Hello, hello, welcome to Highbrow. I'm your host, Mina Lay. And today's another chatty episode. I'm just in a pretty good mood

right now because I paused right before I said right now because I don't want to be too presumptuous.

I don't want to jinx myself. But as of the last 48 hours, I've been in a pretty good mood.

I went out yesterday and the sun was shining. I was sitting in

the park. I was reading my book. I was wearing a linen dress. I was drinking a macha latte.

The mood was right. The vibes were right. I felt like I was in a studio jibbley movie.

And even though the book I was reading was pretty depressing, you know, I was smiling through it.

And the book I was reading was The Poppy War, of course, which I have been posting about on Instagram, or I did until I finished it.

It was a really good book.

If you're interested in the whole like military war fantasy genre,

then you'll definitely like it. It is very graphic, very violent, but a fast-paced read.

And it's one of three, so I have to pick up the other two books. And the author is Arv Quang. R. Quang, I don't want to pronounce her name,

but she is a phenomenal writer. And I read Babel, which is another book that she wrote, and it's like

a dark academia fantasy that's also like ties in colonialism. And yeah, I think she is a very smart woman in that, especially Babel, was incredibly smart

because it's about linguistics students.

And so she brings in linguistics into the book and, yeah, your brain just feels like it's

growing bigger as you read it.

So I highly recommend her work.

She's also coming, oh my God, I feel like I'm plugging her so hard. I'm like, RF, Rebecca, do you want to hire me as your publicist? But she's coming out with a new book this month that I'm really excited to read. It's called Yellowface.

I read a lot of like books written by Asian authors and books with Asian protagonists

because, you know, now the tie is changing with Hollywood and I'm seeing Asian faces

on the big screen.

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