David Yoon

I'm still trying to figure out why I have this book in the first place. What trusted source recommended this Finnish Weird novel? Who prompted me to set this aside so that it was the rare book on my shelf just waiting for the right time to read? Let's just say, I'd like a word.

In the first chapter we find ourselves in the midst of some illicit dealings going down at a cemetery. It seems to involve hot peppers being tested for potency by our protagonist snaking a finger under her waistband and dabbing it against her vagina? I've got questions.

The frame widens and we find ourselves in the Eusistocratic Republic of Finland. A heavy-handed dystopian world where women, or elois, are raised to be subservient mates solely obsessed with romance, weddings and pleasing their man. Never too smart or demanding, just content to raise a family and keep a tidy home. All this wrapped around a mystery of a missing sister and expanding a lucrative but illegal hot pepper trade. Neither, though resolved by the end of the novel, really work to tie anything together or work to a larger cohesive theme.

And just hammering it home. Not a lot of subtlety on display here. There are manuals for the discipline of women that sound a lot like dog training guides. Repeated emphasis that our hero never appear too smart as a woman and more akin to an etherized lobotomy patient. And maybe Sinisalo gets a bit of a pass for pulling much of her material from the real world, (there's even a Transcendental Capsaicinophilic Society!) that might generously put her in the same speculative fiction realm that Margaret Atwood treads. But make no mistake this is no Gilead.

As the book opens, we are introduced to the horrible Plumb siblings. Avaricious New Yorker who've borrowed against a massive shared trust coined The Nest, that has been held for them until the youngest turns 40. When they find the Nest has been spent to quiet an incident involving brother Leo, a crashed Porsche and a waitress that was certainly not his wife, their lives begin to spin apart.

These are horribly unlikeable New York urbanites. Everyone is obsessed with what others might think - how they present to the world. Melody is overprotective and adamant about her twin girls attending the right college. Paul has been borrowing behind his husband's back to try and keep his antique shop afloat, confident in the Nest's ability to bail him out. Bea is a stalled writer who has been coasting on her early success for over a decade without producing anything.

And from there, like some Manhattan based Marquez novel, we're introduced to at least a dozen minor characters involved in the lives of the Plumbs. To Sweeney's credit she manages to juggle them all and keep them clear in my head - but it began to feel like an operatic romance novel with it's myriad plot lines and machinations rendered in brief glimpses.

I appreciate that the ending isn't entirely pat but it does render most everyone in a nice glossy patina of hope like some Hugh Grant ensemble movie.

A fascinating exploration of Grit. There's even a Grit questionnaire to assess how gritty you are. I'm moderately gritty BTW - happily mediocre. I'm aware I could be grittier and resolve to do so, but then I've already moved on to the next book.

I like the idea though. It seems like a hearty admonishment of work and stick-to-it-ness that appeals to my Asian upbringing - Duckworth herself is raised by Chinese immigrants. It's resonated far more than the conversing with your creativity ala Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic or Brené Brown's focus on shame and our own imperfections. And like all the best pop-psych books there's lots of anecdotes from folks at the top of their game. Truly gritty paragons.

And it's reassuring for those of us lacking natural talents or long past the age to ever be considered a prodigy of anything. That through focused effort and perseverance we can excel. An extension of Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours. Perseverance and passion - perhaps distilled down to this it's nothing new but nonetheless an engrossing read that got me thinking of where I could be grittier and how to raise grittier kids.

While not nearly the gleeful surprise that was The Rook, this sequel is still a ton of fun with all the requisite ass-kicking ladies, supernatural beings and dry wit with a side of the Belgian Wetenschappeljik Broederschap van Natuurkundigen. Myfawny Thomas is determined to bring about peace between the two warring factions and has assembled the heads of each at a fragile peace accord in London. We follow alongside Grafter Odette Leliefeld and Pawn Felicity Clements of the Checquy who find themselves getting involved in no shortage of shenanigans. Meanwhile a mysterious third party is decimated lives on both sides and seems determined to undermine Rook Thomas' efforts.

Daniel O'Malley could have benefited from a stern editorial hand that might have trimmed a bit of the flab off this book. But it still manages to maintain all the suspense with a hint of fun like a pulpy Sunday matinee. A perfect summer distraction.

Rebecca Wright feels like something is off, that the world is upside down. She lives in a near future New Jersey with driverless cars and an omnipresent president that happily introduces every TV show and delivers personalized messages to couples out on a date or families celebrating a birthday. Maybe it's nothing though, she's got all the hallmarks of the unreliable narrator we've grown used to in fiction. Meanwhile her husband is obsessively working on a causality violation device - which he's tired of everyone referring to as a time machine.

And there you go. All the pieces are in place and you settle in for some time travelling shenanigans. But Dexter Palmer isn't interested in telling you that story quite yet. He meanders around, poking at ideas around big data, race, relationships and more. And you as the reader can't help but wonder what sort of book you've found yourself in. You begin to feel the same sort of unease that Rebecca feels. This isn't quite right. One of the characters in the story states; “Science fiction is a fantasy in which the science always works.” Is this a clue? Where are we headed exactly?

Dexter Palmer is a wildly entertaining writer and I couldn't help but enjoy his tangents and poking around in this world. So good!

It's fairy noir and our hard-bitten detective protagonist is mentally struggling double amputee who lost both her legs after an attempted suicide dive from seven stories up. There's lots of work throughout the book devoted to wrangling with her prosthetics, the perils of staircases, concerns over her stumps getting infected, and struggling to get out of various chairs not to mention the varied mental gymnastics she needs to perform to get through the day struggling with Borderline Personality Disorder. Honestly it's a refreshing take but it can be a bit much. To her credit, Baker handles misfits well and avoids overly sentimentalizing them. Millie Roper is a broken badass taking it one day at a time instead of a handi-capable, crime-solving inspiration - which is a good thing.

In the meantime she's been recruited to a secret agency peopled with mental outpatients tasked with managing traffic between the fairy world and ours. It's MIB Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I enjoyed the magic systems and the slow reveal of the integration between the two realms. This is some serious world building that begs for a series of books and reads like a TV series.

I've never been big on reading philosophy. I've not read any Camus or Satre and only know the handful of Neitzche quotes every emo teenager learns. As far as I know, existentialists wear all black with a penchant for turtleneck and smoking Gauloises.

Despite that I found the book incredibly interesting. When the current philosophical craze tends to Hyyge or the teachings of Marie Kondo, the idea of Sartre and de Beauvoir sitting in Paris cafes “loudly slaughtering the sacred cows of philosophy, literature and bourgeois behaviour to anyone who venture into their ambit” is compelling.

This was a time where women swooned at a sold-out public talk by Sartre at the perfectly named Club Maintenant. Where Franciscan monks orchestrated the smuggling of philosophical papers with a cadre of Benedictine nuns. Ideas held power and thoughtful discourse was weighted with the realities of World War 2.

The book isn't written with the haughty tone of a Philosophy major holding forth on his intellectual heroes but more a clear-eyed examination from an ardent fan. Imminently readable even if, like me, you don't know your Hegel from your Heidegger.

This is a dark and twisty family drama that presents as a thriller. Told in the close third person, it follows Kyung Cho in the aftermath of discovering his mother, naked, bruised and bloodied stumbling out from the woods of his backyard. It is the crack that starts the slow collapse after a lifetime of accumulated pressure. Yun is ruthless and mines the tension wrought from economic, generational and cultural differences to create a storm that catches up Kyung. He is one of those insanely frustrating characters that you watch as he destroys every semblance of shelter in his life. He's like a duck gliding upriver, outwardly exhibiting stoic calm but paddling furiously underneath not to be swept downstream. The story is unexpected and defied my expectations going in.

I am Jack's disappointing sequel.

Chuck Palahniuk follows up his Fight Club novel (slightly different than the movie) with a comic series collected here. Our protagonist (here named Sebastian) is 10 years older, married to Marla Singer and father to a precocious little child. He's popping pills and living in a haze, doing whatever employed, middle aged white guys do in these sorts of stories.

It's Fight Club. But older! It's the movie except everyone knows the twist about Brad Pitt and Ed Norton before it even begins.

And of course Tyler's been busy. The grass roots Project Mayhem has globalize into Rize or Die (which is either a brilliant nod to the bro culture spawned by the movie, now commercialized and brought to you by Axe body spray, or just patently lazy)

it's the same question I ask when Chuck Palahniuk appears in the comic wrestling with how to move the story forward. By the time he breaks the fourth wall and gives up any responsibility for a singular narrative ending I'm pretty invested in lazy.

A.O. Scott is kind of a big deal. He's a film critic for the New York Times and has been at it long enough to be a recognizable name in the business. And so I assumed something along the lines of Stephen King's On Writing, a practical guide of sorts framed by personal anecdotes and a lifetime of experience. Instead it feels like a Philosophy of Criticism 101 class.

Freed from the shackles of having to review Tyler Perry's latest, or yet another Jurassic movie, he throws on the smoking jacket and settles in to mine the likes of Rilke, Shaw, Kant, Sontag and Baudelaire to ask the question, is criticism necessary?

And the answer for this and almost every other question posed in the book is yes and no. It's not looking for answers but instead content to excavate past philosophies. And here it veers back and forth from being incredibly smart and erudite, to sounding like the worst dinner guest imaginable - rambling in self important obliviousness.

I'm no philosophy buff so it was exciting to listen to Scott drop some knowledge, pulled from history's great thinkers, and consider the philosophy of art and criticism. He's my kind of wordy and it's just approachable enough that I could follow along, but tends to overstay its welcome. If nothing else I suppose he did just manage to write a mandatory textbook for the Film Studies Class he currently teaches.

Adapted from Brazilian writer Milton Haltom's book The Brothers it is the story of radically different twin brothers set against each other since childhood. Significant in that Ba and Moon are also twins. I found the artwork and story compelling but difficult to resolve as the narrator moves back and forth through time and across generations. It touches on larger themes and hints at varied motivations but is confined by the medium. I suspect the original book might answer some of the questions I have.

You've got Dr. Avrana Kern of the technologically advanced Old Empire, seeking to terraform planets and seed them with an evolutionary accelerating nano-virus. Her efforts are stymied by the escalating conflicts back home on Earth that manages to corrupt her mission, forcing her to upload her consciousness to an orbiting satellite where she grapples with her own sanity over the ensuing millennia. Meanwhile the nano-virus ends up infecting spiders, the planned primates completely destroyed on arrival. We follow the spider civilization through the millennia as they advance through their own dark ages, renaissance, and technological revolutions.

Meanwhile, thousands of years after the wars that devastated the Earth, a new era of human discovery sets out on cannibalized technology from the Old Empire. The Gilgamesh and its host of explorers, kept ageless in cryostasis, are out looking for new world to inhabit. Victims of their own infighting, living on a ship that is crumbling around them even as new generations are born and die on board, they're running out of time to find this habitable world.

The chapters flip back and forth between these two worlds. Even as centuries slip by the pace is breakneck as we head to the inevitable collision of civilizations. Along the way we explore the nature of godhood and religious fervour, interspecies communication that extends beyond the interpreting of sounds, the fight for male spider rights, world ending game theory, and how people are just the worst.

As the first book of a trilogy, Children of Time stands on its own as a fantastic, award-winning read with a wonderfully satisfying ending that is up there as one of my favourite sci-fi reads of all time.

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.

Holy crap. I got maybe 70 pages through the book and it wasn't gelling for me. So I stopped and started over. This time slowing down to read it instead of simply consuming it. It's worth the effort.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie blew me away in Americanah when she said she only became black when she came to America. Now Ta-Nehisi Coates talks about those who believe they are white. Here is a raw and open letter to his 15 year old son. It is his story as a continuum, trying to understand his changing place in the American Dream.

It is beyond me to articulate the power of the book. It's an entirely readable PhD thesis. It is humbling in it's sharp eyed examination of now, and human in it's rendering of ideas. It is a fantastic read, worthy of re-reading and discussion. Wow.

These are a small collection of perfectly sharp, short stories written by your most clever Tumblr friend. An escalating war on interior design, magical bra fitters, the novel sponsored by Tampax and a sadly, all-too-plausible reality show called Dumpster Diving with the Stars. A light bit of confection that was altogether a hoot to read.

Four women work the night shift at a boxed lunch factory. Slogging through the numbing, repetitive work they return home to contend with ungrateful children, absent husbands, demanding mother-in-laws, mounting debt and daily indignities that chip away at their happiness. When Yayoi finds her husband has completely blown their life savings gambling, drinking and chasing a club girl, she snaps and kills him.

With no where else to turn she enlists her no-nonsense co-worker Masako to help her dispose of the body. It's too much for the two of them and armed with the promise of money Masako also enlists her fellow co-workers Kuniko and Yoshie.

It doesn't take long things to unravel when pieces of the murdered husband are discovered, carelessly disposed of at a nearby park. There's the investigating officers, the loan shark hustling for the next buck and the club owner framed for Yayoi's husband's death that all converge as the story relentlessly ratchets up the tension till it builds to an over the top, graphic, bloody climax.

A guard is found dead, his lips sewn shut, inside Fukuoka prison during WWII. From there we are launched into a crime thriller as the narrator tries to determine who killed the feared and brutal Dozan Sugiyama, known as The Butcher. There are intrigues aplenty and nothing is as simple as it seems on the surface.

But it's also about the power of poetry, music, literature and the works of Korean poet Yun Dong-ju whose poems have been posthumously published after he perished inside a Japanese prison. It glimpses at the power of words and language.

At times the prose is a little clunky and can read like a script to an overwrought Korean soap opera. But amidst that are the bits of beauty you read books for, paragraphs that come out of nowhere that just floor you. Individual results may vary.

I kept thinking of Station Eleven, which I recently reread, and the adage “survival is insufficient.”

Set in the same world as her universally praised, award-winning debut Ancillary Justice, I admit I was a bit leery going in. I just didn't get the first book of the trilogy and thought that it was more sci-fi for sci-fi purists. A tourist like myself inevitably felt lost. I imagine it akin to watching Avengers: Infinity War and wondering what all the fuss is about, when the last codpiece and cape movie you saw was Adam West's Batman.

It's a bit of a whodunnit, meets caper, with a sprinkling of intergalactic tension, spiralling around our protagonist Ingray Aughskold. You don't need to have completed the Imperial Radch trilogy to enjoy this and thankfully it's a more approachable stand-alone story. More Ant-man than Avengers.

Read as Luis as played by Michael Pena in Ant-ManSo it starts with a prison break right? It's supposed to be Pahlad Budrakin, who's totally going to be the lynchpin to a larger plot that's like a swing for the fences plan that's going to get Ingray's hoity-toity foster mother to take notice. Can't fail right? But it turns out e's not Pahlad. Hold up - see Pahlad is a neman who identifies as neither male or female so e's pronouns are different. So Ingray is in over her head. And then, get this, an intergalactic dignitary is killed and then representatives from remote worlds begin to pop up on Hwae. Things are blowing up down there. end scene

And then a wonderfully intermixed exploration of provenance. On whether where you come from matters as much as where you are now and who you claim to be. How malleable that notion is when it comes to identity vs artifacts.

A great accompaniment to Atul Gawande's Being Mortal, referenced in the book itself, Caitlyn Doughty talks candidly about our current obsession to remove ourselves from death and in doing so hand over all responsibility to the massive funeral industry.

She's also a hell of a storyteller and the book is shot through with gallows humour. From her start as a 23 year old in a small crematorium and encountering the task of shaving her first corpse to gritting her teeth through mortuary school, what could be a grim read is shot through with humour and warmth. A surprisingly entertaining and informative read.

It's the semi-autobiographical story that starts with Craig from his childhood, sharing a bed with his brother huddled against the cold of Wisconsin winters. It's a bed that is both a battleground and a life raft.

It mirrors his relationship growing up in the Christian faith, the child of devout parents. Christianity is a refuge against the small-town bullies but becomes something he has to wrestle with in the throes of young love when he meets Raina.

It's such a particular Western story. While nowhere nearly as devout I recognize both the strength and the torment growing up in the faith can have. I know that Jesus painting, I recognize the narrow confines of the church and it's almost desperate proselytization. How the raptures of faith can come up hard against the awareness of first love and how both can be utterly transporting and wildly confusing.

Thompson's brush work is perfect and clear and somehow manages to evoke the nervous awe of first love, the creative impulse, Christian guilt and the raw imagination of youth.

Matt Ruff's initial vision for the book encapsulates it perfectly. He imagined it as TV series pitch ala X-Files where characters explore the unnatural, giving Ruff the opportunity to examine horror, sci-fi and fantasy tropes and how they change when you put a black character at the centre instead.

Atticus Turner and his friends and family find themselves embroiled in a power struggle amongst the Order of the Ancient Dawn. Each chapter follows a distinct character, set within familiar genre standbys like the ancient cult, alien horror, haunted house, evil doll, Jekyll and Hyde and others. The stories are linked and build to an overarching climax but it can be jarring going from chapter to chapter. The paranormal horror also pales in comparison to the realities of being black in Jim Crow America circa 1954.

It's no mean feat being a white author telling the stories of black characters while invoking a racist white writer to inform the themes of the story that explores the black experience against the backdrop of a racially charged America. There is so much that could have gone horribly wrong so it's tellingly significant that my biggest beef is that it didn't offer up enough traditional horror scares.

It's an upside-down fairytale complete with a simple boy from a modest village wishing that “something would happen” and finding himself sent off to work in a dark and dusty castle.

He promptly falls in love with a girl in the nearby village while a Pythonesque war wages in the hills nearby. There's also a giant hole, a mad baron, a family of cons and pickpockets and an errant salami. All with the same bits of wry deWitt dialogue that so charmed me with his earlier Sisters Brothers.

And while many somethings happen, I'm still not sure what, if anything, has transpired.

I find many of the Korean works in translation challenging books and this slim volume is no exception. Essentially the story is anchored around our female protagonist trying to visit her sort-of-boyfriend off on military service. But surrounding it are explorations of ennui, familial obligations, cultural expectation and struggling in an indifferent world.

It feels deep, piercing and sharp but ultimately there are no narrative stakes here. It's like a Bergman movie in print. I just don't feel like I'm smart enough to really get it, but naturally feels like something deep thinking academics would choose to translate.

Jon Krakauer pored through stacks of court transcripts, recordings, police reports and otherwise dry documentation and manages to pull together a compelling, readable story. It's just the facts and the facts are hair pullingly frustrating. The legal system is stacked against sexual assault victims, and in college towns where sports teams can take on an almost mythic import, it's hard not feel a hopeless sense of injustice at how these things play out on an all too frequent basis.

It's almost impossible to review this without spoiling the sense of discovery that is so important for this story to succeed. The book itself is a beautiful artifact that adds to the enjoyment of the reading experience but you need to pay attention. The narrative switches from a 19th century novel and a steampunk future dystopia with asides and tangents aplenty. Finishing the book I was left wrestling with an abundance of “plot holes” for lack of a better word that may have simply been a result of inattention on my part. Or maybe I'm just missing the point entirely.

Despite finishing the book frustrated, I nonetheless find myself thinking about it incessantly and wanting to talk about it which is perhaps greater proof of it's value. And while I'd say that the conceit and subsequent payoff don't work for me, it was an entirely compelling journey to get there.

Sorry for the oblique and somewhat contradictory review but I think there's value in discovering this one for yourself ...then hit me up and tell me what's real.