The Lillian Review of Books Turns One!
Celebrating the LilRB's Dol
Koreans have a special ceremony to mark a child’s first birthday, called a dol. The child is presented with a number of objects that represent potential futures, based on the family’s values—a gavel for law, a stethoscope for medicine, a pen for scholarship, a coin for commerce, a spool of thread for long life, etc. Whichever object the child grasps is said to be her fate.
At my dol, I immediately grabbed the pen, and then, after a moment, the coin. My family interpreted this to mean that I will make a lot of money as a writer and/or scholar.
It hasn’t happened to me yet, but thanks to Substack, I’m one step closer to my destiny. As you can see in the video below, I respond very strongly to public praise and acclaim, so don’t forget to hit the like button.
One year ago today, I published my first post in the Lillian Review of Books. On this, the Lillian Review’s dol, I’d like to reflect on how it started and where it’s going.
My first post was a short review of Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany, and I expected no one to read it. It was sent to 4 subscribers: my parents, my sister, and my spouse. To this day, it has zero likes—and deservedly so. I tossed it off quickly and posted it up before I could talk myself out of it.
You see, I’ve been trying to start a blog, or a YouTube channel, or something, for about 17 years. A couple of abortive attempts at posting poetry on Blogspot in my mid-teens, but my poetic genius was not immediately validated by the indifferent void of the internet, so I gave up. Since then, I’ve had many plots and plans to get rich and famous by posting ‘content’ on the internet, but each one was foiled by anxious over-planning and failure to follow through. If only I could’ve come up with the perfect title, designed the perfect logo, planned the perfect editorial schedule, I could’ve been somebody. I could’ve been a contender.
All of this, while frustrating at the time, was a blessing. I’m so incredibly grateful that I did not start a fashion or lifestyle vlog when I was 17. At best: embarrassing. At worst: soul-destroying. Instead, I made my public internet debut at age 30, writing about literature, in a stable period of life. I’m sure as I continue to grow wiser with age, I’ll find much to cringe at in these pages, but I can say with confidence that I’m currently the least stupid I’ve ever been.
So it was with this baggage, and not quite on a whim, that I started the Lillian Review of Books a year ago. The name is, I accept, a little dumb. It was the first name that came to mind, a tongue-in-cheek riff on the London Review of Books—“the other LRB.” I still might change it, I don’t know. The whole point was to not overthink it. LilRB is easy to remember, descriptive, and not overly clever. I publish book reviews, mostly of old books, many of them Jewish and/or speculative. I also started publishing a monthly post of brief recommendations for music, movies, and food, a series I call Rec Center.
I promoted my newsletter on my Instagram and pressured some of my friends in-person to subscribe, so by November of 2024 I had about 50 subscribers. (My parents have been tireless promoters of the LilRB as well, which has resulted in some delightful engagement with some of their friends whom I’ve known most of my life, but have seldom had an occasion to converse with as an adult.) Then I discovered that Substack, in addition to being a newsletter platform, also has a social media aspect called Notes, which functions as, essentially, an internal Twitter. I could discover other Substack writers who wrote about literature, the Great Books, science fiction, and history—and they could discover me. I started to engage with other writers and have begun, over the past few months, to participate in an exciting community of readers and thinkers.1 Shoutout to
, , , , , , , et al — thanks for your work, and for letting me be an interlocutor.Today, I have 229 subscribers. Most of you I don’t know personally. You’ve subscribed because you found something compelling about my writing about books, and I’m terribly honored that so many of you bother to read my bi-monthly-ish missives. I’m especially grateful to those of you who choose to support my work with a paid subscription. None of my work is behind a paywall, so it’s particularly meaningful to me that you’ve decided to show your appreciation in this way. Whether you’re a free or paid subscriber, please leave comments or email me privately whenever a post sparks an idea or a disagreement. This is a two-way conversation!
If you’re a new reader, welcome, and thanks for being here! Not sure where to start? Try my fan-favorite post about Philip K. Dick and Saul Bellow being kindred spirits:
Or my thoughts on Ursula LeGuin after reading the first three books in the Hainish Cycle:
If you love dogs, see my review of Sirius by Olaf Stapledon:
For a deep(ish) dive into an under-explored corner of Jewish history, check out my review of Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man/Survival in Auschwitz:
For the Lillian Review’s second year of life, I have no plans to slow down on either the sci-fi or the Jewish lit. Expect more Saul Bellow in the near future. But I’d also like to work in more Korean and Korean American literature. I’ve got some Han Kang, Chang-rae Lee, and Eugene Lim burning a hole in my bookshelf.
I’m taking tentative steps to explore the genres of memoir and biography. I overwhelmingly prefer fiction, but I have recently read and enjoyed EJ Koh’s The Magical Language of Others, a memoir built around translating the author’s mother’s letters from Korean, and I’m currently reading Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho, a memoir about a daughter grappling with her Korean mother’s schizophrenia. Both are beautiful and troubling. I’m also reading Bellow: A Biography by James Atlas, and I’m amazed at the experience of reading nonfiction. You don’t have to intuit and infer universal truths like with fiction; the author just comes right out and tells you facts! Amazing. What a fabulous technology.
If you care to celebrate the Lillian Review’s first birthday, please consider subscribing if you haven’t already and leaving a tip via Buy Me A Coffee if you’d like to show your support but don’t want to commit to a paid subscription.
Thanks, as always, for reading. See you in a week or two with more Bellow :)
-Lillian
Also, a fair amount of shitposting.
Happy anniversary, Lillian! Your newsletter is great and you’re a valuable voice in the book world. Here’s to many more years of LilRB!
Happy Blogversary, with many more to come. As a reader as well as a writer, it is always a joy to find new-to-me books through thoughtful reviews. Cheers to you, Lillian.