David Yoon

She's the Queen, our literary Beyonce who delivers the goods with an earlier collection of short stories. You can see here the briefest of outlines that will become Americanah later. Confidently African stories told with a measured awareness of Western sensibilities. That storyteller voice that gently leads you across the page with a sharp eye and wry line. Adichie is so adept at alluding to deeper themes with a light touch that doesn't slow down your reading.

If I'm going to quibble the stories can be somewhat jarring in their abrupt end, building steam only to be just as quickly discarded. Like songs that end sharply just as you're expecting a third verse.

Pat Barker offers up a retelling of Homer's Illiad from the perspective of 19 year old Briseis who sparked the fight between the mighty Achilles and Agamemnon, King of men. It's the latest in female led interpretations of the classics that's just so hot right now with Madeline Miller's Circe and Emily Wilson's translation of Homer's Odyssey.

After the sacking of Lynessus, Briseis is offered to Achilles as a war prize. Her story seems an answer to the line Priam utters in the Iliad, pleading with Achilles to return his son's Hector's body to him. Escorted into the Greek camp by Hermes he falls to his knees and says, “I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son.”

When Briseis echoes that statement she does so with a bit more force. “I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers.”

And while I'm thankful for the arms distance remove the story is often written in, it can almost approach impassive. Barker does occasionally brings the focus in and it's justly unsettling. From Achilles' spear piercing Briseis' brother's neck as he lay wriggling like a stuck pig as Briseis watches. This warrants barely any attention from Achilles as he fastidiously puts his foot on his neck to pull out his spear. And when Agamemnon takes Briseis as his own, he shows his contempt and ownership of her by hurling a gob of phlegm into her mouth.

The relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, the camp of war brides and slaves, Achilles communing with his goddess mother all lacked the heft I was hoping for. The personal stakes seemed diffused under the haze of hoary legend and Briseis' defiant sounding ending seemed unbelievably sad and ironic.

At its heart it about the Aids epidemic in the 80's specifically in Chicago and how it decimated that community. The trick is how Makkai manages to show so many different facets to the story. It avoids being one-note and I never felt like some voyeuristic tourist chaperoned by a voluble tourguide shouting about all the interesting gays! It also steers clear of being pure misery porn as well.

The 2015 timeline with Fiona looking for her daughter in Paris allows us to reflect on the 80's from the perspective of a caregiver. But the story didn't quite gel and it felt almost cruel to know that this women who cared so deeply for these men dying of AIDs would end up alienating her own child as a result. And we also get memories of an artist commune in Paris of the 20's which adds a bit of gallery acquisition thriller in the middle.

I guess it's just this weird theme of the excitement of living in a moment with these larger than life figures with all the attendant beauty and tragedy but how it leaves its mark on the next generation. The disconnect with Nora wanting to preserve her memories at the expense of her children who are shown as petty and small-minded, or Fiona's love for the men of boystown throwing a long shadow over her own daughter's understanding of maternal love. It's a lot to pack into a book and it started to feel shaggy around the edges. If it sometimes misses the mark, it still manages to stay a compelling read.

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.

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

Our narrator is near death and recalling the events of the summer of 1969 when she found herself at an abandoned country house. Despite her boozy sounding name, Fran Jellico is a 39 year old, thick around the middle, awkward, greying virgin barely held together with her mother's (who she's just lost) foundation garments. Suddenly she's thrown in with Peter and his mercurial wife Cara and despite not knowing how to meet people, make friends, and hold a conversation she manages to strike a summer friendship with the couple.

When it's done well, I'm happy to read a sun dappled and bittersweet recollection of a summer past, but there's something more going on here. From the very onset Fran remembers looking down from the upstairs peephole to a body, lying in the pinking water of a bathtub, eyes open and staring for too long.

Gothic elements from shadowy figures hovering in windows, mysterious noises and secret rooms are introduced. Cara seems deeply troubled and her and Peter's relationship is not what it seems on the surface. The two stories seem at odds but are pulled together beautifully keeping you off-balance and questioning like some high-literary thriller. Kazuo Ishiguro, meets Charlotte Bronte channelling Gillian Flynn. An unexpected surprise.

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.

Would make one hell of a TV script with Reseng, our protagonist torn between the old world of trained career assassins, the back-alley, anything for a buck world of the Meat Market and the slick, MBA having, Stanford educated Hanja and his corporate supermarket of death. The host of eclectic characters from the soft-hearted but bear-sized owner of the pet crematorium, the cross-eyed, knitting librarian, the non-stop talking convenience store owner and her wheelchair bound sister. The action is done well and the story moves but I guess I like a bit more flourish in my writing. The translation is serviceable but I have a Western appetite for wordy flourishes on the page and the need for some authorial pyrotechnics. It's a question of activist versus originalist translations explored a bit more here: https://youtu.be/rKmkhWh_vzY

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

It's just such a delicious writerly challenge. You envision some future world - a seemingly benign surveillance state where everything is on video, where everyone records the facts of their days and lives entirely by truth. Where lies are punishable by law and enforced by Speculators that can sense lies in the very air. Where even fiction is banned and TV shows are just curated recordings of actual surveilled events. Now, how does one get away with murder in this world?

And there is this joyful sense of satire as you begin in this fictional place built on truth inspired by Winter's new understanding of our current real world after watching the swirling alternate facts reality of Trump's inauguration. Fun! And Winters is a smooth writer, taking us through this police procedural in a skewed dystopia without getting too mired in the world-building. But he wants his cake and to eat it too.

Talking about it with people smarter than me who noticed the presence of white lies in this world and the grey area of hyperbolic advertising claims. Magicians are allowed but how does science even progress if theorizing is a form of lying? Even our own speculator is guilty of lying. Nitpicking sure and I'm more than willing to suspend my disbelief for the sake of a good story but Winters just can't stick the landing. It feels rushed and hand-wavy instead of earned. Winters tees up some interesting aspects but finds himself scrambling in the rough at the end.

Examines our culture's need to keep women in “their place”. A tightly constrained little box where we can police their voices, sexuality, clothing choices, and general behaviour. Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Bronte, Sylvia Plath, Whitney Houston, Britney Spears are all examined and understood in their time to be difficult, unhinged, irrational, too emotional or just downright crazy.

“By zeroing in on the messiest and most badly behaved women, and rejecting them, we make a statement about what makes a woman good. The trainwreck is the girl who breaks the rules of the game and gets punished, which means that she's actually the best indication of which game we're playing and what the rules are.”

Why is Jennifer Aniston understood as a sad, childless, lovelorn woman? Why do we love to hate on the Kardashians. Why is Janet Jackson reviled for her NippleGate halftime antics but Justin Timberlake is hardly mentioned? What is the standard we hold Hillary Clinton to that Donald Trump manages to avoid. Where does Christine Blasey Ford stand in relation to Brett Kavanaugh?

It's a readjusting of focus, an altered view of our voyeurism fuelled by TMZ and the message it sends into the world. How we, whether we realize it or not, police women everyday. We snigger at Taylor Swift for singing about her breakups while conveniently forgetting that Steven Tyler of Aerosmith adopted an underage girl and impregnated her or applauding the bad behaviour of male rock stars in movies like The Dirt.

It's no screed but a smart, engaging book that reads like your smartest friend dropping some serious knowledge on your ass over beers.

The book opens when two kids find Chase Andrews, former star quarterback and newly engaged local golden boy, in the swamp by the old fire tower, dead.

The story rewinds back 17 years and we're introduced to six year old Kya Clark on the day her mother walks down their sandy lane wearing fake alligator skin heels, carrying a suitcase - never to reappear again. Kya, the youngest of five, sees the family slowly slip away from their abusive and drunk father until it's just the two of them left in the marsh shack. And then one day it's just Kya.

The story flips back and forth in time. Kya, the March Girl, Wolf Child, Miss Missing Link manages on her own, learning to read and take care of herself. But that murder is there, like an itch, nagging in the background as the townspeople of Barkley Cove become sure that Kya is the murderer.

So we've got a mystery and a small handful of possible suspects but what hooked my from the beginning is how Delia Owens renders this strip of land. She's got a wildlife scientist's eye for place, rendering the flora and fauna so vibrantly. (Doesn't hurt that Delia Owens is in fact a wildlife scientist and has won the John Burroughs Award for Nature Writing already.) From Kya's shack to Jumpin's Bait and Gas the marsh comes alive. The herons the colour of grey mist reflecting on blue water, Kya reciting poetry to preening gulls as the marsh's moist breath hung the oaks and pines with fog.

Ayelet Waldman has long been “held hostage by the vagaries of mood.” She's combatted her mercurial nature with a “shit-ton of drugs” that goes on for half a page and reads like the advance battalion of some YA dystopian sci-fi novel with names like Celexa, Lexapro, Prozac, Zoloft, Cymbalta, Effexor, and more. All legal but not altogether effective.

Desperate to alleviate not only her own suffering but the suffering of the people she loves that have had to deal with her fractured moods she embarks on a 30 day microdosing trial with 10 micrograms of LSD on every third day.

Understand that Ayelet is the type of person I can't handle at close quarters. She's the oversharing dinner guest prone to tangents and manic bouts of neurosis. At 52 she's the “totally basic” woman in line ahead of you at Starbucks ordering a skinny vanilla latte that seems a misspelled name away from demanding to speak with the manager.

In other words she's fallible and entirely human. She's not hiding behind a pose or putting herself at a scientific journalist's remove. She'll drop her credentials as a federal public defender, a consultant for the Drug Policy Alliance, and a law school professor but also cop to her affluent white privilege that lets her partake, and write about, a Schedule 1 drug.

And while we'll get books from Michael Pollan talking about the efficacy of psychedelics to treat depression, addiction and end of life anxiety, or breathless articles about how techbros are hacking their productivity with microdosing I like Waldman's approach.

Microdosing helped with her chronic shoulder pain, increased her productivity and leveled out her moods to the point her kids even comment on her new chill. She's the soccer mom, the PTA chair, the Facebook user clipping articles on her timeline - in other words the perfect vector to begin the process of normalizing these long maligned drugs.

It's fairy noir and our hard-bitten detective protagonist is mentally struggling double amputee who lost both her legs after an attempted suicide dive from seven stories up. There's lots of work throughout the book devoted to wrangling with her prosthetics, the perils of staircases, concerns over her stumps getting infected, and struggling to get out of various chairs not to mention the varied mental gymnastics she needs to perform to get through the day struggling with Borderline Personality Disorder. Honestly it's a refreshing take but it can be a bit much. To her credit, Baker handles misfits well and avoids overly sentimentalizing them. Millie Roper is a broken badass taking it one day at a time instead of a handi-capable, crime-solving inspiration - which is a good thing.

In the meantime she's been recruited to a secret agency peopled with mental outpatients tasked with managing traffic between the fairy world and ours. It's MIB Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I enjoyed the magic systems and the slow reveal of the integration between the two realms. This is some serious world building that begs for a series of books and reads like a TV series.

I am Jack's disappointing sequel.

Chuck Palahniuk follows up his Fight Club novel (slightly different than the movie) with a comic series collected here. Our protagonist (here named Sebastian) is 10 years older, married to Marla Singer and father to a precocious little child. He's popping pills and living in a haze, doing whatever employed, middle aged white guys do in these sorts of stories.

It's Fight Club. But older! It's the movie except everyone knows the twist about Brad Pitt and Ed Norton before it even begins.

And of course Tyler's been busy. The grass roots Project Mayhem has globalize into Rize or Die (which is either a brilliant nod to the bro culture spawned by the movie, now commercialized and brought to you by Axe body spray, or just patently lazy)

it's the same question I ask when Chuck Palahniuk appears in the comic wrestling with how to move the story forward. By the time he breaks the fourth wall and gives up any responsibility for a singular narrative ending I'm pretty invested in lazy.

Wanted some more of Sean Murphy's work after his impressive run on Batman: White Knight. I love his scratchy kinetic style and this earlier work did not disappoint.

But it's such a comic. Snyder leans into the tropes. The first half is a rag-tag group of experts (naturally) in their respective fields taken miles underwater to a secret sea base (of course) where they've captured (I'm sure that'll last) a menacing mer-man (Hadley from The Cabin in the Woods would be so pleased!) and you know all this will go absolutely pear shaped. I could have leaned into that, there's meat on those bones. It's essentially Aliens underwater and I would have happily enjoyed a man vs merman showdown.

But then the second half of the book comes on 200 years into the future and we've got another protagonist with a sonic dolphin (that at one point will out-surf an avalanche) and a whole wack ton of hand-waving mythology that's supposed to tie into the first part but frankly doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense. It's like Matrix Reloaded and Prometheus where there's a ton of pot fuelled exposition that at first blush sounds great but in the light of day just falls apart. I mean individual story beats are great but taken as a whole it just didn't work for me. Convince me I'm wrong.

It's the zombie apocalypse but the mindless, infected hordes this time aren't craving human brains but are instead locked in an endless loop of familiar and comforting patterns. Setting the table for example, or trying on outfits, over and over and over again.

In that sense, Candace barely differs from the infected. As the city vacates around her and more and more people succumb to the fever, she is stuck in her own routine. She continues to punch a clock, and put in her time at an increasingly empty office. As a Chinese immigrant she has no family to go to, no living parents, no real connection to her co-workers, or even the city she lives in.

Even at the tail end of the apocalypse, when she decides to throw in with a tiny band of survivors headed out of New York, she's still the odd one out. Their fearless leader, an gothy IT admin, WoW player who smokes vanilla scented e-cigarettes admonishes Candace to try being a bit more participatory. See if their group is a “good fit” as if she's fielding offers from other survivor bands.

It's a wry meditation on being other and the familiar routines we often hide in. Everyone locked into their own repeating patterns, oblivious to everyone else. It's the Millennial apocalypse - full review here: https://youtu.be/oZ-LiukdoCY

In an exciting development the Man Booker longlist includes, for the first time, a graphic novel.

But why this one?

I mean that rich middle section with tinfoil hat wearing talk show hosts calling out conspiracies and crisis actors in our thriving clickbait culture speaks to the current American dumpster fire beautifully. And the email from “Truth Warrior” is a perfectly realized little gem with its own subtle twists moving from soothing empathy to sputtering rage. But all of this is wrapped up in a bland burrito. The flat muted colours and the barely rendered characters centred on each rigid panel gives it a feel like an airplane emergency card, and just about as compelling. And yes I get it, it's supposed to feel banal and tedious. But is it better in this format? I liked the meaty, almost too text heavy section. Would this have been better as a short story?

If I'm being generous, Drnaso does use images to portray an underlying threat - the held knife behind the door, the gun revealed in act one, the end times bunker noted without comment. But overall the flat style draws too much attention to itself. Look! We are all living lives of quiet desperation, empty and flat! Look at these long uncomfortable silences, these placid faces! LOOK! Do you get it? I'll keep hammering it over your head with these repeating boxes following the flat rhythm of a comatose patient's heartbeat. MuCh mUnDanE! VeRY DiSapPoInT.

Author Nico Walker grew up the son of affluent parents in Ohio, spent 11 months in Iraq pulling in more than 200 missions as a woefully under-qualified Army medic and returned to develop a heroin addiction which led to a string of 11 bank robberies in a 4 month span, stealing about $40K to feed the habit before inevitably being caught. He's currently spending 11 years at the Federal Correctional institution in Ashland Kentucky where he wrote Cherry. And despite the author's note proceeding the work - “This book is a work of fiction. These things didn't ever happen. These people didn't ever exist.” - the story is pretty much that.

But damn what a read. I think critic Ron Charles put it best when he calls Cherry a morose Holden Caulfield goes to war. Walker is matter of fact, adopting a simple street argot but not in a boastful way, trying to show off his cred. The story is not a metaphor, Walker's not angling for your sympathies, he's not looking to redeem himself in your eyes. There's nary a whiff of an MFA program, juggling intent. He's a walking shrug emoji noting the blunt, blood-used and crooked needles in the cupboard, the quiet joke of robbing a bank, the whole make-believe mess of the war. I really enjoyed the read and really settled into Walker's distinct voice - and maybe I'm just taken in by the lived experience on display here, the story that fuels the story adding to the weight of the thing. In contrast to the novel, Walker's Acknowledgements are an effusive read, crediting the people around him for any semblance of talent on display here which just adds to the allure.

The book has sold in several languages already and Walker's using the money to pay back some of the banks he's robbed. They're already working on a movie deal but it's currently held up because he's used up all his phone time in prison. At a meta level it's just such a beautifully crafted package.

From Albert Hofmann accidentally discovering LSD after the worlds first unexpected acid trip, to Timothy Leary and his cries to “turn on, tune in and drop out” that drove the drug underground, and it's current scientific resurgence - it's been a long strange trip indeed for LSD.

Digging out from the countercultural baggage of the 60's, psychedelic research is showing remarkable efficacy in treating depressions, addiction and the existential anxiety of the terminally ill. But Pollan takes things a step further and recounts several of his own guided sessions, his first at age 60. These aren't recreational binges or microdosing sessions but heroic doses administered with the help of trained professionals.

But Pollan himself notes how hard it is to share these experiences. How they tend to cliche and the outright banal. “Love conquers all.” “We are all one.” But at the same time, in the grip of a psychedelic episode, these take on profound import.

Pollan brings the same level-headed reason that he applied to food in a Defense of Food to psychedelics, perhaps leaning a bit harder on the science given the controversial nature of his subject. I think I would have liked a bit more wide-eyed wonder but maybe I'm not the one the book is meant to convince. Full video review here: https://youtu.be/DtYcGwm6Of4

I shouldn't like this book. it's an extensive brain dump of information about forest intelligence, how trees in fact communicate with each other to warn of impending threats. How a vast underground network connect trees across thousands of kilometres creating a plant neurobiology. We have eco-warriors Watchman and Maidenhair, she a survivor of a near death electrocution that has left her with the ability to communicate with light beings that exhort her to save the trees! And to be honest it gets a little scattered nearing the end, juggling 9(!) different characters, some of whom I'm still a little unsure as to what they're supposed to represent, what story they're trying to tell.

But damn can Powers write about nature. I realize that my literary fiction diet is made up of cityscapes and suburbs. Characters that rarely look up from the concrete under their feet. Powers gets us outdoors and manages to evoke the wonder you felt staring at a massive redwood, or the spare jack pine on a rocky outcrop bending against the wind. It's a rare talent that can tread that line between deeply researched science and woo-woo nature gazing but Powers pulls it off with aplomb.

It's the story of young George Washington Black, 11 years old as the books start in 1830. He's a slave on Faith Plantation in Barbados, under a new master. Wash understands instinctively that Erasmus Wilde owned their lives, and their deaths, and that clearly pleased him too much. But we're soon introduced to his brother Christopher Wilde or Titch who will change Wash's life. It's an adventure story that sees Washington off to Virginia, the Arctic, Nova Scotia, London, Amsterdam and Morocco jumping from one improbable situation to another massive coincidence. And read that way it's an entertaining, if mostly forgettable read.

But this is a Giller Prize winner, the second for Esi Edugyan! A Man Booker shortlisted title - clearly reading it as a plot driven travelogue is naive. Smarter people than I loved this so what am I missing? Is this wrestling with white guilt - is Titch an ally to Wash or is he simply white knighting to assuage the guilt he feels over profiting from their labours? Or is this more about Wash's struggles in freedom and the commitment to life when all you've ever known is slavery and the narrative that death is the only true escape? Insert shrug emoji here.

Maybe it's the perfect book club read. Seems like faint praise for this much lauded book, but there's a lot to tease out if you want to put the effort in ...otherwise it's just an unlikely story with lots of hand-wavy explanations and convenient plot devices that makes for a nice enough diversion.

My head-scratching review here: https://youtu.be/uRk8q__uqm8

Ben Fountain, at the behest of The Guardian, is sent out on the campaign trail in the lead-up to the 2016 US Presidential election and finds himself at the Quicken Loans Arena for the Republican National Convention. Here he finds stern warnings against tennis balls. Tennis balls are definitely not allowed on the convention floor. Same goes for water guns, toy guns, tape, rope, umbrellas with metal tips and a dozen other items that are considered verboten. What are allowed are guns. In the open carry state of Ohio, guns are allowed on the convention floor. Clearly America has lost its mind.

It's Fear and Loathing on the campaign trail and while Fountain saves much of his head-shaking ire for Trump, he's a non-partisan critic assessing Hillary as someone completely incapable of connecting with the middle-class and Ted Cruz who is determined to out-Jesus everyone else. He posits that the United States finds itself at a critical crossroads, one they've only been twice before during the Civil War and the Great Depression. In all cases, the country has had to completely reinvent itself to survive as a democracy.

Fountain is one hell of a writer. In our current breakneck news cycle that sees fresh new dumpster fires everyday, looking back those few short years seems to make the most sense. It is an arms length view that still seems horribly prescient. Full length video review here: https://youtu.be/uQ1HHhujnXY

I've been a fan of Heather Havrilesky since the prehistoric days of the internet when she was writing for Suck.com. An ancient past when my pre-work routine would consist of reading long form stories called blogs, back when paragraphs weren't so intimidating. Thankfully our modern era, sensitive to our time constraints, has since concentrated my mornings to scrolling memes, instagram pics and 140 character tweets.

Heather is smart and acerbic and I love her voice - she writes like I imagine I one day could, wry observations heaped with the gloss of 10 dollar words. Unfortunately I fear I've started with the wrong book. It's still her erudite and cutting wit applied to the mundanity of everyday life, but it veers too close to earnest screed. It's easy pickings decrying the capitalist fantasies of Fifty Shades or the insufferability of foodies, Disneyland and Crossfitters. To claim we need to get out more, and online less.

But unfettered by the constraints of blogging and fleeting online attention - free to truly flex in book form, the chapters can tend to the baggy. Things used to have to be tighter, or maybe my attention has just shrunk. Maybe in this environment I need my reasonable edicts to be delivered as precise, ranting screeds, eviscerating polemics that point and laugh at the misguided other in 1000 words or less. ...insert appropriate gif meme here.

For author Ben MacIntyre, Oleg Gordievsky belongs in the pantheon of world changing spies. A KGB colonel at the height of the Cold War, he was in fact an agent for the British Secret Service. The book opens with his flat in Moscow being bugged, cameras installed and a light coating of radioactive dust sprinkled on his clothes and shoes. Oleg is returning to Moscow and it's clear his traitorous activity of the past decade has been discovered. The noose is tightening and Oleg is quickly running out of options.

MacIntyre is a meticulous researcher and interviewed nearly every British agent working with Gordievsky and several Russians as well. He creates a tense historical account that reads like a slow burning thriller. But this isn't movie spy-craft and what becomes critical to Oleg's story is a Mars bar, a Safeway bag and a soiled diaper.

Mundane details certainly, Oleg is turned while playing badminton of all things, but let's not discount the world-changing effect he had on geo-political relations. He may very well have averted nuclear disaster and helped usher in a new age of glasnost. An eye opening account of old world spy-craft where the KGB, CIA and MI6 converge.

A full review for our Non-Fiction November pick here: https://youtu.be/qoz3wJAL-Xs