David Yoon

We're mid collapse. The world is slowly ending, not with a bang but a whimper. There's no viral pandemic or cataclysmic incident that sets things in motion. Instead, global warming, natural disasters and economic collapse have the wealthy retreating to gated “Communities” while others, like the protagonists Calvin and Frida, eke out an existence on the edges. The dystopian backdrop strips away everything so Lepucki can examine the interpersonal relationship between newly married Cal and Frida - the secrets they keep and the stories they tell now they know that Frida is pregnant.

I went in completely blind, knowing that I absolutely loved Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah which, along with Half of a Yellow Sun, recently made the top 20 for BBC Culture's Greatest novels of the 21st century.

It's gut wrenching historical fiction. Outlining the Biafran struggle for independence from Nigeria filtered through the lens of a small affluent Nigerian family. Adichie manages to balance the horrors of war with smaller family dramas without allowing either to become overwrought and melodramatic. Through the course of the book she will somehow manage to touch on colonialism, propaganda, child soldiers, aid efforts, Western media coverage, tribal superstition, famine and grief. It's appears effortless and natural.

What is incredible is the story of Nigeria and how a book can bring that place to life. Well duh, but I've never really considered it before, reading mostly Western works. It's got me thinking of tackling more international writers.

Was completely ready to put this book down after the first chapter. James Lee is the same age as I am, in a bi-racial marriage with a treasured 16 year old daughter Lydia who is struggling to find her place among her brother and sister - it's all very familiar. But then the book opens with “Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet.”

It's structured like a mystery as we try and unravel the events that led to her death but really it's an examination of parents foisting their dreams on their kids, the pressures of children trying to live up to those expectations or thwart them entirely. Of being other, an outsider and the trials of trying to fit in or the need to stand out. It nails it on so many levels and there is so much that is familiar without veering into cliche.

There are a couple minor missteps but it's one of those books I'll be thinking about for a long time. If I'm still thinking about it in a month it'll probably get boosted to a 5.

How could I not read a book where my namesake provides the frankly wonderful illustrations that add to the story. And man, I think I get the allure of YA. Done well, the ability of an author to capture that moment of first love is thrilling. Eleanor and Park did it so well and Nicola Yoon manages it with assured deftness here. And biracial protagonist FTW! For me there's a larger story of what it is to be a parent and the wholehearted love and abject fear that attends that responsibility. (And unlike Eleanor & Park it has the most satisfying of endings)

It's easy to dismiss Barbara Ehrenreich as being merely a tourist. Sort of a ghetto Elizabeth Gilbert who enjoys the type of lifestyle where she can just “drop out” for a couple months for the sake of the written word. She comes from the decidedly white collar world where “sweat is a metaphor for hard work, but seldom its consequence.” Nonetheless I've held variations of the jobs she explores, in my late teens and early 20s but always came home to the comforts of my middle class upbringing. She's 50 and slogging through the work week to sleep in some barely hospitable living conditions. Let's cut her some slack.

“Take away the career and the higher education, and maybe what you're left with is this original Barb, the one who might have ended up working at Wal-Mart for real if her father hadn't managed to climb out of the mines. So it's interesting, and more than a little disturbing, to see how Barb turned out – that she's meaner and slyer than I am, more cherishing of grudges, and not quite as smart as I'd hoped.”

Written by the London Ontario born, Korean-French-Canadian, Bryan Lee O'Malley of Scott Pilgrim fame, it focuses on a chef and reality bending magic mushrooms in a color soaked Canadian manga. It's my wheelhouse.

Something is out there. Something that on seeing drives you into a screaming, murderous, hysteric breakdown. Whatever it is out there it bears no obvious malice. They don't attack and simply kill by being observed.

Malorie and her two kids survive by holing up indoors with the windows covered and doors bolted. They only venture outside with blindfolds. Searching for the promise of a better life and other survivors they must navigate the outside world and travel the river completely blind.

Ironically it's the scenes where Malorie is completely in the dark that are so compelling. Horrifying and descriptive based solely on smell and sound there are several scenes that are incredibly vivid. Those scenes alone would push it to a 4.5 but sadly when the blindfolds are removed and Malorie is inside the narrative pales to dull greys. The characters aren't clearly defined and the story lags. Still a fun, quick read.

Theodore Finch wonders, at the open of the book, “is today a good day to die?” Instead he meets and “saves” Violet Markey from the ledge of the school bell tower. What is with YA meet-cutes that have to include someone near death?

The whole book feels wholly manipulative with an IMPORTANT message for all teens. And certainly I can't argue the sentiment about raising awareness around suicide. I especially like that Jennifer Niven includes resources for teens that may be wrestling with issues of depression and suicide as an appendix to the book. But otherwise I'm left wondering why are all the parents here are criminally hamstrung, blind and hapless while the teens are just all the feels.

I am the aged curmudgeon wondering why everything has to be so overwrought and melodramatic. On a completely unrelated note, I currently live with 3 teenagers.

This should be a far more harrowing read. Yolandi is supplanted from her Toronto home to icy Winnipeg after a suicide attempt by her sister, following in the footsteps of their own father who took his own life by stepping in front of a train. Yo is separated from her children including a teenaged daughter relishing her unsupervised freedom and her new Swedish boyfriend - who later calls in to report an infestation of carpenter ants. She's in the midst of a divorce, questions her less than engaged string of assignations, her stalled career and money woes. Her aunt takes a turn and is soon hospitalized. Hardly sounds like light fare. Even more depressing is the fact that Mirriam Toews lost her own father and only sister to suicide.

But it's a lovely read and unabashedly Canadian - dropping two-fours, double-doubles, Players Extra Light, Northrope Frye, Margaret Laurence, Neil Young and Nellie McClung. It doesn't uplift through a notion of “I thought I had it bad” comparisons but rather through the weary optimism we Canadians are known for. The idea of being “as Canadian as possible, under the circumstances.”

IN 2011 online magazine Grantland staked the $10K entrance free for Colson Whitehead to play the WSOP, competing against 6,865 other entrants vying for millions and poker glory. It was a far cry from his usual $5 game where “catching up with friends took precedence over pulverizing your opponents.” With six weeks to get in poker shape for the big game, this is his story.

Author Whitehead is a recipient of the MacArthur, the Guggenheim and the Whiting. He's a lecturer at Princeton, a graduate of Harvard (where he meets and road trips with Darren Aronosfsky and hangs with the founder of The Source magazine) and a successful novelist so his everyman schlub hitting the felt reads a bit forced. Still, his observations bring back memories of playing Vegas tournaments. Still, it's a long form magazine article, maybe stretched a bit too far to make it a book.

Widowed bookseller on a tiny island off the coast of Massachusetts. I want to call him curmudgeonly and old but when we're first introduced he's younger than I am. Depressed, alone, bitter and often drunk. A bit of a book snob, one we're all familiar with, if not outright identical to. Fikry is “repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and — I imagine this goes without saying — vampires.” He hates e-readers as well.

It's a book for bibliophiles. A light bit of confection. Zevin glides you through the story serving up brief glimpses but never lingering on details, much like the shelf talkers that precede every chapter. A bookseller, a baby, and a story about second chances. I should be more critical, but it was just what I needed.

In the acknowledgements Adam Rogers admits that;
“The word “actually” is why people don't have drinks with me anymore. ...Every time I was in a bar ...someone would start talking about the drink in his or her hand ...and I would start a sentence with “Actually-“ And that was it. I'd disgorge a head full of booze data and turned into the snottiest of snotty bar know-it-alls.”

It is this love for the subject that shines through. As an editor for Wired, the book grew from a feature story called “The Angels' Share” which won an award for science journalism in 2011. Here Adam examines more than just the science of yeast and dives into barrel aging, fermentation, aging, smell, taste and hangovers. Actually, “23 percent of people do not get hangovers (the scientific term for them is “jerks”) He's a likeable guide through the world of booze and takes us down some interesting nooks and crannies.

Ostensibly it's the story of an 18 year old maid who, at point blank range, fired 2 shots and killed her employer Bert Massey - he of the Masseys (think Massey-Ferguson and Massey Hall) A guilty verdict brings with it a death sentence and for a few short weeks it held the city of Toronto's rapt attention.

But that's just the thread that moves the story forward. It's also the story of Toronto at the turn of the century. We see rival newspapers vying for readers with partisan politics and brash editorial personalities. It's the story of Canada a mere generation after Confederation, looking to shrug off the yoke of British colonialism. It is the start of WWI and Canadian soldier showing their nation's resolve at Pachendale, Vimy and Ypres. With the men off to war women are entering the workforce and we see the beginnings of social reform and the seeds of the suffragette movement. Narrative historical non-fiction generally falls outside my wheelhouse but this proved an engrossing read and a vibrant snapshot of Toronto for a few weeks in the winter of 1915.

In the end it's a secret agent racing against the clock to avert jihadist armageddon. It's great in that sense with a sort of summer blockbuster movie logic. It could have been really great if stripped down to a more workmanlike prose but stumbles under author Hayes. It's not only his penchant for nicknames like Rider of the Blue, Whispering Death, Saracen and Pilgrim, but countless bits of prose that remind me of a 12 year old writing an international thriller. It reads like the love child of Pee Wee Herman and Dan Brown.

“I stared at them, asking myself why they would have thought of me. But if I was honest, I knew the answer. I was a perfect candidate for the secret world. I was smart, I had always been a loner and I was damaged deep in my soul.”

The book is filled with these little bits that make me cringe and wish he'd just stick with telling the story.

“He catches sight of me – standing silently against the wall, just watching, like I seem to have spent half my life doing. He ignores the people demanding his attention and makes his way over. We don't shake hands – I don't know why, it's just never been our way. I'm not even sure if we're friends – I've always been pretty much on the outside of any side you can find, so I'm probably not the one to judge. We respect each other, though, if that helps.”

Ugh.

I shouldn't like this. Historical fiction set in World War 2 with the obliquely titled “All the Light We Cannot See” featuring a blind French girl?! With George Clooney's Monuments Men, Angelina Jolie's Unbroken and Brad Pitt's Fury it's only a matter of time before Sandra Bullock snatches this up for her own bit of WWII movie relevance.

Marie-Laure LeBlanc is the blind daughter of master locksmith for the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Werner Pfennig and his sister are orphans in the coal mining town of Zollverein. He's destined for the mines as soon as he turns 15 until his skill at repairing radios gets him a ticket out via a Hitler Youth academy.

Reviewers have found his language overly decorated - “no noun sits upon the page without the decoration of at least one adjective, and sometimes, alas with two or three“ while others complain about the zig zagging timeline that shuttles back and forth over the years and flips between narrators. Screw them. This is one of those books you tell people to just read. It was one of those books I finished and didn't know what to read next, assured that anything else would just be words on a page. Individual results may vary.

It's an exciting first foray into the world of Norwegian detective Harry Hole. Unfortunately we're 10 books in already. Nonetheless it hardly suffers for my late arrival. I suspect the first half would have been even more compelling had I read the previous 9, but it was still a fantastically gruesome thrill ride.

Police officers are being killed at the scenes of crimes they failed to solve. The murders are graphic and continue unabated. The police have no leads and the media frenzy is only growing with each death. We're are sent down dark alleys, introduced to a host of possible suspects, all of whom are most certainly guilty of crimes, of murder.

Nesbo does a great job working within the limitations of the written word. Words hide as much as they reveal and Nesbo is a sure hand at twisting them to create incredible tension on the page. He sets down so many threads but keeps a tight rein on all of them.

Translator Don Bartlett should be feted as well for maintaining the tone throughout and the reading is enjoyable throughout.

“Even when they switched off the floodlights the light seemed to hang in the air for a while. But then, gradually, it became quieter. And darker. And even quieter. Until the silence filled all the hollows in the terrain, and the darkness crept out from the forest.”

The story reads like a grim, modern-day fairy tale.

It's partly narrated by a mute death row inmate who has retreated into the world of books and imagines golden horses running deep under the earth, miniature men wielding tiny hammers and clay bodied flibber-gibbets. It's his way out past the horrors of his previous deeds that even in the prison world of rape and murder remain unspoken.

The story follows the case of a death penalty investigator (author Rene Denfeld herself is a death row investigator) working to free a condemned man who simply wants to die. It could be irredeemably dark or sentimentally maudlin but manages to skirt the fine line for most of the narrative.

It's a short little book written beautifully, despite its at times brutal content, with a style I didn't expect from a prison drama.

From the expansive, Lovecraftian eco-horror of the first book exploring Area X, we move to the claustrophobic and paranoid office politics of book two in the Southern Reach trilogy. Jeff VanderMeer's Authority sees John Rodriguez brought into the secret government agency to make some sense of what's going on. He insists on being called Control, reports into The Voice and is manipulated by his mother. It's like we're reading for a TV serial here.

It's about getting the pieces in place for the final act. There's lots to examine and pull apart, like the notion of terroir they keep coming back to, but it's a little forced for my liking. Despite a few surprises it was a bit plodding. I'm still in for the final book however and am curious how VanderMeer pulls it all together.

(Who just up and decides to call themselves Control? Especially an office suit like Rodriguez. It was probably hard enough for Sting or Bono to convince their mates, but coming from a momma's boy like Rodriquez seems a bit of an extraneous stretch)

I'm a sucker for Lamott's philosophical musings gently tinged by her Christian faith. She's not shy about it, but is gracious in her acceptance of whatever you the reader might subscribe to. Here she's musing on loss. She offers up no easy answers, no grand epiphanies, just a hand on the shoulder and a nod of recognition. Sometimes you just need a silent witness, not empty platitudes about God's plan. She quotes self-proclaimed Hind-Jew Ram Dass who said ultimately we're all just walking each other home. I love that. It feels like the guiding tenet of the book - just a quiet partner to walk you home. Another quick read but one worth lingering over.

Amanda Lindhout chose to have a co-writer for the book and found a kindred spirit in Sara Corbett who wasn't just interested in telling the harrowing story of her 15 months of captivity in Somalia. Instead we meet a young Amanda escaping her grim northern Alberta upbringing in the pages of National Geographic. A teenaged Amanda in South America finally visiting those places she'd only read about. A young 20-something globe-trotting Amanda chasing the next big story. Someone who spent time in Iraq and Afghanistan and finds herself in Mogadishu Somalia covering the stories that traditional news outlets weren't. Captured on the road she and her one time boyfriend and photographer are held for 1.5 million each. Amanda endures 15 months of torture, rape, beatings, starvation and more yet maintains her sanity and optimism throughout.

This could have been misery porn, an endless litany of things endured but Amanda infuses it with hope. It's a huge gut punch of a book made even more relevant knowing that one of the kidnappers has been arrested and is facing trial. Now years after her ordeal, Amanda is forced to relive her time in captivity reviewing the thousands of pages of debriefing documents recorded at the time of her release. Events she had buried and forgotten, even things she doesn't mention in the book itself. She exhibits such incredible strength in the pages of the book and continues to prove her fortitude even now.

“I'm pretty much fucked.”

That's the opening sentiment of astronaut Mark Watney when he finds himself left for dead and abandoned on Mars. From the opening pages it's Gravity meets Castaway as this NASA botanist and mechanical engineer tries to stay alive and get home.

The Martian is the debut novel by software engineer Andy Weir which was originally self-published and made available for free on his website. A Kindle version did phenomenally well resulting in a six figure deal with Random House and subsequent option for film. Not too shabby.

Herein is where I poo-poo the book in an envious pique.

The Martian gets way too geeky for me talking about atmospheric regulators, oxygenators, radioisotope thermoelectric generators, martian potatoes and muses constantly about things like “5 molecules of Hydrazine becomes 5 molecules of harmless N2 and 10 molecules of lovely H2.” Watney thinks through stuff like this a lot. Thankfully he's also a likeable and funny narrator that has to endure the terror of eking out an existence on Mars with only disco and bad 70's television to distract him. (And you're wrong, Mr. Furley was not better than the Ropers)

I could have used less science and more fiction but nonetheless plowed through this over a weekend.

Being clever only gets you so far and if that's all that there was to this particular volume of 64 short stories it would grate pretty fast. But Novak's smarter than that. I'm not kidding, Novak is a Harvard grad with a degree in English and Spanish literature.

There are throwaway bits, SNL type sketches like the Market Was Down “Why was the market down? No reason. Well, stupid stuff. Actually to be honest, maybe it was Spain at the beginning, but it was really only worried about Spain because it woke up looking for something to worry about.” Or Great Writers Steal where “Neither of them ever got anything published, In fact, those who read their writing went so far as to say they they misunderstood literature on an unusually fundamental level. But after a few years, they got to be pretty good thieves.” But even those prove Novak's got a good ear for language and he manages to flex his writerly muscle with his longer pieces. He deserves the praise he's been getting for this collection.

I came to the party ill prepared. I thought I was signing up for a breezy pop-science read along the lines of the Psychopath Test. Instead it's a more thoughtful collection of personal essays. Maybe if I slowed down and tried to unravel the narrative I'd enjoy it more but instead I kept getting irritated by the oppressive, navel gazing, grad school, verbal gymnastics.

The first book of the Southern Cross trilogy sees our crew enter Area X, a heavily quarantined area of unknown threat. Tasked to explore this mysterious zone and discover what happened to the previous 11 expeditions it naturally goes sideways fast.

It's grim and violent but told in an almost affectless, distant manner which renders it all the more frightening. It's like the first season of Lost where it's all vague threat and delicious possibility. Released in early 2014, the remaining two books are following shortly with the final slated for September. I'm curious if VanderMeer can ride this pony home without going all Matrix Revolutions.

It took me awhile to find my footing with the story - the idea of an opera that tells of the secret history of Lilliet Berne, the operatic toast of Paris seems interesting enough. But then the idea that only 4 people in the world could possibly know of her past - “one is dead, one loves her, one wants to own her. And one, she hopes, never thinks of her at all” - is all a bit too. I'm worried Chee is going to read like a gay Dickens.

But then it's circus performers, prostitutes, changing identities, reversals of fortune, grand escapes and more told with the sweep and majesty of an opera. It's a breathless adventure but Lilliet is no damsel in distress. She hurtles headlong into the story meeting folks like George Sand, Ivan Turgenev and Verdi during the time of the French Revolution along the way to becoming a massive star. Chee keeps an even hand on the wheel and prevents the entire thing from flying off the rails while indulging in some truly operatic moments.