David Yoon

It feels like I'm the last person to find out Joe Hill is Stephen King's son. In the acknowledgements he talks about riding motorcycles with his dad.

“It was a happy ride, following him along his back roads in the sun on my shoulders. I guess I have been cruising his back roads my whole life. I don't regret it.”

He does the old man proud too. Great characterization (which does comes at the cost of a hefty page count.) Still, I loved NOS4A2. I'm relatively new to literary horror and protagonist Victoria MacQueen's first meeting with Charlie Manx is deliciously chilling. It gets increasingly savage and brutal from there - author Joe Hill is relentless and Vic should be by rights clinically insane or dead halfway through the book.

It's a reimagining of the vampire myth, featuring an ass-kicking librarian with psychic Scrabble tiles, a time and space travelling Raleigh Tuff Burner bike, a kid named Bruce Wayne and lots of nerd love throughout.

Do yourself a favor and check out the audiobook. Kate Mulgrew narrates and absolutely kills it. She is pitch perfect and it's even more chilling in the telling.

Cozy friends to lovers with medium spice. Maggie's getting over a bad breakup and has nine months to find a date to her best friends' destination wedding. This of course means firing up the apps and sifting through the sludge to uncover a travel-worthy partner. You know how it's going to go, so it's all about settling in and enjoying the ride. And McCoy does not disappoint. No one has a better ear for dialogue and every chapter is a feast for the senses. It's not dinner and a date, it's spicy lamb with red chilies and Thai basil, crab-stuffed prawns with bucatini pasta and blistered Marzano tomatoes, or porcini-mushroom-and-Gruyère-stuffed pork tenderloin with a spinach-and-Parmesan risotto. It's clear she's drawing on her past life as a private chef and we all benefit from it. Frankly we could all use a bit more Garrett energy in all our lives too.

In NOS4A2 Joe Hill really settles into his own voice and tells a kick ass story that completely blew me away and I highly recommend it. Heart Shaped Box is an earlier work and he clearly shows his influences. If you're going to emulate a style you could do worse than Stephen King, especially if he happens to be your father.

It's the next generation of King. The musical influences that littered King's earlier work are updated for a new generation. Instead of Baby, Can you Dig Your Man our protagonist singer is an aging goth rocker with albums like Happy Little Lynch Mob. Classic muscle cars, monster trucks and long American highways also feature prominently. And the writing is at that same languorous pace of human interaction and slowly building characters.

Some deft touches and flourishes here that I really enjoyed but halfway through the penny dropped and I realized what sort of book I was reading, and exactly how it was going to end. Still a well told story that hasn't diminished my enthusiasm for Joe Hill and I will read his Horns I'm sure.

It's tough. Like reviewing Hey Jude with nothing more than the lyrics. The play's the thing! After reading it I'm more than a little disappointed to find it just finished it's run in London Ontario. I can only hope someone mounts it again nearby.

The play, not unlike the Korean variety store it's set in, crams so much into such a tiny space. Parental expectation, xenophobic bias, forgiveness, immigrant Korean's roots in the Christian community and, with the convenience store, the community at large. And while I agree with reviewer that says “it could be accused of sacrificing truth to reconciliation” I understand the motive. It's hilarious, heartfelt and it can't help but make me think of my own folks.

I haven't read Stephen King since I was in high school when it seemed everyone was carrying around a dog eared paperback of Cujo or Christine. It felt odd revisiting King on my ipad, the paperback covers having become such an iconic part of my adolescence.

The Stand is one of those books, like the Lord of the Rings, that seem to engender repeated readings and I know several people who've managed to plow through this weighty thing more than once.

I read the unabridged version published in 1991 weighing in at 1200 pages. Apparently this makes it longer than Moby Dick or War and Peace and caps off my post apocalyptic trifecta after finishing The Passage and The Twelve. You can see how much of a debt Cronin owes King.

Stephen King is a storyteller. I loved how much time spent on the early days of the virus, gleefully recounting each expired life as well as introducing the characters we would explore the post-virus world with. With it's heft he can really create wonderful, fleshed out arcs for each character. The Larry Underwood pre-virus is escaping from his drug debts and hiding at his mother's in New York. Stu Underwood is working a calculator factory and helping out at the gas station. Harold Lauder is a marginalized teen, mostly invisible and largely enraged. These characters and more get a nicely paced progression into the people they become. Maybe it all comes together a bit too neat, but as with the best road trips it's not the destination but the journey there that's the thing.

“Murray's mom made really good chili, and lots of kids made regular trips to Murray's house to have some of his mom's chili. She seemed to always have chili ready. Murray's house became known for his mom's chili. Murray was well liked, but his mom's chili made him even more popular.”

Jian is no writer. Without the notoriety of his day job there would be no book. But his stature as a minor Canadian deity is inescapably linked to the reading of the book. As a fan of Q I'm sure I'm not alone in reading it entirely in his voice.

That aside how could his memoir not resonate? Jian comes up in the 80's harking from a Southern Ontario suburb as a second generation immigrant trying to fit in at highschool. I suspect Jian, despite his hand wringing, to be waaay cooler than I was at that age growing up down the 401 from him. Hanging with the seniors in theatre class, in a band, making out with girls and meeting Rush. As far as 14 year old me was concerned, he was living the dream.

It's still a treat to revisit that era, and our lives as preteens before the internet. Here's a list - Jian loves his lists - of things this book reminded me of.

• My blue and red pleather Adidas bag


• Mix tapes


• Sam the Record Man


• Spiral corded phones attached to walls


• Commodore PET computers


• The Spoons


• Porn in magazine format


• Grade 13

A childhood friend prompted me to pick up the book. He's a devout Christian, new-order Mennonite strong in his belief. His was a self-assured faith that felt no need to justify itself in proselytization or broad overtures. Nor was it narrow or exclusionary. There was never a whiff of smug self righteousness or pitying condescension.

Valedictorian, musically inclined, all round athlete he would go on after high school to seminary. That complete he moved on to psychology then medicine. His faith unshaken.

I'm told he read this book and become an atheist.

I don't know if was a creeping doubt and that the God Delusion simply gave him permission to question his faith or a blinding epiphany. Hell, it could simply be untrue, nuance lost with each retelling.

I guess reviewing this is no more beneficial than opining about Twilight or 50 Shades of Grey. Not that I didn't love this book, but it seems that many opinions are formed well prior to the actual reading.

It's a brisk read, with easily digested chapters that break down traditional Christian arguments one by one. I don't find it overly smug or even mean spirited - charges often laid at it's feet by scandalized Christian defendants. It is egocentric, concerned for the individual's sense of religion. “Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own.” I like the sentiment but I still think there's power in the rituals of faith, especially in the face of grief, the loss of a loved one. But even then Dawkins is careful to make the distinction between “belief in God and belief in belief: the belief that it is desirable to believe, even if the belief itself is false.”

It is an entirely approachable read regardless of your faith going in. I'm sure there's no shortage of “cafeteria Christians” that pick and choose their beliefs that befit their lifestyle; or “Not like those” Christians that distance themselves from Creationist extremists or fundamental nut jobs. I think a book like this helps them take a critical look at the nature of their belief. I'm sure in many it will only deepen their faith but there's value in stepping outside and examining it in a new and honest light. A highly recommended read.

Cyrus Shams is an unpublished poet, former alcoholic, and recovering drug addict pretending to have terminal illnesses to train doctors on their bedside manner. He's profoundly, inconsolably, suicidally, sad but comes off as a bit of an emo 20-something. As the story opens we find him lying on his mattress that smells like piss and Febreeze and dreaming of becoming a martyr.

Cyrus' mother was in a plane mistakenly shot out of the sky by the US Navy, his uncle dressed as the angel of death to comfort dying soldiers in the field and now wrestles with PTSD, and his father made it to the US to see Cyrus off to college before dying himself. In New York to see an artist installation by a woman named Orkideh who, dying of breast cancer, sits in the museum and answers questions, Cyrus is immediately pegged by her as just “another death-obsessed Iranian man.”

Throw in some dream interludes where Lisa Simpson chats with his mother and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar makes an appearance, one hell of a coincidence, and snippets of poetry and you've got a free-wheeling, debut novel with a poet's careful consideration of language that's still careening all over the place while riding a swelling wave of critical love. A messy, imperfect, but wonderfully ambitious outing.

Naomi Klein appreciates the irony of having written a book called No Logo and now finding herself trying to shore up her own personal brand. Naomi Wolf is another middle-aged, big haired, Jewish thinker who came to prominence in the nineties with an influential book.

And while it's annoying enough to face constant mistaken attributions on Twitter, things escalate when her doppelgänger takes a hard rightward turn into anti-vax conspiracist. Still, it seems thin gruel on which to base a book on.

But this is just an entry point into the rabbit hole that is our society's obsession with the other, with the mirror world. From the mild, like our personal online avatars in the attention economy, to the massive, with right wing media network spouting wild conspiracies as traditional journalism flounders.

Significantly, Klein notes that conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but the feelings right. Political elites beholden to corporate interest - becomes a cabal of pedophiles planning to institute a world government. Railing at globalists, elites and the World Economic Forums conveniently diverts attention away from capitalism as a broken system and leaves most global billionaires intact.

It's a powerful tool of diversion and distraction that keeps us so busy fighting ourselves, dunking on others, owning the libs or fact-checking the right we miss the opportunity for collective action for something better. Change requires collaboration, even when it's uncomfortable. But we're so caught up in the frantic, divisive, noisy hullabaloo. We're hooked on the dopamine kick of being validated in our own little bubbles as we land another sick burn before doomscrolling to the next crisis.

In the end Klein posits that calm is a force of resistance. That calm is the precondition for focus, which gives us the capacity to prioritize and possibly work together. Just a far reaching and prescient read.

It's the twisted tale of a family of freaks, the Binewskis. These people are sociopaths - their otherness isn't confined to physical deformities but to a skewed morality that exists outside the confines of us “norms”. It's a big, bold and at times horrifying look at family in a book that defies easy description.

I liked it. Turns out I just hate everyone else's opinion on it. George Saunders seems to invite an abundance of critical lit dick-swinging. He's the Bon Iver of the written word. Have you read some of these reviews? Sorry, I can be just as guilty of the same overwrought analysis but this is just too much. You've all forced my hand and now I'm reading non-fiction and self-help.

Brené Brown hits me where I live. Books like these just help reset and realign where I'm coming from and her chapters on parenting were especially important. I'd argue that her anecdotes are a bit too scripted and convenient but I'm happy to give her a pass. Brown is an imperfect, flawed and human writer that shares her own struggles to illuminate her point. It's broken up into short little chapters that were easy to dip into while I was reading other books. It's a reminder to live wholeheartedly (ugh that sounds terrible) embrace vulnerability and continue showing up.

I've been hearing a lot about Ferrante lately. Her latest book made up the long tail of a bunch of best of lists for 2014 as well as topping translated reads. Ferrante is a pseudonym and the author makes Salinger seem downright social in comparison. This is the first book in the Neapolitan series which follows the lives of Elena Greco and Raffaella (Lila) Cerullo. Book one gets as far as their teenage years starting from when these frenemies are first introduced.

It's a luxuriously paced Bildungsroman that explores class rifts, how your community and friends define you and yet force you to define yourself in opposition to them. Nothing much really happens here and somehow it avoids being a plodding reminiscence. I'm actually surprised how much I liked this book and will be picking up the rest in the series.

She's a Canadian Twitter superstar. So that's a thing now I guess? “But she's been retweeted by Roger Ebert and Jimmy Kimmel! – and she's from Calgary!” It's that me-too Canadian reflex that infects us as a nation and has us uttering things like “You know Maria Hill from S.H.I.E.L.D is Canadian right?”

Despite being consciously jealous of her ability to write for a living based on having been discovered via Twitter. I still really liked the book. It's not easy writing all about yourself without it becoming all about yourself. But maybe I'm in the minority. A good chunk of readers found it narcissistic and humble-braggy - the reflections of a clearly attractive, privileged white girl.

C'mon - this is someone who's been given a book deal based on 140 character observations. You'd think the resurrected ghost of Dorthy Parker dropped this book the way it's being savaged. It was fun. But then I'm a fan of mind-reading monkeys, elbow semen, 6-year old stagings of Star Wars, underage car puking and bad judgement meeting good luck.

A true-life Dr. House mystery. What starts as two suspected bedbug bites for 20 something reporter Susannah Cahalan quickly escalates into hallucinations, out of body experiences, rampant paranoia and massive seizures. Doctors are stumped when MRIs and blood work come back clean and dismiss is as stress or drinking too much. It takes the persistence of her parents and the intervention of one Dr. Souhel Najjar and a simple paper and pencil test that sets her on a path to recovery. Cahalan digs through medical records, video footage and countless interviews to piece together her month of madness. Riveting.

A bibliographic quest involving a mysterious book store, a black-cloaked secret society and a fellowship of modern day adventurers. Ancient texts and classic typefaces collide with Google, Hadoop and Mechanical Turks.

Clay Jannon is an art school grad and out of work dot-commer desperate for work. Spying a Help Wanted sign he agrees to be the night clerk for a dark and narrow 24-hour bookstore. It's main clientele turns out to be an eccentric cadre of readers who borrow cryptic books filled with indecipherable text.

From there we tumble down the rabbit hole of an ancient bibliographic cult attempting to solve a centuries old secret. Clay gathers his merry band that brings together a Russian programming prodigy, boob physics startup CEO, Googler and data visualization whiz, a knitting collective, ILM whiz kid, book hacker/pirate and some octogenarian acolytes. More olde school fun.

Festina Lente!

Sometimes in order to find yourself you need to get lost ...and the characters populating this book are completely and utterly gone.

Titular Bernadette Fox is the ugly American, Real Housewife of Seattle kvetching to her Indian virtual secretary Manjula, who she pays $30.00 a week to pull together travel itineraries, order anti-psychotics and blackberry abatement specialists. She's her offshore confidante who she can unload on about the weather, 5 way intersections and even Canadians.

“One of the main reasons I don't like leaving the house is because I might find myself face-to-face with a Canadian. Seattle is crawling with them. You probably think, U.S./Canada, they're interchangeable because they're both filled with English-speaking, morbidly obese white people. Well, Manjula, you couldn't be more mistaken....The way you might fear a cow sitting down in the middle of the street during rush hour, that's how I fear Canadians. To Canadians, everyone is equal. Joni Mitchell is interchangeable with a secretary at open-mic night. Frank Gehry is no greater than a hack pumping out McMansions on AutoCAD. John Candy is no funnier than Uncle Lou when he gets a couple of beers in him. No wonder the only Canadians anyone's ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality. The thing Canadians don't understand is that some people are extraordinary and should be treated accordingly.”

Maria Semple wrote for Arrested Development - which should really be the one line review.

The story is a whirlwind, pieced together from police reports, hasty faxes, email directives to offshore virtual assistants, psychiatric evaluations, school newsletters, FBI abstracts and blogger transcripts. This allows Semple to write each character in their own voice.

From a former MacArther Genius to a Microsoft slash TEDTalk rockstar, private school marketing douche, mooney, self-help (Victims Against Victimhood) admin, high strung neighbour wound drum tight and a preternaturally smart tween daughter (naturally) they're all here. But don't just dismiss it as TV fluff on the page. It's smart and satisfying. Snark without being terribly mean spirited.

This seems the perfect approachable entry as I attempt to further my exploration into modern philosophical thought. A more readable examination of the ever prevalent phenomena of assholes with a slight philosophical sheen. Sure, I'm still gripped by an adolescent glee when James tries parse the minute differences that separate assholes from mere ass-clowns, douchebags, and jerks, not to mention the more gendered bitch. But I appreciate the rigorous approach.

Things get even more interesting when he considers “asshole capitalism” and suddenly this book from 2012 feels eerily prescient. Kanye West is confidently placed in the Delusional Asshole category while Trump is categorized as a Narcissistic Asshole back when he was just crying over birtherism. You start to see assholes as a relentless force that wears down opponents. Entitled regardless of the larger social costs, assholes can start to break down the cooperation needed for systems to remain healthy - degrading them over time. Assholes win converts to assholedom looking to lunge and grasp at their own piece of the pie in the face of dwindling resources. One can see the dangerous appeal of the asshole, especially in our current attention economy.

Maybe this could have been tighter, reduced to a long-form Atlantic article — but I still enjoyed the ride and appreciated the accompanying Canadian documentary that was free to watch (at least on CBC)

And remember, if you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole.

I was going to go on about how Yunior is such a unique and distinctive voice until every review I read talked exactly about how unique and distinctive his voice is.

So instead I will say that I love these veiled, semi-autobiographical memoirs. Maybe talking about oneself frees the author to really flex some narrative muscle. I'm thinking of Michael Ondaatje's Running the Family - still one of my favorites.

Diaz can leave you spinning in the wake of his ever changing narrative voice though. Chapters jump from first to third to tangential characters. But through it all it's a compelling read on the manifestations and muddling of love.

Yunior is a misogynist cheater. Incapable of monogamy and hair rending, teeth gnashing full of remorse when it all becomes uncovered. In less deft hands it would be unreadable but it's rendered so clearly it rings true. You probably know people like this.

It's a Swedish Forest Gump as written by Carl Hiaasen. Not exactly literary high art, but an entertaining romp with a mounting body count. Murder and mayhem with a side of slapstick.

Allan Karlsson has led quite the eventful life. An early fascination with explosives and a penchant for the drink has brought him around the world and in the company of Stalin, Churchill, Kim Il Sung, Truman, Mao, Albert Einstein's incompetent brother Herbert, as well as inadvertently finding himself key to the Manhattan Project, the Spanish Civil War and Reagan's Star Wars program. You can see the similarity to Forest Gump but instead of sitting on a bus stop bench proffering chocolates to strangers he, on the day of his 100th birthday, makes off with a suitcase filled with illicit cash which leads to both the police and a notorious biker gang, with less than generous intentions for his health, scouring the countryside looking for him and his growing entourage.

We finish up Volume 4 with the Locke family thinking they've rid themselves of the evil Lucas Caravaggio but we know the demon spirit is inhabiting Bode! And now he's got the Omega key. It's all kinds of bad so Hill gives us a chance to catch our breath. It's a deep dive into the history of the Keyhouse Estate and the “Omega” door. And we manage to get a bit more of Rendell Locke as a high schooler and the drama crew.

Someone has finally articulated this nagging feeling I've been having for some time. The algorithmic anxiety that comes from living in the teeth of technology. How identity has been replaced by consumerism driven by algorithms that influence the music I listen to, the movies I watch, the vacations I take, and the next must have item I need to buy whether it's Allbirds, a Stanley Mug, or Taylor Swift tickets.

There is a flattening of taste, a statistical averaging of desires that is elevating mid content to stratospheric heights. It's keeping us glued to the apps by staying away from anything that might challenge or confound us. It's dispensing with anything that would require nuanced consideration in favour of the pre-packaged and instantly understood.

We have such a herd mentality. Nothing draws a crowd like a crowd, and so it's not just the consumers but the creators chasing virality that influences and flattens content. Songs are necessarily shorter to monetize within Spotify, movies become focused on meme opportunities over thoughtful writing, everyone is seeking the same shot from the rooftops of Santorini Greece or the shores of the Amafi Coast which drives even more tourism to the same spots. And around the globe, coffeeshops have adopted the same aesthetic of subway tiles, reclaimed wood furniture, rusty plumbing, and hanging lamps with exposed Edison bulbs in a High Brooklyn lumberjack vibe that is instantly recognizable whether you're in Seoul, Copenhagen, or Reykjavik.

Sure this can be a bit of a baggy read at times but it's a necessary reminder to cultivate your own individual taste, to be aware of how the algorithms are subtly influencing what we consume and how, even in the act of consuming it, we are considering how we will present it to others. Of course you are unique, just like everybody else.

It's a cozy anti-capitalist tale that reads like a gauzy K-drama. Yeong-ju leaves the unrelenting grind of her engineering job, divorces her career obsessed husband, and decides to open up a bookshop in a quiet Seoul neighbourhood. She discovers a found family that is likewise escaping from the prevailing hyper-competitive, burnout inducing reality that is modern life.

Jungsuh left the corporate world behind to pursue knitting, Mincheol escaped the hagwon to spend his afternoons at the bookshop, and Minjun has thwarted his parents expectations by devoting his time to being the bookshop barista. All of them are renegotiating their lives and looking for new meaning at a different pace than what the world might expect of them.

It's an earnest, heart-on-its-sleeve story that mirrors the authors own experience leaving her career as a software engineer at LG to pursue writing, eventually winning a story contest, and publishing it as an ebook to nationwide acclaim. So maybe fairy-tales do come true.

Focused on a single afternoon of a Thanksgiving weekend football game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Chicago Bears the book manages to invoke the spirit of the United States from the heart of Texas, post 9/11 when Bush was in his ascendency, Fox ruled the news airwaves and we were looking for WMDs and ways to oust Saddam.

No wonder it garners comparison's to Catch-22. It's a wonderfully satirical novel where every character in the book feels like a metaphor for a larger idea. OMG the cheerleader represents the American people!

With the 1%, Hollywood and millionaire athletes glad-handling American troops it has all the subtlety of a Dan Brown novel. Fountain will go into incredible detail about the millions spent on outfitting the Dallas cowboys. The thousands of shoes needed every year, that include shoes made for dry conditions, wet conditions, grass and astroturf. The latest technologies arming their helmets. The thousands of towels used in a day to ensure their comfort. The warehouses of talcum powder, sunscreen, gum and Gatorade required for these industrial sized humans. And with a curt nod, he'll move on to the next scene, leaving you to digest those bits of information.

“But for a certain kind of reader — say, one whose tastes normally veer towards Jonathan Franzen but will argue that Stephen King is underrated after a couple of beers — I can't imagine a better book than The Twelve.” Josh Visser National PostThat's where I'm at. After finishing the first two books of the purported trilogy I'm continuing on with my jag of hefty tomes and segueing nicely into Stephen King's The Stand. The Twelve faces the middle book challenge, building on the momentum of the first book but holding something back for the finale. So Cronin does some world building and returns to the scene of the initial outbreak. It's all very familiar and adds additional layers to his world. I'm excited to see how he wraps it up this year. Hoping more Return of the King and less Matrix Revolutions