David Yoon

Dark academia with a smart magic system built for logophiles and translators. It's a multi-racial, emo Harry Potter that strikes against empire and colonialism. An alternative steam punk Victorian England fuelled by enchanted silver bars that still adheres to known English history. The golden shackles of privilege and wealth blinding you to the world outside whether it is beyond the walls of academia or the wider world past your shores. This is a campus novel set in a fantasy world with incredibly realized stakes and the tumultuous nature of university friends. Potter was never this scathing or nail biting.

This feels revelatory in how it approaches the topic of being trans. What could have easily been an overly earnest intro to trans-life primer with empowering story arc or, more likely, veered into overdone misery porn, instead feels like author Torrey Peters has long ago dismissed those tropes and is interested in something more. Indeed she has a history self-publishing novellas and offering up name-your-own-price pdfs. She's well past explaining her world to the rest of us and is instead looking to see what happens when, as she puts it, you put a trans woman into a bougie domestic social novel.

Simple premise. 35-year-old Reese, a trans woman living in Brooklyn, is one day contacted by her ex, formally Amy, now detransitioned to Ames, who has knocked up his boss Katrina, a Chinese-Jewish divorcee, and is offering up the novel idea of a three-way, co-parenting of the yet to be born child. Wild.

Along the way we're gifted a ton of insight. Sure some are in your face, theories too good not to share like the “Sex and the City Problem” wherein women are constrained to one of four paths embodied by the women on the show. “Find a partner, and be a Charlotte. Have a career, and be a Samantha. Have a baby, and be a Miranda. Or finally, express oneself in art or writing, and be a Carrie.” The idea that divorce is itself a transition story, or the extended metaphor of rampaging juvenile elephants likened to a generation of trans women in the early 2010 who, without the guidance of an older generation otherwise decimated by HIV, poverty, suicide and repression, inevitably lashed out, ostracizing and punishing those around them.

But Peters is far more subtle about the ideas around performing gender and these were just eye-opening. Reese and her questionable choice in men, the idea of being subjugated, even abused reinforcing society's somewhat backwards notion of femaledom. How Ames can detransition into a man but still retains a bit a “slither” when he walks and while identifying as male doesn't know if he can quite handle the title of “father”. Even Katrina trying on “queer” with all the confrontational assertion and zealotry of a recent convert.

There's a lot to unpack but it's wrapped up in a compelling narrative that I blazed through. It's not written for me but therein lies much of its strength.

Hornclaw is a 65-year old “disease control specialist” who's been killing people for nearly 50 years. Lately she's been missing a step, and in her line of work that can get you killed. She's still working while deflecting well-meaning suggestions of retirement, to outright hostility for the presumption she can continue on at her age. But a few near botched jobs has her wondering if sabotage is afoot, or may she's just getting sloppy, sentimental even.

It's a fun romp through the corporate world of assassination that is reminiscent of Un-su Kim's The Plotters. Hornclaw is part of a functioning underground with its attendant fixers, doctors and disposal experts, and The Old Woman With the Knife feels like a small story within that universe. I've already fan cast this translated work, perfectly suited as a streaming actioner, with Helen Mirren in the titular role.

George Saunders is the master of the short story and this is as close as I'm going to get to attending the creative writing class he teaches at Syracuse University, “chalk dust hovering in the autumnal air, old-fashioned radiator clanking in the corner, marching band practicing somewhere in the distance”. The feeling of sitting a class of earnest students willing to closely examine a text and see where it takes us is nostalgic catnip for this former English major. To top it off it's a close reading of the Russian classics which are included in their entirety from luminaries such as Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Gogol.

Saunders is a warm presence here on the page with an effusive love for these stories. The book is filled with his infectious enthusiasm and clear love of the genre. It's a far cry from a dry and plodding academic tome brandished by some stuffy academic.

For someone who tends to ravenously gulp down entire books this was a welcome admonishment to slow down and better consider the choices being made and the subtle craft of bringing a reader to a satisfying conclusion.

This thing was churned out of a productivity book factory. A paint by numbers self-help book.

Step one: Open the chapter with a bit of anecdata.

“It's 1940 and Dutch scientist Niko Tinbergen would win the Nobel Prize for his research on herring gulls... ““Or, 1965 and Laszlo Polgar is embarking on a grand experiment in creating a squad of child chess geniuses... “

This segues into a habit shaping method reinforced with a few requisite paragraphs and then a bullet-pointed chapter summary while noting our ongoing progress on the 3 laws of creating a good habit. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I get it, it's a self-help book, repetition is important but it feels like the bookish equivalent of someone speaking slower and louder to me after assuming that English isn't my first language.

Still I like the idea of “you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems” and the simple rule “never miss twice.” That's enough to make me gloss over some of the more painful habit tropes gussied up with fancy terms like “temptation bundling”. The “I will do 10 burpees, THEN I will check Facebook” which manifests in so many futile ways when you're trying to quit smoking and does nothing to eliminate the bad habit itself as a long-time quitter will tell you.

Quan Barry made a splash in 2020 with a much talked about novel that focused on a girls field hockey team in the 80's. Naturally you expect her to follow that up with a Mongolian Buddhist quest story helmed by a 23 year old novice that shares a psychic connection with his rebellious twin brother.

Chuluun is in search of the reincarnated Lama and embarks on a reflective travelogue that includes sheep smuggling, personal hunting eagles, American paleontolgists and sky burials. But it's a spiritual journey as well as Chuluun wrestles with his place in the Buddhist order, especially when his pool hustling, cigarette smoking and decidedly “experienced” brother has forsaken much of the order's tenets.

It's a slow journey but one that was thoroughly savoured.

Benny Oh is 13 when his father dies lying drunk in the alley, mistaken for garbage, and run over by a chicken truck. It upends his small family's life. Benny begins to hear objects — the anxious buzz of fluorescent lights, the screaming of coffee beans, the arrogant chatter of coins. Meanwhile his mother Annabelle can't stop seeing the potential in things — old shirts that can become a quilt, the promise of potential in a Michaels store, the perfect world contained in the snow globes bought on eBay. But their relationships to objects is a bit broken. Benny can't shut out the malevolent insistence of scissors and plunges them into his leg and Annabelle becomes a full blown hoarder.

It's up to Benny and the Book, the one the reader is holding in his hands, breaking the literary fourth wall and speaking to us, to unravel the story. It's one that involves the library, a recovering drug addict named The Aleph, a wheelchair bound Slovakian poet known as the Bottleman, ferret sky burials, a backyard murder of crows, a Marie Kondo stand-in and the pervasive question of what is real.

There's a lot going on here, wild digressions, unresolved questions, weird meanderings that render the whole thing a bit shaggy but it is ultimately a hopeful book suffused with Zen sensibility.

Mandel is here expanding her literary universe, plucking characters from her last book, The Glass Hotel, and mining her own experience on tour promoting her world-ending pandemic book Station Eleven. Here in Sea of Tranquility, Olive Llewellyn is touring her wildly successful post-apocalyptic novel and finding herself thinking about how end-of-the-world literature could be born from our current state of economic inequality. In a world that seems fundamentally unfair, perhaps we long to just blow everything up and start over. Or maybe it's based on a longing for heroism. That should the unthinkable happen, we might find ourselves remade into better, more heroic people. Or maybe we just want to imagine a future with less technology in it. Whatever it might be, Mandel muses here that “no star burns forever.”

The book slips from timelines and perspectives over a span of 600 years from a British dandy Edwin St. John St. Andrew arriving in Canada in 1912 to take a run at something, anything really — to a disaffected hotel worker on a moon colony in 2401. Along the way Mandel leaves tiny breadcrumbs across the years and on the page while managing to bring it all together in a melancholic, yet satisfying way.

Mandel I find has a soothing light touch. The writing never really blows my hair back but I enjoy the ride nonetheless. It's literary chill-hop, the perfect bookish vibe.

Finally, I have to mention my favourite anecdote, captured here on the page, based on an experience Mandel had at a literary festival in 2015 with American poet Kay Ryan. Ryan called attention to the phrase “The chickens are coming home to roost...“

“Because it's never good chickens. It's never ‘You've been a good person and now your chickens are coming home to roost.' It's never good chickens. It's always bad chickens.”

And now I can't stop thinking about those bad chickens.

Equal parts scathing humour and eviscerating horror, this feels ripe for a Jordan Peele adaptation. I could happily continue reading as Everett skewers our current cavalcade of racists from the backwoods hillbillies who were “living proof that inbreeding does not lead to extinction” to the president of the United States stuck and cowering under the Resolute desk in the Oval Office forgetting his own wife's first name.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. We open on Money Mississippi with a dead and castrated white boy slumped beside a black man in a suit holding his severed testicles in his hands. It's a police procedural as two Black detectives try and unravel the mystery as the dead Black man mysteriously appears at the scene of another murder.

Everett is working on so many levels here from the broad to the subtle and meta textual. We have the vaguely voodoo Mama Z who has faithfully chronically every lynching in the United States since 1913 - all 7,006 of them - wryly noting to the published professor Damon Thruff that he has somehow constructing three hundred and seven pages on racial violence “without an ounce of outrage.” The Trees is about 307 pages from the Distinguished professor Percival Everett and it feels far from academic with the outrage hidden under a veneer of entertainment.

I wanted to like this more. It's a confident translation and an International Booker nominee highlighting the life of a young gay man in a fiercely conservative country that doesn't yet fully acknowledge LBGTQ rights. Young is irreverent, bold and still deeply conflicted and this I'm sure is an important work taken within the context of the larger culture it is borne from. But I just wasn't interested in the meandering love life of a 20 something millennial playing at Sex in the City: Far East edition.

It's the 1990's and Kirby Mizrachi, a survivor of a brutal attack, is trying to close in on her unknown assailant with the help of an ex-homicide reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times, Dan Velasquez. What they don't realize is their suspect is time-travelling serial killer Harper Curtis who is somewhere in Chicago, sometime between his world of 1930 and now.

It's an impossible mystery and I was hooked with the notion of how author Lauren Beukes was going to resolve this for the reader. What hope does Kirby have while Harper traipses through the timeline viciously murdering a remarkably diverse list of “shining girls” including a black welder at the Chicago Bridge & Iron Company in 1943, a Korean social worker in 1993 and transexual Lucas Ziegenfeus (Alice) working a travelling carnival. Harper leaves anachronistic tokens by his victims, but considering the thousands of unsolved cases spanning a near century they hardly seems like viable signposts. We're talking some pretty impossible odds here against a foe with your entire timeline at his disposal.

This is gruesome and horrifying, veering well into horror but I was riveted. I hesitate to call spending time with a perversely motivated, brutally vicious serial killer a beach read but it was the thoroughly engaging thriller that I needed as I lounged by the pool not thinking of work.

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.

Long ago the natives known as Green Bones defended their island nation of Kekon from foreign occupation. They were imbued with the magical properties of the local jade which granted warriors incredible capabilities across six disciplines known as strength, steel, perception, lightness, deflection, and channelling. But brandishing these skills demands a delicate balance requiring intense training. More jade means greater power, but too much can destroy minds and bodies.

In war the families fought side by side but in peace the city of Janloon is controlled by the No Peak Clan and the Mountain Clan. War heroes become profiteering mobsters holding down their territories against each other. It's a Far East Mob Novel as we focus on the incoming generation of Kaul's taking the reins of the city and pushing up against the ruthlessly ambitious Ayt Madashi.

And while the first book manages to do a lot of world building, introducing us to the strict clan hierarchies of Pillar, Weather Man, Horn, Luckbringers and Fists and a sprawling tapestry of characters it never lags. Lots of turns, fights and drama that sets the stage so you can see how it will evolve over subsequent books in the trilogy. Engrossing and fun.

It's a CanLit Hallmark movie which means a lot more cussing, smoking and the looming spectre of death. Toronto wannabe returns to her rural roots in Cape Breton after she finds her fiance inappropriately entwined with his boss. And so Stacey Fortune, or Crow as she's know back home, finds herself back in her mother's old trailer facing her all too imminent demise thanks to a mass of brain tumours she's nicknamed R Parry Homunculus, Ziggy Stardust, and Fuzzy Wuzzy.

And so we have a foul-mouthed diarist with nothing to lose recounting the last days of her life in the tenor of someone who grew up in the 80's where you could have acquaintances you'd refer to as Willy Gimp, Becky Chickenshit, Duke the Puke and Skroink. It reads like a Canadian made dramedy - less thoughtful interiority and more eclectic small town characters chewing up the scenery like the unhinged tree talking prognosticator and the straight from central casting wealthy villainess. It's Anne of Green Gables meets Trailer Park Boys - pretty broad but entirely winning nonetheless.

It's a man's world.

Sure, I'm familiar with income disparity, about how office temperatures are dialled to male physiology, and the head scratching oversight from Fitbit tracking various health statuses but not menstrual cycles. Obvious annoyances but this book outlines how much more is at stake.

How about the fact that it wasn't until 2011 that the US started using a female crash-test dummy. Up to that point they simply used a small male version which leads to cars being completely designed around the male body. As a result, females are nearly 50% more likely to be seriously hurt in a collision and 17% more likely to die.

How police protective armour is specifically formed to the male body leading to female officers having a higher likelihood of dying from a stab wound due to ill-fitting gear. How women are 50% more likely to be misdiagnosed after a heart attack because trials tend to use and research predominantly male participants.

Or how about that miraculous drug that helped alleviate menstrual cramps being deemed non-viable and unlikely to turn a profit that would go on to find life as a little blue pill to address male erectile dysfunction instead.

This book is filled with tidbits that spotlight our patriarchal data bias that go beyond the obvious to things like transit routes, snow removal and discovering the story of Mozart's older sister.

This is wall-to-wall knowledge that will having you nudging your partner, friend or co-worker with a “didja know?” that still leaves you shaking your head if not outright pulling your hair. Well worth the read, can't recommend it enough.

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.

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.

It's a high-speed bullet train running from Tokyo to Morioka. Former underworld heavy, Kimura has boarded the Shinkansen to mete out revenge after his son was pushed off a roof by the sociopathic 14 year old known as The Prince. Meanwhile Thomas the Tank Engine loving Lemon and his partner, the more erudite Tangerine, have left a bloody trail after rescuing the top crime boss, Mr. Minegishi's, son along with the ransom money in a marked suitcase. And Nanao, the self-dubbed “unluckiest assassin in the world” is there to steal that suitcase. And that's just the set-up. Things get truly wild from there.

It's the world of John Wick: Japanese transit edition. This is the bit of thriller escapism I've been looking for and The Prince - though royally annoying, and one of those literary characters you wish you could just smack across the head with the book as you're reading it - offers up some timely observations around groupthink, persuasion and people's inability to see the bars of their own cage. Punk kid still deserves a swift kick though.

As the bodies start piling up it does begin to teeter towards ridiculousness, but the confined space with multiple players intersecting over the course of the story delivers constant momentum. I suspect this could very well be a case where the movie will be better than the book.

Deep within the Saffron Mountains is a cave where on a dark southerly wall can be found a 3,000 year old cuneiform inscription carved into the rock by the first king of Persia. It will inform deaf-mute Aga Akbar's own secret language that he will use to imprint his thoughts. His son Ishmael, exiled to Holland, will struggle to decipher the notebook and with the help of a third person omniscient narrator tell the story of Aga Akbar and the history of Iran. Meanwhile I'm reading the English translation of an Iranian author's Dutch work. And it's just a joy to read. It's a beautifully rendered, semi-autobiographical story that just carried me through to its satisfying end.

If you, like me, still harbour dreams of waxing eloquently on Wittgenstein, noodling aloud over the nihilism of Nietzsche, or articulating your profound ideas about Aristotle — but the thought of actually reading these philosophers feels just a little too exhausting — this is the book for you. 2,500 years of philosophical thought rendered in short pithy chapters like “Do I Have to Return My Shopping Cart to the Shopping Cart Rack Thingy? I Mean... It's All the Way Over There” and the one I'm currently wrestling with; “This Sandwich Is Morally Problematic. But It's Also Delicious. Can I Still Eat It?”

Turns out being good is hard. Even Schur admits that 80% of the time when faced with a morally problematic issue the decision is never perfect. But 20% of the time, if you're thinking about it with some rigour, there is the realization that “Oh, you know what? This other thing I could do is just slightly better so I'm going to do that instead.” There are no hard and fast rules, but there's value in the thinking.

Also, I did not realize how many permutations of runaway trolleys and unwitting victims there are. Someone should really contact the trolley control board.

I'm only here because of the Amazon series (which was pure action comfort food) There's such a mythos around Jack Reacher and author Lee Child has reached the lofty heights where his name appears larger than the actual title of the book.

But man, this was not good. I'm wondering if even Jack Reacher fans think this is good. Sure the 6'.5, 250 pound ex military police officer is here, complete with hands like dinner plates - but he feels like a pre-release version. Reacher is a pedantic, overly excited mess, prone to singing out loud and administering high fives. He's a muscular kid's show host, a steroidal Steve from Blue's Clues packing heat.

Yes I do tend to literary fiction, introspective novels pondering the human condition but I was ready for some dad-level action. The dude-bro equivalent of a beach read. Nothing complicated or fancy - I was ready to meet this book half-way. But I just couldn't.

Childs just doesn't let up with the short sentences. Tweets are verbose in comparison to his sentence length, and it just grates after awhile. And yes I fully expect the trouble around every corner and a woman in every port through line but even that reads like a 12 year who's learned about romance from reading letters to Penthouse. It's clear that Lee Childs used to write for TV in the 90s as this has all the internal logic of an episode of the A-Team. I wanted to like this more but I just don't get it.

This was fantastic, helped in no small part by the fact it is a beautifully put together physical object representing a complete, self-contained manga. No more going to the bookstore to find volume 1 and 2 while 3 and 5 don't exist anywhere.

We are introduced to the seaside town of Kurouzu Cho where high-schooler Kirie begins to discover the town is contaminated with spirals. Hardly the stuff of horror. Oh look! Shuichi's father is carefully examining a snail - could be trouble!

But this thing escalates fast. Shuichi's father's demise is only the beginning. Snail people, human jack in the boxes, duelling hair, mosquitos and more. Each episodic chapter reveals a fresh new horror building to a consuming climax that, while expansive in scope, is less effective than the personal stories that got us here. Small quibble for what is an otherwise transporting horror manga rendered in a straightforward style that works when contrasted with some of the body horror on display here. A great introduction to manga that has me wanting more.

Bit of a queer story that focuses on the power of found family and where marriage is just the worst.

Mick Riva (who I've learned is a keystone part of the TJR universe having also appeared in The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones & The Six) is a Sinatra-level singing sensation that, before leaving his family and burning through 6 marriages, was devoted to one June (of course her name is June) Costas.

He's a next level order of cad. Grand-master, good-for-nothing cheat who doesn't just leave June and his two kids but impregnates another who drops the bastard foundling at June's door before heading off into the sunset.

At least the kids are alright. Nina is married to a multiple Grand Slam winning tennis star, she herself is a surfer model that's graced magazine covers and calendars. She's Farrah Fawcett and Cheryl Tiegs all in one. Her brother Jay is a world-class surfer who's graced countless covers himself, all taken by his devoted brother Hud and then there's “never-been-kissed” Kit who, despite being the youngest, might well be the best surfer among them all.

The story takes place over the course of a single day in 1983 and from the opening pages we know it ends in flames.

Totally invested in the opening chapters and completely immersed in the sun and sand set against the hazy backdrop of pre-internet 80's Malibu. By the end it felt like every cliched house party pulled from 80's teen movies. There's even swinging from chandeliers! But it was fine, it was fun. It was the platonic notion of a beach read and a tiny balm against the raging winter chill outside.

This blew the doors off my own cultural understanding of Vietnam. Raised in North America through the 80's and 90's Vietnam is invoked as more an idea than a country. Vietnam is the backdrop to American reckoning, set to the music of Creedence Clearwater Revival. The people of Vietnam are mere props in the ongoing narrative the West tells itself. Americans are the heroes or anti-heroes in the story, the main protagonists while the Vietnamese are relegated to the margins. The complete appropriation of the idea of Vietnam by the Hollywood machine is just jaw-dropping. Vietnam invokes Marlon Brando whispering “the horror”, R. Lee Ermey dressing down recruits and Tom Berenger with his arms raised as he's gunned down. Vietnam has been repeatedly sold to me as a white American story whether it's Rambo rescuing POWs or Trump dodging the draft. And Viet Thanh Nguyen gets me thinking about all that while skewering a thinly veiled representation of Apocalypse Now as the director in the book may or may not have tried to have our protagonist killed. Just wild.

This is a book by a Vietnamese writer writing to the Vietnamese people. From its harrowing first pages as we see the fall of Saigon from a perspective I'm only just realizing I've never considered, to the torture nearing the end that is the most visceral, mind altering passage I've read that doesn't need to rely on gore. (Also the most extreme writers workshop I've ever seen rendered on the page.) The Vietnamese here are refugees, not immigrants. Former soldiers, counter-revolutionaries and patriots finding themselves suddenly living tiny, mediocre lives tending liquor stores and working in restaurants. Like our protagonist in the opening lines of the book they are of two minds. Not always an easy read but perspective changing ...and a tip of the hat to the badly abused squid.

A more coherent examination of the notion of Asian-American, coalescing the various thoughts he's poked and prodded at in numerous articles and in his ongoing conversation with his No Time To Say Goodbye podcast co-hosts Tammy Kim and Andy Liu.

King pushes against the notion of Asian-American, a term that perhaps matters only to affluent, educated, second-generation professionals who are becoming as white as whites will allow while still brandishing their POC status. But the term barely manages to contain the multitudes of cultures and countries, and breaks down across class lines, irrelevant to the refugees, the undocumented and the working class.

The chapters are all over the place, more like individual articles than a real cohesive whole. It's an exorcism of sorts for Kang who seems to want to shake off all the nagging thoughts he's had around Asian-American identity. At the same time it can read like a “Not Like Other Asians” justification. Kang is constantly setting himself apart, the author at a cool remove from those he's talking about. He's the lonely American sitting on his own instead of engaging with the other Asians sitting together at the lunch table. Still, his podcast is well worth a listen where you'll find his more misanthropic tendencies are better mitigated by his co-hosts.