David Yoon

You can't be too mad over a book that weighs in at a slight 176 pages. Even that number is misleading as it's narrated in an unbroken stream of consciousness with spare lines that scatter on the page like poetry. You could finish this in an afternoon.

It's hypnotizing. You're following a mountain lion barely surviving as they prowl the area surrounding the Hollywood sign. The lion listens to mangled snippets of conversations that translate into “scare city under capitalism” and “that's the thing with ellay...all we've got here is gurus.” And then it veers into a surreal fever dream as the lion imagines themself in Disney, snuck in as an emotional support cat to ride Splash Mountain and sit on an elevated sofa to lick their paws to a regal polish. And still, it ever so lightly manages to touch on homelessness, climate change, and pay homage to P-22, the cougar that once prowled Griffith Park in Los Angeles before being caught.

Who knew cozy fantasy was the way into my hardened heart that was tired of Tolkein, meh on Middle-Earth, over orcs, fed-up with fairies, and done with dwarves.

It's a D&D inspired world where instead of facing off against deadly creatures in search of magical loot hidden in dank caves, your dungeon master has you rolling to pour the perfect latte, discovering biscotti, and building a cozy vibe. As the subtitle claims it's “High Fantasy. Low Stakes. Good Company.” Here. For. It.

It doesn't hurt that Baldree really manages to evoke the warm scent of fresh baked pastries wafting over cooling mugs of hot coffee amidst the sound of convivial conversation. It's found family, a sapphic spark, and holding onto hope against some minor tension with a disgruntled former bandmate and a local crime boss. And while it doesn't bear too close scrutiny as it trips over a host of anachronisms and pat coincidences it is, after all, about the vibes. Feel-good fantasy that has me looking for more in the genre.

Wall-to-wall WTF this thing dials it up to 11. Every chapter feels like it delivers an epic climax worthy of its own book, the boss fight to end all boss fights, and then just does it again and again. It's unrelenting.

An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties which prevents people from spreading it. Aggressive antimemes can be regarded, written about, drawn or photographed — but absent the actual object they are entirely forgotten, the words rendered hieroglyphic, the images blurred.

Already present everywhere on Earth is an antimeme threat labelled SCP-3125. The Antimemetic researchers in the book note the threat is omniversal-scale, endangering neighbouring realities, encroaching on universes that embed theirs as fiction. But how do you fight against a world-ending cognitohazard that is impossible to remember? That once acknowledged erases the individual and any memory of his or hers existence from reality.

How ironic that a book on antimemes has me thinking about it incessantly, I loved this read.

It's Cloud Atlas meets The Overstory. A collection of connected short stories, spanning 3 centuries, centred around a yellow house deep in the woods of Massachusetts incorporating diary entries, letters, songs, poems, medical notes and more, written by young lovers escaping puritanical judgement, a Loyalist soldier struck with pomomania, a buxom fortune teller, a slave hunter, a schizophrenic, twin spinsters, a disgraced amateur historian, a closeted painter and plenty of ghosts beside. Throw in the smutty goings on of a horny scolytid beetle, the thwarted efforts of an industrious squirrel preparing for winter, a spore shaken from the coat of a dog, and various mountain lions. Not to mention various folks axed, eviscerated, and blown away. Each chapter is written in accordance to the time and narrator, from the prim prose of the late 18th century, the florid letters from a 19th century painter, to the lurid exclamations of a 70's true crime writer.

[Deep breath] It's a lot, and yet Mason somehow manages to pull it off and land this thing. It is pure storytelling magic where all that is asked of you is to revel in the magic of the words on the page. Not a bad side hustle when Mason isn't busy teaching psychiatry at Stanford. #showoff

Three preteen girls meet at a Fourth of July BBQ in the 80's which marks the beginning of their loosely intertwined lives. From there they being to forge distinct paths for themselves that frame the three sections of the book.

Giselle Chin is a performance artist seeking to fully become an art monster, Jackie Ong is a coder trying to build and sustain an online community, and Ellen Ng is a commune living squatter eking out an existence at the edges of society. All three are creatives in a world that pushes back against the purity of the work and any hope of escaping the clutches of capitalism. Their work is compromised in some way, inevitable in the world of art and technology, but even in the dystopian future, Ellen's punk ethos still can't completely escape big corporate.

But it's about navigating that reality and emerging into the possibility of something better. That capitulation may be inevitable, but there still remains the chance of something more. The project is ever ongoing.

It seems such a minor detail, but I wasn't enjoying this read until I started over with the understanding that the historical events and people in the Dream portion of the book are all real. And the opening refrain of the book begins to make sense. After all, what is history? Turns out it's a collection of unlikely coincidences, vastly connected events, tiny moments that ripple and collide, a three-way standoff, a memory of rain, a cure for insomnia.

Korean history is easily reduced to Japanese occupation and the Korean War until its soft-power explosion that offered the world k-pop, k-dramas and k-beauty — but it's obviously much more than that and Park explores its wild nooks and crannies, giving us the cut finger club, assassinations, and oblique poetry written in architectural magazines. From Jack London dismissing Koreans as “the perfect type of inefficiency - of utter worthlessness” to Ian Fleming's Goldfinger claiming Koreans “are the cruelest, most ruthless people in the world” it hasn't been easy changing the minds of the Western world.

And the 3 sections of the book begin to converge as you read. Elements echo across stories and tiny connections are made while characters evolve and mutate before our eyes. It rewards close attention even as it plays with expectation and indulges in a bit of fun. From the 1999 Stanley Cup final between the Buffalo Sabres and Dallas Stars to Friday the 13th and North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Il. It's all connected and it's a blast to read.

With all the literary panache of an IKEA instruction manual, begrudgingly written by an author who didn't much like the subject, who resigned himself to doing the bare minimum to get this book off the ground.

But I guess it's in keeping with the anti-capitalist theme of a millennial renegotiating their relationship to the grind. In opposition to hustle culture it's not pro-lazy, just anti-burnout. And Shoji comes by it honestly given his dismissive, bordering on abusive former boss and the fraught relationship to work his siblings have that would eventually lead to a death by suicide for his sister.

Shoji does recount some interesting requests from folks looking for company as they file divorce papers, to have someone wave from the train platform as they move out of Tokyo after ten years, or to simply make a fuss over their dog as they walk in the park. But a page turning manifesto this is not, despite having already been made into a manga and TV series in Japan.

Naomi Klein appreciates the irony of having written a book called No Logo and now finding herself trying to shore up her own personal brand. Naomi Wolf is another middle-aged, big haired, Jewish thinker who came to prominence in the nineties with an influential book.

And while it's annoying enough to face constant mistaken attributions on Twitter, things escalate when her doppelgänger takes a hard rightward turn into anti-vax conspiracist. Still, it seems thin gruel on which to base a book on.

But this is just an entry point into the rabbit hole that is our society's obsession with the other, with the mirror world. From the mild, like our personal online avatars in the attention economy, to the massive, with right wing media network spouting wild conspiracies as traditional journalism flounders.

Significantly, Klein notes that conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but the feelings right. Political elites beholden to corporate interest - becomes a cabal of pedophiles planning to institute a world government. Railing at globalists, elites and the World Economic Forums conveniently diverts attention away from capitalism as a broken system and leaves most global billionaires intact.

It's a powerful tool of diversion and distraction that keeps us so busy fighting ourselves, dunking on others, owning the libs or fact-checking the right we miss the opportunity for collective action for something better. Change requires collaboration, even when it's uncomfortable. But we're so caught up in the frantic, divisive, noisy hullabaloo. We're hooked on the dopamine kick of being validated in our own little bubbles as we land another sick burn before doomscrolling to the next crisis.

In the end Klein posits that calm is a force of resistance. That calm is the precondition for focus, which gives us the capacity to prioritize and possibly work together. Just a far reaching and prescient read.

Honestly, I had to do a Google search on Daniel Kraus to find out how he managed so many lines of print from the NYT to NPR for what is a mediocre, gastrointestinal thriller. Is he married to Anna Wintour? Does he have a pleasure island with comprehensive guest logs? Can he snag backstage passes to Taylor Swift?

This should have been a novella. Just cleave the out all the sad father/son dynamics. We're supposed to believe that Jay is shunned by the local community, his shoes spat on as he passes by for refusing to see his father as his cancer progressed? I'll allow for some emo teenaged angst but come on. Mitt may have been an accomplished local diver but he's was also a belligerent asshole that got kicked from job to job to the point he was fishing golf balls out of the local club's water traps. Meanwhile Jay has been living on the kindness of strangers for most of his teenaged years. Sounds like he was really reviled. Of course without the father son clash how would we get that whale telepathy that becomes essential later on?

Let's just focus on the gooey viscera inside the 60-ton sperm whale that has swallowed Jay. Let's just revel in the squishy, mucid, intestinal, gelatinous and fetid environment that he less than hour to escape from before his oxygen runs out. Jay does some hella whale McGyvering outta that stomach while enduring John Wick levels of abuse. That was fun.

But back to my confusion, the film rights have already been secured. Do they even read these things before snatching them up? I relish the thought of experiencing 90 minutes of barely illuminated dark amidst the persistent sounds of intestinal squelching. Like being trapped in a dryer on tumble filled with jello and a dozen silicone dildos.

It's not the book's fault! It's an award-winning debut to a series based on the fantastic premise of Slough House, where disgraced, problematic, or washed up MI5 agents go to toil out the rest of their days. And clearly there was enough there to warrant a fantastic series on AppleTV.

But therein lies the problem. I watched the first season based on this book, starring an outlandishly flatulent Gary Oldman, first and THEN read the book. It's not a matter of the show being better than the book, it's just they are both exactly the same. It was like I was reading the script for the season - the book adds nothing to the experience. There's no missed backstory, no character interiority that's examined, no literary flourishes that would be impossible to render onscreen. Apart from a slight divergence at the ending (which I thought the show did better anyways) the two are one and the same.

So it gets knocked a star for a lacklustre reading experience, unique to me. Read on its own, prior to seeing the show, I imagine it would fare a lot better.

The short stories have an uncanny feel about them. They're not necessarily foreboding but still slightly off kilter explorations that peter out instead of resolving themselves. The writing is solid and has me yearning for her next full length exploration. In spite of all that, the collection completely slipped through my mind leaving barely a ripple of recollection once I'd finished.

Unaware of the Matryoshka doll-like conceit of the novel, I go in blind and find myself shaken by the second chapter with its jarring notes, “Brief paragraph Mildred, domestic delights. Home a solace during these happily frantic times.” The third novel realigns my approach to the preceding two (I especially love the flourish as Bevel recounts a complete fiction to Ida as if it actually happened) and all these are once again re-examined by the time I finish the book.

At least it is a clever take on what seems to be a glut of fiction this year that pokes at extravagantly moneyed douchebags existing within their own reality distortion bubbles, intent on manufacturing their own imagined legacies.

Despite being written prior to the pandemic it feels like the perfect encapsulation of that fraught time. The escape of affluent New Yorkers from the city to some wooded retreat to mitigate against the push of people in elevators and the subway. The think pieces and countless “Why I Left” essays that appeared constantly in the early days of lockdown. All of it mirrored by Amanda and Clay's retreat to a rental that promises to “leave the world behind” with their teenaged kids in tow. It's all sunny relaxation until the Washingtons arrive at their doorstep.

Surely this wasn't a home that black people owned thinks Amanda, that this was some con perpetrated by the cleaning staff to some nefarious end. Her liberal values completely overrun by previously hidden prejudices, fuelled by the uncomfortable feeling of not knowing. Sounds familiar. And the disaster, much like Covid, isn't clearly defined. Things are bad, we're just not exactly sure how bad.

So what do we do when the end of the world comes? Bake a cake, pour ourself another drink and go swimming. Or bake sourdough bread, adopt a pet and buy a Peloton. Either way it seems we just keep moving forward in uncertainty. So yeah, the book is all undercurrent and uneasy vibes that I can see being frustratingly vague - but that's a feature not a bug. The book feels all the more relevant with most of us having emerged from Covid. A pitch perfect Netflix adaption to boot.

I assumed Thelonious (Monk) Ellison was an over-the-top satirical portrayal of a tweedy, leather-elbow-patched, white academic who of course enjoys fly fishing and woodworking when he's not teaching literary theory and writing dense papers on semiotics. Someone who mutters “egads” on the basketball court after missing a shot and the obvious polar opposite of the Stagg R. Leigh persona. Turns out author Pervical Everett teaches literary theory when he isn't fly-fishing, woodworking, and ranching besides. What does that say about me and my assumptions?

The book pokes at credulous readers and the publishing industry hype machine fumbling around representation. It recalls the early days of Indigenous writers and authors from Africa selected to shore up misery porn narratives. Predominantly white industry gatekeepers shaping BIPOC narratives, fuelled by good intentions but blind to their own biases.

Ellison is in the middle of a family crisis as his sister is killed by an anti-abortion protester, his brother is newly out which has thrown his marriage on its head, and their mother is clearly deteriorating with Alzheimer's. The bank gained by his literary minstrelsy sure could make things easier but then who is Thelonious Ellison at the end of this? The existential crisis he faces is evident on the page as he drops snippets of dialogues between Wittgenstein, Derrida, and Joyce along with the entire hit making novel My Pafology. It can make for a disjointed story that careens all over the place, glancing lightly on both the satirical, like the literary award panel, and the sombre struggles of his family situation.

What should be the insufferable, late stage reminiscing of a recently widowed man returning to a childhood haunt is instead a beautifully rendered story that sparkles at every line. This was my first foray into audiobooks and I found myself listening at natural speed to better luxuriate in the language (despite my penchant for 1.5x or faster speeds listening to podcasts)

Our protagonist meanders back and forth across the years recalling childhood crushes, current griefs, and a middling career in-between. This should be as tedious as a garrulous old man sitting next to you at the pub regaling you with shaggy dog stories and teary eyed laments. Indeed nothing seems to happen for most of the book, but Banville manages to captivate with his language.

Marguerite is quite the moneyed 17-year old, traipsing the globe with her mother to secure items from those that understand it best. While the English understand wool — “the French understand wine, cheese, bread”; “the Germans understand precision, machines”; and “the Arabs understand honor.”

This short story beautifully packaged, joins a slate of recently read books that offer up incisive pokes at the publishing industry coming off the heels of Yellowface and Erasure. I'd say more, but it would otherwise be mauvais ton

Despite being an absolute SEO nightmare, I love these Field Notes from Biblioasis. Thoughtful conversations from a Canadian perspective — I had to grab the latest On Class from the books editor at the Toronto Star, Deborah Dundas.

Things that I take for granted like reminiscing about back to school shopping. Fresh new notebooks, a mittfull of highlighters, the misguided ambition of a Day Timer, and Post-Its galore was something Dundas didn't have an experience of. Even the modest Laurentian pencil crayons were out of her reach growing up. She was poor, and for many that realization is weighted with a sense of shame.

It's that bootstrap mentality. That we live in a meritocracy and that a little elbow grease is all you need to pull yourself up. That hard work gets rewarded - the corollary being that it's your fault alone if you don't succeed. With failure comes shame, which prevents folks from talking about it openly, and absolves those who find themselves on the positive side of the ever growing wealth gap.

The pandemic seemed a moment ripe to consider class more closely. How those at the lowest rungs suddenly became incredibly invaluable to keep things running. Heroic pay for grocery workers. Banging pots and pans for our PSWs and nurses. The continued expectation of migrant workers keeping the food coming. But all that attention and sympathy dried up as soon as the pandemic ended. Dundas is writing to remind us of the every growing disparity between the haves and have-nots.

It's a cozy crime read with a neurodivergent narrator in the guise of 25 year old Molly Gray. She's working as a maid at the Regency Grand, a five star boutique hotel. It's her only respite in an otherwise lonely world since her Gran passed away nine months ago.

Molly's an easy mark who struggles to pick up on social cues and read individual's intent. When she discovers the very much dead body of a boorish millionaire while cleaning his room, things start to unravel. In a life spent as mostly invisible and overlooked, it's clear the odds are stacked against her. Thanks to some found family, a plan is hatched to save her and nab the ne'er do wells.

Total feel-good arc concocted to be made into a heart-warming movie with an unlikely hero satisfyingly prevailing over a cabal of absolute cads with a host of quirky secondary characters. Pure confectionary light reading that doesn't bear too much thinking about, the bookish equivalent of a lazy Sunday afternoon TV movie.

Libertarians descend on the small New Hampshire town of Grafton to launch what they will call the “Free Town Project.” There is a hope that like-minded libertarians across the nation will come to help build this shining beacon of logic and reason. A city vehemently opposed to government overreach and taxes. There's a lot of room for interpretation and would extend beyond the God given right to bear arms, to trafficking in organs, holding bum fights, and accepting consensual cannibalism. While they pared down services to the bone, forgoing road repairs, capable fire stations, and even a drivable police car for the lone full-time officer, the city saw an increase in sex offenders, homicides, lawsuits and, as the title suggests, bear attacks.

Dunking on credulous firebrands intent on battling government overreach against their own self-interest and well-being is by now a wearying pastime. There's little humour to be had now that it's become such a pervasive part of our world. Charismatic ideologues proffering their vision of some ideal future state, positioning themselves as noble vanguards pushing against reigning norms has given us anti-vaxxers, QAnon, the manosphere, and Elon Musk. Chuckling along at their antics with an exasperated “oh you” and pandering to some imagined leftwing reader feels like the writing of an older, gentler time and lacks the teeth you'd want in this increasingly partisan world that demands blood - or at least a scathing hot take.

Nathan Hill's debut Nix blew me away, and Wellness is just such an assured follow-up that is so crammed full of ideas it requires its own bibliography. Hill manages to weave together so much without feeling overdone. Even when he brain-dumps, like the chapter on the internet, it reads at once obvious and yet utterly novel despite being a well worn topic. And Hill, with an abundance of confidence (seriously, the audacity to tackle any of these topics that have endured reams of examination and opinion across media) explores the challenges of parenting, marriage, gentrification, and of course, wellness itself. But what could be overly dour and heavy-handed is leavened by various hilarious recountings of Elizabeth's familial wealth, dot-com exceptionalism manifested as polyamory, and mean-girl school moms.

It's just a joy to be in the hands of such sheer writerly aplomb. From the pitch-perfect, Chicago fairy-tale, meet-cute first chapter to the abrupt jump ahead to marriage and the raising of an 8-year-old. It's a GenX reckoning that follows its own bookish logic, and while admittedly relying on some overly tidy epiphanies later on, I still can't be mad at the whole magnificent endeavor. Despite being a brick of a book, I'm still tempted to pick it up and read it again - it's that good.

Alan Parson's goes out for a run in the woods with his son Eugene. Only Eugene returns. Diagnosed with autism and mosaic Angelman Syndrome, Eugene is completely non-verbal. It's left for the family to determine what exactly happened.

Mia Parson is the 20-year old daughter of Alan, who provides the frenetic narration of the story, often indulging in tangents and copious footnotes as her mind careens about pulling at various possible threads. Is her father dead or has he simply left the family behind? Which is worse? Was it suicide or perhaps something more ominous, and how does the research he left behind about a “Happiness Quotient” fit into the picture? How much can we even know about our own family and the secrets they keep? How far would we go to protect them?

It's another literary thriller with a special-needs child at its heart from Angie Kim who clearly owns this genre. She doles out bits and pieces of information that point to various motives while indifferent outside forces conspire to assign certain blame. Truly a rollercoaster ride, the book nonetheless manages to provide a satisfying ending without completely showing its hand.

It's such a millennial love story. It's a world where breakups are performed online. It's seeing your ex move on and show off their fabulous new single life on social. Brunch with the girls on Insta, TikTok travel with the besties, and who is that guy that keeps showing up in the shots? Concert pics, wine tours, cottage fires — your ex living their best, unemcumbered, happy life while you're wallowing in your fort of pizza boxes, Cheetos and Mountain Dew.

Amplify that by a million - and now your girlfriend is living her dreams on national TV for all the see. Even if you know it's all fake, the book offering it's own clever skewering of reality TV, you can't help but take a little seriously the blossoming romance with the fellow show contestant Adam. This new relationship fueled by his muscular back and smug cheekbones being cheered on by legions of fans. And maybe you're not exactly making the best decisions coming to terms with the ending of the relationship either.

And there's the billionaire douchenozzle who cloaks his selfishness in pseudo spiritual language. His pet project to send humans to Mars is the best he can come up with to escape the slowly disintegrating planet that he and his shareholder friends and the politicians that live in their pockets have completely orchestrated.

It's also about the emotional scars that parents can leave and the outsized influence on what their adult children's relationships might end up looking like despite best efforts.

So it's love in the time of clicks and engagement that offers up a darkly funny mirror into our very online world. The Giller longlist once again pointing me in the direction of some wonderful new voices in Canadian literature.

I loved this activist, anti-capitalist book wrapped in a disarming, self-help floral cover. It's consolidating a lot of what I've been reading lately that's been a reaction to our always online hustle culture.

Time is money and it's gone well beyond #girlbossing, the grind, and side hustles — expanding the boundaries of our work life. It's the fact that for many of us, every waking moment sees us building our personal brands, submitting our leisure time for numerical evaluation via likes, comments and views. We're constantly checking in on our performance and monitoring the value of our personal brand. Even self-care is framed in terms of returning to work replenished, to optimize ourselves to do more.

It's not like stepping away is going to be easy. History is scattered with the remains of those that felt they could escape the grind. Turn on, tune in, and drop out. Odell has us consider the work of maintenance, disrupting the attention economy and escaping its pervasive framework. To listen, reflect, heal, and repair ourselves. Stupidity is never blind or mute. Maybe holster that hot take, touch grass, and do the work of doing nothing.

The conceit is simple enough. It's 1976 and Dana Franklin is moving into her new apartment when she is suddenly transported to the antebellum South of 1819 where she saves a young boy named Rufus. A boy that is a pivotal branch in Dana's own family tree that must be kept alive to ensure Dana continues to exist.

Dana wrestles with her modern day understanding against the backdrop of casual violence. She is far and away more educated than any of the slave holding landowners and yet physically cowed by the merciless whipping she receives. In her words you feel the abject fear that prevents her from making the attempt at escape again. You understand, in a way that wasn't available to you before, the compromises that she is willing to make, and those she accepts in others. It brings the casual cruelty of that time into sharp focus and Rufus is as compelling a villain as you will ever find on the page.

It's as harrowing a read as it is informative, and each side informs the other. An incredible accomplishment that is just as powerful now as it must have been nearly half a century ago.

We are living in a time of excess. We are “achievement-subjects” — multi-tasking, productivity maximizing, hustle culture entrepreneurs of the self. Even our leisure is commoditized - pretty picks of vacation destinations or fancy meals offered up for numeric judgement in the form of clicks and likes. Self-care is only in service of returning refreshed, getting back to the grind so that you can be more, better, richer. We are in the midst of Performance Society, there is no limit to our potential and so burnout is inevitable in the face of constant striving. Depression is our inability to measure up, becoming tired of having to become ourselves. We need to admit the idleness that benefits the creative process. We need to be bored and be able to contemplate.

This picks up the thread from Byng-Chul Han's earlier work The Scent of Time and in my head gets mixed up with the recently read How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. This one proved a bit more of a slog but coming in under 80 pages one can hardly complain. I've always got time for a bit of anti-capitalist philosophical thought.