David Yoon
It's hard to rate this confection of a book. It's thoughtful and warm hearted, exploring issues around love, meaning, art, aspiration and nothingness - perfectly suited for our internet attention spans. It feels like a collection of web comics. Each page is crudely drawn as if with a thick Sharpie and typed by a fat fingered child. I liked it as a physical artifact. It's a hefty hardback that binds cotton candy content.
PS. Loved the nod to the Giving Tree.
Having killed a handful of company employees on his previous job the self-described Murderbot quietly hacks it's own governor module and essentially becomes a petulant, self-conscious emo teenager that would rather watch soap operas than deal with humans. One armed with military grade weapons and defensive systems mind you.
Now on a planetary mission where things aren't adding up, the crew including Murderbot find themselves in mortal danger. Murderbot having gifted him/herself with free will is no longer restricted to following orders but still works to keep his/her human crew safe. The book doesn't overstay its welcome and manages to pack a tight little story in under 200 pages. And it looks like its building a world that will continue on with a new book slated for this year. A quick sci-fi hit.
Listen, reviewing this incredibly fantastic run as separate volumes is a dumpster fire. What good exactly is giving volume three 5 stars when it's part of a six volume series? I will say off the top that this is one of my all time favorite long running graphic novel series. Over the span of 35 issues Hill and Rodriguez tell a gripping horror story filled to the brim with a huge host of characters that nonetheless feel fleshed out and wonderfully realized. Rodriguez' artwork never flags, never feels like midway through he's just phoning panels in to meet an issue deadline. The artwork is intricate, interesting and ambitious. Hill avoids over dialoging and other traps traditional authors might fall into making the transition to comics. The two together have crafted a brilliant piece of work that understands the medium it's in.
Which is to say I'm not sure how well this is going to make the transition to TV. I mean in this the first volume we see Rendell Locke violently murdered by two students. The rest of the family barely escape death, the mother is raped and the eldest kills one of the perpetrators. And yet in the aftermath after the family has moved across the country to the family's Keyhouse Estate the youngest Bode seems remarkably well adjusted and still in possession of a wide-eyed innocence and curiosity. The eldest are still quick to trust new friends and are no more mopey than any typical highschool teen. In comics that gets a pass for the sake of the medium and it's need to push the story forward. On TV - that's going to feel weird and may require some handwringing and inserted family drama which slows down the pacing. It's not going to be an easy transition. Speaking of transitions... I guess I'll continue reviewing these across the volumes. Not all are 5 stars, I figure the entire run averages a 4.25 stars overall.
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.
Father Lockwood has snuck into the Catholic priesthood despite being married and having kids. His road to Damascus moment was leagues under the sea in a nuclear submarine after watching The Exorcist which turned a once staunch atheist into a man of the cloth. He's still staunchly Republican, prone to farting, loves pork rinds, and lounging around in his underwear when he's not shredding on his collection of electric guitars he's decided to purchase instead of funding college for his kids. He's known to yell Hooo-eee, Jiminy Christmas and OHHH YEAHHHH while listening to Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly at peak volume, at the same time.
The titular Priestdaddy is quite the character and Lockwood is at her best when she's riffing about him, for example his guitar playing:
“It sounds like a whole band dying in a plane crash in the year 1972. He plays the guitar like he's trying to take off women's jeans, or like he's standing nude in the middle of a thunderstorm and calling down lightning to strike his pecs ...Some people are, through whatever mystifying means, able to make the guitar talk. My father can't do that, but he can do the following:
1. Make the guitar squeal
2. Make the guitar say no
3. Make the guitar falsely confess to murder
4. Make the guitar stage a filibuster where it reads The Hunt for Red October out loud”
Lockwood can turn a phrase. She's hilarious and quirky on the page and selfishly I just want her to keep on riffing. Like explaining milfs to the seminarian haunted by the concept, or discovering semen on the hotel bedsheets in the room she's sharing with her mother. Shifting gears to obliquely talk about the abuses of priests in church, her rape and attempted suicide, living near radioactive waste which rendered her incapable of having children and wrestling with anger — it's jarring. Still beautifully written but less sure. My attention starts to wane and I'm finding myself missing words, trained in her prior voice and familiar with the language of the profane and funny I'm adrift in the more serious and poetic. Still, like her mother, Patricia Lockwood loves language and it shows on the page.
It's a book filled with marriage advice - which clearly dooms this book to a purgatory of well-intentioned bromides and Pinterest worthy quotes suitable for placement over a picture of a sun dappled tropical beach. But Ada Calhoun is far smarter and way more real-talk than that.
Her advice on not getting divorced? Don't get divorced. The idea you'd take a bullet for your husband or wife - that bullet is infidelity. No easy advice here - and she backs it up with candid vulnerability and a courageous willingness to share her own experiences.
It's an antidote to the heartfelt admissions couples make at weddings. Ludicrous bargains, impossible standards and smaltzy analogies. When she shares some hard won advice that the first 20 years are the hardest, she's not kidding. She's smart, funny and willing to throw open the doors of her marriage and let us snoop around inside without having tidied everything up first. Hers is messy, chaotic, broken in places, hopelessly mundane in others but still home.
I loved this collection of short stories. I forget what podcast I was listening to that proclaimed that it's the book everyone who read J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy should be reading instead. Author Chavisa Woods managed to escape the gravitational weight of her hillbilly backwoods origins but still writes from a place of recognition and compassion. It's the rural poor, bible belt, military heartland that voted overwhelmingly in favour of Trump. Chavisa on the other hand is a New York based, lesbian performance artist and poet author.
The writing is sharp and with some fantastical elements but for the most part hews close to her experience growing up in rural Illinois. Get out of your East coast liberal, MFA literary bubble, reading about rich white people problems and dive right into this exploration of meth labs, ufos, truck stop prostitutes, fundamentalist Christian sects, Mensa party acid trips and a living replica of the Gaza strip on someone's head.
It was initially tough finding my way amidst the choppy verse. It's disjointed and scattered - which makes sense as the narrator finds herself torn. Living up the the expectations that come with being a second generation Asian, navigating the perils of her Ph.D and trying to figure out what to do with the marriage proposal from her entirely devoted and loving boyfriend.
Like Jill Alexander Essbaum's Hausfrau, where the rules of grammar spill into the how that narrator navigates her relationships in the real world, our narrator here can't help but throw out scientific asides. But it just wasn't gelling for me until I got past the halfway point. I started to find my bearings - or maybe our narrator managed to draw on some meagre strength of her own that helped straighten out the narrative.
And then I took a two week break from the book. It's not that big a book either. On my return the ending rushed up to meet me and that was it. Having found my footing I'd hoped for more and left the book feeling a bit unsatisfied like after a too small bowl of ramen (if you'll pardon the tad on the nose metaphor)
As Nick Offerman succinctly puts it: “Animal Farm - It's like the movie Babe: Pig in the City, but in the end it turns out Communism is bad.”
I honestly have no idea what I just read. It's such a showy text with unlikely conversations emanating from characters mouths, on one hand mimicking the often stilted dialog of comic book characters but uncanny in the mouths of others. Characters are simply mouthpieces to forward ideas about capitalism, collective action, personhood and more. And all in the highly coded language of academia - “vestigial inflection point manifesting aggrandizing cultural erosion” I'm sure it rewards those willing to unpack it, decipher the fractal plot and reflect on the ideas within. But know that this is an exciting academic examination of protest that, among other things, introduces you to real world activists Kiyoshi Kuromiya and Richard Aoki and less rousing sci-fi romp.
assaulted and dead. The killer is never found. The girls are unable to describe him or even consistently identify the color of his clothes. The bereaved mother demands that the remaining four girls find the killer or perform an act of penance lest they suffer her revenge. 15 years later we get the story of each of these girls.
The set up is simple enough and from there we get a collection of connected short stories told from the perspective of the remaining 4 girls. Some have the looming creepiness of a Stephen King short while others play out like a Korean revenge drama.
I found the different narrative voices to be a little too passively similar and the unfortunate coincidences of each of the girls situation, only tangentially tied to the initial act, beggared belief. But within the confines of the genre it worked well and there were several moments where Minato earns her title of the queen of iyamisu (or ewww mysteries).
On the surface it's a typical university story. Namin comes from a poor family that have scraped and sacrificed so that she can have a chance at success. Namin is singularly focused on overachieving on the expectations set upon her. Jisun comes from unimaginable wealth and privilege. Naturally she hates everything it represents, protests for workers, and adopts an earnest activist stance. Sunam is the dumb-ass boy caught in the middle, still a little slack jawed at the opportunities he's been afforded and determined not to blow it. You know he's going to blow it.
Plainly told with little in the way of flourishes what struck me was what is at stake. Seoul National is a top 3 university pick. Only 2% of the student population make it after years of rigorous study. 10 hour school days through high school and countless hours at private institutions well into the evening. Weekends are non-existent for anything other than study, private tutoring and library visits. Students give over their entire lives for the sake of a single entrance exam that determines their university placement. They carry the expectations of their entire family. The sense of discovery, pushing the boundaries of self, rebelling against authority, reinvention and aspirations aren't things explored in high school like they are here. No one cares what you hope for - your life is given over to be the most efficient test taking machine possible.
In university, for the first time in their life the student is able to define who they are as a person. But the stakes are so much higher now. It's different than not being invited to the cool kids party or finding a date to the prom.
Wuertz isn't examining any of that in the story, it's just sitting at the back of my head and raising the stakes for me. I'm bringing my own context to the story that makes it all the more raw and devastating. Read from a Western context it may not carry the same weight.
At 32 Helen Moran is Korean born, American adoptee barely living in New York. She's inexplicably a counsellor for troubled youth where she may or may not be under investigation.
She gets a call that her non-biological, but also Korean, adopted brother has committed suicide. It's not her adoptive parents that make the call, and even when she arrives at her childhood home in Milwaukee her parents seem almost surprised by her arrival and are on edge the entire time. She hasn't talked to them in 5 years and it seems everyone would have been completely fine if that had gone on for another 5.
Meanwhile Helen is sleuthing around her old home town to try and decipher why her brother killed himself with all the nuance of a 12 year old storybook sleuth. It's a weird and disjointed read. People float in and out of Helen's narrative. Later in the book we find Helen's brother wondering whether she's bipolar or schizophrenic. We're seeing the world through her eyes and it's off kilter and meandering filled with jarring affectations and sneaky contradictions. The writing proved elusive to me and I just never made a connection.
It's a lovely New York tale that starts back in 1968 when we're introduced to Lillian Kagwa and Brian West. They would marry and eventually have a boy named Apollo. By Apollo's fourth birthday Brian West had disappeared. It's a familiar story simply told with only the slightest hint of magic.
Apollo grows up, meets his wife and they have a son they name Brian. He's your typical father in this connected age, uploading dozens of photos of his boy to Facebook, looking for the flurry of likes. A doting father trying to make it work.
And then we wake up in an entirely different world that's violent and seething just under the surface. This in an old world fairy tale where horrifying things happen and happily ever after has no place in the world. LaValle slips effortlessly between the world we know and then past the glamour that hides the world we don't see. And like Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country it's a fairy tale that's made all the more unique when instead of Aryan boys and girls traipsing through Germanic pastoral landscapes it is centred around a black man in modern day New York contending with ancient forces while being hyper conscious of what the stakes are as a black man circling a tony suburban block in the middle of the night.
Being a parent is a harrowing, tooth and nail struggle against the forces of your own personal history, the baggage that the world is intent on foisting on you and the realization that your partner may not exactly agree on how best to navigate this unfamiliar territory. And everyday it only grows in scope and potential terror. Good luck.
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.
Oghi has awoken from a coma after a horrific car accident. His wife has died and Oghi is almost completely paralyzed. With a shattered jaw and damaged vocal cords he's also rendered mute. Eventually discharged from the hospital he finds himself alone in the world with only his mother-in-law to look after him. She's exhausted by the effort but also seems to be harbouring some seething resentment towards Oghi.
It's a claustrophobic story with a bubbling undercurrent of mounting tension told from Oghi's curtailed perspective. This is a Korean revenge drama set to a low simmer.
I wanted to like it more, but it's telling how it already feels dated having been published in 2017. It misses the ascendency of Twitter wielded by the former president of the United States, the sheer algorithmic power of TikTok to deliver an infinite scroll of short, personalized dopamine hits, the introduction of Meta as Mark Zuckerberg wrestles with how to hook a new generation of users as its Facebook base ages out. And all of this in the midst of a pandemic where we find ourselves increasingly online. Where parents, finding no other recourse, increasingly submit to relying on screens to occupy their children. Where children see little difference between their parents working hours, staring at a screen, and their off hours staring at another screen. The Internet in the midst of a pandemic becomes a human right, an absolute necessity. Irresistible become irreplaceable.
Still, there are fun little digressions into the history of Tetris, Steve Jobs' luddite tendencies when it came to his kids and Freud's obsession with cocaine. I would however like a word with the monsters that purposely induced visual amblyopia in kittens, permanently pickling their visual cortex.
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.
Deming Guo is 11 years old when his mother leaves him. It's not the first time. Making the trip to the United States Deming's mother Polly finds she's too late to have an abortion. Still an infant, Polly briefly leaves Deming in a stiff plastic bag on the pavement under a bench in New York but returns to him. Deming gets sent to China to live with his grandfather for a time before returning to live with his mother, her boyfriend Leon, Leon's sister and her son Michael.
At 11 Deming's mother disappears without a trace. Deming soon finds himself in upstate New York with Peter and Kay, two well meaning liberal arts professors. Deming Guo becomes Daniel Wilkinson - perennial f**k up. Directionless, Daniel has racked up a sizeable gambling debt, dropped out of college and can't find a path that fits him.
Both characters seem less than sympathetic but Lisa Ko builds them out so that while you may not agree with their choices, you can certainly empathize. It's a tough look at the immigrant experience, struggling to fit in while trying to integrate between warring cultures and identities, finding your place in an indifferent world and living with the choices you've made to live within it.
Mohsin Hamid writes in a clipped, declarative style. It's a matter of fact story of an unnamed place (loosely based on Lahore where Hamid was writing at the time) and the burgeoning love between Saeed and Nadia. Things are going from bad to worse in the city they live in. A civil war is breaking out and when doors open to other places they take a chance and slip through together.
The doors of Exit West are a wonderful bit of magical realism that keeps Hamid from getting mired in the narrative so often associated with migrants and their crossing of borders, walking long distances over a barren landscape or freezing in a leaky inflatable. It let's him talk about how Saeed and Nadia's lives change in new worlds.
Saeed clings to the home he left behind while Nadia reaches for the promise of the new. In an interview Hamid talks about the short vignettes interspersed throughout that show we're all migrants in a sense, even if it's migrants through time. That the worlds we grew up in change around us even if we never leave our childhood neighbourhood. A beautiful story well rendered.
Translated by Megan McDowell, this Argentinian novella is a creepy head-scratcher. It's the worms. We have to find the exact moment the worms come into being, or at least that's what the unsettlingly articulate child David believes as he whispers in the hospitalized Amanda's ear. How's that for an eerie setup?
From there several narratives unfold, from Amanda meeting David's mother Carla only a few days prior, to Carla's story about David nearly dying and the decision she made that changed her son. “David doesn't call me Mom anymore.”
It's an atmospheric and creepy story, superbly translated to maintain it's off-kilter, disoriented feeling of dread throughout.
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 work of fiction to come out of North Korea - smuggled and written under the pseudonym Bandi which means firefly in Korean. It's translated by the Korean translator du jour Deborah Smith, she of The Vegetarian and Human Acts.
This is a collection of grim short stories and while it flies under the banner of fiction and certainly reads like some absurdist dystopia, you get the sense it is more lightly fictionalized reportage than imaginary fiction. It's a bleak portrayal of North Korea that shows how it breaks the strong, the proud and loyal. How it tears at families and sets citizens against each other while insisting on keeping up appearances at all costs.
There isn't a lot of nuance to these stories - they're more blunt instruments bludgeoning their points home. But maybe nuance is a luxury that has no place for the people living in North Korea.
Paul Dini has defined our concept of Batman. His work on Batman The Animated Series helped define DC Animation and gave us Harley Quinn and Mark Hamil's Joker. He also wrote the seminal storyline for the much darker Arkham Asylum video games. He's got five Emmys and two Eisners for his work. There are few men more responsible for our current understanding of the Dark Knight.
Then one night he was mugged, brutally beaten and left for dead. As he slowly heals he is visited by the various characters he's made a career of imagining. That framework allows him to examine his life leading up to that moment with unflinching vulnerability. He's brutally honest about the concerns his parents had of his childhood imagination, the clearly shallow and horrible relationships he cultivated with women, the emptiness of his life despite all the nerd trappings and fame.
Eduardo Risso's artwork is perfect for this story. He manages, along with Dini's writing to keep it from being a one-note premise based on the conceit of “where was Batman?” and turning it into something more. I do think appreciating who Paul Dini is, is important to the story. I'm not sure if I'd care as much if I didn't spend hours glued to Batman the Animated Series.
We are first introduced to Vincent, sitting in a Coffee House in Bangalore and avoiding responsibility. From there we spiral outward to his family as they navigate their suddenly changed situation and newfound wealth. Money affords them a laissez faire ruthlessness. They are sharp edges to those outside the family unit. The intricate dependencies on each other in poverty binds them in wealth. It's a fine balance ;) A tiny book, easily read and beautifully done. Frankly some of the reviews are almost as enjoyable to read as the book itself.
Deborah Smith, Han Kang's translator, effuses in the Guardian. Parul Sehgal in the New York Times is lyrical in her praise, calling it the Great Indian Novel and evokes the trick of translation from the original Kannada. Translator Srinath Perur does an incredible job.