David Yoon
This was fantastic, helped in no small part by the fact it is a beautifully put together physical object representing a complete, self-contained manga. No more going to the bookstore to find volume 1 and 2 while 3 and 5 don't exist anywhere.
We are introduced to the seaside town of Kurouzu Cho where high-schooler Kirie begins to discover the town is contaminated with spirals. Hardly the stuff of horror. Oh look! Shuichi's father is carefully examining a snail - could be trouble!
But this thing escalates fast. Shuichi's father's demise is only the beginning. Snail people, human jack in the boxes, duelling hair, mosquitos and more. Each episodic chapter reveals a fresh new horror building to a consuming climax that, while expansive in scope, is less effective than the personal stories that got us here. Small quibble for what is an otherwise transporting horror manga rendered in a straightforward style that works when contrasted with some of the body horror on display here. A great introduction to manga that has me wanting more.
Maybe it doesn't have the same social clout as Sense and Sensibility or even Jane Eyre (which DuMaurier is clearly inspired by) but Rebecca still holds high esteem for many a bookish nerd. “Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderly again...” is as recognized as “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” and “Call me Ishmael.” And that first chapter is as delicious a gothic introduction as one could possibly want.
Our protagonist is a child prone to wild day-dreaming discursions. Her flights of fanciful imaginings meander for pages at a time, more often than not imagining herself dull and plain, living in the long shadow of the beautiful and charming Rebecca. It is at once swooning then sinister.
At first I was sure this was a novel about the impermeability of memory. How we find the de Winters aging in a dull and listless present day which prompts our protagonist into the past to find some remembered colours, that she is willfully remembering herself the romanticizing child. Perhaps there is elements of that given how the story takes a third act turn that renders everyone in a dark, unflattering light.
Things do take a turn and it's delicious to see this play out amongst the characters in the story, but only at a bookish remove. Otherwise it's just a story of ridiculous rich people problems.
20 year old Kenji is a nightlife guide for foreign sex tourists in Tokyo. He encounters Frank, an American looking for a good time in the red light district of Kabuki-cho on the last remaining days of 1996. Something is off about Frank and Kenji is somehow convinced this tourist is the man responsible for a spate of grisly murders in the area.
Far too much time is spent explaining the commercial sex-trade in Kabuki-cho. Meanwhile when Kenji takes a break from obsessing over how he's convinced Frank is clearly a murderer, he otherwise despairs over the culture he was raised in and the emptiness of Japanese life. It's a lot of tense set-up for an otherwise conventional, if not gory resolution. The back third of the book could have made for an interesting short story but all told it felt disjointed, meandering and uneven.
Cecilia is the perfect housewife who finds a sealed envelope in the dusty attic addressed to her with her husband's handwriting “To be opened only in the event of my death”
I loved Moriarity's latest book, Big Little Lies which had the right mix of fun, intrigue and murder. This is the precursor with less fun but much of the same elements including the outwardly perfect and effusive mother, the social anxious single mom with child and a bright Australian suburban neighbourhood of Tupperware parties and school Easter egg hunts that hides a terrible secret.
Everything converges to single climactic point and the stage is abruptly swept clear. Perhaps a little too abruptly, it's like Moriarity wants to sweep the pieces off the board and get it set up for the next game.
I've always been jealous of America's ability to mythologize their history. Daniel Boone, Davy Crocket, Pocahontas, Laura Ingalls Wilder all elicit familiar nods. Had the Americans won the battle of 1812 I'm sure we'd still be hearing about it now. Canadian history by contrast seems bloodless and steeped in the Protestant ethic.
So when The Orenda is up for, and wins, Canada Reads 2014 as a “Novel to Change Our Nation” it's got a lot of ground to cover.
The book is narrated in turn by Christophe, a francophone Jesuit missionary bringing the word of God to the New World; Snow Falls, a young Haudenosaunee (adopted) by Bird, a Wendat warrior who killed her family in retaliation for the death of his family at their tribe's hand. Taking place in central Ontario during the 17th century the book is exciting and propulsive. There is the ever looming threat of a horrible death by torture. The Haudenasaunee are eager to “caress” the bodies of their victims for days at a time. Burning, dismemberment, and pain followed by tender ministrations so that the physical trials can continue. This is no Heritage Moment with placid natives pointing to their village intoning “Kanata”.
While I'm sure Boyden adheres closely to historical fact, I frankly don't care. I'm just happy to have an unabashedly Canadian, muscular epic, filled with magic and suspense that was a tremendous read.
It's the case where the e-reader suffers in comparison to the physical book. It's no doubt a delight to have these crudely rendered digital line drawings reproduced on paper but on the e-reader it felt like I was just rooting through her blog archives. In fact many of the stories are pulled straight from her blog.
Like any blog it's hits and misses. There are entries that made me laugh out loud and others that felt self-indulgent or in need of a good editor. I'm still surprised at the level of expression Allie Brosh manages with these crudely rendered stick figures. She nails dogs, wild eyed, over stimulated crazy children and slack-jawed adults armed only with Microsoft Paint or similar program. Like many a graphic novel, it's worth it for the art.
A story of a marriage told in fragments like memories recalled looking back over the span of years. As one critic puts it: “They are like your cleverest friend's Facebook updates”. Reading it, I just couldn't hold on to the centre of it and it sort of flew apart in my hands.
Time to travel the world and get outside my traditional Western reads. It's off to New Zealand and the godfather of Kiwi crime writing. Paul Thomas' Tito Ihaka is a hulking Maori detective with a penchant for making his own rules.
We've got two cold cases. One involving the death of teenaged girl at a swanky upper crust party, the other is no less than the death of Tito's own father that may not have been the premature heart attack it's been written off as. Throw in another side plot involving a former best friend and disgraced cop and you've got a ripping good yarn.
I'll take Nesbo's Harry Hole over Ihaka any day but translated to the screen, Tito would be just the right kind of neither black or white, imposing menace you wouldn't want be on the wrong side of. This could be a compellingly dark world worth exploring.
Alternating chapters as two lovers talk to each other, but not really. See the lady in question here is dead. Floating in limbo - sort of Patrick Swayze'ing it alongside her past lover with nary a Whoopi Goldberg medium in sight. But a lot less fun and way more wordy. These two are self indulgent and grandiloquent musers of love, wringing every bit of feeling from a distant relationship that is brought to the fore by a death.
Death allows them to be more honest in a way they never could be in life.
I've read the whole thing but I'm still not clear what happened. What exactly the scope of their love that transcends death is. They'd both moved on relationship-wise when she passed. Through their emo musings we know he was 52, hot off the heels of a second marriage when he takes a class that she, a mere 37 at the time, was teaching. We see the progression of their relationship, her career, subsequent loves, frenemies and friends, and eventually the cause of her death.
I'm confident Pedrosa could write one hell of a Dear John letter, but a novel length catalogue of a lost love seems a bit much.
Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice has won every significant sci-fi award this year including the Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke and Locus awards but I just couldn't get into it. Maybe I need my sci-fi spoon fed to me.
It's got chops certainly, exploring the concept of personal identity and what that means when you're a ship commanding thousands of bodies as a distributed AI now reduced to a single ancillary bent on revenge against a dictatorial galactic emperor that is essentially immortal and spread out over a multitude of bodies that may or may not be plotting against each other. Yeah, that.
I want to read that book, but then I realize I have and was pretty ambivalent about the whole thing. Maybe it's the writing, the shifting pronouns (it's a post gendered society) or maybe I just wasn't in the right headspace to read it.
It's 2011 and Adolf Hitler has just woken up in Berlin, in full regalia, only slightly dusty but otherwise no worse for wear. Hitler being Hitler accepts his new found situation and soon becomes a YouTube celebrity, lauded for his edgy take on modern Germany and his Method-like commitment to his craft.
Translated from German (actually it's been translated into 42 languages including Hebrew) after selling over 2 million copies in Germany, it's told from Hitler's perspective. It's a unique challenge for author Timur Vermes to stay “true” to Hitler's voice then widen the lens and deliver comedic beats based on the larger context. But this isn't Colbert, and Hitler isn't in the same league as a right-wing blowhard, which makes for an uncomfortable frisson. Sill, Vermes is examining the single-minded charisma that propelled him to power while having fun as Hitler opines on weaponizing dogs, those damn cooking shows and Vikipedia. As a whole though, I think it plays better in Germany.
I don't want to say anything about the book itself as it will likely prompt a knee-jerk reaction to a potentially overdone conceit. Even the characters themselves fall into familiar tropes. It's a ride we've all been on before but Carey imbues it with something more and makes the trip worth our while. It was one of those unstoppable reads that I absolutely consumed.
How the Light Gets In is the 9th book in the Inspector Gamanche series and my first introduction to author Louise Penny. It reminds me a great deal of starting with book 10 of Jo Nesbo's Harry Hole series. While Nesbo is all heavy metal thunder, Penny feels more like lite pop. It's Dimmu Borgir vs Box's L'Affaire Dumoutier.
Both stories speak to a larger arc established in earlier books and feature a generous cast of characters that circle the protagonist to help hime solve the crime. But while Nesbo's cold clime is dark, grey and punishing, Penny paints an idyllic small Quebec town with cozy hearths and smiling faces. I want to live in Three Pines, grab a book at Myrna's bookstore and cozy up next to the fire at Olivier and Gabri's Bed and Breakfast with 3 fingers of scotch to talk poetry with Ruth and her duck. Vacationing in Nesbo's Norway seems like an invitation to a mugging. How the Light Gets In is more a nod to classic Agatha Christie. Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot reimagined as Canucks.
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.
It's a mash note for the Impressionists. A long form love letter to Vincent Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Monet, Seurat and more with cameos from Oscar Wilde and Whistler's Mother.
And while Moore states he could “pretty much find out what each of the Impressionists had for breakfast on any given day”, it's still a Moore book with an emphasis on the Fiction in Historical Fiction. Still, I want the 19th century Paris he writes about to be true. These artists chumming around with their outsized personalities and passion for the paint.
Lamb still holds the top spot as far as Moore goes, but if you pick this up, do yourself a favor and follow along with the online chapter guide where Moore provides a ton of additional paintings.
Chop Suey refers to the uniquely Western take on traditional Chinese food born out of necessity, a paucity of authentic ingredients, and narrow local taste palates. It's General Tso chicken, Egg Foo Young and Ginger Beef. It's what I've always referred to as fake Chinese or “Average Asian” - a guilty, delicious pleasure finished off with a fortune cookie.
In Chop Suey Nation Ann Hui, the Globe and Mail's national food reporter, along with her husband embark on an 18 day trek across Canada from Victoria BC to Fogo Island Newfoundland. Their mission? To sample small town Chinese restaurants across the country and discover the hidden DNA of these MSG-laden establishments.
With Anti-Chinese laws preventing the earliest Canadian immigrants from working in anything other than laundries and restaurants the stage was set for the proliferation of Chinese restaurants. Then the Chinese Exclusion outright banned Chinese from coming to Canada at all. When doors eventually reopened, the restaurant business was still seen as a viable way to make a living in Canada. Immigrants learned from owners and carried that knowledge to the next city - taking into consideration what worked (Chop Suey Chinese) and what didn't (traditional Chinese fare). In this way, repeated from town to town and immigrant to immigrant, did this brand of Western Chinese food take root.
This works as a great long form piece that ran in the Globe and Mail but I wished for more in book form. Still it's a warm look at the long and surprisingly Canadian tradition of Chop Suey Chinese.
A desiccated and dusty planet where carpet weavers spend their entire lives hunched over a loom, weaving a carpet made of hair drawn from their wives. It takes a lifetime to produce a single carpet which is sold to line the Emperor's palace. The proceeds are passed to the son who will spend his life weaving his own carpet and so on through the generations.
In a single first chapter this entire system is outlined and explained with a beautifully strict economy of words. It's tightly woven (sorry) and was originally conceived as a standalone short story.
From here Eschbach pulls back the lens and each chapter introduces another character and furthers our understanding of this galaxy spanning system of fealty to the godlike Emperor.
I don't want to say much more. Each narrator is introduced and discarded and it's a credit to Eschbach that he is able to keep introducing new, fleshed out and realized characters without getting bogged down. The book is like a series of grim but wonderfully rendered and interconnected short stories.
I'm still not sure how I feel about the conclusion but getting there was so enjoyably readable.
You don't get to be the the world's best-selling mystery novel and seventh most popular book of all time with over 100 million copies sold without some solid chops. Christie has got game for days.
This was just a wonderfully nostalgic read for me. It reminded me of all the Agatha Christie I'd devoured as a kid, pulling story after story from the library. Poirot, Marples and more have occupied me for many a quiet hour and yet I'd somehow missed this one.
A straight ahead thriller that announces from the onset (at least in my edition) that Christie was playing fair. That it would have a perfectly reasonable explanation with clues for a discerning reader to perhaps suss out the mastermind. That alone would have been a feat, but add 10 guests on a mysterious island slowly meeting their demise in line with the children's poem that girds the story and it's nothing short of a wonder.
Christie wastes no time. This is a slim mystery that's tight as a drum delineating the 10 characters, their past crimes that landed them on the island, and their slow, inevitable elimination until there were none. Just a wonderfully cozy (yet murderous) reading experience.
You might be tempted to dismiss Beaton's ability to tackle a more weighty memoir if you've only known her from her Hark! A Vagrant days, but she nails the industrial desolation of a Syncrude mining operation — the biting cold, the hulking machines, and the poison spewing industry of it all. That implacable desolation mirrors her own experience as she arrives in the oil sands in the hopes of severing the “weighted anchor” of $40K of student debt in a place where women are outnumbered 50 to 1.
It goes badly and yet Beaton exhibits far more empathy than you might expect. This could have easily been a sensationalist story, given to all the salacious detail and harrowing experiences — exactly what a reporter from the Globe and Mail kept fishing for in a later chapter to fill out her preconceived story. But Beaton can't help but wonder how the loneliness, homesickness and boredom might affect someone's brother or dad or husband.
So many have come from away, from coastal towns where the fishing has dried up, the mines long since closed, where opportunity requires a plane trip away from family, from home. It's a place where the death of hundreds of ducks in a tailing pond receives more national interest than the poisoning of Native lands, mining operations set up right next door to Indian settlements where young people are increasingly dying of cancer, the plants and animals spoiled by the poisons sent into the environment. And there are the workers and the mental toll that isolation breeds, the ugly aspects of self revealed, the people chewed up by this extractive industry. This is one hell of a memoir.
It's a collection of vibes that just worked. From the spot on feel of a Theranos miracle technology propelled by a singular cult of personality, to the gritty TV heroes that could never exist in our current environment but were nonetheless riveting to so many of us as kids. David Hasselhoff to Star Lord. And it's inescapable childhood grief that haunts as it bends the arc of your life. There's an improbably missing elevator, a questionable insta-family, and special milk that just didn't quite make sense but I was still down for the entire ride. This felt like a first season of prestige tv, all set up with oblique clues scattered throughout that hint at something larger. There's just so much meaty potential within the gaps of the story that kept snagging at my attention. Just one of those reads where you enjoy the experience without being able to exactly pinpoint the why.
It's a charming love story, pure confection.
Don Tillman is a genetics professor with Asperger's. His life is ordered and finely tuned to his sensibilities. He's the narrator of our tale here, and while I can object to this being an easy excuse to adopt a flat, matter of fact tone, Tillman is nonetheless endearing. Part Data, part Sheldon Cooper.
Don decides to embark in earnest on acquiring a life partner and thus devises “The Wife Project”, a thick questionnaire to weed out incompatibilities in potential mates when in walks Rosie Jarman, the world's most incompatible woman.
I can't even write a review of the story that doesn't have me hating it, or at least discarding it with a yawning dismissal. You know what's going to happen. You know the tropes that will be visited. How clearly the arc will unfold with it's minor crises and major revelations. So it's no mean feat that Graeme Simsion managed to keep me turning the pages and not hating myself after finishing the book. It's a fun, light read that I only feel a little guilty recommending. If you can't bring yourself to enjoy this bit of fluff you can always wait for the inevitable movie this is so ripe to be made into.
It could be a dystopian quest novel. Certainly our hero Fan, leaving the confines of B-Mor encounters her fair share of adventures once she sets out for the open counties in search of her lover Reg. But the narrator, with his overly considered, first-person plural keeps intruding in on the action before it slips back into the story.
Maybe I'm supposed to read this as a meditation on our own class structure. How precarious our middle class lives are, bookended by the hand-wringing psychosis of the upper class and the savagery of the lower - but maybe I'm just burned out from dystopian fiction.
Far more conventional than his prior book Vaseline Buddha, Jung Young-moon revisits some familiar themes with his expansively tangential storytelling. Diarrhea, dwarfs, suicide, and unusual things floating past appear again along with him plotting revenge on mayonnaise, kicking pebbles down hills and a tense standoff with a seven year old girl over a discarded love seat.
He'll meander for a page or two, musing on the nature of penises then tell a story of a monkey visiting the north pole or something perhaps a little more plausible like dropping fruit off the Golden Gate bridge then admit it never happened. Still, it's a bit easier to get your bearings with this one.
Not a retelling as Jane Steele admits to being inspired to set her experiences down on paper after reading an especially riveting book called Jane Eyre. Still, she notices some similarities between Charlotte Bronte's protagonist and her own experiences. The conceit allows Lyndsay Faye the much needed freedom to take us the reader anywhere, borrowing what works but not slavishly tied to mirroring the original work.
We're taken on a fun romp that starts with Jane Steele admitting to her many murders up front and ending in a pastoral estate run entirely by some well-armed Sikhs.
Lyndsay Faye has appropriated the language of the 19th century but kept the pacing upbeat and current. The characters, though situated in Victorian London, are thoroughly modern, sexually and culturally diverse and resolutely feminist. Jane Eyre as Dexter Morgan and all kinds of unapologetic fun.
So when Tyler is recounting letting his sister Kinsey get in the car with the clearly smashed Shep, the paramedics attending to the badly injured Kinsey have got to be Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez themselves. Later we get the epic, tongue-in-cheek nod to Stephen King's Carrie. The series has been a home run and Hill and Rodriguez are rounding the bases and waving to the fans. It's coming full circle as we built to a shattering climax. We once again return to the caves while Rufus makes his way to Keyhouse, his journey mirroring Sam Lesser's in Volume one. A satisfying end to a new favorite graphic novel series.