David Yoon
Jude Rothesay comes in hard and fast with a unique voice I don't often encounter in my reading. It's also not what I was expecting. I'd grabbed it for my 15 year old daughter who was looking for a new read. The Governor-General's Award and spot on the Canada Reads shortlist was convincing enough. After she had finished it I picked it up to read about masturbating, blowjobs, huffing hairspray, stealing pharmaceuticals, abortions, stripper moms and a gay highschool kid who escapes into his own Hollywood fantasy world as a way to survive against the daily bullying and taunts.
It's not an easy read, Jude's not necessarily a likeable character but in the end it provokes discussion. That seems a cop out but it's my liberal knee jerk bias wresting with my conservative parental prejudices. That uncomfortable intersection is probably worth exploring. The fact that it was inspired by a true story turns complaints of a non-likeable character on it's head and forces you to examine your own prejudices.
FYI the daughter hasn't been scandalized and it prompted a discussion of a male middle-school classmate of hers who now identifies as a girl and what this student's experiences at school was like. Isn't that what books like this are supposed to do?
Dagr is a former economics professor and Kinza is a street thug who have captured Saddam Hussein's head torturer who teases a hidden bunker in Mosul filled with riches. Set during the American occupation of Iraq, the promise of riches sets this trio on a path that leads them to blood-soaked mayhem, ancient cults, mythical forces and an American soldier that's either insanely brilliant or patently idiotic.
This is a country sitting on millennia of history that has shaped it well before American soldiers left their bootprints in the sand. It is a chaotic, monstrous, absurd, tragic and frankly hilarious pulpy yarn. It left me breathless in its viciousness and surprised me constantly with each new development.
When four brothers return from sneaking off to fish the off limits Omi-Ala river they encounter the village madman Abulu. Rumored to have the power of prophecy he points to the eldest boy Ikenna and tells him he will die at the hands of a fisherman. Unable to shake the words of the madman he spirals into paranoia, certain that the fisherman in question refers to one of his brothers. It's a tiny spark that sets his family ablaze and it's consequences span the length of the book. It's unrelenting, unsparing, dark and an incredibly dense story for the 20-something author.
An architect, painter actor and lawyer move to New York to carve out incredibly successful lives. As the years pass the nature if their friendship evolves and changes from the early struggles post graduation as 20 somethings in New York as waiters, killing hours behind a desk or barely scraping by in a borrowed loft. And here, Yanagihara, an Asian American woman, nails the familiar New York story of countless upper class, white, hipster male writers.
The men go on to enjoy lofty critical success in their lives, each at the top of their game. But then she veers from this familiar trajectory and focuses on the enigmatic Jude. We are slowly opened to his wrenching past and how it informs his present. The hyenas of his painful history always circling and closing in. This is a brick of a book and filled with triggering, hard to read episodes.
It's about the hidden pain each of us nurture and the insufficiencies of language, of kindness, or faith to bridge that gap and the beauty to be found in those that try. This thing is a gut punch.
This is a Quentin Tarantino movie put to print. Kicking off during the American Civil War the Winter family is a brutal band of killers, sadists, hired guns and ex-soldiers that sow terror through the United States in the late 1800's led by Augustus Winter.
From their exploits during the civil war, to the bloody politicking in Chicago down to Phoenix scalping Indians and up to California it's a blood-splattered, debauched and over the top escapades involving an ever changing cast of well-formed, uniquely eccentric characters.
A tiny book that is a retooling of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TEDx talk (which also gets dropped in Beyonce's Flawless) was recently made available to every 16 year old in Sweden. And while you can see the entire presentation online this physical artifact carries with it its own weight when pressed into the hands of your 16 year old daughter.
The crew of the Wayfarer on a year long journey out to the edge of Galactic Commons space to punch a wormhole next to a tentative new addition to the GC. Its a interplanetary road trip with a diverse, multi-species crew where nothing much happens as the stars slide past, so instead we focus on the emotional interactions between the crew.
It reads like episodes of Star Trek where space is merely the colourful backdrop to larger metaphorical examinations of the human condition exploring ideas of race, sexuality, being and community. All of this is filtered through a YA lens where the emotional beats are dialed up to 11.
Chambers has a firm grasp of each of the characters unique voices and plots their interactions well. Everyone onboard the Wayfarer is heart on their sleeve earnest, and gosh, darned nice. Scrubbed clean of any sort of grit and lacking any real gravitas they are a big, happy family bouncing around their patchwork ship. And it's lovely really. I just found that I had nothing invested in the story, nothing in the lead-up informs the eventual climax and I'm left understanding the crew is a tight knit family. Warm fuzzies all around.
For the first half of the book I worried about what I had gotten myself into here. It just seemed disjointed and bleak, jumping from Anna's therapy sessions to her daytime trysts then back to her language classes.
But I started to get the hang of it, a larger image began to resolve itself as I got further into the book. I began to see a spiral pattern where rules of grammar offer up questions of “is the present ever perfect?” - the wordplay suited for the author who comes from a poetic background. Anna's first affair with a pyrologist brings with it questions of a consuming flame. It sounds unbearable but I swear she's far better at it than I am managing here.
The third act hits hard, leaves you a little breathless and ultimately wanting to talk it out with someone, pushing this 3 into a 4 for me.
Maybe I did myself a disservice by watching it first, but this is one of those rare occurrences where I liked the movie better. Probably doesn't hurt that author Stephen Chbosky was the director and writer. Ahh high school - sometimes the friends you make can save your life.
Also... interesting in that it's the first YA book I've read that has dealt with the consumption of hallucinogenics.
In talking about it you realize that Moreno-Garcia takes common themes and makes them better.
To say Meche is stubborn is just another throw-away adjective used describe a pantheon of YA protagonists but is so much of what makes up Meche. She is unlikeable in the way so many teenagers are - filled with contradictions and big emotions. The duo of Meche and Sebastian, two friends so comfortable in their own skins with each other yet attracted to absolutely the wrong people, all but telegraphs the subsequent plot but right away we're challenged when we jump 20 years to the present and a grownup Meche who hasn't been with, much less even talked to Sebastian for the past 2 decades. Now it becomes the mystery of what happened. It takes what could have been a standard YA magical fantasy into something more considered and moving. Magic has a price.
These are broken people making heroically bad decisions. Rachel, who moves much of the story forward, is perpetually drunk and achingly lonely. She drunk dials her ex, has frequent blackouts and is constantly testing the patience of her altogether too nice roommate who later comes home to the smell of urine soaked clothes and puke on the stairs. She's unlikeable, unsympathetic and an unreliable narrator. But it's so good.
The Girl on the Train is a straight ahead, page-turning, popcorn whodunnit of the beach reading sort. Domestic noir in the vein of Gone Girl and Before I Go To Sleep it may not be high literature but it's ripe for discussion and a compulsive read. Told from the perspective of three women - everyone here is damaged goods, everyone here could be responsible for the disappearance of Megan. The three stories wind down some dark avenues but converge nicely in an over-the-top finale.
Justine Sacco's ill advised tweet of “Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding I'm white!” was sent out to a mere 170 followers. Somehow, in the 11 hour span of her flight, she landed to find she had become a worldwide phenomenon with people demanding she be killed, raped, arrested or, at the very least, fired.
This overzealous outrage has gotten out of hand. It's one thing when a vocal online community can bring corporate entities down a notch. It's only thing entirely when it ruins the lives of otherwise unremarkable folks. Sure it's a single tweet, but no snowflake ever feels like it caused the avalanche.
It's certainly stirring up discussion online. Which is a big part of the problem I have with the book. Between the interviews, think pieces, criticism, podcasts and reviews it felt like I'd already read most of the book already. It's like finally getting to watch the movie and all the best parts were already in the trailers.
From its wild-eyed open with a young Eddie driving a stolen Subaru, blood soaked towels where his hands should be, to Hannaham's choice to have crack cocaine narrate much of the book, this book subverts expectation. We're in the midst of a “how-dunnit” as we go back years to meet Eddie's mother turning tricks and looking for her next hit and then years earlier to her in college on a path to build a life with the man who will become her husband.
You can imbue the story with a host of themes — as allegory or expose but it's still at its heart a fantastically compelling read.
Half dead, half alive Carlos Delacruz works for the New York chapter of the Council of the Dead. It's the Men in Black for spirits, ghosts and demons. When he stumbles on a plot to break the barriers between the living and the dead fuelled by other “halfies” like him straddling the line between the living and the dead, he will need all the resources at his disposal including a house spirit, ghost partners, voodoo doctor, surgeon and a kid working the cash at a corner store. New York noir with a spiritual bent and lots of diversity. There's enough hints to a larger, complex world that the book has already been optioned for a possible TV series.
A quiet little book set in Japan in the lead-up to World War 2. Taki remembers her time as a maid for the Hirai family, the wife Tokiko not much older than herself at the time. It's remembrance of a time in Tokyo - the optimism of the 2600th Anniversary and the possibility of hosting the Olympics and the creeping spectre of war played out by this small, affluent family living in a red roofed house.
It is “Mono no aware” or “the pathos of things” and the ephemeral nature of beauty as shown in an unopened letter or a tin toy.
Tokiko's husband brings in a new colleague to help with designs at the toy factory and it's clear that Itakura is smitten with Tokiko. Taki knows that a good maid is responsible for the happiness of her employer's marriage. She remembers a story told by her first master about a maid burning a document “by accident”, taking action in a way that the master never could, and could never ask for, and how that is what makes a truly great maid. Taki has her own decisions to make for the good of the household, for the sake of the marriage and reflected back from a distance of decades, what did her choice ultimately accomplish.
So I had the temerity to chide my niece on her kitty fantasy series Warriors only to find myself picking this sci-fi book focused on an ant uprising bent on destroying the humans and an evolved house cat in the animal army looking for her lost love, the neighbour's dog. Seriously.
So naturally when you write adult fiction about gun-toting animals I assume there's some deep moral centre to the whole endeavour. There's an easy joke about a pig naming himself Bonaparte (since Napoleon was taken multiple times already) There's also a surreal moment when a real-estate cat coughs up a hairball into her clipboard and tries to hide it.
So I'm not sure if I'm reading an anthromorphized moral story about the power of love, notions of faith and the idea that some are more equal than others or a post-apocalyptic, furry fantasy.
When the book opens we're introduced to “The Sellout” getting incredibly high, awaiting trial at the Supreme Court for the crime of owning a slave and trying to re-segregate his tiny town of Dickens. And in the first chapter we're given a clear view about what to expect. Beatty is an author and a poet with a background in slam poetry and it shows in the prose. It's breakneck beats and syncopated syntax and hella fun.
Beatty doesn't skewer stereotypes but rather plays with all their permutations. When he gets on a roll his riffs are razor sharp. As with comedy, individual results may vary but he's got a bigger idea at play here than just making you laugh. So good.
It's got a straightforward, matter of fact clip to it. The words have the persistent cadence of a light jog. It's a stream of consciousness diary of Murakami wherein I find out this amazing novelist is also an avid runner. We're talking marathon, ultramarathon, triathalon runner now into his 50's.
It didn't shed any new light on his books. It doesn't have the wind in your hair, running narrative that Once a Runner employs to great effect. It's just a literary sort of emptying of pockets accompanied by a wry “So there you go.”
A small cohort of Berkeley students descend on Braggsville to punk a Civil War re-enactment with a “performative intervention” as they stage a lynching. It goes horribly awry forcing a new perspective on the motives and actions of everyone involved.
Hand-wringing millennials versed in academic theory whipped into liberal indignation go suddenly quiet when things leave the abstract and get suddenly real. The latent racism (you're soaking in it) that surrounds us making it difficult to see. Our misguided motivations and how nothing is ever clearly black or white.
It was a book that deserved more attention than my post-Christmas, holiday jag could devote and I found myself dragging through some chapters - but it's still sticking with me despite that.
Station Eleven flips effortlessly between pre and post viral plague that wipes out 99.99% of the world's population. Instead of the grim post apocalyptic world of The Road or the Walking Dead there is hope here. Mandel focusing on a roaming theatre troop and travelling symphony whose motto is “survival is insufficient”.
From the moment the story opens with Arthur Leander as Lear dying onstage, fake snow inexplicably drifting down caught in the blue spotlight, the story gives us scene after beautiful scene rife with symbols that echo across the story's timeline, each character winding in an ever tightening spiral. There's a lot of meat on these bones and I can see book clubs digging up an abundance of themes to discuss.
Deep within the Saffron Mountains is a cave where on a dark southerly wall can be found a 3,000 year old cuneiform inscription carved into the rock by the first king of Persia. It will inform deaf-mute Aga Akbar's own secret language that he will use to imprint his thoughts. His son Ishmael, exiled to Holland, will struggle to decipher the notebook and with the help of a third person omniscient narrator tell the story of Aga Akbar and the history of Iran. Meanwhile I'm reading the English translation of an Iranian author's Dutch work. And it's just a joy to read. It's a beautifully rendered, semi-autobiographical story that just carried me through to its satisfying end.
Wanted some more of Sean Murphy's work after his impressive run on Batman: White Knight. I love his scratchy kinetic style and this earlier work did not disappoint.
But it's such a comic. Snyder leans into the tropes. The first half is a rag-tag group of experts (naturally) in their respective fields taken miles underwater to a secret sea base (of course) where they've captured (I'm sure that'll last) a menacing mer-man (Hadley from The Cabin in the Woods would be so pleased!) and you know all this will go absolutely pear shaped. I could have leaned into that, there's meat on those bones. It's essentially Aliens underwater and I would have happily enjoyed a man vs merman showdown.
But then the second half of the book comes on 200 years into the future and we've got another protagonist with a sonic dolphin (that at one point will out-surf an avalanche) and a whole wack ton of hand-waving mythology that's supposed to tie into the first part but frankly doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense. It's like Matrix Reloaded and Prometheus where there's a ton of pot fuelled exposition that at first blush sounds great but in the light of day just falls apart. I mean individual story beats are great but taken as a whole it just didn't work for me. Convince me I'm wrong.
I'm reminded of The Enchanted by Rene Denfeld. A gripping story told with all the trappings of a fairy tale. It's a hero's journey with shades of myth. Crossing the river, descending underground. While it's clear Makina is coming to the US from Mexico it's never made explicit. She instead walks to the place where the hills meet, takes a bus to the place where the wind cuts like a knife - she's indistinctly placed and that lack of naming carries with it a dreamlike state.
The translation is beautifully done and translator Lisa Dillman offers a look at her process involving frequent collaboration with the author himself and the difficulty in nailing down certain pieces of slang used throughout. A slight 100 or so pages, I actually wished it was longer so that I could linger for a while longer in this world.
The narrator floats through the book revealing only the barest of details about herself - it is the observations of the people that float into her sphere and the conversations she elicits from them that make up the bulk of the book. These conversations are observed at a remove, noted with little comment, eliciting little emotion from the narrator. it's a quiet, introspective read and Cusk does such a wonderful job doing that thing we all do - it's literary people watching.
Every so often I have to pick up one of these management books lying around the office and give it a read. This at least wasn't entirely painful and follows the “I'm going to tell you a story” while scattering little business bon mots throughout.