David Yoon

The writing is beautiful and the translation assured. It follows several people in the aftermath of the Gwangju uprising and subsequent quelling by the army. The aftermath creeps across the years as dark tendrils that still lay hold of those involved.

Sounds like a compelling plot as Kang plays witness to the events of 1980. But these are all bookish quotes objectively examining this second translated work from Kang that makes The Vegetarian seem like a happy fairy tale.

But it had such a profound effect on me. I remember visiting South Korea with my family in the late 80's on vacation. I'm Canadian born and raised with parents that embrace and love their lives here in Canada - perhaps at the expense of a deliberate forgetting, if not tight-lipped stoicism of their pasts in Korea. I remember standing in a train station in Gwangju and seeing plastered on columns everywhere photos of the aftermath. These weren't the photojournalism shots we see of sweeping vistas of destruction taken from a remove, anonymous bodies strewn on a dusty roadway. They were almost pornographic. Close up shots of just what remained of a face, now looking remarkably like a halloween mask, the skull completely staved in from repeated bludgeoning. Gore and viscera displayed in a public transit station, multiple strangers in death for all to examine. Closely. Maybe that's what was in the chapbooks referenced in the book. I see them in my head now.

I'm a tourist. I've spent maybe a year total in South Korea. I have only the most rudimentary understanding of the language. I live a privileged, suburban, middle-class existence so take all my hand-wringing as me-too relevance seeking.

I've taught Dong-ho and kids his age in South Korea in small towns. I've been in the concrete sheds that pass for gymnasiums and walked the dirt packed floors of regional office buildings. I've passed by open fields where communities still burn all their garbage. I've witnessed the intense physicality of Koreans so at odds with the expansive space of Canada and personal boundaries.

And though I've never seen it I can imagine them all dead too. I can imagine 15 year old boys tending to hundreds of dead bodies with a matter of fact resolve. I can imagine teachers tortured, struck and humiliated. I can see them just as easily being the ones torturing, hitting and humiliating. In a country where every male has mandatory military service I see only a thin line between tortured and torturer.

And it just wrecks me. That's what a good writer is supposed to evoke but I can't call what this brings up as enjoyable. Kang dredges up so much of what is ugly and distorted and lays it out in a joyless manner and dares you to look away. I see little in the way of hope, and maybe that's more honest. If you liked The Vegetarian you're going to love Human Acts. It just leaves me cold.

I loved the book and found it entirely readable ...so there.

Colin Singleton worries about his future as he pines over the past. Gutshot (wink) over his last breakup and fearful of how to segue out of childhood prodigy status, he embarks on an impromptu road trip with his pudgy Middle Eastern (“I'm not a terrorist”) best friend who loves Judge Judy and is intent on doing nothing. Boom - there's your movie.

Throw in a mystery at the tampon string factory, the grand unifying theory of relationships, Franz Ferdinand's grave, feral hogs and dingleberries and you've got yourself one fun little read. Looking forward to checking out his much lauded The Fault in Our Stars.

A fun romp of a road trip novel as multi-millionaire, cosmetics mogul Charles Wang loses everything during the financial crises and decides to load up his second wife into a borrowed Mercedes and set out from his seized BelAir mansion to pick up his two youngest children and descend on the eldest daughters farm in upstate New York.

These kids are second-gen, monied, white-adjacent, trainwrecks. Andrew has dreams of being a stand-up comic, Grace is an emo, style-blogger and Saina is an exiled New York art-monster. Theirs is the story of being part of a coherent and unique identity that is defined neither by their ancestors country of origin or their father's adopted home. Even Charles is stuck between worlds and finds himself immigrating to both countries in search of something better. They all uniquely personify what it is to be Asian-American.

They are messed up, capable of incredibly bad decisions based on questionable justifications and victim to the mistakes they invariably make over and over again. Human, imperfect, still trying.

It's a propulsive, page-turner that takes you on a breathtaking, multiverse ride. Jason Dessen lives an otherwise unremarkable life. He's got a good job teaching at a local college, has a lovely wife and a son he adores. But after celebrating a friends award for achievements in physics he can't help but wonder about the road not taken. On his way home he's jumped, kidnapped and knocked unconscious. When he awakes he finds himself living the life where critically different choices had him focus single-mindedly on the pursuit of science. It's a quantum mechanic It's a Wonderful Life as Jason is confronted with the consequences of those choices. That's one hell of a setup and author Blake Crouch takes us on a roller coaster ride to to the final pages of the book. It teeters on the edge of over-the-top and falters at times but you're too busy flipping through the pages to notice.

Let me just say right off the top that The Dry is just about the perfect thriller mystery. The writing is straightforward but the strength of the story comes with how well it manages to work with all the genre conventions. You have intimations of an unreliable narrator with a mysterious past that haunts him still, a crime scene with some open ended questions and a barren and hostile landscape that drives much of the plot. You really don't really need to read much more than that to enjoy this.

Federal agent Aaron Falk is called back to his rural hometown of Kiewarra for the funeral of his childhood friend Luke Hadler. Luke has killed his wife and young son and then, shortly thereafter, himself. Kiewarra is a hardscrabble little town in the grip of a multi-year drought. Businesses are closing, people are struggling and the unrelenting heat has everyone ready to erupt. It's the last place Aaron wants to stay having been drummed out of town 20 years ago after the mysterious death of Ellie Deacon. But Luke Hadler's dad insists he stay on and and resolve whether his son is a murderer or not. He sinks the hook when he tells Aaron that he knows he lied about where he was when Ellie died years ago.

There are red herrings, plot twists, and enough clues that you get the thrill of figuring out mysteries moments before it's revealed on the page. Kiewarra could be anywhere, an inward looking, insulated small town in the grip of near poverty. An Appalachian speck where the mill has closed down years ago, a Newfoundland community on it's last generation of fishers. It's the kind of place where desperation and desperate measures bubble just under the surface. It's not literary fiction by any means but I have to give it a 5 for sheer enjoyment at just the right time.

30 year old Ruth finds herself sitting alone in her new apartment. She was supposed to be sharing the place with her fiance Joel - who, on the day of the move, announced he wouldn't be joining her and instead would be staying at their old place with his new girlfriend.

Soon after she is home for the holidays where she learns that her father has been having lapses. He's in the early stages of Alzheimer's and has already lost his position at the college teaching history. Ruth is asked to stay for a year to help out. Her younger brother has decided to stay away, having still not forgiven their father for his infidelity and alcoholism when he was younger.

Sounds like a ton of fun. But Rachel Khong works with a light touch.

Ruth records her year at home in diary format. Her accounts are bookended with the notes her own father left for her in an old notebook. She reads about her youthful queries about where metal comes from and what flavor are germs.

It's a year in the life. There's no real beginning or end, no tidy resolution. It barely hints at the inevitable struggle that will grow in the following years and already has the gauzy feel of nostalgia. It's a book about memory and the things we hold on to.

I suspect it would be frustrating for a reader hoping for a closer look at Alzheimers, a climactic confrontation of past betrayals, a sobbing acceptance of a love lost. A swelling of the orchestra and an emotional close-up. None of that is here. Ruth instead records the quirky everyday things that often stick out. Her father holding his regime of vitamins in one hand, shaking them like dice. I like that. Wry and melancholic but still as familiar as your mom's cooking and just as beautifully done.

It's 1939, and tired of The Shadow getting all the love, a host of comics similarly tried their hand at millionaire vigilantes. You've probably heard of The Green Hornet and of course his fellow copycat crusader The Batman. Now The Bat-Man, as he was known back then, didn't come out of the gate quite the cultural phenomenon we recognize now. In his first year alone he would kill 24 men, 2 vampires, a pack of werewolves and several giant mutants - often with the help of a gun.

But as Glen Weldon works out, Batman over the years became more than just a character but an idea. One that has room for Adam West's pop art infused camp, Lego Batman's self-absorbed parody, Christopher Nolan's gravel-voiced Dark Knight and Tim Burton's twisted outsider - just maybe not Joel Schumaker's bat-nipples.

It's a comprehensive history of Gotham's greatest hero that non-nerds can follow along with hitting all the gleeful classic comic stops like Neal Adam's gritty new take in the 70's, Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns in the 80's, to Scott Snyder's recent run with the series.

Wheldon also carefully prods at the idea of nerd culture, already fully rabid back in the 80's but with the addition of the internet, becoming toxic. Gnashing of teeth over the casting of Mr. Mom in Burton's Batman to full on conniptions over Schumaker's bat-nipples there is this protective ownership of the character that will emerge wherein only the badass Batman of comics should exist and those that tamper otherwise will suffer their righteous indignation. A microcosm of the various trolls that scream behind their computer screens over video game reviews, Star Wars canon, and whether Idris Alba could ever play James Bond.

What am I going to say? It's another one of those books you can't help but read in giant gulps. Great frolicking read that has me committed to the rest of the series - hope it lives up to expectations!

It's an impossible task really. 400 years of class in America concentrating on the white poor. Despite it's brick-like size it can only do so much and this focus is off putting with the noticeable avoidance of black slavery and native peoples. But Isenberg is up front, she's interested in examining crackers, rednecks, hillbillies and the titular white trash.

I'm a Canadian so I have no idea what gets taught in schools across the United States. I'm sure it's as defanged and sterilized as what we learn in Canadian History. So it's incredible to hear about America being seen as a potential dumping ground for the idle poor, the criminal, and orphaned of England. Or about President Andrew Jackson, redneck malcontent that did whatever he pleased with vocal supporters that favoured brawling over brainy discussion. Or the eugenics craze that swept the nation in the early 1900's on the backs of the idea that “class was congenital”.

I could have done without the last fifty years talking about the rise of white trash in the media landscape from the Beverly Hillbillies, to the Dukes of Hazard, Honey Boo-boo and Sarah Palin. It's too much ground to cover and offered no real insight to the pop culture landscape. And in this post-Trump world it would have been timely if she was able to extend her analysis to the past election.

The story of someone who managed to transcend his white trash upbringing that includes a gun-toting grandma that once poured gasoline on his grandfather when he came home drunk once too often - then lit it, to his drug-addicted, 5-time married mother who once begged her own son for clean urine.

But it's thanks to the love of that same grandmother and some key mentors in his life, not to mention his time in the military that saw him graduate Yale Law and become a principal in a San Francisco tech-venture fund.

But Vance never comes off as boastful. It's not a “Look at how successful I've become” story. He's more an embedded journalist that lived for years amongst the disenfranchised, white trash, hillbillies. He shines a light on their learned helplessness and massive blindspots. He talks of folks blaming Obama for their jobless state but seeing them quit jobs because of the inconvenience of getting up early.

Meanwhile Vance's mind is blown at the sheer wealth of opportunity afforded him by simply being white and at Yale. A set of rules that was completely invisible to him before, opens doors effortlessly. He doesn't discount his own work and determination but he knows how lucky he's been.

Yaa Gyasi manages to weave a cohesive and incredibly compelling story that weaves through 300 years and 8 generations of history on both sides of the Atlantic. Spurred on by the Cape Coast Castle where Ghanian women lived upstairs with their white husbands while Ghanian slaves are stacked like cordwood in the dungeons below, Gyasi tells the story of slavery and being black in America without becoming didactic or preachy. And she does it in 300 pages with each chapter introducing us to a completely new character down the split generational lines. Absolutely incredible feat of debut writing that rarely stumbles and mostly shines.

I like the premise. It's a thought experiment that asks the question: How will the distant future remember the present. An early example is John Phillip Sousa. You might recognize the name as a renowned composer of marching music, heard at countless high school football games. Chances are you couldn't name a second marching music composer despite it being a prevalent musical form in the late 19th century. He's the single placeholder for an entire genre.

200 years from now who will be the name that represents rock? Arguments could be made for Elvis vs Dylan vs Chuck Berry. What do these choices say about how the future will understand rock? How about the seminal book of the millennium? The TV show that will be of interest to future anthropological study? Is it inevitable that football will cease to exist?

Like I said interesting questions, but ultimately as Chuck admits, everyone who reads the book will be long dead before finding out how horribly wrong or uncannily right he ends up being. Would have been a super interesting long form magazine piece. Bit of a stretch for a book.

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

I get it. You want characters in your novel. They don't have to be likeable, they can push the boundaries of believable but they have to do the work of carrying your story.

Graham Cavanaugh is a 56 year old venture capitalist 12 years into his second marriage with Audra Daltry. She's the significantly younger, one-time mistress that broke up his first marriage to the icy Elspeth.

Between trying to manage their on-the-spectrum son Matthew and his newfound passion for origami to Audra's oversharing, open armed tendencies that sees them housing all manner of human strays to attempting to foster a friendship with his ex-wife this is one of those light, frothy “white people problems in the big city” type of reads that evokes words like charming, breezy and hilarious.

Not to say it wasn't all those things but I found Graham's typical hand-wringing, greying urbanite's concerns elicited no sympathy. Audra was too guileless and garrulous to be anything but a hilarious caricature and Elspeth was given the dirty work of being the sacrificial straight-man to this meandering story that shied away from exploring too deeply into any dark, troubling territory. I wish it had gone there.

Author Rumaan Alam is a homosexual writing about young female friendship being read by a hetero dad. This should not work. It reads like a Millennial version of the Neapolitan novels. God I'm not really selling this am I? But I enjoyed the read.

Sarah is the rich daughter of a Rumsfield-esque statesmen and is looking forward to getting married. Lauren is the pretty childhood friend who finds Sarah's fiancé to be boring but is tasked with maid of honour duties including the getaway bachelorette.

Nothing really happens though. There's no dead bridesmaid at the bachelorette, no last minute infidelities, dying parent, financial meltdown. It's just the ups and downs of two lifelong female friends as they navigate those tiny things we all do with the friends we've developed a shorthand with. The knowledge of how arguments will grow and subside. The nostalgia of a friendship. At 20 remembering being excited 16 year olds. At 24 remembering being college freshmen. That relationship you really wished could have worked out for your friend.

And then seeing how it's going to change yet again with one of you marrying. The inevitable kids, the changing priorities. It's a quiet book filled with insightful tiny moments.

Currently on the Nebula and Hugo shortlists for best sci-fi novel this is an unforgivingly difficult bit of military sci-fi that throws you in to the deep end and forces you to try and catch up quick. It's a dense, next level work that I found difficult to immerse myself into - sci-fi newbie that I am.

It's calendrical rot, the hexarchate, threshold winnowers and more. Lee doesn't slow down the story with infodumps and simply chugs ahead, giving you credit to tease out the finer details for yourself as you go along. (I did appreciate the Kel's love for space kimchi though) It's no doubt exciting for the seasoned sci-fi reader but I often found myself trying to find footing and keep my head above water. It's the same feeling that I had after reading Ancillary Justice that was much lauded in the sci-fi community.

It's also a punishing war saga that talks of death by the millions while detailing the grisly end of individual soldiers. It's gory, bloody and unforgiving but written so well, balancing the horrors with the human.

I get it. I'm an old guy working in high tech, but I've always been here and in Canada we're at a slight remove from the unicorn madness infecting some other tech centres. I can understand Dan's snark and I've seen evidence of ruthless backstabbing, hi-tech mean-girling, hare-brained revelations from egotistical narcissists, Kool-aid slurping wage slaves, frat boy brogrammers and more - his just goes to eleven.

But calling out the bro-coders out for their frat boy antics then gleefully recounting the dick, fart and shit jokes you live on in the writers room seems disingenuous. I understand you calling out the 20-somethings for their lack of experience, but can you please not mention you were kind of a big deal at Newsweek again?

I'm not sure what I wanted from this story. Maybe more snark or some sort of narrative so that it didn't just feel like a book-length bitch session. Dan manages to be at a complete remove from everyone involved in the story so that it feels like he's just lobbing spitballs at the tech industry now that he's safely hidden behind the protective apron of Hollywood.

Maybe if you work in hi-tech and still can't explain what it is you do to your folks you can send them this so they get a feel for how far removed from reality the crazy farm can get.

Is the story of a handful of remarkable black women who helped move American aerospace technology forward. But their stories aren't isolated achievements and author Margot Lee Shetterly places us in a larger historical context and intertwines these stories to show how America began to define itself as well.

World War 2 opened the doors to women fulfilling new roles made available as the men went off to war. Dorothy Vaughan is there to help build better planes to fight the war overseas. When Russia put a man in space the Cold War threat opened the doors to countless black women like Katherine Johnson who still needed to navigate the indignities of colored washrooms and separate cafeteria tables.

It was eye-opening not only in the sense of shining a light on a long overlooked cadre of women working at NACA which would eventually become NASA, but also the parallel track of black education in the face of segregation. Of black universities, scholarships funded not only by black sororities but government institutions looking to “benevolently” enforce segregation, and the achievements of these women who faced off against the patriarchy and racism, worked inhuman hours, all while raising successful children. Can't wait to see the movie that came out of nowhere to beat Rogue One opening weekend.

Gonzales explodes the narrative and reassembles the shards into a time jumping story that switches from the expletive laden thoughts of a female operative to the dry conjecture of a research paper. It's a pop culture laden romp through the last days of a superhero initiative with nods to Die Hard, Minority Report, Karate Kid with a healthy dose of the X-Men, Morning Glories or the Umbrella Academy.

Given Gonzales' literary history it gets the literary fiction label with a side of genre instead of being placed firmly in YA where it could comfortably sit - less the grisly and funny interlude focused on the office drones that splits the book. And while I loved the action beats throughout I thought Daniel O'Malley's The Rook was the better version of this book.

Krista Tippett is the host of the podcast On Being and as such has the chance to interview hundreds of physicists, spiritual leaders, thinkers, activists and more on how they grapple with meaning in the world.

In Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living, she narrows her focus on words, flesh, love, faith and hope and dips in and out of a wellspring of past interviews. She's a practiced interviewer playing host to some incredibly smart folks.

The language is dense and prescriptive and is made for thoughtful contemplation not the aggressive consumption of my usual fare. You simply can't chug through Rilke like you're reading Rowling. I found myself tripping over the flowery optimism of the language. Still, I appreciate the exploration of ideas like how love demands effort and we should fight against its cheapening by appending it to Fridays, ice cream and “these shoes!” How faith is just as important to the atheist, and that science and religion need not be mutually exclusive. It's just that when epiphanies are had on every page they tend to overlap and congeal diminishing their impact for me.

What's not to like about an introverted, book-loving, procrastinating, self-aware scribble? If you're on the internet you've already seen Sarah Andersen's work. She gets you, she's your patronus, spirit animal, yogi, guru, whisperer to your secret self. Her panels are the comic equivalent of gifs perfectly suited to describe weekend plans, looming deadlines, deferred responsibility and the need to wear pyjamas more. I'm here for that.

In this modern retelling of the Jane Austen classic Liz Bennet hate fucks Mr. Darcy. Just so you know we're in the modern era Sittenfeld also inserts artificial insemination, reality TV, tech startups, individuals that are transgender, asexual and Crossfitters not to mention a Cosmopolitan ripoff and throws in Cincinnati of all places. This is really Liz's stories and the rest of the Bennet sisters are only briefly sketched out and the Bennet matriarch isn't just obsessed with a proper match for her daughters she's also a bit of a hoarder, racist and mortgaged to the hilt.

Sittenfeld is a smart writer that at times can edge a little close to too clever but otherwise a nice, quick diversion of a read.

Between 2009 and 2011 1 in 8 Milwaukee renters faced involuntary displacement. And these figures are consistent across the US for cities of similar size. Matthew Desmond embedded in a trailer park and an inner city tenement to discover the devastating truth of what happens when individuals spend over 70% of their income on housing. With the spectre of eviction hanging over their heads renters are kept quiet and fail to report abuse or horrendous living conditions. It diminishes their self-worth. They can lose their possessions, their job, their benefits and their children. And each successive eviction digs the hole ever deeper.

Matthew follows the lives of several individuals living at the bottom rung of society as they try to claw their way out from underneath a system that profits on their pain. An incredible work of ethnography Desmond continues to stay involved with his Just ShelterJust initiative.

I loved reading this hopelessly self-aware, wonderfully erudite, and viciously satirical novel about a quartet of earnest, screw-up millennials. This book is wall to wall observations, asides and digressions on the nature of personal identity in a digital age. It's almost too clever by half and I had to re-read it immediately after finishing it to figure out how I'd been fooled into thinking it clever. It's like an MFA class ate a thesaurus and shit out this book.

Tulathimutte admits to being clever as a pre-emptive defence against potential arguments that he's being ironic but then cops to the fact that acknowledging that invalidates his prior defence against trying to be clever - all embedded in the text of the story itself. If that kind of stuff makes you want to throw the book across the room — and really explaining it all makes me want to do just that — which he's also already made note of too. See - intellectual stalemate. Tony Tulathimutte is smarter than I am and has already invalidated any argument I may have had for not giving this book a full 5 star rating despite an altogether on the nose ending.

I loved this book - individual results may vary.

I'd never heard of Hong Gildong but he is a huge, pervasive part of Korean culture as immediately familiar as Davy Crockett or, more closely, Robin Hood. On top of that his name is the de facto placeholder - he is Korea's John Doe.

Cast out of his home, the illegitimate son of a concubine in the household of a high ranking government minister, Hong Gildong only wants to refer to his Father as Father and his Brother as Brother instead of by their government titles. Despite his incredible intellect and mastery of the ancient texts he, by caste rules, can never hold a high ranking government position and serve his country.

So naturally he becomes a bandit robbing from corrupt government officials, founds his own kingdom while avoiding assassination attempts, casting magical spells, confusing minds, riding clouds - you know, the usual.

A hella fun little romp that was a nice change from the grim Korean stuff getting translated lately.