David Yoon

Well crap. Figured I'd check out Leviathan Wakes given the TV adaptation coming this spring. Now I have to read the entire damn, George R.R. Martin length, Expanse saga. It's a rip-roaring, space opera lovechild of Firefly, Alien and the Maltese Falcon.

On one hand you've got Jim Holden, ice mining junior officer made leader by default when all but a few members of his crew are obliterated. On the other you've got Joe “space fedora” Miller as your classic noir detective well past his best by date. The two will converge on a solar system-wide conspiracy that could threaten the lives of billions.

Space battles, rapacious corporate interests, alien goo, vomit zombies and fiction's largest Chekov gun. I had so much fun reading this I'm almost afraid of how disappointed I'm going to probably end up being over the TV show.

Favorite Shakespearean play, I've seen it twice at Stratford. The first time I saw Lady MacBeth played by Lucy Peacock losing her mind onstage I freaked. Loved it ever since. (the perils of o'erleaping ambition also seemed relevant in the white collar world I work in)

A rough start - I don't know why approaching it as a novel instead of a memoir threw me off. The thought of a Boston bred, liberal arts WASP working at the Paris Review with George Plimpton while taking ownership of a faltering Brooklyn deli with Korean immigrant in-laws felt too contrived, heavy handed almost.

Thankfully he handles the two worlds with a light hand and I began settling into the narrative. “Truth” is stranger than fiction and the memoir moniker extended author Ben Howe bit of slack. I enjoyed his brand of navel gazing and digression that avoided veering too far into wry, hand-wringing New Yorker.

A wonderfully quirky, coming of age book that kicks off in the late 80's in the small town of Riviere Du Loup where Mickey Bauermann is introduced to Hope Randall. She's the latest in line to realize the Randall curse - to predict the end of the world.

While the clan's visions of the apocalypse have proven less than accurate so far, when Hope discovers her date, further corroborated with by the expiry date of hundreds of ramen packages, she sets out across the globe looking for answers.

Meanwhile Mickey is left behind, somewhat smitten but otherwise eking out his small town existence. It's wry and bittersweet like all highschool crushes that abruptly end.

And so it seems the world ends everyday. From broadcast images of the Gulf war, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the burying of Pompeii, to the continuous reinvention of Japan. the disappearance of childhood landmarks and family legacies.

All in all pretty impressive in that it's wonderfully translated from the original French. Throughout I couldn't help but think of that great Joel Plaskett song “Love This Town”

Davey and me, face down in our soup
In some French restaurant, outside Riviere Du Loup
Last night out on tour, we burned the place to the ground
There's a reason that I love this town.

Not a whodunit but rather a how to get away with it thriller. By the end of the first chapter Yasuko Hanoaka and her daughter Misato have killed Yasuko's ex-husband Togashi. You could argue it was in self-defence but that's not the point. Yasuko's neighbor, the heavyset, round-faced Ishigami overhears the commotion and deduces their predicament. Clearly infatuated with Yasuko, he offers up his services in covering up the crime. “Trust me” he says, “Logical thinking will get us through this.”

Ishigami, the math genius stuck in a dead end job teaching highschool, finds himself pitted against his former classmate Manabu Yukawa, the physics professor that goes by the moniker Inspector Galileo when he helps with police investigations. Yukawa at one point asks whether it's more difficult to create the unsolvable problem or to solve that problem.

That's what's happening here. On one hand you're working with Ishigami to create the perfect alibi while working alongside Yukawa trying to find the chinks in the armour and dismantle the perfect crime. There's clues enough to tease you but Higashino keeps throwing out curveballs.

A clean translation of some direct, workmanlike prose that propels the story forward - this was a unique, to me, take on the thriller genre.

OMG it's Fifty Shades of Grey for the Korean mother set. It's a rich fantasy where a mother's disappearance sends her kids and husband into spiralling guilt over how they should have paid her more attention while she was around. No wonder it sold millions in South Korea. It feeds on the Korean mother as martyr complex while showcasing what her sacrifices wrought - a wealthy and successful first born son and a daughter who is a world renowned author. Even the daughter who has gone to raise her own kids is doing it in America.

There are so many cultural cues that, while certainly universal, resonate so clearly for a Korean son. And while I resent the clear manipulations on display here, don't think I didn't go and visit my folks immediately after reading the book. I've bumped my rating from a 3 to a 4 simply for the joy of reading my first Korean translation and recognizing so many of the Korean traditions and cues that I spent much of my formative years as a second gen trying to ignore.

It seems the introvert, much like the geek, has garnered favour over the years. Even the the word itself is less a pejorative than it once was. Of course I'm on the internet, posting on a website focused on books ...maybe I'm experiencing a slight group bias.

Beyond these bookish walls it's clear we celebrate the Cult of Personality. TV hammers the idea home with outsized personalities armed with witty rejoinders while the news seems to adhere to the adage “he with the loudest voice wins”.

In the office we foster brainstorming, team rooms and open concept work environments.

At school we wring our hands if little Johnny prefers to be by himself while teachers preach “participation” with grouped desks and team work.

We're doing it wrong. When a good third to half of the world is made of introverts maybe it's time we go back to the honouring character instead of charisma, working in solitude, and appreciating quiet introspection. This isn't about being shy - being an introvert is all about how you respond to stimulation - especially social stimulation. Introverts can hold a room, speak to the masses, make their points heard - they just need to carve out some space to recuperate all that spent social capital.

So what's not to like about a book championing the thoughtful, bookish and unassuming with an entire chapter devoted to Asian deference? Susan Cain is one of us and you can't help but find yourself on the page.

Meh, which is strange considering the otherwise effusive reviews. I guess I just wasn't in the right space for this kind of read.

Brothers Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba deliver the perfect combination of story and art. It's beautifully rendered on every page. The colors, the line work, the shadows, the characters at different points in their lives so clearly defined - all of it together creates a compelling whole that I kept thinking on for days after I'd finished.

Fabio Moon in an interview states: “We can plan all we want, but sometimes life has other plans for us, and so life, for all of us, is an adventure worth discovering every single day. ...Every day, we can fall in love, fall out of it, be happy and sad and all in-between, so it all comes down to this: as we live life, are we paying attention?”

Written by Kitchener-Waterloo's very own Scott Chantler who I had the good fortune meeting at Ignite Waterloo. It's a physically gorgeous book with rich, thick paper beautifully bound. I loved the story pivoting on the Thomas Gray poem and its all the more compelling once you hear the backstory. This could be an incredible ebook with such a rich vein of source material that Scott was privy to in making it. A true labor of love

In the end I ended up disliking the characters immensely. But I couldn't put the book down.

It reads like a meta exploration on narrative. Gillian Flynn is a master of words and picks them incredibly well to allude and insinuate. It's an exploration in tone, on unreliable narrators, whether on the page or in the media. The facts never change but your assessment of them does based on how they are presented. So while it's got a keen eye on media and it's manipulative bias to garner ratings - it's also playing with the thriller novel form.

Gillian Flynn sets herself up to solve/resolve a momentous challenge, and while it may not tie up as well as I'd like, it never fails to surprise.

Maybe it's just bald-faced jealousy that taints my opinion. I mean here is an author with a MFA in fiction writing with articles appearing in GQ, Bon Appetit, The New York Times, not to mention a best selling book and the chef/owner of the very successful, if oddly named, Prune in the East Village. But in the end it just feels all a little too...

It comes off like Gwyneth Paltrow experiencing things at a level us mere plebes can only play at. Gabrielle Hamilton has been there done that. Drunk at 13, coke at 16 then off to backpack Europe to come back to a prime offer of running her own restaurant with no real prior experience. In the meantime this “staunch Marxist feminist, budding lesbian, black nationalist sympathizer, and literacy advocate” goes off and marries a tall, dark Italian doctor with his own villa, ironically of course.

Maybe what rankles is that I'm just too much the suburban foodie wannabe that plagues the industry with my uninformed opinions on taste.

“There is a way, a distinct way, that people who work in the industry speak to each other about food and you can tell, within minutes, that they are part of your extended clan. It's not like an obnoxious foodie talks about food, ostentatiously throwing around kitchen terms and names of ingredients they have researched at length. it's not like an appreciative eater talks about food - awed and enamored and perfectly happy to speak of his enjoyment without having any idea of what he's just eaten or how it was achieved. It's the way only someone who works in the industry talks about food, by almost not talking about it, but just throwing out a few code words and signals - like a gang member flashing you his sign. Every single time that I sit at a restaurant's bar, order the txacoli or gruner veltliner rather than the sauvignon blanc, ask for the razor clams and not the calamari, I am sniffed out immediately by the server as an industry peer, having said nothing.”

Or lamenting the state of cheese.

“I am grateful for the burratta, to be sure ...In fact, I have finally understood that we will not be eating burratta in the US anymore, because even the best that you get at Agata and Valentina, “fresh off the airplane” is not it. You can't eat burratta in the States because it can't stay fresh long enough to make the journey. it is always a hair sour and just starting to harden and it turns watery and “off” not matter how “just flown in from Bari” the wholesaler at Murray's insists it is.”

So yeah food porn galore, I just couldn't escape the whiff of condescension on my behalf.

It feels like a loose collection of European short stories bordering on fable.

Darisa the Bear, the greatest of hunters in the old kingdom who in his youth practised taxidermy at night to keep Death there among the dead cats and small animals he worked on. He was long to master the craft but was otherwise intent on keeping Death from wandering the house and alighting on his sickly older sister.

Or there was Luka the butcher who in his youth longed only to master the single stringed Balkan folk instrument the gusla. Seeking a chaste marriage to appease their respective families he would, through a string of seemingly random events, become the monstrous wife-beater the city of Galina quietly ignored.

The Deathless Man, Gavran Gaile who could read the arc of other people's lives in their coffee ground. And of course, the Tiger's Wife.

But while they may feel like the remembered old stories spun from an aging man, his granddaughter the narrator Natalia finds herself amidst her own strange world. An old monastery with families of sickly gravediggers, lavender pouches tied around their necks in fraying ribbon, searching the vineyards looking for a long buried cousin and the phrase “wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind.”

Within each world I find myself engrossed but constantly stumbling to regain my footing in between each section, wishing for some stronger connective tissue that might better bind these disparate elements together.

Joseph Boyden is batting 1000 as far as I'm concerned. Didn't think I could possibly like this as much as his latest, Orenda - but it blew me away. Boyden should be writing all the histories. It's jaw droppingly good.

We follow two young Cree boys determined to join the men going overseas for WWI. They join the Southern Ontario Rifles and subsequently see fighting at the Somme, Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele while proving themselves able snipers.

Elijah begins to relish his role in the war. He is good at killing men and is tinged with the glow of his growing addiction to morphine. Xavier, on the other hand, begins to withdraw from the horrors he cannot help but see.

Boyden jumps from scenes during war, to the aftermath as an elderly Niska paddles her nephew home. We see her childhood, growing up the daughter of a windigo killer then jump to the Xavier and Elijah as young boys growing up in Moose Factory. Their stories are all tied together and beautifully managed. Loved this book.

Being Canadian I've managed to reach middle age having never read To Kill a Mockingbird. (I haven't even seen the movie!) It was never assigned for summer reading. I have not had to sit through a class and endure questions like “how are the themes of equality explored?”

I think every American Family must have at least one copy of the book on their shelves somewhere. Part of the “You're An American” kit that includes Fleetwood Mac's Rumors and Monopoly. How else do you explain the $9000.00 a DAY in royalties still being handed over to Harper Lee's estate. They must just back up a dump truck every year and backfill schools across the United States with paperback copies.

Despite all that, it still holds up. While the Hitler bit near the end is a bit much, it manages to be a well balanced, beautiful gem of a story that doesn't dissolve into preciousness or heavy handed moralizing. It's a lovely read.

Of course I'm eager to list the books I've loved reading but scanning my shelves here on Goodreads it's getting to be a bit predictable. I'm seeming the indiscriminate reader uttering breathless “Loved it” affirmations for book after book. Thought I'd better offer up something else.

I've read this book. Not that long ago. Didn't labor through it like you do with some “important” books. I whipped through it rather quickly which implies I enjoyed it. But honestly I couldn't tell you a thing about it. It's about as bland as the cover. Even after reading some of the other reviews I've got nothing. Just one of those books you consume but never really read.

In searching out and reading more Korean works in translation I'm beginning to settle into the strange narrative obsessions that I see colouring so much of the work. Themes of food, sex, death and art, often mashed into a jarring tangle, keep recurring.

I Have the Right to Destroy Myself is no different but moves with a dreamlike eeriness, broken with the occasional jarring episode. I didn't feel the individual characters got truly fleshed out and are defined by specific actions instead. A brief distraction.

Narrated entirely by a five year old what quickly could become grating is sustained nicely (but only because on reflection it's really an adult telling the story as a child if that makes sense)

It's not the book's fault! It's an award-winning debut to a series based on the fantastic premise of Slough House, where disgraced, problematic, or washed up MI5 agents go to toil out the rest of their days. And clearly there was enough there to warrant a fantastic series on AppleTV.

But therein lies the problem. I watched the first season based on this book, starring an outlandishly flatulent Gary Oldman, first and THEN read the book. It's not a matter of the show being better than the book, it's just they are both exactly the same. It was like I was reading the script for the season - the book adds nothing to the experience. There's no missed backstory, no character interiority that's examined, no literary flourishes that would be impossible to render onscreen. Apart from a slight divergence at the ending (which I thought the show did better anyways) the two are one and the same.

So it gets knocked a star for a lacklustre reading experience, unique to me. Read on its own, prior to seeing the show, I imagine it would fare a lot better.

With appearances on both This American Life and The Moth - Elna Baker's clearly in my wheelhouse. After reading this, I think I prefer her spoken word. Pulled together into a full-blown “memoir” it suffers under it's own weight. Her anecdotes get mired in the persistent narrative of striving to be pretty. It's like she's writing for Mormon Cosmo. There are some great stories here, perfect little bits that are truly fun but she's more of good in small doses sort of treat.

Picked it up after seeing Sedaris at Massey Hall. Using a varied bestiary to tell his stories I found it harder to connect with the vignettes, preferring his more autobiographical “Dress Your Family...” Love the illustrations by Ian Falconer.

Lehane has somehow avoided the curse of the bad movie adaptation with Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone and Shutter Island. He's such a “guys” writer without being cliche. Despite having all the standard set pieces and actors he manages to put them together with an easy familiarity. It doesn't hurt that he has such a keen ear for dialogue (except in the case of teenagers which made me cringe every time) So while I didn't read Gone Baby Gone, I did see the movie, which helped inform the backstory to Moonlight Mile.

I just love his muscular, descriptive style whether it's rendering a narcissistic, chauvinist “Master of the Universe” or a psychotic Russian mobster. While these are essential elements that drive the plot forward I especially enjoyed the wry observations of the time. It's America, post economic meltdown with a middle aged P.I. that's feeling the years and the crushing weight of just making a living.

Quite the contrast reading this after just finishing Evanovich's “One For the Money”

Frankly got tired of slogging through the “classic” Moby Dick and wanted to see what the fuss was about. Blazed through the Millennium trilogy over the Christmas holidays. Lisbeth is the anti-Bella. Book 2 was a bit of tough and really seemed the preface to Book 3 which rounded out the series nicely. First experience with the iPad as an eReader and I'm hooked.

It's my introduction to the Duke and it's proving difficult to live up to the advance hype. Could something like this even exist today or would he be dismissed as nothing more than another James Frey? Unfair, as it's more than just a drug fueled neon blaze across Vegas but an examination of the drug culture and the clarion call of gonzo journalism. This appeared as a two part feature in Rolling Stone and even today would be a savage swipe in a publishing world that tends to favor a grade 5 reading level. Still, I read this and think about the subsequent legion of narcotics taking, wannabe burnouts celebrating their own excesses and shudder.

Alan Parson's goes out for a run in the woods with his son Eugene. Only Eugene returns. Diagnosed with autism and mosaic Angelman Syndrome, Eugene is completely non-verbal. It's left for the family to determine what exactly happened.

Mia Parson is the 20-year old daughter of Alan, who provides the frenetic narration of the story, often indulging in tangents and copious footnotes as her mind careens about pulling at various possible threads. Is her father dead or has he simply left the family behind? Which is worse? Was it suicide or perhaps something more ominous, and how does the research he left behind about a “Happiness Quotient” fit into the picture? How much can we even know about our own family and the secrets they keep? How far would we go to protect them?

It's another literary thriller with a special-needs child at its heart from Angie Kim who clearly owns this genre. She doles out bits and pieces of information that point to various motives while indifferent outside forces conspire to assign certain blame. Truly a rollercoaster ride, the book nonetheless manages to provide a satisfying ending without completely showing its hand.