David Yoon

It's a too long YA origin story that hopefully sets up a better sequel. I guess I was just frustrated waiting. I get it - Jared's a little messed up, but golden hearted and maybe a little in love. His family has secrets and there's trouble afoot. I didn't need an entire book to tell me that.

There's undoubtably something simmering under the surface, threatening to break Jared Martin out of his high school reverie of baking pot cookies, getting drunk, stoned and screwed. Something more than the day-to-day chaos that is his life aided in no small part by his foul-mouthed and volatile mom with her string of questionable exes. One whose feet she nailed gunned to the floor, the other whose dog she killed, slamming her truck into his pitbull then calmly backing up over it again.

I'll bet this thing has legs but it feels like the first 3 episodes of an 8 episode arc that might improve if I was allowed to binge the season.

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.

The Monster Dogs in question walk upright, speak through electronic voice boxes, possess prosthetic hands and dress in the fashions of 19th century Prussia - naturally. Incredibly smart they are also fabulously wealthy and descend on New York in our near future after spending a century hiding out in the wilds of Northern Canada. They leave this town called Rankstadt after murdering their former masters, along with every man, women and child and burning the city to the ground - which we find out in an operatic libretto later in the book.

Yeah this is quirky to put it mildly. The dogs straight up murdered an entire city and are now feted in New York. Their creator Augustus Rank is Victor Frankenstein's sociopathic veterinarian brother. It has this gothic feel with shades of Stoker and there is a pervasive sense of wistful melancholy throughout. I'm just not exactly sure what I was supposed to take away from this all.

Interesting premise in that we're introduced to Kwan Chun-dok, the Eye of Heaven. He's a detective with the Hong Kong Police Force, an Asian Sherlock Holmes that has a 100% success rate. But we meet him not only at the end of his career, but his life as well as he helps solve one last case. The first story stretches believability a bit, but stick around because Chan Ho-Kei recounts Kwan's 50 year career in reverse chronological order over the course of six separate stories.

Each story leaves slight clues in the text for the reader to unravel the mystery but of course it's Kwan Chun-dok that deftly gets to the truth. What's unique is that Kwan is a truly good character. He's not damaged goods, harbouring a secret gambling addiction or haunted by some dark past event. And while he may think outside the box, he's still an officer of the law working within a larger bureaucratic system and ascending through the ranks.

A chewy mystery book in translation that proved a wonderful diversion.

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.

Told in chronological order, this book spans 4 generations and nearly a century of time and focuses on Zainichi or ethnic Koreans living in Japan. These Zainichi are essentially stateless citizens registered to Joseon or a unified Korea that hasn't existed since the Korean War. Up until recently they had to apply for alien registration cards that required fingerprinting every three years and were rarely granted passports making overseas travel impossible. In Japan, ethnic Koreans are seen as second class citizens and even now are still shut out of higher positions.

We follow a Korean family struggling to survive in that environment. The language is plain and unadorned but wields tremendous emotional heft. There are parts that just destroyed me but it never descends into misery porn. And while it moves at a languid pace through time I could have happily stuck around for another 300 pages.

This is a beautiful story of family and notions of home that feel even more relevant in today's political environment. It touches on aspects of passing, of not only surviving but succeeding in an adopted country that can be hostile to your very identity. Quite simply, I loved these characters and the book just blew me away.

It's been back to back reads with strange meta-narrative, mobius plot threads (I followed this one with Bats of the Republic)

The Impossible Fairy Tale is weirdly unsettling and moves ahead with a grim inevitability following the intertwined lives of two 12 year old girls. The language skitters off on strange tangents and plays with words in a way that must have proven a unique challenge to translate. Violence and death constantly linger in the periphery but the tangents pulled me out of the story making me wish for the relentless energy of Samanta Schweblin's David in Fever Dream, who kept the narrative on its creepy track.

The novel then shifts it's focus halfway through and the book becomes something else entirely. I just couldn't get invested enough to truly follow along and make the necessary connections. And I was frankly still catching my breath from the ending of the first half. Inventive and challenging, it just wasn't what I was after.

Exploring the nature of art, creativity and paying better attention to the world around you without expectation. It is about the perverse audacity of aiming tiny and giving yourself permission to be creative.

This is and isn't a woo-woo self-help book in the same way it is and it isn't an autobiography about the time immediately following the time her father suffered two strokes. It's a meandering, playful, chat with a curious mind.

It's Anne Lamont meets Cheryl Strayed with a distinctly Canadian sense of restraint. And it's just the sort of reassurance that any creative needs once in awhile.

Renee the concierge and Paloma the 12 year girl are both in hiding. Renee adheres to the stereotype of the invisible, frumpy working class servicing the rich tenants at Rue de Grenelle. Paloma is easily dismissed as a privileged daughter of one of these moneyed boarders, but who has decided she will end her life on her 13th birthday. They are both ravenous autodidacts working out their own personal philosophies. Renee offers up chapters on phenomenology, grammatical crimes and Tolstoy. As such the first half of the book starts out like an all too clever first year philosophy major writing fiction. I wouldn't call it immediately accessible.

It's not until a new tenant arrives in the building, the mysterious Mr. Kakuro Ozu that it becomes a story. One of friendship and love. Shaking off intellectual pretensions for conventional feelings. The second half is beautifully done, a bit of a gut-punch, and kept from being overly maudlin and melodramatic by the tone established in the first half.

This isn't a breezy celebrity memoir cashing in the resultant media exposure after taking on the Daily Show from John Stewart. This is more a loving tribute to Trevor Noah's dauntless mother who raised a coloured child in apartheid Africa. Noah is the product of his Xhosa mother and Swiss-German father - literally born a crime during a time where inter-racial relations could by punishable by 5 years in jail.

With a comedian's sense of timing and a gift for storytelling Noah tells us about never being able to walk with his father in public, to never hold his mother's hand outside. Of hiding indoors with his imagination. But he peppers the stories with an examination of the inevitability of crime in this environment, institutional racism and the unstoppable determination of his mother in the face of all this.

It ends up being a jaw-dropper of a story that stops well before Noah enters our collective consciousness as a comedian and host. Surprisingly moving and wildly compelling.

Phoebe Robinson is one half of the podcast 2 Dope Queens which is part of a podcast continuum that includes Animatou Sow from Call Your Girlfriend to Heben and Tracy over at Another Round. They're all great but, duh, best served aurally. The freewheeling nature of podcast conversations simply don't translate as well on the page. Lingo like b.t.dubs and nope.tumblr.com as well as the difference between truth and troof work better heard than read.

And while I get the impulse to leaven the medicine of speaking to the idea of the angry black woman, micro-aggressions and the politics of hair with the order in which you would sex the members of U2 — this did feel all over the place.

So hey, an easy non-threatening primer on the black experience in America shot through with humour. Totally has its place - but do yourself a favour, level up and read Citizen by Claudia Rankine, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

By the 1920s the Osage were the wealthiest people per capita in the world, sitting on the oil-rich sands of Oklahoma. And yet they were not deemed competent enough to spend their own money so the federal government magnanimously appointed legal and financial guardians for them. Almost all white. Naturally this went about as well as one might expect.

Between 1921-25 dozens of members of the Osage tribe were murdered, shot execution style, poisoned and blown-up. It was an era when law enforcement barely existed and forensic science would be years away. The then sheriff of Osage County weighed in at 300 pounds and was known to be friendly with bootleggers and gamblers. Questionable sheriffs and shoddy investigative practices were hardly a viable recourse to justice.

Meanwhile in 1924 J. Edgar Hoover was appointed the director of the FBI. He would argue the need for a national police force. Enlisting former Texas Ranger Tom White to put together a team and uncover the root of this Reign of Terror in Osage County, Hoover hoped for an early win for his nascent FBI.

It was a Herculean task. Corruption was everywhere and it was impossible to know who was liable to double-cross you or steer you astray. The sheer amount of money on the line motivated numerous crimes and betrayals and it seemed those on the take would stop at nothing to keep their long running grift going.

So it should have been more gripping. We've got private eyes and bootleggers, safecrackers and explosives experts, cowboys and conmen peopling the pages. But it's trying to do too much with too many characters and keeps jumping all over the place. And then when it seemed like we could chalk up a win for the FBI, the story continues with author Grann inserting himself into the narrative. He would go on to uncover hundreds more potential deaths through dogged research and digging in the library but by that time it felt like we'd long overstayed our time at the party.

Once you have Harrington down this is a great exploration into a less conventional style of play. I tend towards a predictable TAG, Poker 101 type of play so it's interesting see how Hansen makes use of some unconventional starting hands and then extricates himself from getting into too much trouble.

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.

It's a remarkably grim YA story that belies any of the luck invoked in the title. Mary does not have an easy go of it and at first her story clashes with the dreamy love triangle she finds herself enmeshed in that is reminiscent of Patricia Park's Re Jane. How could I not appreciate the story of a 2nd generation Korean story set just up the road from where I grew up. So much of it was familiar even down to the disappearance of an aunt. (in my case an uncle disappeared and was given up for dead only to turn up in North Korea 40 years later)

I am here for books that represent the environment I grew up in, that share a common language of the second generation experience. I realize that the gossiping parents that trade in their kids achievements isn't confined to Asians. Their constant reminders of the sacrifices they've made and the implied fealty that it demands is common across cultures and yet there is a distinctly Korean flavour here which I recognize and love.

What Emil Ferris manages to do with a handful of colored pens is nothing short of incredible. Laid out on spiral bound notepaper it's a sprawling novel that does away with the traditional comic conventions of contained boxes and defined gutters. Words crawl up the sides of pages, images bleed into each other and carry across the persistent wire-bound fold. The way Ferris renders classic paintings in ink is jaw-dropping and she transitions to pulpy, classic monster comic covers just as easily. Her people are rendered with Robert Crumb-like exaggeration and then with portraiture precision especially when it comes to Anka.

Anka lives upstairs from Karen our 10 year old narrator who lives with her womanizing brother Deeze and her mother who is in the late stages of cancer. It's 1960s Chicago but the world this 10 year old builds from the perspective of a half werewolf includes dealing with bullies at school, and changing friends, the Holocaust, child prostitution in Nazi-occupied Germany, race relations, a possible murder investigation, classic art scholarship and ruminations on love and the budding awareness of her own sexuality.

It careens all over the place and at it's heart is this 10-year old obsessed with monsters, looking for the bite that will keep her and her family together forever. There is that seeking curiosity that takes in the world around her and puts it on the page in all it's messy confusion. Where looking for a werewolf is just as important as understanding the mysterious woman upstairs and St. George and the Dragon is just as pivotal as Ghastly Issue 03.

I needed this fun detective romp and had such a blast reading it I followed it up immediately with Joe Ide's sequel Righteous. This is Devil in a Blue Dress meets the Hound of the Baskervilles as written by Kendrick Lamar. Right away we meet Isaiah Quintabe or IQ as he's known. He's in the process of thwarting a pedophile child abductor with the help of a modified grenade launcher. IQ is the African-American resident problem solver of East Long Beach Los Angeles. He's Sherlock Holmes, Encyclopedia Brown.

IQ tests at near genius levels and can look forward to an assured trajectory riding an academic scholarship to his choice of Ivy League institution. But that all changes when the older brother he idolizes is killed in front of his eyes by a hit and run.

From there we follow two timelines. There's IQ and his tentative partner Dodson as they try to solve the mystery of who exactly is trying to kill the wildly successful rapper Calvin Wright aka Black the Knife - which is at times a hilarious send up of peak fame in the rap game. Ide has a keen ear for the language drawing from his experience growing up in South Central LA .

We also flip back to the immediate aftermath of IQ's brother's death as Isiah tries to find his place in this new world and it works as a suitable superhero original story set in the hood.

We're introduced to our protagonist as he's being held in New York for murder. He's got a rap sheet that finds him wanted by Interpol for drug smuggling, money laundering, mass murder, stock manipulation and spying for his North Korean home. If that's not enough, he's found at the murder scene, blood on his hands, covering the room in strange symbols.

An interrogator is brought in to unravel how a North Korean ended up traversing the world to end up in New York. It's here we find that Gilmo has Aspergers and is some sort of mathematical savant. From there author J.M Lee serves up a bit of Forrest Gump meets The Hundred-Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared. It's a pulpy romp that screams to be made into a movie. An easy distracting read.

Hilarious! Sort of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern meets Kevin Smith's Dogma. Lots of fun and never veers too far into judgement or timid reverence. Great for someone like myself with a passing Sunday school knowledge of the Christian faith.

Don't let the illustrated cover fool you, this is no comic romp but rather a dark existential look at the tenuously connected lives surrounding a low-rent, off-off Broadway musical called Mister Monkey.

It's a clinic in people watching written by a master author. As people exit the theatre and gather outside, someone is concocting stories for the middle-aged actress smiling through gritted teeth, another wandering home still wearing the police uniform she wore during the production, the surly boy and his doting, hippie mother, the long faced man standing alone outside.

There isn't a happy one in the lot either as Prose devotes a chapter to each. They suffer over failed first dates, the persistent fear of the end of the world, thwarted ambition, self-doubt, self-loathing, unrequited love. Wonderfully written and piercingly thoughtful it was, nonetheless, far too dour for my current reading state of mind.

You could argue reading this is timely in the lead up to the 2016 elections but it speaks to a nuance that is completely lacking in this particular campaign.

It's more about the skewing of stats, presenting information that favours your viewpoint, logical fallacies. And it ties it into Fox News polls, autism claims, 9/11 truthers, unknown unknowns and more.

And while the sly authorial voice does occasionally peek out it reads like a first year textbook. There's the missed potential to have more fun with this but it instead, seriously and perhaps appropriately given the nature of the book, resorts to cold hard logical truths and talks of bimodal distributions and Bayesian probability.

Still, 3 out of 4 dentists agree that this is better than 50% of the books out there.

Our unnamed protagonist is a bit of a cypher surrounded by three strong willed women each with a singular focus, not to mention distinct blind spots. There is a willful blindness to inconvenient truths that stand in the way of what they perceive as success.

Tracey is wonderfully brash and filled with the boastful lies we tell others to shape our own heroic narrative. The narrator's mother is fuelled by a singular self-righteous ambition that brooks no time for others. And the Aussie pop-star is surrounded by a reality distortion bubble, shored up by handlers and yes-men.

Zadie Smith is a wonderful writer but I just wasn't sure of the story she was trying to tell. Maybe I needed something more to hang onto to here. It's got a good beat, I just can't dance to it.

Such a timely read. It's a love letter to introverts facing a post-truth world where the brash bully their way to the prize with a complete disregard for anyone other than themselves. Hill careens wildly about exploring every shiny idea that presents itself as he jumps back and forth from the present to the 1968 Chicago riots, to 1940's Norway; from the Iraq War to online quests. With all these balls in the air he somehow never manages to miss a beat.

It's another debut novel that is filled to overflowing with a lifetime of ideas distilled onto the page. It is a credit to Hill's talent that the book doesn't topple under the sheer mass of ideas, even if it felt like there were some head scratching tangents that keep it from being a complete 5 star book.

It's an exploration of big pharma, corporate rule, love, ownership of people, robots and even ideas.

Jack Chen is a pharmaceutical pirate that reverse engineers drugs to make them available to people in need. She does this by selling hacked in demand pills to fund her more altruistic efforts. Imagine selling off market Viagra to fund malaria relief efforts.

Now imagine Pfizer sending out armed goons with a license to kill to “protect” their intellectual property. In this case it's a military grade robot and his/her human handler that burn a bloody swath across the globe looking for Jack.

The pill in question is Zacuity. It's marketed as a productivity enhancer but in some cases leads to death as work becomes as addictive as heroin compelling users to do nothing else at the expense of food, sleep and drink. There's a horrifyingly funny throwaway when a thinly veiled version of a Tim Hortons worker (this is set in Canada after all) is so compelled to make donut holes that he begins feeding it other things including a stray cat, other customers and his own leg as he screams “We're just making donuts!... Timmo's bots make the best donuts!”

Despite all the future world-building going on here it moves at a brisk, race against the clock pace.

Paolo Bacigulupi takes a sci-fi conceit and really fleshes it out. Scorched earth, inhospitably polluted Earth necessitating modified humans built to withstand the environment? That's the template to countless post-apocalyptic sci-fi novels. Table stakes for a larger story. Paolo instead decides to pull up on the reins and examine the idea a little closer and the results are wonderfully thoughtful. Lots of these sci-fi conceits are explored in each tightly packaged story. Lots of fun dipping in and reading between books.