David Yoon

This is classic Raymond Chandler/Dashiell Hammett noir featuring a hard boiled, hard luck detective with a smart mouth. But instead of crooked cops and ruthless gangsters hunkered in the dark alleyways of LA we find our protagonist Bernie Gunther in post WWII Germany. He's following his own moral compass, trying to shake off the horrors of the Third Reich.

It's 1949 and Bernie's life as a hotel-keeper has reasonably bottomed out in the town of Dachau. He finds himself assigned to track down a missing Nazi, and the ostensibly simple request explodes into a dazzling, if not somewhat improbable, series of escalating fiascos.

It's filled with the pulpy argot of detective noir that is deliciously distinct. “There was a sort of twinkle in his iris that came off his eyeball like the point of a sword” or “The fog was back. It rolled in like steam from a sausage kitchen on a cold winter's day.” It's the readerly equivalent of the Sunday TV matinees of my youth that never let any sense of probability get in the way of a rousing tale.

John Green has a style. His characters are the whip smart, wise cracking, post-millenial heirs to every John Hughes teen. With a twist ...cancer!

I felt manipulated. (which I'm not entirely adverse to, considering how much I like Wonder) Without spoilers it's just felt like we were steered to every cathartic, emotional climax with laser precision while everything else fell apart. In movie parlance, we've got killer beats throughout but no single thread gets resolved.

Anyways, I'm willing to own up to the fact that the fault may lie with my reading, my frame of mind; considering how smart people, who's critique I respect, loved the book. But this reading gets a 3.

I don't know what to say considering the profound impact it had on many a reader, but I just thought it ok - which is even more damning than being vehemently opposed to it. The story should be enough, revolving around Satan, a talking cat, naked witches, Pilate in the time of Christ and Satan's ball. People lose their heads, run naked in the streets and are disappeared. But it found it flat despite all that.

A fantastic conversation over on Twitter revealed alternatives to the uninspired translations of my Penguin edition done by Pevear and Volokhonsky including those by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor and another by Hugh Alpin. It's worth a re-read to find out if I might enjoy it more.

** Just a note that I had the chance to reread the 1995 Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor translation. This was definitely a more enjoyable read that warrants a solid four stars. Perhaps being familiar with the story reading it a second time made it run more smoothly but I find that the Burgin/O'Connor translation scans better. The Peavar translation on the other hand often tripped me up, making me conscious of the lines and frustrating the flow of information.

It's easy to forget this isn't a work of fiction and instead represents over 3 years the author spent in a Mumbai slum interviewing its residents. Unlike a typical journalistic novel, Boo disappears from the narrative and lets the people speak for themselves.

The slum dwellers live in the space nearby the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport, walled off from it's clean terminals and opulent hotels by a large billboard for floor tiles that over and over promise to stay Beautiful Forever. They scavenge and live off the detritus travellers leave behind. When a spiteful, one-legged prostitute sets herself on fire and falsely accuses her neighbours, it sets in motion a series of events. Beyond notions of guilt or innocence, everyone sees it as an opportunity to line their pockets from the police to the neighbours. Despite their bottom rung status there is still jockeying for position and notions of hierarchy.

Adam Johnson just kills it in the Orphan Master's Son. To pull the veil on the Hermit Kingdom and render such a complex, multilevelled story is just an Herculean task. The book starts with our protagonist groping in the dark with only a vague sense of his surroundings, catching snippets of words from the outside world. Jun Do is the blank slate this world necessitates, a tool to be used. His name is a neat reminder of John Doe and an American later notes “I don't think a John Doe is a missing person, I think it's when you have the person, just not his identity”

“They lived in a land where people had been trained to accept any reality presented to them‚ and there was only one penalty, the ultimate one, for questioning reality, how a citizen could fall into great jeopardy for simply noticing that realities had changed.” And there Jun Do finds his answer and creates a new identity in the second half. Jun Do disappears.

It's peppered with enough gallows humour to keep it from getting mired in grim despair. Even the People's loudspeaker admonishing the North Koreans is a fully realized character. It's hard to know how much license the author takes, some have taken umbrage over the overly comical take on Kim Jong-il but then this was someone revered as both leader and religious figure who claimed to be able to change the weather based on his mood and regarded himself as a worldwide fashion trendsetter. If anything I worry that the author kept some of the more savage elements from the reader.

Do yourself a favor and forgo reading too many reviews if you're the type that hates spoilers. Everyone - mine included, give something away and it's one of those audacious books that has you guessing all the way through and surprises you at every turn. Fantastic read!

I'm trying to read more contemporary poetry this year, just don't expect any sort of piercing analysis. You know when looking at abstract paintings someone always says something to the effect of “My 3 year old could draw better than that”. Same.

Still, what we have here is a poetic Paul's Boutique mashing Guns and Roses with T.S. Eliot - but we're veering awfully close to Poetry Slam territory. Turns out if you want to write your own with that Michael Robbins flavour www.poetweet.com.br will happily render a sonnet or rondel using your Twitter feed.

Deep fried
(by David Yoon via poetweet)

Tequila than some pigface tacos?
Sampler ...and now I'm diabetic
Company to my list. Any recos?
She's not being euphemistic.

Always looking for great stories.
To Sleep coming out this September!
Point as far as superhero movies.
What day it is ...and still sober.

To sipping some spirits soon!
Experience? It's been so long.
His first child this afternoon.
Brings me back - love that song!
It's Dethklok meets Sailor Moon

Ernest Cline was raised in a world of orange shag carpeting and wood panelled dens. An era where grimy arcade games were stuffed in the corners of pizza joints and bowling alleys and John Hughes movies were our teenage touchstones.

Cline may not be a great writer and frankly Ready Player One plays out like a screenplay that foreshadows the inevitable movie. Still, that's not to say this isn't a hella fun read.

We're talking competitive bouts of Pac-Man,Tempest and a memorable head-to-head against a Lich King playing Joust. It's walking the marbled halls of the Tyrell Corporation, flying the Serenity with Max Headroom as your personal AI or racing your own DeLorean. Throw in some School House Rocks, Family Ties, Ghostbusters and mix well. It's guilty pleasure in the form of geek lore. I blazed through this in a weekend.

All that's missing is the denouement where the villain is escorted away shaking his fist and screaming “And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling kids!”

Fine, BookTok made me buy it.

It didn't take much of a nudge considering how much I loved Circe and how interesting it was to have this perspective after reading Silence of the Girls. And while it didn't reduce me to tears as BookTok would have me believe, I can't begrudge the additional attention that has pushed book sales north of 1 million copies.

And I get the BookTok love. I might venture as far as to say it reads like YA. It has all the necessary fantasy elements, the burgeoning young love in the face of disapproving parents, the tragic choices that must be made, all between wild swings of rapturous joy and plummeting despair. And it is written through the eyes of a young, smitten Patroclus, best-beloved of all of Achilles companions.

But it's based on the Iliad and Miller with her Masters in Classics and years of teaching high school students takes the source material seriously. She nails the major beats but fills in the remaining spaces with such grace. Their time at Mount Pelion studying under the centaur Chiron is a study in young love “We were like gods at the dawning of the world, and our joy was so bright we could see nothing else but the other.”

Miller needs to bank that youthful affection because at Troy we see Achilles coming into his birthright and seeking glory and fame. Miller manages to take a decade of war that left thousands dead, countless innocents killed, and hordes of war brides taken as trophies and reduce it into a vague backdrop onto which Patroclus and Achilles love continues to grow. Achilles is a petulant dick but rendered through the sympathetic eyes of Patroclus he remains redeemable. Also, Miller can write an ending.

Pasquale Tursi is the proprietor of the uniquely named “Hotel Adequate View” located in Porto Vergogna. It's a place people arrive at by mistake.

Dee Moray is the Hollywood starlet diagnosed with a terminal condition that gets shuffled off to this “rumour of a town” She is only the second American guest the hotel has seen aside from a failed novelist who, after years of visiting, has only managed to punch out a single thin chapter of a war memoir.

Jump to the present day where we meet Claire Silver the over-educated assistant to one of Hollywood's biggest producers Micheal Deane, a seventy-two-year-old man with “the face of a nine-year-old Filipino girl” the result of innumberable “facials, spa treatments, mud baths, cosmetic procedures, lifts and staples, collagen implants, outpatient touch-ups, tannings, Botox injections, cyst and growth removals, and stem-cell injections.”

Claire is getting pitched by wanna-be screenwriter Shane Wheeler on a movie about the fated (and cannibalistic) 1846 expedition party called “Donner!” (Exclamation mark essential)

Oh, and there's Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor too.

Jess Walters somehow manages to juggle a horde of characters spanning decades and continents. A perfect summer read about thwarted ambition, dashed hopes and beauty amidst the ruins of expectation.

Auggie Pullman is about to start fifth grade. It's his first day at school having been homeschooled all his life. Auggie has a severe craniofacial abnormality. As he puts it, “Whatever you're thinking, it's probably worse.” This is his story.

You can probably imagine the rest. Any synopsis would read like the plot of a saccharine after school special. You've got all the usual suspects. The sneering bully, the tentative best friend, the supportive family, the pretty girl who sees what everyone else can't. Ugh - I've just thrown up in my mouth a bit. I'd also argue that while several sections of the book are told from alternate viewpoints, they all read the same. Their voices are not distinct.

I loved it. Hope, friendship, love and above all, kindness. Loved the punchy chapter arcs. The frank narration and warm tone throughout. Even the outright manipulation of heartstrings (you can all but hear the swelling tones of the soundtrack in your head as you read) can't dissuade me that this was anything other than a beautiful read.

“Folks think a lifetime is a thing stretched out over years. It ain't. It can happen quick as a match in a dark room.”

It is a completely new world to me. Rural, poor and black in the days leading up to the arrival of Hurricane Katrina. I could listen to Jesmyn Ward write about the weather all day. I feel the throat-closing heat like a wet blue blanket and hear the sounds of the summer insects.

Let me just get this off my chest. The cover is awful. Not that it assaults any design sensibilities. It's just scans as a YA novel, intimating the houses at Hogwarts or the Districts of Panem. The Rook is more a pulpy, supernatural action thriller laced throughout with a dry wit. This deserves to be a BBC mini along the lines of Sherlock. As to the book, it warrants something a bit more oblique, like a Justin Cronin cover.

The book opens with our protagonist in the rain, surrounded by a ring of unconscious, latex glove wearing assailants, inhabiting a body that used to belong to a Myfawny Thomas. With that we're off and running.

Through a series of letters written to/by herself Myfawny finds out she is a Rook for her “Majesty's Supernatural Secret Service” or the Checquy. In order to secure their shores from any extraordinary threat they employ a menagerie of powered individuals; from a single consciousness spread across 4 bodies to an operative that can exude tear gas through his pores or another that can wander through your dreams. When the Wetenschappeljik Broederschap van Natuurkundigen rears its head, Myfawny must work to quell a horrifying global threat while uncovering the traitor in their midst and unraveling the mystery of who wiped her mind clean and why.

So while I take umbrage with it's YA cover I have to admit it reads like a comic (or graphic novel if you prefer) in novel format. It's Bourne meets the X-Men meets Hellboy's BPRD (Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense) with a bit of the Umbrella Academy thrown in - and it is breathtakingly fun in it's scope. It, as one reviewer notes, “reminds us of those feelings we would get as a child hiding under our blankets trying to read just one more chapter.” A perfect holiday book - be prepared to stay up late.

I picked this up after catching a glimpse of it in the trailer for the upcoming adaptation of Bullet Train. It's clearly a fave of the film's director David Leitch, the book also having made brief appearances in both John Wick and Atomic Blonde.

Not sure what I expected - what I got was a throwback airport thriller with a long middle section entirely devoted to the intricacies of caving.

Written under the pseudonym Trevanian (last names are for barbarian Americans) this feels like such a product of its time, perfectly suited for 12 year old me that was currently riding the era's obsession with ninjas. Our protagonist is born in Shanghai, raised by a Japanese general and infused with the mystic sensibilities of the East. Of course Nicholai Hel is white, with piercing bottle green eyes and is a superior Asian to all the Asians he's surrounding by. Capable of mystic transport and incredibly strategic Go play, Nicholai has dedicated his life to the pursuit of Shibumi or elegant simplicity. At the same time he's a master assassin who can never be photographed due to his “proximity sense”, is a master of Naked/Kill - capable of turning everyday objects into deadly weapons, and is a Stage IV lover capable of ruining women for all future partners who would inevitably fail to come close to the ecstatic orgasms he could inflict.

Trevanian is a man before his time! If this was released today you know the author would be a 350lb ginger neckbeard who writes haiku and unironically owns several katanas and a Sailor Moon dakimakura.

I'm not immune to the guilty read, but this felt plodding and anti-climactic. I was hoping for more outlandish daring-do and outrageous exploits, instead I got inscrutable musings about Americans, Arabs, Brits and Australians with some global oil conspiracy theories thrown in for good measure. It just doesn't lean far enough either way to work as thriller or satire and ends up as a mediocre romp.

I'm gob-smacked after reading this.

I mean more than the fact I ended up enjoying this story of Chungpa Han coming to the US in the 1930s from Korean with only four dollars in his pocket and a suitcase full of Shakespeare. That he portrays an America populated by immigrants; Koreans, Chinese, Italians, Russians helping each other out. That it's a sharp commentary on the “American Dream” and it reads like something that's always been a part of the canon.

And I'm floored that I've never read this before, that Amy Tan would be my first experience with an Asian-American writing about-Asian Americans. That Chang Rae Lee would be my first encounter with a Korean-American author years later. And here was Younghill Kang writing decades earlier.

And that's what absolutely kills me. Younghill Kang taught English at New York University with Thomas Wolfe. Wolfe would introduce him to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner who published his works. Kang dined with Hemingway and Fitzgerald. And while they have become part of the popular consciousness with countless movie adaptations of The Great Gatsby, pilgrimages made to the bars Hemingway wrote in, and even a movie treatment, called “Genius” telling the story of Perkins and Wolfe - Kang doesn't even warrant a footnote.

This is a huge work that deserves wider recognition. As Alexander Chee remarks in the foreword to the new Penguin Classics edition “He is one of those writers whose work has influenced you even if you've never read him.” Expand your literary canon and take in a new perspective from what should be a recognized voice in American letters. Video review here: https://youtu.be/yiEBa_RDxAo

It's a light punchy read. The narrative flows along with a succession of beats clearly informed by her background in TV writing. And in that vein you not so much garner any insight into who Tina Fey is so much as you've got a great script for a Tina Fey sitcom.

She's far too classy to really spill on her co-stars at SNL or 30 Rock other than to effuse loudly over them. What did it mean to her to write Mean Girls. What was working with Lindsay Lohan like or having to feature a movie with Steve Carrell? Minor quibbles really for such a fun read.

“Do I think Photoshop is being used excessively? Yes. I saw Madonna's Louis Vuitton ad and honestly, at first glance, I thought it was Gwen Stefani's baby.”

Mindy gets closer to penning the book I wish Tina Fey wrote. Maybe it doesn't have the comedic beats per minute as Fey, but Kaling dishes. She's the friend over for an evening settling in after polishing off that 2nd bottle of wine and riffing on Romantic Comedy heroine types, potential movie pitches and favorite comedy moments. More importantly she delves into her own life and her rise to current “fame” as costar, writer and producer for The Office. She's pretty aware of the inevitable comparisons to Fey and gets it out of the way early with a FAQ starting with “Why isn't this more like Tina Fey's book?” and can only offer up “I know, man. Tina's awesome.” Mindy's pretty great too.

Moves at a languid pace. Weighing in at over 1,000 pages it's a collection of 3 books. It meanders, takes odd tangents and closes in on itself in ever tightening concentric circles. It could probably be rendered in a third of the length but I never found myself begrudging it's heft.

Simple and straightforward in its prose, perhaps due to translation. It's the story of Tengo, a cram school math teacher and budding writer and Aomame, a fitness instructor and part time assassin. Two divergent lives slowly, inevitably drawn together (

This reads like a lost Tim Burton movie directed by Wes Anderson. Flipping through the first chapter I kept waiting for the character that Johnny Depp was going to play in the inevitable screen adaptation. Turns out it did make to the stage for a brief musical run.

It's Encyclopedia Brown all grown up. Apparently your child prodigies don't exactly navigate adulthood well. Billy Argo is 30, recently released from a mental hospital and still not quite over the mystery of why his beloved sister killed herself. He finds vague work selling hair replacement products. Wig and moustache sets with names like The Junior Executive, The Noble Hunter and The Mysterious Stranger. Past nemeses, now doddering old men like Professor Von Golum keeps forgetting that they plan on killing Billy.

Time hasn't been kind to other kid detectives. Billy runs into the Hartly boys, now working the movie theatre, their detecting days long past when it was discovered their father was running a counterfeiting ring. Frank is heavily medicated after a bad accident at the Old Mill and Joe lost his gig as a mall cop when he shot a shoplifter in the leg.

And I'd happily linger in this off kilter world as Billy navigates his own existential crisis. Cryptic letters hug page gutters to be deciphered (check the copyright page) and the books' french flaps hold a decoder ring to solve other puzzles. Chapter 14 gets stolen entirely.

But it's uneven. Horrible crimes flare up unbidden. Entire buildings and people disappear never to be explained, a little boy tortures his primary school classmates - Bobby Cohen will never walk in a straight line again. And I get it, the adult world comes with adult problems but then it swings back to a shy girl who meekly steals anything pink, blossoming love and classic unmaskings. It's too big a swing - beyond Burton's Batman appearing in the midst of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure this is Todd Phillips' Joker rearing his head.

24 year old Ashely Cordova, the enigmatic and talented daughter of reclusive horror filmmaker Stanislas Cordova, is found dead by apparent suicide.

Enter disgraced journalist Scott McGrath. Several years back he calls out the director as a predator and then on national television says “Someone needs to terminate this guy with extreme prejudice.” Apparently not a good move as far as your career goes, especially when it's based on some innuendo from the supposed chauffeur to the director. (Really? This guy was a respected and hard hitting journalist?)

Being a disgraced journalist must pay well. Seemingly unemployed, McGrath lives in a tony New York brownstone and when his white whale reappears in his life he's got the cash to pay interns, bribe informants and jet off to where he pleases. Naturally he's got a beautiful ex-wife and finds two 20-something proteges, including a beautiful coat-check girl, willing to follow him on his investigative journey from sex clubs, mental hospitals, backwoods shacks, tattoo parlours and witchcraft shops. We're in Dan Brown territory here and at times it's just trying too hard. We're told that to see a Cordova film is to “leave your old self behind, walk through hell, and be reborn.”

Marisha Pessl does a fine job of wrapping up the story and turning it into something else. A different examination altogether. But this bit of metafiction would have been better served up as a novella instead of this full blown tome.

I loved the eerie tension of the mountain aerie mixed with the absolutely stunning language. I had to stop at several points and determine for myself if it was too much, was it veering into purple and overwrought? Considered line by line it feels excessive, but reading at pace the language just gelled into glittering prose. The language felt right, perfect for this discombulated experience.

Our narrator is hired on as a chef for the billionaire elite who trade the grey smog that covers the world and the ubiquitous engineered mung bean flour for the sun bathed Italian Alps and lavish dinner parties. What could go wrong catering to the one percent of the world's one percent? Winning the hearts and minds of potential investors through gastronomical science and a veritable Noah's ark of heritage grains, abundant produce, and a vast deep freezer filled with protien. It feels like an easy set-up where there's a third act revelation of “it was people all along!” but Zhang avoids that easy trope. She does lean hard into the horrors of privileged consumption that left me queasy nonetheless.

Things get wild cooking for a widowed billionaire, his flamboyant geneticist daughter, and a scruffy cat — which now that I'm describing it makes it all seem like Rachel Ray stumbled into Dr. No's mountain lair. It's a lot of chaotic culinary energy here alongside the zeitgeist of anti-billionaire fiction.

Incisive, hilarious and emotional, I just love David's voice on the page. Though in terms of his actual voice - David Sedaris does a mean Billie Holiday. I'm not kidding.