David Yoon
This is just a plain spoken, completely unsexy, wildly rational take on money. Becoming financially unbreakable, sticking to a program through market fluctuations, and considering it all in the proper time horizon. Folks should be reading this again and again as a patient reminder of keeping things in the proper perspective against the consumerist tendencies we're all soaking in daily. I think it'll hit different depending on where you are on your financial journey but it's well worth revisiting for some reassuring truths. A smart investment if ever there was one.
Hand-wringing, affluent, New York jew navigating middle-aged life as a newly single man in a city awash with women that suddenly want to sleep with him? Or an examination of how we've marginalized women's stories in traditional literary narratives.
Sure!
A novel where the Upper East Side doctor is played off as a slacker not living up to his economic potential and big city mom's drop their kids off at private school armed with kale smoothies and athletic T's that read “Your Workout is My Warmup” that somehow explores the invisible work of suburban moms.
IKR?
There's a lot going here and lots to pick apart. Is Rachel a soulless careerist monster? Is Toby really just a self-involved dick? Is Seth an overcompensating idiot? Is this just a petty hit job from a bored housewife?
Absolutely!
This is your next bookclub read so sharpen your knives and get ready to pick a side cause marriage is hard.
Ok dogpiling on the book is bordering on cliche. Wanted to read it before my daughter did to make sure it wasn't entirely objectionable. Never thought you could make being a vampire more lame - really, I'm immortal and so I'm going to go to highschool the rest of my life? ugh.
Actually reveals the futility of these review sites. My loving or hating this book is entirely irrelevant.
Published in 1997, it still feels exactly like the middle-aged, affluent white guy hand-wringing story that comprises a good chunk of the classic Western canon. Hank Devereaux Jr is nearing 50 and as the interim chair of the West Central Pennsylvania State University he's facing funding cuts, potential layoffs, a mutinous department, a debt-ridden daughter, and the daily struggle to properly urinate. He's surrounded by bumbling, impotent men and nearly every woman is somehow an object of lust. Hank eventually finds himself choking an unlucky fowl by the neck on local television and threatens to kill a duck a day until his department receives funding. Which, along with some unresolved daddy issues, is the height of his turmoil. One that he can assuage with games of racquetball, or sitting on the quiet deck of his forested home with his ever patient and capable wife, considering his tenured position at the university. It sounds absolutely insufferable.
What can I say, I'm still charmed by the story. The expansive cast of characters is easy to laugh at but it's rarely done out of malice. Its slapstick set pieces are rendered with writerly flair that I can't help but admire. And the whole thing moves at a brisk pace throughout. Yes there are some clunkers that remind me it's a book of a past era, one that follows its own bookish logic to conclusion, but I'm in the hands of a polished storyteller with a sharp eye for character that's generated enough goodwill to carry me through.
How do you talk about a short story collection? Some work, others don't but what's clear throughout is the thoughtful effort Chiang puts to these stories. He explores notions of time travel, free will, entropy, alternate realities and wrestling with notions of being and memory.
He's careful with his logic but what I appreciate is the his exploration of the human impact. A miniature device with a negative time delay that can send a signal back a second in time creates a catastrophic existential toll on some individuals. Meanwhile a time portal allowing travel back and forth across 20 years doesn't change the past but can change our understanding of it.
You never get the sense he's overly impressed with himself and his sci-fi conceits. He doesn't fall in the trap of trying to dazzle with outlandish futuristic worlds and clever scenarios (which abound nonetheless) but instead uses these ideas as a jumping off point to wrestle with something more human.
It's a polyphonic collection of 12 short, loosely interconnected stories of Black, British women ranging in age from 19 to 93. We've got Amma hitting the big time with a play opening at The National after years of scrappy outsider productions. Her daughter Yazz pushes up against her mother's brand of Boomer feminism with her own rules and concerns. Dominique enters into a lesbian relationship and is quickly skirted away to a “wimmin's commune” and we even have a Black British farmer. I appreciate the representation, certainly at this moment it feels all the more important to have a book wholly dedicated to these voices. In hindsight the dual Booker manages to balance Atwood's brand of white feminism against Evaristo's Black and Intersectional feminism.
I enjoyed the collection and seeing the connections however slight as it is bookended by Amma's play “The Last Amazon of Dahomey.” It doesn't really resolve any larger narrative tension when it finishes but collectively the stories work together to paint a rich world with characters we don't often see on the page.
It's a man's world.
Sure, I'm familiar with income disparity, about how office temperatures are dialled to male physiology, and the head scratching oversight from Fitbit tracking various health statuses but not menstrual cycles. Obvious annoyances but this book outlines how much more is at stake.
How about the fact that it wasn't until 2011 that the US started using a female crash-test dummy. Up to that point they simply used a small male version which leads to cars being completely designed around the male body. As a result, females are nearly 50% more likely to be seriously hurt in a collision and 17% more likely to die.
How police protective armour is specifically formed to the male body leading to female officers having a higher likelihood of dying from a stab wound due to ill-fitting gear. How women are 50% more likely to be misdiagnosed after a heart attack because trials tend to use and research predominantly male participants.
Or how about that miraculous drug that helped alleviate menstrual cramps being deemed non-viable and unlikely to turn a profit that would go on to find life as a little blue pill to address male erectile dysfunction instead.
This book is filled with tidbits that spotlight our patriarchal data bias that go beyond the obvious to things like transit routes, snow removal and discovering the story of Mozart's older sister.
This is wall-to-wall knowledge that will having you nudging your partner, friend or co-worker with a “didja know?” that still leaves you shaking your head if not outright pulling your hair. Well worth the read, can't recommend it enough.
Man is this ever a polarizing read.
On one hand it's a YA romance. Marianne is the dorky rich girl and Connell is the popular working class football star whose mom cleans Marianne's family home. If that sort of high school cliche doesn't sell you it soon slouches into NA territory. Marianne hooks up with the wrong kind of guys and Connell dates bland nice girls. Will they or won't they? We spend the entire book watching the two dance in and out of each others lives in what amounts to a Marxist romance novel. People hate this and the growing social media hype surrounding author Sally Rooney isn't exactly endearing her to serious readers.
Well screw them. All aboard the hype train!
I loved Normal People. As Rooney states, it's essentially a nineteenth century novel dressed up in contemporary clothing. Jane Austen for the social media set. Say. No. More. Marianne and Connell are recognizable types in high school but in college their status flips. Marianne is suddenly interesting and surrounded by a large coterie of friends and acquaintances while Connell feels like a milk-drinking culchie lost among the prep school kids in their plum chinos, carting around MacBooks. The two weave in and out of each others lives. Sometimes dating, sometimes just friends, and to me it never mattered whether they ended up together or not - it felt more like an examination of a pivotal four years post high school where they both wrestle with what it means to be in a relationship, grapple with depression and grief, understand their own worth and contend with the shifting power dynamics inherent with relationships. Consider me a fan.
https://youtu.be/WVTgzL9ZCj8 for more gushing over the hardest book you'd ever want to try and handsell.
Alfred Homer's just trying to put his past behind him. He's lost both his parents to a car accident and his lover has just left him. So he joins his parent's friend, Professor Morgan Bruno, on the hunt for information on poet John Skennen that will take them both across Southern Ontario.
And while the small towns of Schomberg, Feversham, New Tecumseth and Coulson's Hill are all actual locations in Ontario, what awaits the pair in the book is another thing altogether. They encounter towns peopled by blacks that speak only in sign language, annual house burning lotteries, ridiculous Indigenous parades, witches, werewolves and the Museum of Canadian Sexuality.
It's all a deep metaphor! It sound exhausting and self-important when I put it like that, but Days by Moonlight proves to be a dreamy odyssey propelled by Alexis' lyrical writing that glides effortlessly from one story to the next. It avoids feeling didactic and self-important in favour of a bucolic, certainly skewed but confidently Canadian road trip. All that's missing is a Timmy's double-double for the ride and roadside poutine stops.
It's a not entirely unlikely future scenario - hell we're already well underway with the cagily named “Heartbeat” rulings being pushed in several US states. In this, the darkest of timelines, abortion has become illegal. Those that provide abortion services can be charged with second degree murder and those seeking abortion can face significant jail time. In vitro fertilization is banned and legislation is being put into place demanding every child should have two parents.
In this environment we have the biographer/teacher Ro desperately trying to conceive before the laws are put into place making it impossible. Susan the housewife and mother feeling trapped, tied to a blithely oblivious jerk of a husband. Mattie the high schooler who finds herself pregnant and seeing her future dreams slipping away.
I loved the interactions between the characters. How these characters see each other through their own wants and desires. How the childless Ro quietly seethes at the mother in Susan and yearns at the possibility in Mattie. Wrestling between her own self-interest and what Mattie needs. How Gin, the healer in the woods is understood by the women in the community. Those moments really shine for me.
But as a whole it just didn't work for me. Maybe I'm just Pete, the oblivious dude friend to the equally crass Didier. Typical guy, doesn't get it. It just seems to deal with the aftermath of these ruling and duh, it kinda sucks for women. It puts their lives in danger, wrongfully incarcerates them and subtly pits them against each other. Preaching to the converted here. I wanted a villain and not just ignorant men. I wanted to read about how this affects the Christian right that has been fighting for this, how lawmakers subvert the rules when it's beneficial to them, how you justify denying abortion when it's rape or incest. Maybe it just wan't dystopian enough and instead focused on the hand wringing of suburban white women when the current conversation IRL happening right now feels way more dire.
A collection of short stories built around the titular story originally published as a standalone novella. It's easily the strongest of the group about a 70 year old veterinarian Byeongsu living with his adopted daughter Eunhui. The thing is she's actually the daughter of Byeongsu's last two victims capping off a long killing spree. And that's just the set-up. Things get even more interesting from there with twists that play with the form and leaves you scratching your head.
It's something that carries over into the other stories as well. The twist, the subversion, the punchline in each of the stories. The final story, The Writer, veers way off the beaten track reading like a Korean Hunter S Thompson writing Naked Lunch while channelling Monty Python. It was a bit much - but again, totally unexpected.
I really enjoyed the assured translation. Krys Lee teaches creative writing at one of of South Korea's most prestigious universities and is an English language novelist in her own right. She maintains the clipped, declarative style of an originalist translation but injects a bit of writerly flourish without getting too carried away. It's just right for this surprising collection.
This Giller shortlisted book opens with 23 sections, alternating between 19 year old Felicia Shaw from an undisclosed Caribbean island and Edgar Gross, an affluent, middle-aged German, heir to some vague family interest. They meet in a shared hospital room, tending to their respective mothers who are both near death.
The 23 sections represent the number of chromosome pairs found in DNA. From there the novel begins to reproduce. Part 2 jumps ahead a few years and we alternate between 4 voices times 4 to make 16 sections. Part 3 is comprised of 16x16 or 256(!) sections. The book can't keep up with this exponential growth and finally develops cancer. Super- and sub-script words insinuate themselves across the page, telling a familiar yet disjointed story. Explaining it seems altogether too much but I enjoyed the constraints Williams placed on the structure.
Williams has a poet's ear for language. He nails the privileged white guy apologist in the crosshairs of the #MeToo movement; the fast talking, big dreaming, bi-racial tween hustler working from the garage of his landlord's garage in Brampton; to the out-of-step, Portuguese, suburban, divorced dad that can't quite reconcile his long past glories with his present day indignities. Multiculturally, unapologetically Canadian.
Both slyly funny and casually devastating, it pokes at the idea of nature vs nurture, asking if we can ever hope to escape our own histories, and exploring both the family you're born into and the ones you make.
TL;DR - just watch the video review: https://youtu.be/7xQv7F8tiMQ
It's a hell of a handsell. A 30 year old postman is diagnosed with a brain tumour with days to live when the devil appears to make him a deal. He's already fashioned an end of life bucket list but it ultimately feels an empty practice, seeking novelty when that's not what he's really after. The devil instead offers an extra day of life in exchange for him agreeing to something in the world disappearing. You've read the title - you see where this is going.
It's a sweet, gauzy lensed story filled with swelling music and heartfelt tears that I'm not opposed to. I can appreciate it when it's done well, even if it's clearly manipulative —but this felt a little rote and by the book for my tastes. And that's even with the addition (or possible subtraction) of cats.
Lisa See tackles the free-diving women of the South Korean island of Jeju. It's been a matrifocal society since a 17th century king conscripted most of the island men to his army but still required his tribute of abalone. The remaining women had no choice but to take to the sea and they've been doing it ever since.
Young-Sook is 85 in 2008 when the book opens. She's managed to survive the seas as a haenyeo but living on the island has exacted a heavy toll. Jumping back to 1938 we're introduced to who will be her best friend, Mi-ja. This is their story growing up.
The haenyeo have a saying: “Every woman who enters the sea carries a coffin on her back” and we're quickly introduced to the many dangers they face underwater. This alone would have made for a compelling story, the girls growing in their underwater abilities, travelling to the frigid waters of Vladivostok, the petty jealousies and familial hardships their friendship would endure. But their lives are set on a horribly different path in the aftermath of the 4.3 incident.
April 3, 1948 saw an island uprising against the US installed government that was violently suppressed with some estimates seeing 1 in 10 islanders eventually killed while others put the number closer to 1 in 4. It's a brief, jarring and incredibly violent episode in the novel that sets the girls on separate paths.
So I came for the story and stayed for Lisa See introducing me to this heretofore unknown aspect of Korean history that sent me down a rabbit hole. Requisite booktubing in cars review here: https://youtu.be/o5jwCqucmOo
I've a contentious relationship with Marlon James. I find him at once a compelling writer but also a difficult read. I DNF'd his Brief History of Seven Killings and if Black Leopard, Red Wolf wasn't our book club pick I might have, in a moment of weakness, put it down never to return.
It was a confusing start - disjointed and abrupt. I couldn't quite settle into the unique voice of the narrator. The bookclub assured me that it was slow going at the start but picks up 100 pages in. I kept going. I found myself not exactly eager to pick up the book each time I put it down and felt it would have done better being read in larger swaths, taking a while each time to settle into the cadence of the novel.
It's the first book of the Dark Star trilogy, the subsequent books telling the same story but from different perspectives. I keep noticing the gaps in the story, places left conveniently blank for future narrators to fill in.
Such measured praise I know. This is a violent fantasy novel steeped in African myth. Not familiar with the fantasy genre I found it surprisingly visceral and bloody. The Omoluzu Roof Walkers are brilliantly imaginative, their intended victims never daring to step under a ceiling again. The Bad Ibeji is pure nightmare fuel, Tracker's experience with the Hyenas won't soon be forgotten, and the Adze still leaves me entirely creeped out. At the same time I loved The Buffalo, Sadogo and The Mingi.
It is a book chock full of imagination with a sprawling cast of characters that inhabit a massively compelling world. Michael B. Jordan has bought the rights to the series and there is much to mine here. But as to reading - it remained a challenge that I wouldn't recommend to everyone.
Haig himself admits it's a mess of a book. Short page or two chapters musing on places he's had panic attacks, what people on social media think about social media, how to stop worrying about aging, the stigmas around mental health, how algorithms eat empathy, and how we all need to take a break from our phones.
If I'm being snarky, it's nothing more than Rupi Kaur's brand of earnest Instagram poetry fleshed out to blog length. And yet it's strangely soothing. We know that social media is a dumpster fire, that everyone is faking it, that the world can be a toxic, anxious place filled with smooth-brained and superstitious monkeys but it doesn't hurt to be reminded to get outside, leave our phones behind, and be kind to one other. It's the Simple Abundance Daybook for the new Millennium. A simple book of reminders to keep moving forward.
It's a literary, literary thriller with Boyne unleashing his inner tea-spilling, gay, bon-vivant writer. Maurice Swift is a careerist psychopath who will stop at nothing to become a revered part of the authorial pantheon. Trading on his good looks he manages to insinuate himself in the life of aging Erich Ackermann, who's enjoying a late career resurgence after winning a prestigious literary prize. But one doesn't get to the top without stepping on others and Erich is just the first of many victims sacrificed on the altar of Swift's ambition.
Boyne is having a blast and writes sneering snark better than anyone and even channels some Gore Vidal in the middle of the book. As with any thriller you're better off not knowing too much going in, just trust you're in good hands with Boyne.
John Boyne has said he based many of the characters on people he's run into after decades in the publishing industry. A place that tends to invite some outsized personalities... https://youtu.be/a8D3tBWmtB8
I loved Children of Time so much that I did something I rarely ever do and immediately picked up the second book of the trilogy to read. Sadly it couldn't keep up the frenetic momentum of the first book. Children of Ruin felt way slower and Tchaikovsky once again draws from his zoology background to poke at the challenges of interspecies communication — which frankly started to feel a bit “been there, done that.”
Nonetheless the alien collective revealed midway through the book vocalizing their mantra “We are going on an adventure” is easily one of the more terrifying species I've encountered on the page. I could have read an entire book (albeit through my fingers) about this consuming entity and my hats off to Tchaikovsky for penning some truly chilling moments of alien horror.
But sadly it too often got mired in its own plodding structure and I felt none of the stakes I should have with the other characters. Maybe I did myself no favours by reading this so quickly after the first. The themes echoed across the books and I couldn't help but find this the weaker of the two.
Orson Scott Card is a raging homophobe, Mormon and more recently just a plain bat-shit crazy, racist ant-Obama nut. With all that furor it's hard not to inject the author into the story.
All this on the heels of the imminent movie release of Ender's Game (which prompted my reading) and the recent furor surrounding his potentially penning a Superman story arc for DC.
As a result I couldn't help read this as some metaphoric homophobe rant against the gay scourge. I mean he names the scary, alien species “buggers”. Then there's the nod to the Mormon afterlife wherein the heros “acquire” their own planet. All that's missing is magic underwear and Joseph Smith.
All that to say it's a lot more fun to read it as a LDS screed than a more literal reading about the cycle of abuse, the futility and falseness of honest communication, the abstraction of war and the loss of innocence.
You know what, forget all that. It's a great read and I hope the movie does a good job of translating it to the big screen.
I realize that reading poetry is seen as a bit of an affectation but dammit, sometimes I need me some of that purely distilled wordcraft. Not everything is a hit, I've lost a bit of the ear for the language but that's why this volume was a revelation. Cathy Park Hong creates her own language for the Desert guide, a funky patois of Korean, English and ebonics that just begs to be read aloud.
So you've dipped your toe in the anti-racist syllabus with Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility and now you're ready for some meatier fare. Ibram X Kendi is arguably the most recognized name in the growing anti-racist awakening that is gripping the West right now. But he wasn't always its greatest champion. Here he reflects on his own past, buying into racist ideas of laziness and lack of effort keeping Black people down in an inflamed and righteous sounding speech he made in high school. His own colorism and acceptance of White notions of beauty. His eyes being opened to his own homophobia and struggle to embrace intersectionality.
It's clear to him that no one is completely immune to the cancer that is racism when it is so embedded in our culture and such an integral part of our systems. And it is in this environment that simply calling yourself not-racist is no longer enough. You are either complicit in allowing racist ideas to proliferate or your are antiracist and expose and eradicate these ideas wherever you encounter them. Which is to say an activist produces power and policy change, not mental change. Changing minds is not a movement. Critiquing racism is not activism. If a person has no record of power or policy change, then that person is not an activist.
Time to step up your game.
“You have not been here before. You may imagine, from other stories you've read, that you know it well, but those stories flattered you, welcoming you as a friend, treating you as if you belonged. The truth is that you are an alien from another time and another place altogether.”
From the opening lines of the book the narrator takes us in hand as we explore 19th century London. We are following the ascendency of one of her prostitutes by the name of Sugar who finds a sugardaddy(!) in the guise of William Rackham, heir to the Rackham perfume fortune.
This is a huge read that devotes its languorous attention on issues of class, the roles of women in Victorian England specifically prostitutes (at the time there were apparently 1 prostitute for every 12 men), sexual disfunction, thwarted ambition, mercurial circumstance and writerly ambition. I enjoyed the writing and happily settled in for the long haul, content to let Faber lead me through the book.
Without saying anything about it, the ending knocks a star off an otherwise 4 star read.
This book is just so British, like a novelization of Coronation Street. (my apologies, I'm sure there are far more apt analogies but that is about the extent of my knowledge of British soaps)
It is the world prior to the pandemic. Of xenophobic rhetoric, an aging populace wishing for past glories, dog whistle politics dreaming of a whiter past, people reacting against political correctness and a polarized nation. Government flacks toeing the party line, spewing partisan double-speak, overzealous millennial social justice warriors and, inexplicably, two feuding children's entertainers. Sounds a lot like a place we all know on this side of the pond, except this book is unapologetically, 100% English - so of course this is a Brexit novel.
But it's almost too Brit-lit. Like a North American writers room trying extra hard to convey that this is set in England. I mean if this was anyone else writing, I'm sure the editor would have demanded they try and tone down the Britishness of it all a smidge. “Look Brett, I love what you're doing but could you dial down the tea and crumpets of it all a tad?” Coe doesn't miss a chance to drop a street name or rural village into the mix - but I will give him credit, his lavish coverage of the 2012 London Summer Olympics opening ceremony did prompt some YouTube viewings. In the end, much like Coronation Street, the story doesn't quite wrap up but rather stop as if in anticipation of yet another season.
Korean immigrant, trial lawyer and HBOT mom Angie Kim pens this incredible debut. Legal thriller wrapped in an incisive story of outsiders and immigrants. The lengths parent will go to for their children and the use of legal rhetoric to manipulate our sympathies. We have an explosion at the beginning of the book that kills two people but culpability is not so easily sussed out.
We jump from character to character as they slowly begin to fill in the blanks. Pak Yoo, the wild goose father who lived in a closet sized apartment in Seoul trying to save enough to join his family in America. Feeling less in a new country where language sets limits on what he might do. Emily, her life consumed with trips to countless therapy sessions, holistic organic stores and alternative treatment centers. Hours spent researching new medicines, medical advances and innovative research - everything focused on her child at the expense of her own life. Characters motivations and secrets leading to a satisfying but no less heartbreaking resolution.
Jaw dropper of a debut. Worth checking out - video review and ramblings here: https://youtu.be/WvyOeIsKUS4
This thing was churned out of a productivity book factory. A paint by numbers self-help book.
Step one: Open the chapter with a bit of anecdata.
“It's 1940 and Dutch scientist Niko Tinbergen would win the Nobel Prize for his research on herring gulls... ““Or, 1965 and Laszlo Polgar is embarking on a grand experiment in creating a squad of child chess geniuses... “
This segues into a habit shaping method reinforced with a few requisite paragraphs and then a bullet-pointed chapter summary while noting our ongoing progress on the 3 laws of creating a good habit. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I get it, it's a self-help book, repetition is important but it feels like the bookish equivalent of someone speaking slower and louder to me after assuming that English isn't my first language.
Still I like the idea of “you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems” and the simple rule “never miss twice.” That's enough to make me gloss over some of the more painful habit tropes gussied up with fancy terms like “temptation bundling”. The “I will do 10 burpees, THEN I will check Facebook” which manifests in so many futile ways when you're trying to quit smoking and does nothing to eliminate the bad habit itself as a long-time quitter will tell you.