David Yoon
Gene works within the confines of a terse newspaper style pushing against the constraints of limited lines of copy. There's not much room for meandering prose and building a scene. It's just the facts ma'am. He also relies on the aside and necessary tangents that loop around the main narrative to keep up the punishing pace of information. It's just I kept getting jarred out of the flow.
He's a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist (both are included in this collection) so don't listen to my armchair criticisms. I love the ideas behind most of his stories too, whether it's a write up on Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau, having dinner with a girl he had a crush on in elementary school or following around a wildly successful but ultimately damaged children's entertainer - the stories have got legs. I just wasn't that into them.
Vaillant is best known for his non-fiction work and both The Golden Spruce and The Tiger have entered my TBR orbit. But my introduction is his first work of fiction. I felt unclear as to why Vaillant chose this route given that there would have been no shortage of experiences to fashion a compelling non-fiction narrative.
Instead we get a story that is unrelentingly grim and horrible. Trying to escape into America, Hector and Cesar climb into an empty water tank truck along with 13 other migrants. The occupants have been sealed inside, the doors welded shut. Things go south and it's as appalling as you might imagine. The writing is evocative and there's so much potential to be explored.
Instead we get Hector telling us the story of his family and his introduction to the United States through an improbable conceit of recording sound-files into his friends dying cell phone over the course of several days. There's also political thriller storyline surrounding Hector and genetically modified corn which felt misplaced here. Thrown together the elements didn't quite gel for me and I found myself wishing Vaillant was instead constrained to the truth, to tell a non-fiction story of migrants trying to escape into the US.
It's a world where “poets” can hack the primitive linguistic centres of the brain to directly access our human OS. Once an individual's numerical segment is identified, base words can bypass our natural defences and render us compliant to command.
And segmenting has become easier in this connected world of online quizzes, Facebook likes and browsing patterns. We are ripe for coercion. The more data we willingly hand over, the easier we are to categorize and mould.
The Organization trains individuals in this hidden language to persuade. They just need to find able prospects. Enter street hustler Emily Ruff, who is identified and offered the opportunity to hone her skills. Running parallel to her story is that of Will Park, who we meet in an airport bathroom with a needle jammed in his eye. The two are somehow connected to the complete and utter devastation of the town of Broken Hill.
Incredible conceit. My only complaint is that it couldn't maintain it's pace throughout. It's a jangled open and a weak close that bookends a meaty thriller in-between. A wild ride nonetheless. I always knew Eliot was a badass.
PS. I'm a cat person.
The Sinclair's are old money that summer on a private island off the coast of Massachusetts.
The Liars are teenaged cousins Cadence, Johnny, Mirren and Gat.
Something happens at “Summer 15” leaving Cadence with debilitating migraines and selective amnesia. After a year away she returns to the island determined to piece together the mystery of her missing summer. Think of it as Gone Girl for the YA set. ...I've said too much already. I'm also lying - read it.
It's the 1990's and Kirby Mizrachi, a survivor of a brutal attack, is trying to close in on her unknown assailant with the help of an ex-homicide reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times, Dan Velasquez. What they don't realize is their suspect is time-travelling serial killer Harper Curtis who is somewhere in Chicago, sometime between his world of 1930 and now.
It's an impossible mystery and I was hooked with the notion of how author Lauren Beukes was going to resolve this for the reader. What hope does Kirby have while Harper traipses through the timeline viciously murdering a remarkably diverse list of “shining girls” including a black welder at the Chicago Bridge & Iron Company in 1943, a Korean social worker in 1993 and transexual Lucas Ziegenfeus (Alice) working a travelling carnival. Harper leaves anachronistic tokens by his victims, but considering the thousands of unsolved cases spanning a near century they hardly seems like viable signposts. We're talking some pretty impossible odds here against a foe with your entire timeline at his disposal.
This is gruesome and horrifying, veering well into horror but I was riveted. I hesitate to call spending time with a perversely motivated, brutally vicious serial killer a beach read but it was the thoroughly engaging thriller that I needed as I lounged by the pool not thinking of work.
It's a small story of Yohan living out his days after the Korean War in Brazil, apprenticing to a quiet Japanese tailor. It's a tightly constrained life where little happens so it's up to Yoon to make the moments relevant. He tells a economical story with an arguably predictable arc, but it takes up no more space than it needs to.
Having slipped past the mid-century mark myself, I was looking forward to some empathetic chuckles with a fellow middle-ager musing on turning 49. Gurwitch is a Hollywood adjacent, secular jew with a preteen son - not insurmountable differences, but apparently still a gap too wide to forge. This is in no small part due to the fact she's narrowing in on 50 as a woman. For women in Hollywood, as Gurwitch notes, 50 is the new 80 in actress years. Meanwhile Tom Cruise at 58 is no doubt in lifts, sprinting across some soundstage shooting Mission Impossible 15. Liam Neeson at 68 is still using his unique set of skills as a passable action hero even if it takes 15 slash cuts to shoot him jumping a chain link fence. Now I don't for a second fashion myself an aging Hollywood star, but it is to say different rules apply for men aging in our cultural consciousness. You could make a compelling argument that US citizens currently live under a male gerontocracy.
I have yet to spend a small fortune on facial creams and age defying unguents. I will never experience menopausal dry vagina. I don't yet have osteoarthritis. That shouldn't preclude my enjoyment of this collection of musings but it all felt a little too Borscht Belt, “take my wife, please” brand of humor. The broad swipes just didn't connect for me. But then again it could simply be as an aging male I tend to crotchety and cynical grumbling as I mumble into my porridge complaining that I'm not like those other seniors.
Comprised of several stories split and interspersed, each has its own unique voice. The thin threads linking them across time are visible enough, carrying through themes of faith, humanity and a will to power. Grand themes set against a canvas of centuries.
Mitchell at turns channels Melville, with ships at seas in the 1800s all the way to pulpy noir, dystopian sci-fi ala Brave New World and oral folktales peppered with island patois. It would be easy for this to just fall apart but Mitchell keeps the reins tight.
It sounds too clever by far but it is still, at its heart, a fantastic read.
Trust your intuition. We've all become capably adept at negotiating a world of signals. Whether it's instinctively knowing you need to keep an eye on the white Civic just ahead of you on the expressway or that your opponent has just opened with pocket aces. And yet we often ignore intuition when it comes to fear. We push it aside and dismiss it as “probably nothing”. We go out of our way to tamp down these signals so we don't appear rude when it applies to others or just paranoid. Honor your intuition.
This is something I will have my daughter read and I guess that's recommendation enough.
The tyranny of memory and the mysteries of our own past. Julian Barne's The Sense of an Ending is beautifully rendered and carefully laid out. It would have been too easy to falter writing this, the cliche of the old man remembering his youth, old cliques and distant girlfriends from the comfort of his “peaceable” retired life. But as the author notes, “When we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.” It's easy to delude ourselves, write our own histories and see ourselves in a flattering light.
Multiple plotlines, family intrigues, a will-they-won't-they marriage storyline, mean girls and party boys and it hits me - I just read a romance novel. And I loved it.
I can damn it with faint praise and talk about how it's a perfect summer, beach read - and it is at that. It's just so readable. I flew through this thing, spurred on no doubt by the impending movie, but I had a blast.
All you haters complaining about the brand name dropping are missing the point. It's called Crazy Rich Asians for a reason, it's like complaining that Harry Potter uses too many magical words. For a clunker of a book I just flew through the things and have already picked up the sequel.
It relies on workmanlike language that moves the story forward. It doesn't draw undue attention to itself, it isn't particularly clever, but it also avoids trying too hard and coming off clunky. And Kwan speaks from experience, the world isn't entirely imagined as he grew up in a world much like the one that Nicolas Young experiences.
It's hard to talk about the book now without referencing the movie and I talk about both along with narrative plentitude in my review here: https://youtu.be/4JuXQUGiPYs
The thing about these books is you know it's going to work out in the end. The fun is trying to figure the con and how it's going to be resolved based on the title Bad Monkey and the opening chapter where a honeymooning couple reels in a severed arm off the Florida Keys.
Our protagonist Andrew Yancy is a disgraced Florida detective booted to roach patrol working as a restaurant inspector after anally assaulting a former girlfriend's husband with a Black and Decker vacuum (naturally). Hiaasen's got flavour and delivers a fun, distracting ride.
It's an existential detective novel if that's your thing. When an extinction sized asteroid is 77 days away from striking earth, potentially ending all life, what's the point in putting on a suit and taking on a missing person's case? Protagonist Hank Palace isn't even a cop anymore and with the Earth ending - many have gone “bucket list” chasing end of the world thrills, or their own oblivion into drugs and debauchery. So when an ex state-trooper, now pizza restauranteur and devoted husband disappears why would it be any different than the hordes of others leaving their lives before life leaves them?
Countdown City is the second in the proposed Last Policeman trilogy from the author of “Android Karenina” and “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters”. The whole felt a little too “convenient” - but maybe it suffers for my having skipped the first in the series. The sophomore slump wherein we flesh out the cast of characters and bridge the introduction of the world ending conceit in the first book with the final resolution in the third.
Despite being saddled with a plot that sounds like it was written by an insecure 13 year old who's watched one too many Bond movies ...or maybe because, since that sounds exactly like me, I loved this read.
An alien race has occupied human hosts for their entire existence and has led them to greatness from Shakespeare to Genghis Khan. Due to a series of unexpected circumstances one of these lands in the mind of Roen Tan, a schlub of an IT worker. It whips him into shape, trains him with the help of a super hot fellow agent, helps him woo the girl and fight a pitched battle against evil enemy forces with all the witty, snarky banter of Michael Knight and KITT.
So it's a credit to Chu that every single set piece a story like this needs to have is dispatched with aplomb. You could probably write this book given the outline, but not with the same panache and joy that Wesley imparts. I wouldn't call it a guilty read, just plain fun.
Having never read Hemingway I felt it time to rectify the situation.
Absolutely straightforward prose about an old man and a giant fish. I mean it borders on ridiculous, as if it the whole thing was translated from Spanish into spare English verse.
“Fish,” he said, “I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends.”
So maybe I'm swayed by the mythos surrounding Hemingway. It just feels like a classic fish story told over beers sweating in the tropical heat. Santiago isn't having a dry spell, we're talking 84 fucking days without a nibble. When he finally lands a fish he doesn't wrestle with it for a few hours but several fucking days as it drags him out into the ocean. He finally kills it, lashes it to his boat and heads back to shore. And of course he has to beat off sharks, fucking sharks! with his bare hands, as they eat his fish out from under him so that he comes back with nothing. And you know what? He just went right back out there the next day. Man, that Santiago was a tough fucker.
It's a languorous tale set in New York in the early 1900's. The golem, distilled from clay to serve as a wife, finds herself untethered when her master dies on the journey to New York from Danzig. Incredibly, dangerously strong, she can hear the thoughts of those around her and finds work in a Jewish bakery.
The jinni is freed from a thousand year slumber in a copper flask but is imprisoned in human form by an enchanted iron band. He can melt metal to fashion beautiful artifacts and bides his time with a tinsmith in Little Syria.
Neither require sleep and find themselves hemmed in by the need to hide their true natures. It is their otherness that exposes one to the other. They and a growing cast of characters come to discover what they are and how they came.
A barnacle encrusted freezer bag washes up on the shore of a tiny island off the coast of British Columbia. Visible inside is a Hello Kitty lunchbox that holds a journal, a bundle of letters and a broken wristwatch.
So begins the story of Nao Yasutani, a 15 year old girl from Japan who is beset on all sides, from her bullying classmates to her father who has already tried to commit suicide and will surely try again. Maybe, she thinks, she'll join him.
All of this is revealed as Ruth, who is clearly modelled after Ruth Ozeki herself, reads through the journal. We switch back and forth between the two narrative voices as we try and determine along with Ruth what happened to Nao. Is she ok?
We're also introduced to a kamikaze pilot, ecological artist, a 104 year old zen priest, a mom with Alzheimers along with magical realism, quantum mechanics, the multiple world theory, Schrödinger's cat, maid cafes and more. All of it's necessary to explain the larger idea of the zen koan that opens the book. It comes together beautifully despite the gut-wrenching stories within.
“On the morning after the Feds burned down her house and took her father, Havaa woke from dreams of sea anemones”
Set during the Chechen conflict the book follows 8 year old Havaa who, after her father is “disappeared”, is whisked away by her neighbour Akhmed to a crumbling hospital where she meets the grim surgeon Sonja.
A host of other characters float in an ever connected periphery — but all this is just the book jacket synopsis covering the who, what, where. I won't say it's irrelevant, but these are just the facts of the story. It's the writing that's the star here. Anthony Marra hadn't reached 30 when he wrote this, his first novel, and it's incredible. There are entire paragraphs that just fucking devastated me.
These characters are defined by what they have lost, the people that have disappeared from their lives. “As a web is no more than holes woven together, they were bonded by what was no longer there.”
Just some incredible writing throughout.
We are introduced to Shin Dong-hyuk at the execution of his mother and older brother. By the second chapter a six year old girl is beaten to death at the camp school for the crime of stealing 5 kernels of corn. It's tough slogging here as Blaine Harden profiles the only know person to have been born in a total control zone camp (in this case Camp 14 considered one of the harshest) and escaped. North Korea's labour camps hold between 150,000 and 200,000 prisoners and have existed for twice as long as the Soviet gulags and 12 times longer than Nazi concentration camps.
Shin's life outside North Korea has proven no less challenging. Being raised in that environment leaves Shin suspicious of others, aping the human emotions expected of him. He's still looking for footing in a world completely foreign to him and once again raises the spectre of how a reunified Korea could ever hope to reintegrate such a starkly divided nation.
I want to sit on a park bench with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and have her tell me the story of everyone that walks by. In Americanah she is scathing, witty and honest. With fine detail she manages to capture the gum snapping New Jersey girl at the hair salon, desperate to land a husband; to the newly moneyed, smug liberals at a dinner party.
I found myself reading it in small snippets, poring over every phrase. Even now I can flip to any random page and there find something finely wrought. No one better writes of the “water” we all swim in.
Choi Hyonsu is awaiting execution for the murder of his wife, an 11 year old girl, and her father. He would also be charged for opening the Seryong Dam floodgates which wiped out half a town and drowned 4 policemen. Ever since, his son Sowon has pinballed from place to place. Anytime he would get comfortable, magazine articles would mysteriously appear on classmates desks, on landlord's doorstops, and dropped off at places of work. Revealed as the dead-eyed son of a mass murderer, Sowon would find himself forced to move again. It seems his only ally left in the world is Mr. Ahn.
Until Mr. Ahn disappears leaving a manuscript that recount the days leading up to the Seryong Lake Disaster. There's clearly more to the story than what Sowon has already pieced together.
What little mystery promised by the setup is easily teased together and so it becomes more an examination of moving forward when everything is already lost. How one reacts to personal tragedy - from retreating inwards to lashing out. It's that Korean obsession with outsized emotions and the work of struggling through the days. An existential thriller that spirals out into an overblown, climactic summer movie nail-biter.
Fat ginger falls for Asian nerd, probably the two unlikeliest of protagonists for a YA romance novel. Ugh - typing that makes me realize I just read a YA romance novel. I need a moment.
It's a fantastic build up to their first touch on the bus. From there - well it just didn't escalate fast enough for me. And no, I don't mean getting to third base - I just kept waiting for a crisis to hit.
I appreciate Rainbow's ability to write a teen love story that didn't have me wanting to reach up through my nose and yank my brain out. She's got a deft hand and I'm sure there are people out there taking passages out of the book and pasting them over washed out photos of couples kissing to throw on Pinterest. And so maybe that makes me a heartless cynic that punts little kittens but it wasn't entirely for me.
That said, I love the community that Rainbow Rowell has managed to create around her books. I love that she's on Tumblr and that there's a Tumblr book club for her other release for 2013 - Fangirl. I'd love to see more of this kind of engagement and discussion around modern releases. I wish people didn't feel like it has to be a YA read to be this approachable.
Yu-jin wakes up, the evening before a muddled blur perhaps due to his refusal to take his anti-seizure medication, and he's covered in blood. It doesn't take long as he retraces the bloody path leading from his room to discover his mother dead, her throat slit with the very razor he now holds. We follow along as Yu-jin tries to piece together what happened. It seems hard to imagine any plausible scenario where Yu-jin isn't in fact the murderer so I'm excited to see how Jeong You-jeong plans on resolving the scenario she's set out for us here.
It's a quick read that slowly metes out information and fills in the blanks. Saying anything more would diminish the surprise so I won't go into more detail. The translation felt a little wooden at times and I found myself yelling at the ending in the same way you can't help but object to the girl in the horror movie exploring the darkened basement to investigate a strange sound. A great, straight ahead thriller novella that didn't quite stick the landing as much as I'd hoped.
I can see how this story would strike a particular chord in South Korea where mothers give up so much of themselves for the sake of their children. South Korea has the highest suicide rate among OECD member nations. Every year there is a rash of academic suicides when children fail their university admissions. That comes with an uptick in maternal suicides as mothers feel the brunt of responsibility and shame of their children failing. It is that degree of parental responsibility that might propel this particular story in South Korea and create an added dimension of visceral empathy.
Just saying.
It opens with a Tarantino-esque scene with our protagonist walking into a German cafe, ordering a streusel and shooting Hitler. Darkness falls, Ursula Todd's life is reset and we're back at her birth. From there it's like I'm the world's worst Choose Your Own Adventure reader killing off my protagonist at birth, drowning as a child at the beach or falling out a window in search of a toy. I'm starting to wonder how I managed to survive my own childhood.
It's a life defined by singular, unremarkable moments. A fall on a street corner, a painter on a beach can change the tenor of Ursula's life significantly. She even gains a vague awareness of having been here before, a sense of pivotal moments. Speculative fiction? Light sci-fi?
Kate Atkinson never bores with each retelling but I've finished with so many questions.
It's an aptly titled graphic novel - a wonderfully illustrated love note to food and the culture surrounding it.
Lucy Knisley was raised by foodies. Her godfather was a renowned restaurant critic, her mom worked at a local restaurant and was the type to bring a blowtorch for school birthdays to make creme brûlée. Lucy would later find herself in upstate New York with her mother growing vegetables and working the farmers market. In college she became a cheese seller. Her memories are tied to food.
But she's not some foodie hipster and still recalls the joys of pizza pockets, KD and McDonald's fries. It's an uncomplicated book that had me headed out to buy myself some fancy cheese as a result. That counts as a win.