “First Thursday” silent reading parties and “Third Thursday” doodle nights, which both cost $15 to attend. But it’s not only the financial support that has made a difference for TippedEars cats.
“We’ve gotten volunteers from them — donors, adopters, obviously, but the byproduct of that is really just educating people about the cat overpopulation crisis, what TNR is and how they can help,” Woith said.
Placing rescues at Cool Cat Collective, where they are comfortable and their personalities are on full display, has also allowed TippedEars to give them a better chance at being adopted.
“The cat they may not have looked twice at online, they now are the one [adopters are] taking home, because they actually got to meet them,” Woith said.
“This is a beautiful marrying of my interests,” silent reading party attendee Regan Rudman said of the event. “It also provides a great third space that we’re really missing nowadays.”
Carr has a spreadsheet of potential resident kittens always on her mind, so she’s eager to facilitate adoptions. But everyone is welcome at Cool Cat Collective, whether they’re looking to adopt or not.
“You don’t even have to be shopping,” Carr said. “That was part of our goal: to create a space with a really low barrier to access for people who are cat-curious or just need a little moment of cat joy in their day.”
Regan Rudman, a recent Long Beach transplant, can’t have a cat of her own for health reasons. Still, she visits Cool Cat Collective every month. She tried for three months to snag a ticket to the store’s silent reading night before she secured a spot for the September event.
“Getting to actually interact with cats in an environment that they feel comfortable in just makes my heart so happy,” Rudman said.
Rudman, who works at a publishing company, made an effort to focus on her book during the silent reading hour, but she also hoped her ruffled leg warmers would entice a curious kitten to come over.
“I think everyone is a little distracted by the cats,” said silent reading party attendee Mathilde Hernandez, who befriended foster cat Gumball.
Other attendees, lounging on cushions throughout the boutique, gazed down at their e-readers but peeked as cats bounced around like pinballs in their periphery.
Poolboy and sibling Chauffer, who would find their forever home together that weekend, were particularly rowdy. On the other hand, Bisque — from a litter Carr called “the Soups” — hid in a cardboard house for an hour before she finally stretched a paw out, like a jazz hand through the “front door.”
“There’s always some antic happening,” Carr said. “People are reading, but they also have one eye on the cats as they’re reading. I’d be curious asking people, like, how far into their book they actually get.”
Attendee Lien Nguyen, whose love for the kittens overrode her cat allergy, admitted she’d drop her book the second a cat came into her vicinity. But no matter how hard they tried, scarcely an attendee could successfully attract a kitten. The cats chose their company, not the other way around.
“Part of our goal was to create a space with a really low barrier to access for people who are cat-curious or, you know, just need a little moment of cat joy in their day,” said Jena Carr, co-founder of Cool Cat Collective.
“It was like rejection therapy whenever they went away,” Nguyen said.
That’s why Likins was so touched when Soup Enhancements found her at the August silent reading party. She nearly burst into tears, she said.
Later that evening, she was moved even more when her boyfriend, Max Mineer, bonded with his feline soulmate, Handyman. Happily, Handyman happened to be the only cat Soup Enhancements tolerated.
Now, the two cats live together in Likins and Mineer’s Long Beach apartment. They sleep together, clean each other and, despite being from different litters, generally behave like siblings.
The day Likins brought the cats home, staffers at Cool Cat Collective and TippedEars gave her every resource imaginable, including a 20% off coupon for Chewy products and scratch post recommendations. And there was an easy out: If anything went wrong, the couple could bring the cats back, no questions asked.
“It really made me trust them more to know that they were thinking to the future about these cats,” Likins said. “It wasn’t just a process of making sure that a cat got a home. It was making sure that a cat got a life.”
So it goes in the United States, where daily reading for pleasure has plummeted more than 40% among adults over the last two decades, according to a new study from the University of Florida and University College London.
From 2003 to 2023, daily leisure reading declined at a steady rate of about 3% per year, according to the study published Wednesday in the journal iScience .
“This decline is concerning given earlier evidence for downward trends in reading for pleasure from the 1940s through to the start of our study in 2003, suggesting at least 80 years of continued decline in reading for pleasure,” the paper states.
Jill Sonke, one of the study’s authors, said in an interview Tuesday that the decline is concerning in part because “we know that reading for pleasure, among other forms of arts participation, is a health behavior. It is associated with relaxation, well-being, mental health, quality of life.”
“We’re losing a low-hanging fruit in our health toolkit when we’re reading or participating in the arts less,” added Sonke, the director of research initiatives at the UF Center for Arts in Medicine and co-director of the university’s EpiArts Lab.
The reading decline comes as most Americans have more access to books than ever before. Because of Libby and other e-book apps, people do not need to travel to libraries or bookstores. They can check out books from multiple libraries and read them on their tablets or phones.
But other forms of digital media are crowding out the free moments that people could devote to books. More time spent scrolling dank memes and reels on social media or bingeing the “King of the Hill” reboot on Hulu means less time for the latest pick from Oprah’s Book Club.
But researchers say there are factors besides digital distraction at play, including a national decline in leisure time overall and uneven access to books and libraries.
The study analyzed data from 236,270 Americans age 15 and older who completed the American Time Use Survey from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics between 2003 and 2023. [The year 2020 was excluded because data collection was briefly paused amid the COVID-19 pandemic.]
Participants were asked to provide granular detail of their activities beginning at 4 a.m. on the day prior to the interview and ending at 4 a.m. the day of the interview.
Researchers found that people who do read for pleasure are doing so for longer stretches of time — from 1 hour 23 minutes per day in 2003 to 1 hour 37 minutes per day in 2023.
But the percentage of Americans who leisure-read on a typical day has dropped from a high of 28% in 2004 to a low of 16% in 2023.
Researchers said there was an especially concerning disparity between Black and white Americans.
The percentage of Black adults who read for pleasure peaked at about 20% in 2004 and fell to about 9% in 2023. The percentage of white adults who picked up a book for fun peaked at about 29% in 2004 and dropped to roughly 18% in 2023.
The study showed that women read for fun more than men. And that people who live in rural areas had a slightly steeper drop in pleasure reading than urban denizens over the last two decades.
In rural places, people have less access not only to bookstores and libraries, but also reliable internet connections, which can contribute to different reading habits, Kate Laughlin, executive director of the Seattle-based Assn. for Rural and Small Libraries, said in an interview Tuesday.
Although there have been concerted national efforts to focus on literacy in children, less attention is paid to adults, especially in small towns, Laughlin said.
“When you say ‘reading for pleasure,’ you make the assumption that reading is pleasurable,” Laughlin said. “If someone struggles with the act of actually reading and interpreting the words, that’s not leisure; that feels like work.”
As rural America shifts away from the extraction-based industries that once defined it — such as logging, coal mining and fishing — adults struggling with basic literacy are trying to play catch-up with the digital literacy needed in the modern workforce, Laughlin said.
Rural librarians, she said, often see adults in their late 20s and older coming in not to read but to learn how to use a keyboard and mouse and set up their first email address so they can apply for work online.
According to the study, the percentage of adults reading to children has not declined over the last two decades. But “rates of engagement were surprisingly low, with only 2% of participants reading with children on the average day.”
Of the participants whose data the researchers analyzed, 21% had a child under 9 at home.
The low percentage of adults reading with kids “is concerning given that regular reading during childhood is a strong determinant of reading ability and engagement later in life,” the study read. “The low rates of reading with children may thus contribute to future declines in reading among adults.”
Researchers noted some limitations in their ability to interpret the data from the American Time Use Survey. Some pleasure reading might have been categorized, mistakenly, as digital activity, they wrote.
E-books were not included in the reading category until 2011, and audiobooks were not included until 2021.
From 2003 to 2006, reading the Bible and other religious texts was included in reading in personal interest — but was recategorized afterward and grouped with other participation in religious practice.
Further, reading on tablets, computers and smartphones was not explicitly included in examples, making it unclear whether survey participants included it as leisure reading or technology use.
“This may mean that we underestimated rates of total engagement, although … we expect any such misclassifications to have minimal effects on our findings,” they wrote.
To look inside Julie Celestial’s kindergarten classroom in Long Beach is to peer into the future of reading in California.
During a recent lesson, 25 kindergartners gazed at the whiteboard, trying to sound out the word “bee.” They’re learning the long “e” sound, blending words such as “Pete” and “cheek” — words that they’ll soon be able to read in this lesson’s accompanying book.
Celestial was teaching something new for Long Beach Unified: phonics.
“It’s pretty cool to watch,” she said. “I’m really anticipating that there’s going to be a lot less reluctant readers and struggling readers now that the district has made this shift.”
Engage with our community-funded journalism as we delve into child care, transitional kindergarten, health and other issues affecting children from birth through age 5.
These phonics-based lessons are on the fast track to become law in California under a sweeping bill moving through the Legislature that will mandate how schools teach reading, a rare action in a state that generally emphasizes local school district control over dictating instruction.
Julie Celestial teaches her kindergarten class a literacy lesson at Mark Twain Elementary School in Long Beach.
The bill is the capstone to decades of debate and controversy in California on how best to teach reading amid stubbornly low test scores. Gov. Gavin Newsom has pledged his support, setting aside $200 million to fund teacher training on the new approach in the May revise of his 2025-26 budget proposal.
“It’s a big deal for kids, and it’s a big step forward — a very big one,” said Marshall Tuck, chief executive of EdVoice, an education advocacy nonprofit that has championed the change.
California has long struggled with reading scores below the national average. In 2024, only 29% of California’s fourth-graders scored “proficient” or better in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP.
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Literacy instruction has been controversial in California for decades, but state legislators may have finally decided on a compromise.
The proposed law, which would take effect in phases beginning in 2026, would require districts to adopt instructional materials based on the “science of reading,” a systemic approach to literacy instruction supported by decades of research about the way young children learn to read, from about transitional kindergarten through third grade.
The science of reading consists of five pillars: phonemic awareness (the sounds that letters make), phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.
“It’s finite. There’s only 26 letters and 44 sounds,” said Leslie Zoroya, who leads an initiative at the Los Angeles County Office of Education that helps districts transition to a science-of-reading approach. “Phonics isn’t forever.”
After a failed effort last year, the bill gained the support this year of the influential California teachers unions and at least one advocacy group for English-language learners. In a compromise, school districts would have more flexibility to select which instructional materials are best for their students and the option to decline teacher training paid for by the state.
Kindergarten student Annika Esser works on a literacy lesson at Mark Twain Elementary School in Long Beach.
For decades, most school districts in California have been devoted to a different approach called “whole language” or “balanced literacy,” built on the belief that children naturally learn to read without being taught how to sound out words. Teachers focus on surrounding children with books intended to foster a love of reading and encourage them to look for clues that help them guess unknown words — such as predicting the next word based on the context of the story, or looking at the pictures — rather than sounding them out.
“The majority of students require a more intentional, explicit and systematic approach,” Zoroya said. “Thousands of kids across California in 10th grade are struggling in content-area classes because they missed phonics.”
Kindergarten student Tyler Madrid raises his hand to answer a question during a literacy lesson at Mark Twain Elementary School in Long Beach.
An extended reading war in California
California embraced the whole language approach to literacy, which took hold in the 1970s and 1980s, said Susan Neuman, a New York University professor who served as assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education under former President George W. Bush. The state became a national leader in what was considered a progressive and holistic approach to teaching literacy, with a focus on discovering the joy of reading, rather than learning specific skills, she said.
Bush then incorporated a phonics-heavy approach in an initiative that was part of his 2002 launch of No Child Left Behind, which increased the federal role in holding schools accountable for academic progress and required standardized testing. States, including California, received grants to teach a science-of-reading approach in high-poverty schools.
But many teachers in the state disliked the more regimented approach, and when the funding ended, districts largely transitioned back to the whole language approach. In the years since, science of reading continues to draw opposition from teachers unions and advocates for dual-language learners.
Many California teachers are passionate about the methods they already use and have chafed at a state-mandated approach to literacy education. Some don’t like what they describe as “drill and kill” phonics lessons that teach letter sounds and decoding.
Advocates for multiple-language learners, meanwhile, vociferously opposed adopting the most structured approach, worried that children who were still learning to speak English would not receive adequate support in language development and comprehension.
A 2022 study of 300 school districts in California found that less than 2% of districts were using curricula viewed as following the science of reading.
But the research has become clear: Looking at the pictures or context of a story to guess a word — as is encouraged in whole language or balanced literacy instruction, leads to struggles with reading. Children best learn to read by starting with foundational skills such as sounding out and decoding words.
“Anything that takes your eyes off the text when a kid is trying to figure out a word activates the wrong side of the brain,” Zoroya said.
Los Angeles County renews focus on phonics
In the last few years, several larger districts in California have started to embrace more structured phonics learning, including Los Angeles Unified, Long Beach Unified and Oakland Unified.
Recently, these districts have started to see improvement in their reading test scores.
Julie Celestial teaches her kindergarten class a literacy lesson at Mark Twain Elementary School in Long Beach.
At Long Beach Unified, for example, the district’s in-house assessment shows significant gains among kindergarten students. In 2023-24, 78% of them met reading standards, up 13 percentage points from the previous school year. Proficiency rates across first and second grade were above 70%, and transitional kindergarten was at 48%. The district’s goal is to hit 85% proficiency across grades by the end of each school year.
In 2019, LAUSD introduced a pilot science-of-reading based curriculum, and adopted it across all schools for the 2023-24 academic year. After the first year, LAUSD reading scores improved in every grade level and across every demographic, chief academic officer Frances Baez said.
From the 2022-23 to the 2023-24 school years, LAUSD’s English Language Arts scores improved by 1.9 percentage points — five times more than the state as a whole, which improved by 0.3, she said.
‘Science of Reading’ makes waves in Lancaster
Teresa Cole, a kindergarten instructor in the Lancaster School District, has been teaching for 25 years. So when Lancaster asked her to try out a new way of teaching her students to read three years ago, she wasn’t thrilled.
“I was hesitant and apprehensive to try it,” she said, but decided to throw herself into a new method that promised results.
Artwork and literacy lessons hang from the ceiling inside Julie Celestial’s kindergarten class at Mark Twain Elementary School in Long Beach.
Teaching kindergarten is a challenge, she said, because children come in at vastly different stages. Many are just learning to hold a pencil; others can already read. She was seeing many children under “balanced literacy” lessons slip through the cracks — especially those with limited vocabularies. When she asked them to read words they didn’t know, “it almost felt like they were guessing.”
But as she began to teach a phonics lesson each morning and have them read decodable books — which have children practice the new sound they’ve learned — she noticed that her students were putting together the information much faster and starting to sound out words. “The results were immediate,” she said. “We were blown away.”
She was so impressed with the new curriculum that she started training other teachers in the district to use it as well.
Looking back at her old method of teaching reading, “I feel bad. I feel like maybe I wasn’t the best teacher back then,” Cole said. Part of the change, she said, was learning about the science behind how children learn to read. “I would never say to guess [a word] anymore,” she said.
This kind of buy-in and enthusiasm from teachers has been key to making the new curriculum work, said Krista Thomsen, Lancaster’s director of Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment Department. In schools where the teachers are implementing the program well, scores have started to rise. “But it’s a steep learning curve,” she said, especially for teachers who have long taught a balanced literacy approach.
“We are stumbling through this process trying to get it right and making sure that every one of our kids has equitable access to learning how to read,”Thomsen said. “But we have every faith and every intention, and the plan is in place to get it where it should be going.”
A compromise may bring more phonics to the classroom
Kindergarten student Lauren Van De Kreeke answers a question from teacher Julie Celestial as they work on a literacy lesson at Mark Twain Elementary School in Long Beach.
A bill introduced by Assemblymember Blanca E. Rubio (D-Baldwin Park) last year requiring a science-of-reading approach in California public schools did not even get a first hearing. This year, Rubio introduced another version — Assembly Bill 1121 — that would have required teachers to be trained in a science-of-reading approach.
Opponents included the California Teachers Assn. and English-language learner advocates, who said in a joint letter that the bill would put a “disproportionate emphasis on phonics,” and would not focus on the skills needed by students learning English as a second language.
The groups also voiced concern that the bill would cut teachers out of the curriculum-selection process and that mandated training “undermines educators’ professional expertise and autonomy to respond to the specific learning needs of their students.”
Martha Hernandez, executive director of Californians Together, said the group opposed both bills because they were too narrow in their focus on skills such as phonics. “They’re essential. But English learners need more, right?” she said. “They don’t understand the language that they’re learning to read.”
Rubio said she was shocked by the pushback. “I was thinking it was a no-brainer. It’s about kids. This is evidence-based.” Rubio, a longtime teacher, was born in Mexico, and was herself an English-language learner in California public schools.
In 2024, just 19% of Latino students and 7% of Black students scored at or above “proficient” on the fourth-grade NAEP reading test.
But with the support of Democratic Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Hollister), the groups reached a compromise that not all teachers would be required to participate in the teacher training.
Hernandez said she was pleased that the compromise included more of an emphasis on oral language development and comprehension, which is vital for multi-language learners to succeed.
AB1454 requires the State Board of Education to come up with a new list of recommended materials that all follow science of reading principles. If a district chooses materials not on the list, they have to vouch that it also complies. The state will provide funds for professional development, though districts can choose whether to accept it.
This article is part of The Times’ early childhood education initiative, focusing on the learning and development of California children from birth to age 5. For more information about the initiative and its philanthropic funders, go to latimes.com/earlyed.
I’m Aaron, a former sportswriter currently wrapping up a graduate degree at USC, and these days I love to read about pretty much anything other than sports — thrillers, books about transit and urban planning, and stories with a protagonist who is grappling with their identity.
The last of those has been part of my literary world since I was at least 12, when, as part of my seventh-grade creative writing elective, I wrote a memoir titled “Jasian,” as in Jewish and Asian.
My dad is a native of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, my mom immigrated to the U.S. during the Vietnam War, and as a racially ambiguous kid growing up in Houston, I often corrected classmates who mistook me for Latino.
With this being the first full week of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, I’m using my L.A. Times Book Club debut to highlight some of my favorite books about Asian identity, many of which unpack feelings I’ve felt a lot more elegantly than I did in “Jasian.” I also interview the owner of Bel Canto Books, a Filipina-led bookstore in Long Beach. We talk about upcoming AAPI month events at her store, her favorite books featuring Asian protagonists, and new releases she’s looking forward to.
📚 Book Recs
“Yellowface,” R. F. Kuang’s fourth novel, is a dark satire on book publishing, racial appropriation and cancel culture.
(John Packman)
In Rachel Khong’s “Real Americans,” Nick Chen is a Chinese American teenager who looks completely white and feels isolated growing up in rural Washington with his single, Chinese mother, Lily, who he believes is hiding something about his past. This intergenerational family story with a sci-fi twist is about identity, inheritance and how much control we all actually have in controlling our destinies.
“Almost Brown,” a memoir by Charlotte Gill, the daughter of an English mother and Indian father, unpacks the tensions that can exist in a mixed-race family featuring parents with different worldviews and children searching for their own sense of self. As someone who’s felt more connected with my Vietnamese identity as I’ve gotten older, this story of reconciliation and understanding resonated with me.
You’ve probably already read “Crying in H Mart” — and if you haven’t, correct that — but I’d be remiss not to include it here. Like author Michelle Zauner, I lost my mother to cancer, a disease that hung over my relationship with my mom for much of my childhood and into my early 20s, when she died. But I’ve learned that my relationship with her and the Vietnamese heritage she gave me can continue to evolve even though my mom has passed — a lesson Zauner beautifully shares in this bestselling memoir.
If you’re like me and enjoy satire and cringe moments, then you’ll fly through R.F. Kuang’s “Yellowface,” a thriller about a woman who steals the manuscript of her dead Asian American friend and passes it off as her own, navigating cancel culture and racial politics along the way.
I also want to share a few reported books I enjoyed:
I had no idea how much influence China wielded over Hollywood until I read “Red Carpet,” by Erich Schwartzel, a film industry reporter at the Wall Street Journal.
A former Los Angeles Times bureau chief in Beijing and Seoul, Barbara Demick shares what life is like for six North Korean citizens in “Nothing to Envy.”
I’ve read every book from New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe, and “The Snakehead,” an epic tale of a human smuggling operation in New York’s Chinatown, might be my favorite.
(Please note: The Times may earn a commission through links to Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.)
Reading list
📰 The Week(s) in Books
Mark Whitaker’s new book deftly traces Malcolm X’s enduring cultural impact six decades after he was assassinated.
Whether you’re an architecture buff or just someone who appreciates the beauty of old L.A., check out the West Hollywood Denenberg Fine Arts Gallery’s exhibit showcasing Robert Landau’s new book, “Art Deco Los Angeles.” The son of L.A. gallerist Felix Landau, Robert began taking photos for his latest book on a Hasselblad in the 1970s. “I was responding visually and emotionally to places I grew up going to,” Landau tells The Times.
Jhoanna Belfer owns Bel Canto Books in Long Beach.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
This week, we talk with Jhoanna Belfer, the owner of Long Beach’s Bel Canto Books. The Filipina-led indie booksellers, which focus on celebrating works by women and people of color, started as a pop-up book club in 2018 and now has three locations: a standalone bookstore on the 4th Street corridor/Retro Row; a bookstore inside a Filipinx-led collaborative workspace in Bixby Knolls; and a mini bookstore inside Steel Cup Cafe.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
What events is Bel Canto Books hosting for AAPI month?
Saturday, May 10: Helena Ree will read her picture book, “Sora’s Seashells” at Billie Jean King Main Library in Long Beach
Wednesday, May 14: Book signing with authors Sarah Ahn and Nam Soon Ahn, who wrote the Korean cookbook “Umma,” and C.B. Lee, whose book “A Clash of Steel,” is a remix of “Treasure Island” featuring two queer girls of color
Saturday, May 17: A conversation with middle grade authors Tracy Badua and Van Hoang at Southeast branch of the Torrance Public Library
What are some of your favorite books featuring Asian protagonists?
One of my favorite writers is Lisa Ko. Her first book, “The Leavers,” was about a mom who’s a nail shop technician and an immigrant in New York’s Chinatown. She goes to work one day and never comes home. And her son has to grapple with what happened and try to figure out how to live, since he’s 10 or 12 when she first disappears.
Lisa Ko has a new book called “Memory Piece” that just came out in paperback. It’s phenomenal. Writers obviously are writing about what’s percolating in their minds and in the world that they’re in, and “Memory Piece” really reflects our current world. In the book, the government has become incredibly authoritarian, everyone is surveilled, and these three friends are trying to figure out how to live their lives and still make sense and find meaning.
The last one I would mention is Ocean Vuong’s new novel, “The Emperor of Gladness,” which drops next week. I got to read an early copy, and it’s stunning. It’s my favorite of his work so far, which is a very high bar. He just gets better and better with every book.
What new releases are you looking forward to?
“Coffee Shop in an Alternate Universe” by C.B. Lee is a cozy, queer fantasy about two young women who meet in a coffee shop. They don’t realize that they’re crossing into each other’s different worlds. One world is not magical, and the other one is. It has tons of fun cafe drinks and monsters that they have to defeat.
A local author, Elise Bryant, has a second book coming out in her PTA moms murder mystery series: It’s called “The Game Is Afoot.” It’s super fun if you either have kids in elementary school or you have ever known a PTA mom. It’s very juicy and gossipy and fun.
The last one I’ll call out is “Moderation” by Elaine Castillo, a Filipina American writer whom I love. The protagonist is a content moderator, which sounds very benign. But she takes you into the deep, dark depths of what moderation actually can be, or horrifyingly probably is, with these people having to flag and kick out folks on the internet.
You can find Bel Canto Books at their standalone shop located 2106 E. 4th St., Long Beach; in Kubo LB at 3976 Atlantic Ave., Long Beach; and inside Steel Cup Café at 2201 N. Lakewood Blvd. Suite E, Long Beach.
That’s all from me for now! I look forward to sharing more books with you all soon!
