David Yoon
Chefsploitation! Pulpy samurai mashup that lets Bourdain thumb his nose at pretentious foodie douches and holier than thou vegan/freegan/locavore hippies.
Fine food becomes the currency of the wealthy and chefs are the new kingpins. The poor live off in the periphery and indulge in pre-packaged fare and franchised McRestaurants - stuffing their fat faces with processed pablum.
Langon Foss' art is pitch perfect and he fills each panel with tons of wonderful detail. Meanwhile Bourdain can't help but drop some knowledge, from the Moguro Bocho, Hinoki wood, elvers (which even today can cost 1K per pound), to the ritual of the ortolan.
Nonetheless, here in landlocked Waterloo - I'm still dunking my sushi in soy sauce.
This is a gut punch of a novel that vividly explores a mother's grief and how it ripples outward across borders, reverberating across generations. The later chapters flip mid sentence, the present mingling with the past to probe at the compounding, echoing loss. An experimental work driven by the loss of the author's own child, it was almost too heavy to bear the first time.
I read it again, and the mounting body count of grief, the missing daughter trafficked or dead, the children left alone as their mother, unable to find her daughter flings herself off the cliffs, seen by a visiting woman who misscarries but refuses to give birth to the child and the recollections of cousins and best friends killed - it's a lot. Recounted here it seems almost ridiculous, but there is a plodding sameness to the passing of time, of moving forward that makes for a breathless read. This is an incredibly ambitious novel that's now stuck in my head.
Augusten Burroughs is Brene Brown's shit talking older brother. He's examining much of the same issues but drawing from his own life experience involving abuse, alcoholism, suicide and the death of a loved one.
While he's a tad inconsistent when it comes to kids, and I'm still not sure how I feel about his fat chapters, he still gets the same pass as any self-help book. There comes no expectation of hitting it out of the park every time. And maybe he falters here because he's at his most compelling when he's drawing from his own life experience, and as a childless, average framed, gay man he's a bit out of his element talking about anorexia or losing a child.
Still, Augusten is a straight-talking, no-nonsense story teller and proves a welcome respite from the more airy, optimism indicative of the genre.
17-year-old Romanian Leo Auberg is sent off to a Russian labour camp with a gramophone case filled with poetry, aftershave, socks and a silk scarf. He will spend 5 years shovelling coal, lugging cement and pitching slag armed only with the words of his grandmother “I know you'll come back.”
The book is comprised of short chapters recounting aspects of Leo's life in the gulag. It is filled with oblique details that reveal Herta Muller's long correspondence with poet Oskar Pastior who endured 5 years in a Soviet Labor Camp. This isn't misery porn, some grandiose statement of suffering - it's more precise than that and all the more pervasive.
There's the cheek-bread, so named for the white hunger-fur that appears before death that reveals bartering for food is wasted on them. The nightly exchange of bread and the curse of your ever shrinking exchanges. Trading 50 pages of Nietzsche's Zarathustra cigarette paper for 1 measure of salt. The ridiculous image of the cuckoo-less cuckoo clock - the mechanism reduced to a small piece of rubber, like an earthworm that vibrated with a pitiful rattling noise as it called the hour. And the hunger angel. Even sixty years since his release from the camp, Leo can't escape the memory of the hunger angel — is still locked up inside the taste of eating, that he is still eating against starvation.
Interesting to talk to someone who read it in German and the poetry of the original language. Credit to translator Philip Boehm for his word choice as much of it is still retained in the English translation. Some subtlety is inevitably lost in hunger angel, breath swing, heart shovel and hase-vey but I appreciated the distinct word construction.
The book focuses on one Bryant Tenelle, a young 18 year old boy gunned down mere blocks from his home. It serves as a microcosm of the larger issue of murder in this contentious neighbourhood. After covering homicide and being embedded with the 77th Street precinct in South Central Los Angeles for over a decade Jill Leovy has a unique insight into this problem.
She argues it's the absence of law that is the primary cause of the high homicide rate in predominantly black neighbourhoods. As she puts it “where the criminal justice system fails to respond vigorously to violent injury and death - homicide becomes endemic.”
This absence leads to criminals being emboldened, bystanders living in fear and a cycle of violence where violent acts may be the only way to settle a dispute or exact revenge. Pair that with the crackdown on minor crimes fuelled by the “Broken Windows” theory and you have growing resentment as citizens feel that police are looking for control, not justice.
It's an incredibly readable book and Leovy is an evocative writer.
Before writing Wild, which relaunched Oprah's Book Club, and is of course being made into a movie, Cheryl Strayed wrote an advice column for The Rumpus online. This is a collection of her advice there.
To reduce it to a compendium of online advice is to diminish its beautiful writing. Like the best advice columnists, while I may not wrestle with the conundrum of whether I should have sex for money or attend Christmas with a drug addicted and abusive brother, there is in each answer a kernel of something bigger and potentially relevant to everyone. Without resorting to fey sentimentality, this is a book I'll revisit over and over again when I need a bit of acceptance and understanding, you may find it does the same for you too sweet pea ;)
Lots of geek love. I feel an inevitable screenplay in this book's future.
Andrew Dahl has just been assigned to the Intrepid, the flagship of the Universal Union. It soon becomes evident that Andrew and his newly posted friends are replacing crew members that have met with untimely, and inevitably gruesome deaths. Death by falling rock, toxic atmosphere, pulse gun vaporization, shuttle door malfunction and those damn ice sharks. It doesn't take long to determine there is a bizarre set of rules that seem to govern this ship - most importantly involving away missions and any member of the bridge. There's the pitch - for the sake of keeping the review spoiler free, I'll leave it at that. But you've probably pieced together several plausible resolutions. It's a super fast read so you can forgive it spiraling out with a sputter with the three codas at the end. But it's still hella fun.
I love this Trekkian reality and can only imagine the immense nerd glee I'd feel hearing the Audible version narrated by Wil Wheaton.
Before Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr made words superfluous, I was a card carrying member of the blogsphere. Apart from dissecting my life in long form several times a week over 4 years I eagerly consumed an extensive blogroll. I loved the funny vignettes painted by fellow bloggers. It was my equivalent to the morning paper as I settled into the office in the morning.
Jenny Lawson's book reminds me of some of the best aspects of that world (no surprise as she is a blogger herself) It's outsized personalities finding the drama in everyday life and celebrating the absurd while chasing down every tangent and oh look! something shiny over there! Bad-ass Harry Potter vaginas, Beyonce the Giant Metal Chicken, and hand puppets made from small dead rodents.
Oh relax, it was a squirrel. Funny, random, self-indulgent.
With all the literary panache of an IKEA instruction manual, begrudgingly written by an author who didn't much like the subject, who resigned himself to doing the bare minimum to get this book off the ground.
But I guess it's in keeping with the anti-capitalist theme of a millennial renegotiating their relationship to the grind. In opposition to hustle culture it's not pro-lazy, just anti-burnout. And Shoji comes by it honestly given his dismissive, bordering on abusive former boss and the fraught relationship to work his siblings have that would eventually lead to a death by suicide for his sister.
Shoji does recount some interesting requests from folks looking for company as they file divorce papers, to have someone wave from the train platform as they move out of Tokyo after ten years, or to simply make a fuss over their dog as they walk in the park. But a page turning manifesto this is not, despite having already been made into a manga and TV series in Japan.
Pretty sure this is part of the rarefied pantheon of books joining the likes of Infinite Jest and A Brief History of Time as one of the most bought, least finished books of all time. It starts out strong with an almost singsong, Indian lilt and cadence as Gibreel and Saladin hurtle to earth - interestingly nonplussed by the whole affair. But then its dream sequences and odd digressions left me scratching my head - I just couldn't get my footing.
Rushdie clearly is an accomplished writer. Open the book to any page and the writing often dazzles and he's working here, juggling ideas and poking at concepts. Maybe it's my own expectations coming into the book - wondering what could be so damning as to warrant a fatwa against his life. But it never really gelled and for all the furor it engendered all it managed to elicit from me was mild indifference. If it wasn't part of a book club read I doubt if I would have finished it.
Adina is born in Philadelphia in 1977. At the age of four she is “activated” when her father leaves the family after pushing Adina into the concrete of their yard. Adina realizes that she is a citizen of planet Cricket Rice, sent to earth to report on its inhabitants via a fax machine her mother has rescued from the trash.
You could be forgiven for thinking this is merely a childhood coping mechanism to being raised without her father on the edge of poverty, mostly isolated and alone. But her transmissions continue into adulthood — eventually being collected into a novel that receives wide acclaim. Lovely, but the conceit could quickly devolve into twee musings of life on Earth but Bertino is also writing a story of loss and grief. The acknowledgements speak of an Adina Talve-Goodman, a writer integral to the New York literary scene who passed away just prior to the pandemic at the age of 32 from cancer. The story is at turns devastating and yet Bertino managed to marry these divergent tones. I think in large part it's because Adina and her friends are queer, in every beautiful iteration of the word.
Falling into that well mined territory of Levitt & Dubner, Gladwell and Pink - The Power of Habit was another great, heavily researched and thoughtful read about the science of habits.
I loved discovering Target's investment in data driven analysis. Motivated by how a pregnancy can make consumers more susceptible to marketing and flexible about their purchasing habits, Target saw a goldmine in identifying pregnant shoppers. An uptick in skin creme and vitamin purchases along with a myriad of other tiny factors, and Target can pinpoint your trimester with frightening accuracy. Or course people are creeped out by that sort of prescience, so while Target sends targeted flyers showcasing cribs and diapers, they're placed alongside ads for lawnmowers and wine glasses so that it will all appear random.
Or how there's a program called Hit Song Science that analyzes mathematical characteristics of a song to predict potential chart toppers. Hey Yeah was identified as a bonafide hit before the general public even heard the song.
Maybe one should despair at our entirely programmable decisions but I for one welcome our data driven overlords.
I loved Leviathan Wakes, Book 1 of the Expanse trilogy, and fortunately Caliban's War does not suffer from the typical sophomore slump. It was great returning to the world introduced by the writing tag team of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck.
It's a blockbuster of a book. The protomolecule isn't content to ferment quietly on Venus and a modified organism has decimated a station on Ganymede forcing a tense standoff between Earth and Mars. It's the literary version of a summer tentpole movie with action beats in every chapter. I even enjoyed the political machinations scattered throughout the book. They've got a seriously diverse cast of characters and some of the most bad ass ladies in sci fi, anchored once again by a search for a missing girl. I'm already clearing the reading calendar for Book 3: Abbadon's Gate.
All the makings of a cult classic with some great meta elements once you start digging into the bibliography of the author James Renner. It opens with the discovery of the Man from Primrose Lane. A notorious recluse also known as the Man with a Thousand Mittens for his quirk of always wearing mittens regardless of the weather. He has been found dead in his home, the victim of a gut-shot wound. But more significantly, it looks like he has been dragged to the kitchen where all his fingers have been cut off and put into a blender.
That's it. That's all I want to tell you. I went in completely blind and loved the sense of discovery as more elements of the story unfolded. I want to give it 5 stars but my sense it could have been edited tighter butts up against my love of all the hints, easter eggs and wish for a closer examination of some of the story's elements.
It's the Princess Bride written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, read to a young Fred Savage by Emberto Eco. It's a gothic thriller, coming of age, roiling caper, noir, love story about books.
Daniel Sempere is taken by his father to The Cemetery of Lost Books where he gets to chose a book to adopt and keep alive forever. He settles on The Shadow of the Wind by Julian Carax, certain that it had been waiting for him there for years, since before he was born. The book begins to bleed into his life and over the next 10 years he tries to unravel the mystery of what happened to the author Julian Carax and why someone, named after the devil in one of Carax's novels, horribly disfigured and smelling of burned paper, is intent on destroying every bit of the author's work.
It's deliciously gothic, bordering on, as Stephen King puts it, cheesy. It's translated from the Spanish, who I can only assume don't mind having a ton of names dropped on them. While not quite the mess of One Hundred Years of Solitude where everyone is named Arcadio or Aureliano it's still way more characters than I normally have to juggle. Each offers a tiny thread that Daniel will need to decipher what has happen to the elusive Julian. I would have been happy to travel the streets of Barcelona with Daniel and his motley group of compatriots but it gets neatly, maybe a bit too neatly, wrapped up in the end.
After reading Faber's Book of Strange New Things this one seems a bit heavy handed with a bit too neat an ending but it's still a compelling read in his familiar restrained style.
The movie adaptation distills the story down to it's barest essence but has only a glancing familiarity to the original text. The book is far more visceral and like Faber's latest book works on multiple levels.
It seems such a minor detail, but I wasn't enjoying this read until I started over with the understanding that the historical events and people in the Dream portion of the book are all real. And the opening refrain of the book begins to make sense. After all, what is history? Turns out it's a collection of unlikely coincidences, vastly connected events, tiny moments that ripple and collide, a three-way standoff, a memory of rain, a cure for insomnia.
Korean history is easily reduced to Japanese occupation and the Korean War until its soft-power explosion that offered the world k-pop, k-dramas and k-beauty — but it's obviously much more than that and Park explores its wild nooks and crannies, giving us the cut finger club, assassinations, and oblique poetry written in architectural magazines. From Jack London dismissing Koreans as “the perfect type of inefficiency - of utter worthlessness” to Ian Fleming's Goldfinger claiming Koreans “are the cruelest, most ruthless people in the world” it hasn't been easy changing the minds of the Western world.
And the 3 sections of the book begin to converge as you read. Elements echo across stories and tiny connections are made while characters evolve and mutate before our eyes. It rewards close attention even as it plays with expectation and indulges in a bit of fun. From the 1999 Stanley Cup final between the Buffalo Sabres and Dallas Stars to Friday the 13th and North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Il. It's all connected and it's a blast to read.
Angelmaker was a wonderful read that left me disappointed it didn't go on longer. It's one of those books you need to take long, savoring pulls at and not middling little sips. The prose meanders but never dawdles.
Chronologically placed in the now, it yet manages to intimate Victorian steampunk, 1920's gangster chic and Bond era villains with global aspirations. Author Nick Harkaway (FUN FACT: He's the son of John le Carre!) renders women well - from the octogenarian Edie, with a few tricks up her sleeve and a vicious, blind pug in her bag - to Polly, the gun moll with an enthusiastic and altogether erotic fixation on passing locomotives. Throw in some mechanical bees. robotic monks, an underground criminal market and a backstory that spans generation - well, you've got yourself a ripping good yarn.
It's a wonder it doesn't collapse into a jumbled mess. There are so many cogs and wheels, pins and pulleys that it should fly apart in all directions but Harkaway, like his protagonist Joe Spork, manages to pull it all together with clockwork precision.
I'm not a fan of the hand wringing, first world problems - have I got some, redemptive memoir. Stop me if you've heard this before... with the death of her mother the author divorces her husband, flirts with rampant promiscuity and a quickly developing heroin addiction. Her solution? To hike the Pacific Crest Trail from California to Washington on her own with little to no outdoor hiking experience... in an effort to find herself.
But I like her honest, unfettered voice that tells a story like a good friend over a bottle of the good stuff. She has an ability to invoke the sweeping vistas and bleak otherness of the wilderness. How awesome people can be. How they can save your life by doing something as simple as talking to you or putting you up for the night.
You know how the story ends but she makes the journey worthwhile. It's contradictory, messy and convoluted with no easy outs and only the persistent weight of an all too big backpack and the punishing crawl of simply putting one aching foot in front of the other and telling herself over and over “I am not afraid.”
I loved this quiet book. Beautifully written, but it is the small shared experiences that ring familiar. An apple peel, stories of persimmons, the ”death” of an aunt that hides a stranger truth and a pervasive sense of melancholy. I don't often get to read stories that obliquely mirror my own experience and I'm grateful for the experience. That is also a perfect cover.
I loved the movie and reading the book I can't help but see a young Sean Young, William Sanderson and Harrison Ford occupying the characters in my head. I like the movie even more having read the book.
It's a fantastic read with a ton of ideas bubbling on the surface to explore. Notions of faith, empathy, religion, consumerism, perception and kipplization.
The Antichrist is brought into the world to to fulfill his role in the coming Armageddon. A screwup at the nursery and Damien-in-waiting ends up in bucolic Lower Tadfield basically growing up as one of the Little Rascals while the confused American Satanists wonder when their little one will begin to manifest his unholy powers.
While the demon Crowley and angel Aziraphale (“Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide.”) should be girding themselves for the coming war of angels they instead find they rather like Earth and would prefer it not be destroyed.
Meanwhile the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have duly arrived and have managed to attract another biker gang in their wake who decide they need names denoting their unpleasantness on a lesser degree to Death, Famine, War and Pollution (Pestilence having retired in 1936 following the discovery of penicillin) And so we meet Grievous Bodily Harm, Cruelty to Animals, Really Cool People and Treading in Dogshit (formerly All Foreigners Especially The French, formerly Things Not Working Properly Even When You've Given Them a Good Thumping, (but secretly No-Alcohol Lager), briefly Embarrassing Personal Problems, formerly known as Skuzz)
It's Monty Python meets Douglas Adams with a pinch of Christopher Moore's Lamb and a lot of fun besides.
I count it a privilege to be able to revisit the canon as an “adult” instead of the forced march of high school reading. It's nice to savour the book and just be blown away at the sheer volume of ideas intimated at in every chapter. And dense too. I can't help but feel in today's indulgent age the book might have ended up being twice as long and half as good.
Ironic reading this on the LED screen of an iPad especially considering how Bradbury was a big fan of words on the printed page. When Faber caresses the Bible Montag gives up he reminisces aloud: “Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go.”
Glad I finally got around to reading this.
Man this hit me in the feels. This would have been a momentous book for me as a pre-teen. I totally identified with Jin Wang and in him recognized the need to fit in as a second generation Asian surrounded by a majority of white peers and the undercurrent of Asian stereotypes that still bubbled to the surface from Long Duk Dong to William Hung. It is a coming of age story that explores this overwhelming need to fit in while wresting with a larger cultural identity. It works absolutely perfectly as a graphic novel and manages to say so much in such a short and simple way. Loved it.
Frustrating in that it's slow going at the onset as it works to establish the rules of this world. Elements that will no doubt figure heavily in later books are teasingly introduced, including the idea of Dust and the city in the Aurora. Bookending that is a non-ending that simply opens the door into Book 2.
It's that chewy centre where all the goodness lays. Packed with adventure and an ever growing cast of incredible characters. Loved it.
Taken as an individual book I give it a 3 (it's so incomplete!) but I suspect the trilogy will fill in the gaps and clarify the themes Pullman is striving for.