This brief collection of essays from Viet Thanh Nguyen is well worth a read. The pieces muse on writing and writers, the experience of being Asian American, and the experience of being human. They are interesting and insightful, but not difficult to read. I often find that writers writing about writing are too esoteric, and the knowledge level required to read them can be too niche. But I found this writing accessible and enjoyable. As an Asian living in the West, I also related to a lot of his thoughts.

Nguyen packages his Harvard Norton Lectures into essays pubished in this collection. As a clarion voice today on writing, American life, and global politics, readers will value his perspectives. Still, I struggled to listen through the lectures and only made it half way through. Nguyen retrieves and reshapes the idea of "otherness" in discussing people of color and immigrants not native to America. I found this concept challenging to wrap my mind around since culturally we've been pushing for a different direction. An "other" is normally viewed as an epithet; Nguyen celebrates the goodness of an "other." He may be on to something helpful, but ultimately, perhaps due to the lecture in audiobook format, was not able to finish To Save and to Destroy (and I rarely DNF books). My thanks to Dreamscape Media and NetGalley for an ARC.

Stunning and world-changing. An extraordinary way to explore literature and literary history, identity, and notions of 'otherness'. It opens your eyes in new ways to storytelling, and what it means to be a writer in today's world. Audio recommended.

This short memoir continues the story from Nguyen's first memoir, the first book I have read from him. (I own his most famous work, The Sympathizer, and plan to read it soon.) In this one, Nguyen focuses on writing and how it ties to identity and how he struggled to balance the two competing parts of himself. I definitely recommend this book, although with one caveat. Read his first memoir first.

I listened twice and I’m sure I still missed stuff. This guy is a lot smarter than I am! He presented his opinions in a cohesive way and it was educational on many levels.

Six chapters, six great essays about him writing as "other." It says more about writing itself, but also his family and other writers influenced him throughout years as a writer. I love his powerful thoughts in this book.

I found this to be a really interesting and insightful collection. Perfect for anyone who has considered themself "other" and is interested in pursuing writing. And yet also important for any reader to explore. Encourages us to consider who authors are writing for, what responsibility they may have to make their work palatable for the masses, what is important for authors to maintain about their individuality and background regardless of what the market might call for.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ALC in exchange for an honest review.

This book was really informative, and the author's perspective on being an "other" in so many different contexts is something that will stick with me. It really hit home how important it is to recognize the different struggles people face. I started with the audiobook but had a hard time staying engaged, so I ended up borrowing the ebook from the library, and the content was much easier to digest that way.

Vietnam Book and Reading Culture Day 2025 #4

While I didn't love THE SYMPATHIZER either time I read it, and have middling thoughts about the show, I find I have much better luck with Viet's non-fic work. It's real. It's raw. I respect him greatly for his political stance. He has proudly preached for the Palestinian people long before we were even discussing the genocide as a whole.

Some of these essays don't contain new information, especially if you read A MAN OF TWO FACES, which is my favorite work of his. In my opinion, it's still an important read. I listened to the audio, which is short. I read a lot of Vietnamese diaspora writers nowadays, but as the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon approaches, I'm trying to read more.

The discussion of Asian Americans as not being a monolith hit hard. We're not the same. Some of us are similar, sure. But lumping us as one gives less credence to our different struggles. Very excited to hear him speak at the LA Times Festival of Books panel Friend of My Mind: Essays on Finding a Home in Literature.

🎧 Thank you to NetGalley and Dreamscape Media

I don't think anyone will 100% completely agree with the author Viet Thanh Nguyen on each of his views. However, that is the beauty of this book. I hate how we have fiction and non-fiction synonymous with fiction or fact. Seemingly in society we don't appreciate the amount of opinion and context that goes into non-fiction.

The beauty of To Save and to Destroy is that the reader/listener feels the same internal tug-of-war and questioning and realignment of their beliefs as the author explores his turmoil. It makes it so the reader can say "I disagree with you on point 2 but that doesn't mean I think you are bad/wrong on all the other points." This book allows for the acceptance of nuance and the "grey" options.

That being said. My attention drifted and zoned out at times.

Like a good fiction novel, I wish there were more hooks/cliff hangers to make the reader/listener want to keep flipping the page to know what is said next.

Such a unique read. I wasn’t sure what to expect and although I didn’t agree with all of his ideas, I found so thought provoking. We have very different stories relative to immigration so our perspective varied but I was deeply intrigued by the thoughts and experiences shared and how they shaped the author’s beliefs and lifestyle. I’d say now is the perfect time to hear every possible immigration story you can, especially ones that don’t particularly shape your point of view because the reality is all immigrant stories don’t fall left or right. They’re deeply personal and I know from helping my mom with immigration proceedings for her family, it’s a difficult process, it’s expensive and time consuming but seeing families reunited and under one roof is worth all of it. In this case, I believe this author developed an even deeper connection and pride with his roots from his positive and negative experiences.

Listening to this audiobook transported me back to grad school--othering, double consciousness, Edward Said--all so paradoxical, philosophical, yet somehow still making sense in some capacity. Now with a new perspective as a high school English teacher, I found myself reflecting on the texts I've taught in my classroom and the texts I could teach; on the conversations that could be happening with my students in the classroom about what we expect of authors in certain genres; about my own desires as a reader of literature. I can imagine pulling at the very least some quotations from this text as warmup journal entries or even pairing them with other texts or writers who explore similar ideas.

I would have preferred to read this in print versus audio or maybe found a way to replicate that lecture-hall venue that lends itself to this reading. It wasn't a great on-the-way-to-work book, nor was it one that I wanted to listen to while decompressing for my day. It's a text that desires to be annotated, to be reread. While the audiobook format was well produced and easy to follow in most places, there were sections I had to rewind to understand or ponder more. However, this may say more about my own style of learning than it may about Nguyen's narration.

I'll likely return to the Norton lectures with the accompanying transcripts at some point, especially the first two which I found particularly fruitful for my own thinking. And I'll most definitely be exploring more of Nguyen's writing after getting a taste of his artistic purpose and process.

TO SAVE AND TO DESTROY by Viet Thanh Nguyen compiles together his series of Norton Lectures where he delved into what it is to be considered an other.

Throughout, he offers insights into other authors as well as the development of his own work. I appreciated his wordplay, as it would heighten connections he was making, such as when he describes the following: “...giving me the confidence needed to portray her, and, in the end, betray her,” as well as the clever contrast of mother tongue/other tongue.

Nguyen narrates the audiobook, so it allows listeners a similar experience to those who were able to listen to his lectures in person.

(Thank you to Dreamscape Media for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.)

hanks to NetGalley and Dreamscape/Belknap for the ARC!

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s "To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other" reads like an academic addendum to the author's earlier work, replacing personal urgency with social clarity.

After "A Man of Two Faces," a memoir I admired for its confident refusal to simplify identity, I wondered where Nguyen could go next. The answer, it seems, is deeper. "To Save and to Destroy" is more a re-mediation than a step forward, allowing the author to soften his tone while sharpening his arguments across a series of lectures.

In my review for the aforementioned memoir, I noted that Nguyen’s work seemed to suggest that the best way to honor memory is by leaving it as an open wound. That isn’t the case here, as the author seems prepared to heal—ready to find the language to stitch himself up.

Nguyen is much better equipped to discuss otherness this time around, but he has replaced the spiraling, exploratory approach of his memoir with the circular, emphatic format of an academic lecture. It’s still interesting, particularly if readers are into both historical and modern literature, but it isn’t particularly novel. It can even feel a little redundant. I love hearing Nguyen’s take on people like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, but only in the same way that one might be curious about what a professor thinks about a given subject.

It’s anecdotal, not essential.

As a whole, in comparison to its predecessor, the book seems more personally cathartic but, surprisingly, less publicly catalytic, even though it is more direct in its calls to action. "To Save and to Destroy" has an audience in mind, but its timely didacticism seems to underserve them. When, for example, Nguyen writes about genocide in Gaza, it feels anonymously academic—a tragedy to serve as an example to prevent future tragedies.

It’s abstracted, which feels a bit antithetical to the author’s earlier work.

Having noted all of this, one of the book’s themes is how otherness wrongfully creates thematic obligations–perhaps I am burdening "To Save and to Destroy" with stakes it doesn’t need to have. I'm not sure I can fault a book for being unlike another book. I really enjoyed this dive into Viet Thanh Nguyen's brain, and the excellent opening essay is a must-read. It isn’t as if the author is irresponsible—he’s just a little more settled now, even in moments when it seems readers should be unsettled.

You know a non-fiction book is good, when it evokes so much emotion and grinds those gears.

This is my first book by this author, but one I thought would fit as a great starting point as it is a collection of essays.

What was so great about this was I found myself agreeing with the author on many things, specifically with the complicity of the empire in making human beings feel othered.

Now, let me role my sleeves up, what made this even a better read for me was that I disagreed on many mentions or citations of individuals specifically mentions of politically contentious individuals such as Salman Rushdie or the leader of the PKK, Abdullah Öcalan.

I suppose in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s eyes these individuals are at the forefront of being othered within their own communities, or at least that’s what I was grasping from my read.

I do call out these two individuals because they are contentious within my own communities, I speaking from a middle eastern perspective who identifies with a cultural similarity to Öcalan, but also whole heartedly disagree with both individuals here who have not only othered me within my identity, but also I feel othered by their works, in Rushdie’s case and othered by Öcalan’s actions.

I feel more compelled to call out within my own community, to specifically point figures because their works/actions have created a separation when a collective whole is more beneficial.

I could talk to the ends of the earth about this, so I will keep this as short as possible.

Other topics I found I disagreed with was the othering by exclusion. I don’t use this lightly because if anyone knows exclusion well enough, it’s an individual who is from a minority. One topic mentioned was pho. Yes, pho. The author specifically recalls using pho in a sentence but having to “translate” or give contextual markers for unfamiliar cultural foods/phrases in books. The author disagrees with doing this and believes to leave such context untranslated. But fails to mention that you are not only translating for the white individual but other “others” as well.

For me, these little translations are an invitation. The reader might not know what pho is, but by sharing with the reader that pho, a Vietnamese soup dish, is just that, you are welcome individuals to look further into this, by opening a door.

I can go on and on, clearly I have much to say. But let’s just leave it as a book that will invoke emotion and create discourse. Just don’t talk about it at the family dinner table 😉

Special Thanks to Netgalley and Dreamscape Media for an ALC of To Save and to Destroy: Writing As An Other. All thoughts are my own.

Viet Thanh Nguyen demonstrates why he’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning author in this, part memoir, part lecture on the art of writing. The internal battle of who he is and what county he represents is brilliantly written.

As an Asian American first-gen physician, this book hit home for me. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s reflections on being an outsider—through family, literature, and politics—felt deeply personal and powerful. I especially appreciated how he tied in his mother’s story and challenged the idea of “model minorities.” His writing is sharp and moving, and the audiobook narration made it even more impactful. I felt seen. Highly recommend.

A deeply intellectual and insightful collection of scholarly essays about being an “Other,” based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Norton Simon lectures at Harvard. There’s also a lot of humor and cleverness in these series of essays/lectures that’s really thought-provoking at the same time. I’ve been fortunate to hear Nguyen speak in a couple of events, so listening to his narration of the audiobook was enlightening and reminiscent of being in a town hall lecture. Much of the book is autobiographical, as Nguyen relays his musings as a writer and in academia, perusing over the differences between being a refugee, an immigrant, or an exile. Having been in academia for a long time, this series of essays are also very well-researched and well-thought out, referencing classic writers, historical events, other Asian/Asian American/BIPOC writers, and even similar refugee experience to that of the Vietnamese people.

This book touches on important on individual and personal themes of identity, language, representation (and the expectations that come with being an immigrant), collective voices, and the power of narratives (and who’s telling the story) but also on far-reaching topics like politics, violence, capitalism, and post-colonialism. If you’re familiar with his previous work, he also references The Sympathizer and A Man of Two Faces, explaining these themes into his previous works. Overall, an excellent addition to the collection of writings by Vietnamese authors (if you read the book, you’ll understand the importance of this).

Special thanks to Dreamscape Media and NetGalley for providing an audiobook in exchange for an honest, independent review.

Nguyen has written a number of novels, including The Sympathizer and The Committed, which is how I first became aware of him. I'm sure the TV show about the former has brought others of you to him. Like me, you may have initially thought that this would be similar, but instead it is primarily an academic analysis of writing and its intersection with identity, politics, imperialism, and more.

This collection of essays (originally delivered as the Norton lectures at Harvard) is unlike anything I've ever read or heard, and therefore I had some difficulty in deciding on a rating. My hunch is that I am under-rating (i.e. it should be a 5), but I found myself wandering a bit as I listened, most likely my own fault, but nonetheless, the reason for it being slightly lower. Once again, I wish there was a 4.5 option!

As you might expect, Nguyễn narrates the audiobook, which parallels his initial delivery of the essays and also dovetails well with their extremely personal nature. Nguyen is a Vietnamese refugee (not that he would use that word, as you will see when you read), and does an extremely good job talking about "othering", and particularly how to grapple with writing about it and through it. There is a lot to digest here and I personally would likely benefit from a critical reading of the essays and then sitting with them a while. Worth the read for the more "intellectual" among us.

An important and insightful collection - I would absolutely assign this text about writing to my writing students, especially the first essay on inauthenticity. I also really enjoyed hearing the author read the audiobook, especially since the book is based on Nguyen's Norton lectures. I can imagine it being a meaningful experience for students to hear these essays in the medium they were originally delivered.