David Yoon
I was nervous going in. Stephenson doesn't write small, tidy books - but from the start I was happy to amble along with his big, writerly brain. I loved this near future world where the entire town of Moab is obliterated by nuclear detonation - except not really. The natural progression of fake news and internet hoaxes, this staged event predicates the dismantling of the internet. We move from there into a drastically changed country divided between the Moab truthers living in fundamental “Ameristan” where the crucifixion is the conspiracy and the law of the land is a strict interpretation of Old Testament values punishable by stoning. (though in this case automatic weapons are favoured as machines that can facilitate stoning faster and harder) Meanwhile the coastal elites employ editors to cull digital feeds and mediate information bubbles. I could happily swim around in this world for pages!
But that's just meatspace. The real action in a Stephenson novel is going to be in Bitworld. It's the Creation myth in Cyberspace and I'm on board for imaging a post meatspace world where we will find ourselves uploaded in death. But I find myself losing interest as the page count mounts. Stephenson invokes a clunky voice like some way too into it Dungeon Master and suddenly I find myself in a fantasy, sci-fi novel. There's too much Lord of the Rings in my Neuromancer. It's Christian myth, the Grail quest, and Paradise Lost with epic villains and a Pantheon of heroes and it should be awesome. But I'm not invested. In Bitworld I'm just a NPC, a servile peasant at the whim of the wealthy and their strange machinations. This post-human heaven is still the realm of the 1%'ers and I'm still caught in the middle - my life not much different regardless of who takes power. A bit grim really and maybe too on the nose for my liking.
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
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.
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.
A more approachable work of modern philosophy, no doubt aided by the fact that German is Byung-Chul Han's second language which is subsequently translated into English. Not to say as a newbie reader of philosophy I haven't taken the absolute wrong message from this work.
Deep breath.
Our secular society has meant that time has lost its narrative structure. Time has been atomized. Each moment does not link with other moments and as a result we lack directional movement. We're whizzing from experience to experience - multitasking and trying to cram more and more into our lives. It's reduced us to “animal laborans” with an imperative to work. We should be stopping and lingering - seeking a contemplative life that rests in each moment.
Philosophers love explaining this and you respond with “Oh you mean Live, Love, Laugh?”
Like I said, new to this whole philosophy thing. But enjoyed it enough to pick up some more Han. Many of these ideas provide the foundation for his later work in The Burnout Society.
Nagle posits the alt-right's misogynist, transphobic, and racist worldview is just a toxic, in it for the lulz, ironic reaction to overzealous social justice warriors with their fervent “Tumblr liberalism”. The left's ascendency during the Obama years defined by its “culture of fragility and victimhood mixed with a vicious culture of group attacks, group shaming, and attempts to destroy the reputations and lives of others within their political milieu” escalated into hysteria. Increasingly the rhetoric at the edges became anti-male, anti-white, anti-straight, and anti-cis and it has been performatively adopted by the mainstream as it capes for Pride, #BLM and #MeToo.
In that sense Nagle takes alt-light figurehead Milo Yiannopoulos at his word, that the right has become the counterculture; modern day punks focused on transgression against the dominant morality, a big middle finger to the progressive status quo. The right has learned from the left, has better weaponized online aggression, and created more compelling myths that speak to those that can't keep up with the new woke language of gatekeeping, gender fluidity, cultural appropriation, white feminism et al. “America, Fuck Yeah” is just easier to grasp.
These swings come fast and it will be interesting to see how the alt right evolves given their many pronged attack on journalism, constantly moving the Overton window and a pandemic that has backed people into corners looking for easy to grasp narratives that reassuringly tell them who to blame. The left seems to just resort to cultural politics, shaking their head at how dumb the right is and patting themselves on the back for how not-racist they are. That doesn't seem to be working and the rise of the dirtbag left seems like an interesting reaction to watch. I'd love for Nagle to tackle this again now that it's 5 years later.
How could I not pick this up. Michael Shou-Yung Shum is a poker dealer and sometime rave DJ in between getting a doctorate in Psychology and another in English - as you do. What sealed the deal was reading an excerpt from the book over at the Literary Hub. There's a precise sense of growing tension and this works well as a standalone short story that feels like the Coen Brothers meets Chuck Palaniuk. It's seriously good.
In Queen of Spades we've got a poker dealer at a worn around the edges casino outside of Seattle. A pit boss with a terminal condition and an enigmatic older women known as the Countess who seems to have mastered High Stakes Faro.
Shum brings his experience of working the felt to the pages and I loved it. I can see the casino in my head. Garish carpet with extravagant patterns worn at the edges, the chirping of chips and the riffling of cards. But it's not the high gloss bling of the Vegas strip, it's more Fear and Loathing by way of Fargo. Here we have bookie enforcers opening up a gym/salon, mystic healers, gambling addicts and dealers meditating over the differing weight of ink on playing cards.
It nudges up against the mythos of long odds, lady luck and vagaries of chance. It's something that's always left me suspicious as I tend to a more pragmatic, mathematical approach when it comes to gambling. As a result I find myself distrusting the narrative, unwilling to just let it ride.
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.
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.
Much like her debut novel Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng opens her latest with the end. We see the Richardson's six bedroom house ablaze, Mrs Richardson standing on the tree lawn with her hands clutching the neck of her blue robe, her kids Moody, Trip and Lexie watching from the hood of Trip's Jeep. All of this in the bucolic planned community of Shaker Heights.
The counterpoint to their white, affluent ideal of the American family arrives in town in the guise of bohemian artist Mia Warren and her daughter Pearl. Mia rents out the Richardson's duplex and takes Mrs. Richardson's offer to help cook and clean part time at the house. Sparks are inevitable.
But this is more than a book on class. It explores motherhood in its many guises and the relationship between mothers and daughters. Sometimes the mother you're born to isn't the one you choose to help you fully develop into an independent person. And tying that all together is young Mirabelle McCullough or May Ling Chow. She's a Asian child caught in the middle of a custody battle between the doting adoptive parents - affluent and white, and her mother - on her own and struggling.
Ng explores the ideas of cultural differences and well intentioned gestures that come from a place of privilege and entrenched assumptions. By extension she prods the lie of the post-racial society and those people that simply do not see race - and what that can often really mean.
A confident sophomore novel, thoughtfully written and beautifully done.
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.
Darren Matthews is a Texas Ranger. He's also on suspension, drinking a little too heavily and clearly on the outs with his wife. And he's black.
Pulled into the tiny town of Lark to look into a double homicide where nothing is as it's seems. It's a local white girl and an affluent, out of town black man. Attica Locke is here to explore the tensions between rural and urban blacks, race in the South, justice and how it splits alongs color lines and the simmering reality of the Aryan Brotherhood.
I'm usually on board for this kind of exploration but I felt Bluebird, Bluebird stumbled within the confines of it's purported genre. It didn't entirely work as a detective story or a thriller and instead read like the first arc of a longer serial.
I had to pick this one up as soon as I finished Joe Ide's debut IQ where we're first introduced to Isiah Quintabe. Righteous picks up shortly after IQ closes and still has that rollicking East LA voice.
This time Isiah finds himself dealing with a Rwandan gangster, Chinese Triads, Mexican gangs, and his brother's ex-fiance Sarita. She's worried about her Vegas DJ sister and her bro-tastic, loser boyfriend as they find themselves over their heads in gambling debt. Ide once again juggles several stories at once as Isiah begins to question whether his beloved brother was exactly what he appeared to be. Dodson also returns as Isiah's don't-call-him-a-sidekick, partner - now expecting his first child and hustling to make an honest buck.
With Righteous we see Isiah isn't just a fantastic inductive detective but a first rate problem solver. Still a fun read but it does suffer a bit of the sophomore slump as we work to build Isiah's character as he makes the transition from stumbling innocent to a more mature adult. His relationship with Sarita is all old school John Hughes instead of John Singleton and rings a little too predictably. And while I have to give the Japanese American author who grew up in South Central a pass I still cringe a bit at the probably realistically named Chink Mob and their garbled Engrish that has them saying things like “You no my fren, you go way now or we killing you for sure!”
Still I like the world Ide has created and I'm curious to see where Quintabe and Dodson head next.
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's deceptively simple and straightforward. There's little embellishment but it manages to shine a piercing light on the immigrant experience: not only from those leaving the homes of their childhood but the second generation, railing against the conventions of their parents. It's the little details that kill me. The overexposed photo of the newborn Gogol with his parents, the walk to the lighthouse:
“Try to remember it always,” he said once Gogol had reached him, leading him slowly back across the breakwater, to where his mother and Sonia stood waiting. “Remember that you and I made this journey together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.”
Roy Othaniel Hamilton and Celestial Gloriana are educated, middle-class professional on the come-up. They've been married for a year, and like most marriages it isn't perfect - they've still got their secrets. There's work to do yet but a lifetime ahead of them to do it, filled with promise and love.
And then one night at a hotel it's a case of a black man being at the wrong place at the wrong time and Roy finds himself looking at 12 years in prison.
Celestial and Roy write each other in that time. The small cracks in their marriage growing into massive fissures pushed to breaking. The epistolary framework allows each of them to present their case uninterrupted and you find yourself sympathizing with both and neither. It's an impossible situation. Jones wrote that she felt this was a novel in conversation with the Odyssey - of a man trying to get back to his wife.
Jones has got such an ear for language, you can hear the southern black lilt in their words and sympathize with the case each of them makes. In Jones' hands I'd listen to them argue over single payer vs universal healthcare and just as likely still not know who I sided with. Complicated and messy rendered with clear eyed perspective. (But yeah, the poor tree was a bit extra.)
Winner of Thailand's top literary honour and perhaps the first work of contemporary Thai literature to be translated into English in the 21st century from a then 20-something, multi-hyphenate sensation ...still a little lost on me.
Honestly the best review of this short story collection may in fact be from one of the characters in this short story collection. The sullen Marut from Marut by the Sea rails against the author Prabda Yoon and his penchant for “the type of bizarre story which he makes end so cryptically, as though the harder it is to understand, the better.”
I've often been stymied by translated short story collections and maybe it's the sheer density of symbols, hints and nods packed into every paragraph. In English you can infer all the codes buried in the specific choice of words, the allusions to common tropes or fairy tales, expectations subverted, the significance of a plastic bag floating in the air. Without that cultural knowledge it just gets harder with this collection to understand the choice of adopting overtly formal language when a couple discovers a body, or the relevance of exceptional large line spacing.
Marut warns us from trying too hard to decipher it all. “If you try asking Sir Yoon what the meaning of each of his stories is, believe me, he'd chuckle deviously, heh heh, before answering, ‘Why don't you try asking the stories themselves?' ...listening to that makes me want to strangle him until his eyes pop out of their sockets.” I feel you Marut.
Split into two time frames, 2060 sees a ravaged Emilio Sandoz, the only remaining survivor of a Jesuit funded mission to make first contact with the inhabitants of the planet Rakhat, trying to come to terms with what happened. We're also there in 2019 when, fuelled by unbridled optimism, the crew comes together to embark on the journey via asteroid to the newly discovered planet. The two stories converge in time and reveal how it went so horribly wrong.
I loved the story. It's a slow build as the author brings together the cast of characters. It's like King's The Stand in its ability to shape a huge cast of players and imbue most of them with real depth. Anne, George, Emilio, Sophia, Jimmy and DW are lovingly rendered here and it will be a while before I forget them. Sure it's got all the questions of faith, free will and colonialism but it's also a great read filled with sharply defined characters.
So yeah, Samantha Irby is hella funny and her latest book has some legit bona fides with blurbs from Roxanne Gay and the New York Times Book Review. And I get how this could be the perfect literary diversion, but it reads like the Platonic ideal of a hilarious blogger who writes a book. Each chapter is like a long form blogpost, perfect in it's ability to invoke a wry chuckle, reading it over your morning coffee while avoiding work in the early hours of the day. I can imagine the appropriate gif to append to an appreciative, post-blog comment. And just as quickly it's gone, the browser tab shut down as you return your focus to the work you're supposed to be doing. The book feels like a collection of these posts and are just as forgettable. Wonderful distractions in the moment but ultimately nothing stuck with me a week later.
It is the book that arguably started it all. Gordon Ramsey is a caricature of the ideas proffered here. It is chef as rock star written in a gonzo style and a punk aesthetic. It is the reason I use a Global chef's knife.
It's got an incredible open with 16 year old Catherine Goggin of Goleen Ireland in the year 1945. She's pregnant and brought before her church parish to be loudly denounced and violently cast out. Nonetheless, with head held high she boards a bus to Dublin and quickly finds work and a place to stay. Boyne is evocative in his language and brings Dublin to life. Part 1 ends in a riveting climax just before Catherine passes out delivering her son.
And suddenly it's 7 years later and we're introduced to a young Cyril Avery. He's the tortured son of Catherine, given up for adoption. Suddenly foregrounded it is Cyril we follow throughout his life, a gay man in Catholic Ireland where as recently as 1993 homosexuality was illegal.
Boyne catalogs a litany of perils growing up gay. Being closeted and in love with his best friend, growing up cruising back alleys with furtive rendezvous with rent boys, gay bashing, the Aids epidemic and a string of bad decisions in response. But Boyne is careful not to come off too angry or despairing and inserts, in an often jarring manner, points of levity throughout.
I'm a sucker for a cathartic ending but it is tinged with the awareness that as a reader I've been carefully manipulated to this point. You see the neatly constructed narrative framework where all the stray bits and pieces snap into place and the rough edges are buffed out. In the end I have to admit that's what I wanted.
Ah I needed a good plot driven book. Even better, it's a classic sci-fi, grand guignol, noir thriller. It's completely propulsive with a gloriously wicked cast of characters. If you were to make this into a movie, nearly every role would offer the potential to be a meaty, scene stealing, grandiose part. It's one of those books you devour.
We are offered the idea of individuals being “resleeved”, their consciousness downloaded into new bodies. This idea is explored in so many unique ways. The rich who have resleeved themselves over centuries, faster-than light travel made possible by transmitting data instead of actual people, the Catholic take on this technology, the possibilities for torture, weddings, prison, murder trials, relationships are all there. Hell, what does it mean for a book's protagonist and our perception of him when his physical body is someone else's? The great thing is Morgan never gets too impressed with himself and just plays it out as a part of the reality. He's spinning an old school thriller novel here and it's worth the read.
Meddling kids in it's focus on four teenaged kids and their dog solving mysteries is an obvious throwback to Enid Blyton's Famous Five (the crew refers to themselves as the Blyton Summer Detective Club) and Scooby Doo (as they solve crimes in the Zoinx River Vally of Oregon)
It's been 13 years since they unmasked the Sleepy Lake Monster, revealed as old man Wickley who would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for those meddling kids! Adulthood hangs heavy on the team as the ensuing years have not been kind. It's this damaged crew that reunites to take a closer look at what exactly was going on in their last case.
It's Scooby-Doo meets H.P. Lovecraft and it's just as dark. There's no man in a rubber mask here. Cantero ratchets up the horror elements while keeping you guessing throughout. The writing is a bit wooden and the dialog jumps back and forth from narrative to script format but he drops enough Easter Eggs to keep propelling the narrative forward. Cantero for the most part sticks to the rules of world he creates but occasionally oversteps, and I get it already - Kerri has nice hair. So not high literature but damn good fan fiction with one hell of a cover.
I could tell you the plot, about 13 year old Jojo and her 3 year old sister Kayla accompanying their indifferent and often high mother Leonie to Parchman Penitentiary to pick up their father Michael from jail. About his racist (white) parents as well as Leonie's folks, her mother wasting away from cancer and her father, whom Jojo idolizes, still working the little patch of land in Bois Sauvage on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi.
Leonie is haunted by the ghost of her brother Given. Yes haunted as in Given shows up silently whenever she gets high. Jojo picks up his own ghost at the prison. Richie we find has a tragic history with Jojo's grandfather. Maybe it's a story of generational trauma, of the low thrum of lingering pain paired with the keen awareness of black bodies dead and discarded by a white system.
Maybe, but what is certain is the pure poetic song of Jesmyn Ward's writing that is just gorgeous. Honeyed words burnishing a horrific history. Another incredible read.
Denfeld writes with the all sun-dappled optimism of fairy tales, and much like her debut The Enchanted, it can quickly put you in it's thrall. But it's disconcerting given the story's subject matter.
We're following 5 year old Madison Culver who disappeared in the snow-covered woods of the Skookum National Forest while looking for the perfect Christmas tree with her parents. That was 3 years ago.
Plucked from the snow, near death, she has been nursed back to health in a dug out cellar locked underneath the floorboards of a cabin deep in the woods, tended by a mute bear of a man. Madison escapes into fairy tale to reconcile the horrible new reality she finds herself in.
Madison dreams of the sky, nurtures hope, and even experiences moments of quiet joy - fiercely holding onto the story book fables she's been told.
Meanwhile Naomi Cottle, the Child Finder is working to find Madison. Gifted with the singular ability to find missing children - perhaps in part because she was once one of them. She remembers running naked across a strawberry field at night, escaping from someone or something. Nothing before that moment exists for her. The Child Finder is also the story of how Naomi wrestles with who that child was she left behind on the strawberry field.
It's beautifully done but becomes almost unbearably difficult near the middle. The story becomes loose and baggy and I have a hard time reading about Madison and her captor despite the language. It misses the opportunity to be a taut thriller, squanders some forward momentum with a tangental case Naomi takes on, but nonetheless pulls it together in the end.
Given that Rene Denfeld is the victim of molestation and abuse, that she has worked with sex trafficking victims, and is currently raising three foster children who have suffered their own distinct traumas, the story she's looking to tell is far different and more personally invested than the story I as a casual reader am expecting. Denfeld is invested in redeeming victims, pointing to the possibility of a future and the promise of something better. How could I begrudge that.