Shelf Life: Sable Yong's Reading List

Beauty AND brains? They said it couldn't be done...

Welcome to Shelf Life, our themed book list series. Today, Die Hot with a Vengeance author Sable Yong joins us to recommend her favorite reads about all things beauty, vanity, and hotness.

Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom - The New Press

I love the way McMillan Cottom can marry cultural and social politics with pop culture — plus her own experiences — with a sly dose of dry humor and a wink. It makes me feel like, “Damn, you’re just gonna drop a bomb like that and prance off?” Yes, she is and she does. Her chapter about beauty and ugliness is so bluntly cutting. She minces no words naming exactly who defines each and why it is like this, despite our culture’s insistence upon propping up a scaffolding of individualistic self-empowerment without foundational context or change.

Disobedient Bodies by Emma Dabiri - Profile Books

This is a short book (or a long essay, if you want to think of that way) that outlines the contradictory nature of our desire, sense of safety, and the complicated pleasures we find in beauty when we are made aware of its historical context of oppression and misogyny. As a Nigerian-Irish woman, Dabiri explores other cultures’ views of beauty and introduces ways we can engage with it on terms we find more agreeable, expansive, and beyond the physical. An incredibly smart, concise, and compassionate manifesto for furthering a kind of beauty that cares rather than consumes.

Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture From The K-Beauty Capital by Elise Hu - Dutton

As NPR’s former Seoul bureau chief, Hu writes about her observations on beauty culture and appearance politics while she was living in Seoul. And it’s intense! She gets into historical and economic context as to why appearances are so paramount in South Korea. Turns out being hot is the soft power formula that helped make South Korea an international pop culture sensation, then an economic power, BUT all at the expense of its citizens who are not only pressured to conform, but are penalized for not engaging in beauty culture.

Made-Up: A True Story Of Beauty Culture Under Late Stage Capitalism by Daphné B. - Coach House Books

Only a French-Canadian poet could so cinematically parse the complexities of beauty’s connection to our desires and personal pleasures while reckoning with its alienating pressures — from the forces that determine what beauty we crave, how much it costs, and how much is appropriate. And yet! All the ways that beauty and vanity are stigmatized — its idleness, self-concern, and abuse of feminine powers — are what also make it a form of uniquely feminized resistance. When you remove the conventional notions of what beauty is for and indulge anyway, it becomes a form of pleasure that can honor your body and all the ways you choose to adorn it.

Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang - Duttton

This novel has everything: tragic parental love and grief, a musical conservatory, boarding school drama, shop girls, wellness, unwellness, and a big ol’ plot twist. This is an engrossing story about a classical pianist who works at a Goop-like wellness beauty store run by some illuminati-type Elon Musk magician who turns our wholesale lust for beauty into a fantastical body horror story. Could be speculative fiction, could be a Twin Peaks-like crime documentary, but it makes an extremely thrilling read.