David Yoon

It's unfair and draws unintended parallels, but the entire time I read this I kept thinking of Jian Ghomeshi's attempt at taking us back to his childhood in the 80's growing up in Southern Ontario with his debut 1982. Like Jian, Cathal Kelly is a bit of a minor celebrity - a regular sports columnist for the Globe and Mail. But unlike Jian he's never been accused of sexual misconduct, and subsequently tried to make a whining comeback in the midst of the #MeToo moment. He's also a better writer than Jian but shares his shaggy dog style that is more tell than show. Strangely both books even feature a handful of lists.

Boy Wonders is still a wonderful account of growing up in Southern Ontario in the 70's and 80's. it hits all the familiar sweet spots of my childhood. Star Wars, bad TV, questionable decisions, and regrettable fashion choices. Cathal hits some beautiful notes over the course of the book and he manages to avoid having it devolve into narcissistic navel gazing. He's a likeable narrator with a collection of quick, thoughtful hits of a time I remember fondly as well. What's not to like?

This review is starting to feel a bit like the book, a tad rambling, somewhat wordy, but still entirely serviceable and good-natured. I'll damn the book further with the faint praise of “I liked it!”

Serious WTF in the best possible way where the less you know going in the better - which makes reviewing the thing a bit tough. It's Oceans 11 as cast by Neil Gaiman's American Gods directed by Quentin Tarantino. It's bloody and violent. Grievous harm befalls little kids, neighbourhood dogs, a family of deer, and the process of photosynthesis. The main plot resolves itself two thirds of the way through the book and then Hawkins really ramps up the WTF. Pay attention! Hawkins gives us a loopy tale that can seem unnecessarily convoluted, meting out stray bits of information throughout that will have untold relevance later. Something as simple as “it would be the last sunset he'd ever see.” can change from throwaway foreshadowing to wry observation as the book goes on. All bets are off, and the rules no longer apply. It's a horror story with fantasy elements that can be twistedly funny at times. Would recommend, just don't judge me for it when you decide to pick it up.

Oblique review and additional attempts to describe the book here: https://youtu.be/p6Nv4tIqMYw

You've got Jimmy Han, resenting the small and windowless Chinese restaurant his father once ran.
Jimmy's partnered with a hustling real estate agent to sell his mother's home and open a fancier fusion joint downtown. But his mother thinks otherwise and his not-quite-Uncle Pang is making moves of his own that involve the son of one of Jimmy's long standing waitresses of 30 years who is trying to unravel the nature of her relationship with her aged, and also married, co-worker whose wife is struggling with a cancer diagnosis. That's maybe 2/3rds of the actual plot points bandied about in this tragi-comedy about a uniquely American family and the swirling ecosystem of the Beijing Duck House. It's a lot to take in.

Every town across North America has it's requisite Chinese restaurant that you barely think about as you sit down and order your General Tso's chicken on plastic covered tables with Asian zodiac placemats. Lillian Li lets us poke our head behind the kitchen doors and spy the generational toil and drama that fuels these establishments and shows how uniquely Asian-American these stories are.

Kris Pulaski loved to play guitar and her heavy metal band Durt Wurk put in the work, hit the road and played every backwoods dive, seedy bar and smoky venue with their big break surely just around the corner.

But that was 20 years ago. Now she works nights at a Best Western contending with urinating guests while her band mate Terry Hunt has gone off on his own to wealth and acclaim. A solo metal phenomenon rebranded as Koffin. He's back for one last set of shows and it spurs Kris to try and unravel why they all broke up in the first place.

Hendrix captures the in-fighting and brothers in arms duality of being in a band. He also drops a ton of lovely metal morsels throughout the book that had me reaching for classic Black Sabbath. (I love that an intrepid fan has already created a comprehensive playlist of every song referenced in the book on Spotify) A couple of grisy horror set pieces and man, what did UPS ever do to Grady Hendrix anyways? A fun diversion but a bit of a wash for me at the end.

It's not like i'm some mythology fanboy. I read the Odyssey out of some sense of literary obligation, beholden to the early stories of the Western canon. And Circe, if she's remembered at all, is only from her brief appearance in Homer's story. Island witch, turns men into pigs.

But with this rough clay Madeline Miller manages to fashion something incredible. The book opens amidst the Titan pantheon and it's all mythological mean girls. It's a raucous read right off the bat. Naive first love to modest mortal who becomes a douchebag demi-god and the inevitable other girl. Petulant rage and the home-wrecking nymph is transformed into a multi-headed beast. It's a ton of fun that still respects the source material. Scylla aside there's touchstones aplenty with appearances from Daedalus, Prometheus, Hermes, Icarus, the Minotaur, Jason of the Golden Fleece and of course Odysseus dropping in and out of the narrative.

What's amazing is that Madeline Miller is fashioning a coming age story. A minor miracle given she's dealing with an immortal. But from that first disastrous crush to coming into her own, Circe is shown working to define her abilities and secure her independence. Childbirth is shown with all the epic pitch of any traditional hero narrative and motherhood is a defiant struggle that is, at its core, completely badass.

Miller sticks the landing and frankly I was left a little ruined for any subsequent read. Just phenomenal. You check out my video review here: https://youtu.be/B9DdmRRlF6M

I struggled with this one. The constant switching of timelines and narrators kept me perpetually off balance. I found myself wandering around this town of ghosts neither dazzled nor horrified, simply annoyed. Isn't there someplace I could just sit down for a moment without some ghost wandering over to tell me their life story? Perhaps I'm just like the critics of Juan Rulfo's time - puzzled and perhaps a little blind. The book sold poorly and Rulfo never wrote another book. In the ensuing years he would inspire Gabriel Garcia Marquez to write One Hundred Years of Solitude (Marquez said he could recite the book by heart) and become part of the Latin American canon. It just didn't work for me.

It's hard not to go into this without some expectation. This won the Pulitzer after all. High literature and human comedy - we're setting the difficulty level on expert here. Freighted with all that, I'm underwhelmed at the offset. Arthur nearly misses hosting an author interview due to a stopped clock and a handler who thinks he should be a woman.

Where are we going with this? It's starts to feel like a gay Eat, Pray, Love. “A white middle-aged American man walking around with his white middle-aged American sorrows? ...It's a little hard to feel sorry for a guy like that.” notes Arthur's lesbian friend at one point in the novel. And his pratfalls begin to appear less dire misfortune but rather a product of his own self-consciousness.

But Greer does manage to win me over.

Arthur is nearing fifty having survived life's “humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life.” This is warmth in book form. Moments of wonder and unexpected beauty written with an easy grace that had me rooting for Arthur. And Greer really stuck the landing on this one. Lovely.

I love how Will's faith, that once burned with a white hot fervour, is still something that he misses. The certainty that faith brings. Phoebe, still plagued by guilt and needing something bigger than herself to believe in, needs that faith. She's pulled between John Leal who is singular in his focus and promises to be there when she's ready to be something more, and Will who's still just trying to figure it out.

But the book is far more slippery than that and maybe I'm just reaching. The conflict between the certainties of faith and struggling when you no longer have that as a foundation to build on. And more obliquely the notion that religion needs to make demands to incite fervour, that simply espousing kindness hardly invokes devotion. It sees Will proselytizing at Fisherman's Wharf filled with the Holy Spirit and Phoebe standing on a rooftop as explosions level a building.

It's not like I'm saying if you practice the faith it's only a matter of time before you're blowing up a building. I'm struggling to clarify my ideas so I should cut Kwon some slack for being as slippery as she was. I can hardly expect answers, I just wished there was more I could grab on to.

PS I love the Asian-American author community that Kwon name-drops in the acknowledgements! I talk more about that and laissez-faire atheism here: https://youtu.be/bY7DE8UZk0M

Multiple plotlines, family intrigues, a will-they-won't-they marriage storyline, mean girls and party boys and it hits me - I just read a romance novel. And I loved it.

I can damn it with faint praise and talk about how it's a perfect summer, beach read - and it is at that. It's just so readable. I flew through this thing, spurred on no doubt by the impending movie, but I had a blast.

All you haters complaining about the brand name dropping are missing the point. It's called Crazy Rich Asians for a reason, it's like complaining that Harry Potter uses too many magical words. For a clunker of a book I just flew through the things and have already picked up the sequel.

It relies on workmanlike language that moves the story forward. It doesn't draw undue attention to itself, it isn't particularly clever, but it also avoids trying too hard and coming off clunky. And Kwan speaks from experience, the world isn't entirely imagined as he grew up in a world much like the one that Nicolas Young experiences.

It's hard to talk about the book now without referencing the movie and I talk about both along with narrative plentitude in my review here: https://youtu.be/4JuXQUGiPYs

Yu-jin wakes up, the evening before a muddled blur perhaps due to his refusal to take his anti-seizure medication, and he's covered in blood. It doesn't take long as he retraces the bloody path leading from his room to discover his mother dead, her throat slit with the very razor he now holds. We follow along as Yu-jin tries to piece together what happened. It seems hard to imagine any plausible scenario where Yu-jin isn't in fact the murderer so I'm excited to see how Jeong You-jeong plans on resolving the scenario she's set out for us here.

It's a quick read that slowly metes out information and fills in the blanks. Saying anything more would diminish the surprise so I won't go into more detail. The translation felt a little wooden at times and I found myself yelling at the ending in the same way you can't help but object to the girl in the horror movie exploring the darkened basement to investigate a strange sound. A great, straight ahead thriller novella that didn't quite stick the landing as much as I'd hoped.

I can see how this story would strike a particular chord in South Korea where mothers give up so much of themselves for the sake of their children. South Korea has the highest suicide rate among OECD member nations. Every year there is a rash of academic suicides when children fail their university admissions. That comes with an uptick in maternal suicides as mothers feel the brunt of responsibility and shame of their children failing. It is that degree of parental responsibility that might propel this particular story in South Korea and create an added dimension of visceral empathy.

Just saying.

A polyphonic story narrated from a dozen perspectives. When I started I thought they were separate short stories as they were so divergent. Orange starts closing the circle as the characters slowly begin to converge on an Oakland pow-wow. And you realize the gun he brings in the first act is bound to go off.

I love the idea of the urban Indian. Orange gets us off the reservation and places his characters in the city. And maybe it's me missing the narrative plentitude of indigenous writing but it felt relevant and strangely present. And it's placed within a larger context, with Orange briefly leaving the narrative in a searing prologue and interlude to drop some knowledge.

I loved how Orange talked about the dancers too, feathers shaking, shoulders dipping, like gravity meant something different to them.

A stunning debut and a much needed win for indigenous writers after all the recent scandals surrounding Boyden and Alexie. Reviewed here: https://youtu.be/ZZvx3rbjLzk

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.

The youngest of seven, raised by a bipolar, end-of-the-world prepper father and a magic hands, unlicensed midwife mother, Tara Westover managed to escape her fundamental Mormon upbringing to eventually gain a PhD at Cambridge. Achievement enough, but still in her twenties Westover would go on to write this compelling memoir of her life.

Frankly it's a wonder she made it out alive. Over the course of her story, siblings are skewered, brained, set ablaze and lose fingers. Her mother clearly suffers brain damage from a car accident and Tara herself is nearly crushed by scrap metal and barely manages to escape a perilous situation with a wild horse. Add to that the looming threat of her abusive older brother and it at times reads like a page turning thriller.

Westover is a compelling chronicler, helped no doubt by her Cambridge thesis on histiography, the study not of history by historians. How they, like her, had to come to terms with their own biases, ignorance and partiality to recreate a world. She's careful to admit memory is malleable and often calls on her siblings who she is on speaking terms with to corroborate her story. The circumstances of her homeschooling to higher education would be story enough but Westover proves herself a talented writer here.

It's a fantastic read that I also reviewed here: https://youtu.be/QY_lsblsRoM

Sarah Winman somehow manages to infuse her latest with a pervading sense of melancholia. Her words are the long shadows of a late fall afternoon stretching across the page. I mean I love me some of that bittersweet and this book offers up just the right dose of it.

We meet Ellis, trudging through his days at the factory. He's lost his wife and best friend in a car accident 5 years ago and the life of color and imagination his mother might have wished for him died with her as he becomes the man his father demanded.

All he has left are faded photographs, fond memories, and the journal of his best friend. It sounds like it could easily devolve into TV movie bathos but Winman keeps a steady hand on the wheel and keeps it short. Gorgeous.

The story is like a set of Matrushka dolls moving further and further away from the author. Wirkus introduces us to a college acquaintance Danny Laszlo who talks of translating the obscure works of Brazilian science fiction writer Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie and the long journey to uncover his rumoured manuscript called The Infinite Future which is the story of a lesbian, galactic nun recounting the life of Irena Sertorian who was a character featured in Salgado-MacKenzie's work. You get all that?

They're all of them interpreters. We the reader are interpreting the text of course but each level reveals another sort of interpretation. Whether it's Laszlo working as a translator teasing out Salgado-MacKenzie's intent not to mention the interpretation of Salgdao-MacKenzie himself (just read the book). There's also the story of fellow Salgado-MacKenzie fan Harriet Kimball and her interpretation of Mormon text vs that of a more conservative Craig Ahlgren. Translator Laszlo also wrestles with his relationship to the Mormon faith - and I find that I don't think I've ever read anything that presents Mormons as reasonable characters of faith before.

But even that gets muddied when we are presented with a fictional, lesbian, historian, space-nun interpreting the actions of a recurring fictional Salgado-MacKenzie character named Irena Sertorian as a prophet figure who extends beyond the page into Laszlo's world - The Infinite Future promising to be no less than a unifying tract of almost religious import - which brings to mind L. Ron Hubbard and Scientologists. Which brings to mind our own interpretive baggage we bring as readers of these faith groups.

I'm not helping am I?

It's a lot to unpack and I have to admit that while it seemed unnecessarily recursive the ideas stick like that stray bit of popcorn stuck somewhere in your back molars that you can't seem to tease out. And I will give Wirkus props for his power pop bona fides - shout out to The New Pornographers! (though Electric Version will always top Twin Cinema for me)

It's told from three perspectives and starts off simply enough with aspiring journalist Jasminder Bansal working for a massive development firm to cozy up to the man who employed her brother's killer.

Mark Ward left his wife and child in Bangkok to return to Vancouver to work with his criminal brother. He's barely hanging on with some severe PTSD after a stint in Afghanistan

And then we meet Carl “Blitzo” Reed and things go off the rails fast. It's Hunter S Thompson channelling Douglas Coupland and I don't know what's real anymore. I get it - Carl's a drug fuelled addict running a green investment firm who talks to a pig. It becomes a problem when the pig talks back.

It's a swirling maelstrom of a narrative from a Vancouver native trying to foster a unique voice for the city but there was nothing to hold onto. Out at the edges it's frayed and messy but nearing the end it hits a singular point of clarity for each of the characters that felt like the beating heart of the story. Which is a fancy way of saying I invested a lot of time wading through the confusion for a brief moment of clarity.

I will admit that Vincent Peele is painfully good, a delicious character to hate read, and may be indicative of my own biases. He is what we here in Ontario probably envision when we think of those off on the west coast living in Lotus Land.

It's not the strongest of starts - more foul than fair with some overwrought thriller noir stickhandling that had me rolling my eyes. Macbeth's an orphan SWAT team lead and expert knife-thrower while Lady is a former prostitute now newly minted casino owner. It all feels like something 13 year old me would have come up with. But I get it - it's not easy bringing a 400 year old text into the modern era.

And that's the fun of it. Watching Nesbo tackle this particular challenge. The murders, the visions, the witches and the former sense of inevitability come crashing down to nothing but grim resignation. When Nesbo gets to the action he really shines. The Banquo Fleance scene is edge of your seat writing. But it's all the stuff around it that creeps in this petty pace. It's John Woo come to America - you can still see the action that garnered him international attention in the first place - but at a certain point the slow motion doves becomes cringey cliche. More simply - this isn't the Nesbo you want to start with.

It spends some time laying out the groundwork, fashions the requisite meet-cute at a prestigious college between two talented misfits and then jumps ahead 10 years. Two female animators working through the creative process and exploring ideas of love, friendship, addiction, success, family, who owns stories and who gets to tell them. From there it's a full blown soap opera with dramatic turns, unexpected reveals and mounting tensions. Whitaker throws it all on the page but it's entirely readable and she's got an ear for voice. I love Mel and Sharon and the tumultuous creative journey they're on. Rollicking yet assured it was a hell of a read.

Anthologies can be hit or miss and the overarching theme laid out is a bit of a stretch for some of the collected pieces. But certain selections really deliver. Alexander Chee makes it look easy and it was comforting to see Chang-Rae Lee again - he, my first introduction to a Korean writer in English. The heretofore unknown author Alice Sola Kim's “Mother's Lock Up Your Daughters Because They are Terrifying” was absolutely fantastic. I loved the rock and roll, Middle-East meets West poetry of Mohja Kahf. Jason Koo's poem “Bon Chul Koo and the Hall of Fame” speaks to something very familiar.

Sure some of the pieces were a bit inscrutable, not the least of which the poem written entirely in Arabic, but I appreciate the introduction to some new talent pulled from the Asian diaspora. This is the perfect roadmap to some great future reads.

John Hodgman's Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches is what he refers to as his own brand of white privilege comedy wherein he talk about splitting his time between two summer homes in Maine and Western Massachusetts. Super relatable!

He shares personal anecdotes about dining with neighbour Black Francis of the Pixies, buying a wooden Jimmy Steele peapod (it's a boat) and getting high while speaking at colleges. Sounds like the insufferable musings of white male privilege gone slightly to seed - and you're not wrong ...except for the insufferable part.

Maybe he'll always be the nebbish PC to the smug Mac of commercial fame but it's hard to dislike Hodgman. He's a charming storyteller, altogether aware of how lucky he is without being disingenuously modest or humblebraggy. He's just bringing us along as he settles into middle age and wrestles with what that means. I'm here for that.

Zadie offers up a collection of her essays here but what's interesting it that she notes in the foreword that all of them were written during the Obama presidency and therefore a product of an already bygone world. An interesting prompt for an essay I'd wish she'd written as well.

I am the poor reader that is willing to meet the author part of the way but cannot subsist on language alone. That is to say Smith scores some easy hits for me with her essays on Jay-Z, Key and Peele and I loved her examination between writers and dancers and she convinced me that I need to read more art criticism, especially if it's done as well as her.

On the other hand her Harpers Magazine review of books I had no desire to read. While they are perfectly tuned to the specific style expected of the magazine they otherwise left me nodding off. Like any collection it's uneven. It's also a doorstopper of a read. But what shines is the warmth in which she speaks to the reader, perhaps a Zadie from a pre-Brexit, pre-Trump world.

Tegmark is an exuberant AI cheerleader awash in the unbridled nerdy enthusiasm of an inevitable post-human future. To his credit the book, a reflection of the work he's doing out in the world, attempts to broaden the discussion around AI to something more than wondering if sentient robots will kill us all.

His prelude on a plausible AI trajectory is compelling and thoughtful stuff and I loved how it expanded the way I think of AI's progress. The exploration into considering whether super intelligent AI become zookeepers or benevolent dictators or enslaved gods is great too. But thinking about the philosophical considerations of consciousness, intelligence and evolution left me cold and the name dropping, back slapping historical narrative added yet another element to this unbalanced read.

In here is a fascinating exploration of what AI could mean for the world, it's just buried under a lot of wonky, wordy stuff that obscured the picture I was trying to form. Maybe I've been spoiled by more narrative, bite-sized, non-fiction - I want the abridged version of this book.

Stephen Florida is a college wrestler with a clear-eyed, bordering on megalomaniacal, focus on winning the Division IV NCAA championship in the 133 weight category. He's a full on meaty jock completely in his own head. At turns sounding like an adolescent sportbro then veering into post-grad philosophy student that's into jazz into paranoid crazy-person with stalker tendencies.

He's fascinating to read but not anyone you'd ever want to run into in a supply closet or lying in the tall grass outside your house.

It's hard to believe that this is a debut novel - it's so far out there in terms of subject matter. We bookish folk have no problem empathizing with murderous AIs, lonely ghosts and facially deformed grade-schoolers, but an entire book centered around a jock in his senior year solely focused on wrestling? Who decides that's the hill you're going to plant your authorial flag on?

I know squat about wrestling and even writing about it Habash could be fashioning his own language of terms and moves - but it doesn't matter if it's even true - it reads like music.
It isn't mechanical, it doesn't coyly veer into the homoerotic or purely metaphorical - it's compelling. It's Moby Dick loosely played out on the vinyl surface of college wrestling mats and it surprised me how much I enjoyed this book. Gabe Habash makes it worth exploring the inside of Stephen Florida's head.

I still don't know what to make of this dystopian sci-fi novel. It's a far-flung, imagined future that honors a storied past invoking Joan of Arc and medieval feminist Christine de Pizan (I had to look it up) I know nothing beyond the grade school basics when it comes to Joan of Arc but it didn't impede my enjoyment of the book at all.

This thing is bloody, violent, sexually charged and angry without being overly academic. The story is challenging to say the least, but fiercely compelling. It's completely over the top and outrageous at times, bordering on affectation but I couldn't look away. At this point I'm really just throwing adjectives at the wall in lieu of any sort of penetrating review. It's one of those books that throws you into its orbit and spits you out at the end dazed and disoriented, but its ideas have burrowed under my skin leaving me scratching at it still.

The first half of the book sets up our hipster duo worshipping at the shrine of old black music. Deemed “more intense and authentic than anything made by white people.” Carter is a trust-fund douchebag that sports blond dreadlocks in college while DJ'ing and Seth is a “sonic geologist” riding Carter's monied coattails.

When Seth captures snippets of a song while travelling the city doing field recordings Carter matches it against a guitar riff recorded elsewhere and they fit perfectly together. The two fuzz it up and pawn it off as a long forgotten blues artist. They fabricate the name of Charlie Shaw and call the frankensteined track Graveyard Blues. When someone reaches out saying they haven't heard Charlie Shaw since 1959 things get a little crazy.

What starts off as a biting satire on cultural appropriation turns into a blues ghost story that becomes full-on Korean revenge drama. The second half goes a bit off the rails but I can't begrudge the fun Kunzru has at our hipster protagonists' expense early on.