David Yoon

Cyrus Shams is an unpublished poet, former alcoholic, and recovering drug addict pretending to have terminal illnesses to train doctors on their bedside manner. He's profoundly, inconsolably, suicidally, sad but comes off as a bit of an emo 20-something. As the story opens we find him lying on his mattress that smells like piss and Febreeze and dreaming of becoming a martyr.

Cyrus' mother was in a plane mistakenly shot out of the sky by the US Navy, his uncle dressed as the angel of death to comfort dying soldiers in the field and now wrestles with PTSD, and his father made it to the US to see Cyrus off to college before dying himself. In New York to see an artist installation by a woman named Orkideh who, dying of breast cancer, sits in the museum and answers questions, Cyrus is immediately pegged by her as just “another death-obsessed Iranian man.”

Throw in some dream interludes where Lisa Simpson chats with his mother and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar makes an appearance, one hell of a coincidence, and snippets of poetry and you've got a free-wheeling, debut novel with a poet's careful consideration of language that's still careening all over the place while riding a swelling wave of critical love. A messy, imperfect, but wonderfully ambitious outing.

I've never read any Neil Gaiman. I've even failed to crack the spine on a single Sandman. How dare I call myself a comic reader - my secret shame. Long past due to fix this oversight, I started in with American Gods. (10th Anniversary edition)

It's oblique in it's writing. It doesn't draw too much attention to itself and so it seems that the narrative happens in the periphery. Misdirection. I know already that I will be reading this again. If it wasn't for the fact it would ruin it for first time readers I could almost wish for an annotated, and illustrated version ala The Da Vinci Code. The etymology of Wednesday and the histories of the Egyptian gods rendered on the page.

Our protagonist Shadow has just been released after serving 3 years for aggravated assault, only to mourn the death of his wife. A car crash that killed her and her secret lover - Shadow's best friend. There's no reason for him to say no to the strange old man that fortuitously offers him a job. It's a vague sort of employment that eventually finds him in the company of gods old and new, a shadowy Agency and the spectre of his dead wife.

The old gods, immigrated from countries overseas, find America less than hospitable. They are tired and scrapping by in taxis, working in funeral homes, running cons and slowly going crazy. Supplanted by the shiny new gods of credit cards, internet and cable TV there seems to be an impending clash on the horizon.

The novel defies easy categorization, winning awards for science fiction, fantasy and horror. An American road trip, written by a Brit. An incredible novel from a comic book writer.

I've been hearing a lot about Ferrante lately. Her latest book made up the long tail of a bunch of best of lists for 2014 as well as topping translated reads. Ferrante is a pseudonym and the author makes Salinger seem downright social in comparison. This is the first book in the Neapolitan series which follows the lives of Elena Greco and Raffaella (Lila) Cerullo. Book one gets as far as their teenage years starting from when these frenemies are first introduced.

It's a luxuriously paced Bildungsroman that explores class rifts, how your community and friends define you and yet force you to define yourself in opposition to them. Nothing much really happens here and somehow it avoids being a plodding reminiscence. I'm actually surprised how much I liked this book and will be picking up the rest in the series.

Augusten Burroughs is Brene Brown's shit talking older brother. He's examining much of the same issues but drawing from his own life experience involving abuse, alcoholism, suicide and the death of a loved one.

While he's a tad inconsistent when it comes to kids, and I'm still not sure how I feel about his fat chapters, he still gets the same pass as any self-help book. There comes no expectation of hitting it out of the park every time. And maybe he falters here because he's at his most compelling when he's drawing from his own life experience, and as a childless, average framed, gay man he's a bit out of his element talking about anorexia or losing a child.

Still, Augusten is a straight-talking, no-nonsense story teller and proves a welcome respite from the more airy, optimism indicative of the genre.

Pretty sure this is part of the rarefied pantheon of books joining the likes of Infinite Jest and A Brief History of Time as one of the most bought, least finished books of all time. It starts out strong with an almost singsong, Indian lilt and cadence as Gibreel and Saladin hurtle to earth - interestingly nonplussed by the whole affair. But then its dream sequences and odd digressions left me scratching my head - I just couldn't get my footing.

Rushdie clearly is an accomplished writer. Open the book to any page and the writing often dazzles and he's working here, juggling ideas and poking at concepts. Maybe it's my own expectations coming into the book - wondering what could be so damning as to warrant a fatwa against his life. But it never really gelled and for all the furor it engendered all it managed to elicit from me was mild indifference. If it wasn't part of a book club read I doubt if I would have finished it.