David Yoon
Jeonga is our sartorially sharp and stylish, quick tongued, and fabulously wealthy protagonist. She's also 105, or at least was until she is struck dead by a Chicago bus. (Don't worry, this all happens in the first chapter.)
We flash back to find out what this centenarian from Seoul, South Korea is doing in the United States with her equally aged sisters. They are in-fighting, status-hungry, gossipy siblings that you often forget are even older than Joenga. All of them, like aged-up ajummas, are obsessed with appearances — so much so that even in death, Jeonga remains as a ghost to try and prevent what she considers an absolutely ill-fated engagement.
Han delivers an expansive family saga bringing us back to the Korean War and the histories entwined there, all the way into the present as members of the family carve out a life in their adopted country, and then adds another element to the story by bringing us into a richly imagined afterlife. But always with a light touch that keeps everything moving along with unexpected doses of humour throughout. (being a ghost is hard!) Also, it turns out your Korean elders will never stop meddling in your affairs even generations down the line. 아이참!
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.
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.
Normcore narrative fiction ...and I unapologetically loved it!
I get it. At 600 page, a half dozen protagonists, and three different eras telling a pastoral epic, eco-literary treatise and sci-fi exploration this should feel overindulgent. I worried that it was evidence of a literary giant at the height of his influence eschewing the mitigating influence of a sharp editor and allowed to just ramble on. But I was fully here for it.
It goes without saying that it's been a year and I'm frankly exhausted. So I'm just perfectly primed for this bit of storytelling magic concocted to tuck us in at night. Anthony Doerr knows that when it comes to stories “if it's told well enough, for as long as the story lasts, you get to slip the trap.”
I'm here for the harelipped Omeir's deep understanding of his beloved oxen Tree and Moonlight. I feel that primal, earthy connection Seymour Stuhlman has staring into the eyes of the great grey owl he names Trustyfriend. I co-sign on the power of libraries and the enduring strength of a good story. I'm even down with the “dull-witted, mutton-headed lamebrain” Aethon dreaming of a city in the sky.
This is a bedtime story for adults. At 600 pages I would have happily read 600 more. I was content to just follow along as Doer unspooled this meandering narrative. I'm Fred Savage being read to by Peter Falk in the Princess Bride. This is uncomplicated and cozy and exactly the book I needed to read at the right time. Pure magic.
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.
It's the summer of 2002 and 18 year old Kim Hae-on is found dead, the victim of blunt force trauma to the head. The High School Beauty Murder, as it is come to be known, vacillated between two possible suspects; the wealthy Shin Jeongjun who was seen driving Hae-on that fateful day and Han Manu, an awkward delivery boy who had seen them both in their fancy SUV. It's Serial by way of Parasite.
The book spans 27 years over its 8 chapters moving between 3 narrators caught in the aftershocks of that tragic event. Kim Da-on, Hae-on's sister, has “pondered, prodded, and worked every detail” in the ensuing years. Consumed by her death she even undergoes surgery to appear more like her beautiful sister. Yum Taerim, a witness on that fateful day, is a woman unravelling as we eavesdrop into her conversations with helplines and doctors. And finally Sanghui, a friend of Da-on who offers her own unique insight as the years go on.
It's a slight book that prompted a quick second reading that revealed additional layers to the story. It defies genre categorization and like so much of the translated Korean works that make its way here, is a disquieting, open-ended read that flirts with the surreal. It's a whole vibe that I'm only just starting to get the hang of.
When the first story introduces us to a formless mass made of fallen out hair, feces and toilet paper that utters the word “Mother!” before being flushed down the toilet — you're not exactly sure what you're in for. This collection of short stories / modern day fairytales benefit from the stellar translation of Anton Sur and are by turns hilarious, horrifying and more than a little absurd. Bora Chung walks a fine line that balances all these elements and arrives at something unexpected — not always mind you, one of the stories fell completely flat for me — but there's always going to be hits and misses with a collection like this. Chung is otherwise throwing twist upon twist and I love her bent toward horror, the very Korean theme of revenge, and the price of human greed.
Richard Powers absconded to the old growth forests of Tennessee which prompted the fantastic, Pulitzer Prize winning Overstory. Bewilderment feels like a continuation of that book.
Instead of eco-warriors, Powers resorts to the cliched trope of neurodivergent child who speaks plainly of the impending climate crisis, who sees the loss of biodiversity with stark clarity and asks “Why is it so hard for people to see what's happening?
It's easy to screw this up and in less capable hands (or through the eyes of more cynical readers) it's going to come off as cloying and sentimental. And yet I loved the fierce love Theo Byrne has for his 9 year old son Robin, and how lost he feels without his wife to help navigate his erratic rages. How doctors seek to quell his behaviour with drugs, how pediatricians are keen to place Robin on a spectrum.
“I wanted to tell the man that everyone alive on this fluke little planet was on the spectrum. That's what a spectrum is. I wanted to tell the man that life itself is a spectrum disorder, where each of us vibrated at some unique frequency in the continuous rainbow.”
It's that sort of language that Powers invokes that you can either hang with or roll your eyes right into the back of your head. I thought he earned that and that Theo perfectly embodies how much you can love your child and fear, everyday, that you're doing something that's going to ruin them. What it is to wrestle with being a parent in the midst of a climate crisis and the slowly looming end of the world.
That is the chewy centre of the book and rest is confection. I found the imagined extrasolar planets meandering but pretty diversions and the Decoded Neurofeedback a handy plot device to better centre Robin for the sake of moving the story forward and creating the arc of the narrative. PS. totally did not know that rock cairns were a bad thing.
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.
Trust me, you don't know where this one is going. We open with Ludger Sylbaris, the lone survivor of the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelee who escaped to Mexico where he posthumously wrote a book about the inhabitants of Saint-Pierre spouting badger tails, or having two penises. Is this early evidence of symptomers or a clue to the raving paranoia of those locked in their own tiny cages?
Symptomers, it's posited, are humanity's next stage, a new species of people who consume gasoline, eat steel, edit their memories, or have trees growing out from them. And they're all there in Cabinet 13 for Deok-Geun to discover. The book moves along in a series of vignettes that linger at the edges of surreal and disaffected. Someone wants to become a cat, someone else spends half a year methodically drinking 12,000 beers, there's a gluttonous episode in a sushi bar and a violent interrogation. But why? It's a mad, mad world.
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.
So a transgender, self-taught violin prodigy escapes her abusive family and happens to be discovered by the “Queen of Hell” who hopes she will be the seventh and final musical soul consigned to damnation which frees her from her debt to the demon Tremon. Meanwhile intergalactic refugees escaping the “Endplague” are hiding in plain sight at Stargate Donuts where they replicate doughy treats to sell while quietly constructing a warp gate for some imagined future filled with Imperial tourists.
Thats a lot, and I haven't even mentioned the sentient AI seeking some sort of autonomy, a violin repairer contending with her family's legacy and rampant duck abuse. (no assortment of waterfowl should, in good conscience, be fed the sheer volume of donuts evidenced here)
With that many balls in the air you don't pay too much mind when a couple fall to the ground. There is no shortage of nitpicking and lost threads that could be argued, but honestly with so much plot you're just holding on for the ride. I love that Katrina's trans identify is her superpower and Aoki writes about musically so beautifully that I wished I still had my viola to pick up (even if only to remind myself once again why I put it down in the first place) I adored the argument of how technical perfection isn't enough and that there is an ineffable art to evoking the notion of “home” in your craft whether it's a concerto or a cream-filled. And there's the budding romance, the growing confidences, the looming deadline, the inevitable sacrifices and the unexpected curveballs just kept me turning the pages. I might quibble with the plot holes but I can't complain about the propulsive story.
What unlocked this for me is that it's 2021's National Book Award for Fiction, following last year's win of Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu. And to me they feel like the same book, different race. And yes, here is where I emphasize I'm not conflating the minimization of Asian representation on screen to the dangers of being Black in America.
They're both pieces of metafiction that speak to their marginalized experience with humor and surreal flourishes. And maybe I just need to engage with them both more deeply to get beyond my basic interpretation and the feel that they're both just hammering you over the head with their points. The same straight shot of injustices with a bit of Hollywood tinged, imaginative English on the literary ball.
Hell of A Book is about the trauma of being black. Police shootings are just background noise in American life. By not naming the boy that's been shot and on everyone's lips here in the story, it makes it clear this could be anytime - 20 years ago or tomorrow. There's always a dead Black boy on the news that's got everyone buzzing and wringing their hands - and yet nothing has changed. The author who is faced with that reality vs his media handlers who want stories of love with Disney endings retreats into booze, random assignations, imaginary friends and noir movie dialogue as one does.
Mott's got a lot of ideas on the go here and maybe it's both a sharp indictment and canny commentary that this thought provoking examination of Black life in America enrages and elicits knowing nods as I'm reading but fails to really stick with me past the last page.
This was the most Korean-American book I've ever read and an absolute stunning debut short story collection. Easily my favourite read of 2021. All killer, no filler — I can't recommend this book enough.
The entire collection is perfectly balanced. Naturally there is the singular thread focusing on Korean immigrant stories, but from a wide spectrum of voices. We have the girl heading into third grade following the aging couple working at a convenience store. The middle-aged autistic piano prodigy tells one story while a sullen teenaged Korean adoptee tells another. And while there isn't a single personal counterpart for me here on the page, they all struck an immediate and visceral chord within me. Every story feels deeply connected to my own experience.
Even more stunning is that these stories don't centre whiteness the way traditional immigrant narratives tend to. The Koreans here aren't outsiders looking in, there's no smelly lunchbox story. The collection doesn't set out to highlight tensions these characters might feel in their newly adopted land when thrown against a predominantly black and white backdrop. It's Koreans talking about Koreans and centering their own deeply personal experiences. I am screaming.
You don't have to be a second generation Korean to enjoy this book (though it doesn't hurt). The writing is just stellar and this is a jaw-dropping debut from an author I can't wait to see more from.
She's the Queen, our literary Beyonce who delivers the goods with an earlier collection of short stories. You can see here the briefest of outlines that will become Americanah later. Confidently African stories told with a measured awareness of Western sensibilities. That storyteller voice that gently leads you across the page with a sharp eye and wry line. Adichie is so adept at alluding to deeper themes with a light touch that doesn't slow down your reading.
If I'm going to quibble the stories can be somewhat jarring in their abrupt end, building steam only to be just as quickly discarded. Like songs that end sharply just as you're expecting a third verse.
Lynette Tarkington is a final girl. The last one standing after the blood soaked rampage of some deranged maniac. But after the killer is caught or killed and the world moves on, after the failed movie deals, book tours, talk show rounds and the constant hounding to sign blood soaked murderbelia passes, what becomes of these final girls? In Lynette's case she becomes a uber-paranoid, ultra-militant, agoraphobe with a houseplant named Fine for a pet that only comes out of hiding to attend therapy with other final girls. When one of the group is found murdered, she's convinced all their lives are in danger.
These final girls are clearly modelled after some classic slasher scream queens. Lynette's story is pulled from the little known Christmas horror Silent Night, Deadly Night but we also have Marilyn who is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Dani is Halloween, Heather is Nightmare on Elm Street, Julia is Scream and Adrienne, who's death kicks off the story, is from Friday the 13th. When she's found dead it's up to Lynette to warn the others and find out who wants them all dead.
But let's not forget Lynette is wrestling with her own demons. She obsessively tracks peoples shoes when she's outside because stalkers can easily change outfits but rarely their shoes. She's got bugout bags stashed all over town, doubles back on buses and never takes the elevator. She's sequestered herself in such a tiny little life of her own that she's not exactly great at empathy and interpreting social cues. Her fears come off as unhinged and she's found guilty of a whole host of betrayals and screwups.
So we get a horror thriller whodunit helmed by an unreliable narrator. And it's a non-stop thriller from front to back with a cinematic climax worthy of the inevitable TV adaptation. It's smart, self-aware slasher fiction that gets a modern day, meta update without getting too bogged down in handwringing analysis. Fast and bloody with all the adrenaline of a classic drive-in horror movie. Another killer cut from Grady Hendrix.
Nella Rogers is an editorial assistant at Wagner Books. She encounters countless micro aggressions at work, her diversity initiative elicits alternative examples from the aggrieved staff that include left-handedness and nearsightedness, and she can't help but wonder if her desire to become an editor is hampered by her race. Enter the OBG “Other Black Girl” in Hazel-May McCall. Looking Erykah-meets-Issa with thick locs, a grandfather who died protesting against a 1961 busing bill, and herself founding a Harlem based initiative called “Young, Black ‘n' Lit” Hazel feels to Nella at once more “authentically black” and yet somehow more palatable to her white coworkers with her adept code-switching.
When one of the company's white bestseller's latest work which explores the opioid epidemic lands on her desk, Nella wrestles with how to advise against the cringeworthy, cliched and more than a little racist pregnant black addict stereotype named Shartricia Daniels. With two black women on staff, things should start bending towards progress, but it's not how Nella expects.
This was a fine reading experience that ticks up the tension to full blown thriller, but where it really shines is in the subsequent discussions it elicits. This is something you want to buddy read so you can poke at some of the notions explored within around respectability politics, micro aggressions, diversity in the workplace, and how skinfolk ain't always kinfolk. It's timely too given the recent pressures and protests in publishing around works from Mike Pence, Jonathan Mattingly and Jeanine Cummins.
The off-season and empty ski lodge nestled in the French Alps provides the perfectly creepy setting for this locked chalet mystery. 5 friends, mostly competitive snowboarders, reconvene after 10 years apart, drawn together with a mysterious invite. It quickly becomes clear that there is a more sinister motive for bringing the band back together.
The chapters flip back and forth across the decade leading us to the mysterious disappearance of one of their own. Everyone seems to have a motive for wishing Saskia Sparks gone, and in flashbacks it's pretty clear that she is Just. The. WORST.
Author Allie Reynolds is a former pro-snowboarder and the details of the setting brought me back to my many hours on the hills. But with thrillers as in snowboarding it's all about how well you stick the landing and this thing was a bit of a yard sale (apologies for the ancient skiing slang creeping into a book about snowboarding) From the (hopefully this is vague enough) weakly established motive to the confluence of culpability that veered into hilarity, Reynolds gets points for technical difficulty but is ultimately docked on execution.
Ming Tsu is a sharpshooting enforcer who carries a rail spike sharpened to a mirror finish and a list of names he's killing his way through to ultimately reunite with his one true love. In author Tom Lin's hands the story clips along as Ming traverses the West leaving a bloody trail of bodies.
Ming is Chinese American, orphaned as an infant and raised by the ruthless Silas Root. His ethnicity makes for a unique perspective on the traditional Western. At one point he slips in close to a target by joining the Chinese immigrants who made up the majority of the workforce on the Central Pacific line. The $10K bounty on his head is advertised with a barely recognizable wanted sign that clearly illustrates that the predominantly white population can barely recognize him from any other Chinaman. He is perfectly invisible and equally ruthless.
There's enough meat there to render a Tarantino-esque revenge narrative but Lin ups the ante when Ming comes across a travelling circus filled with miracles. There is the tattooed, shape-shifting Pacific Islander, the deaf and dumb young boy who can speak directly into other people's heads, the Navajo that can erase memories, the fireproof woman and the blind prophet who can determine your time of passing.
And therein is my beef with the story. Aside from the fact that there wasn't a single sunrise or sunset that didn't warrant some sort of mention, Lin relegates these fantastical characters to mere color. This could have been a gritty Wild West X-Men story, an elaborate heist perpetrated by this motley crew of mutants, or an X-Force style killing team reaping wrongdoers across Nevada and California. But a small gripe in an otherwise pulpy bit of fun that I just flew through.
“Loneliness is one of the most universal things a person can feel” It's become all the more clear as this graphic novel drops in the midst of a pandemic that has seen folks physically isolated from one another. But Radtke argues that loneliness isn't just “tied to having a partner or best friend - it is the gap between the relationships you have and the relationships you want.”
And the stakes are incredibly high. Across 70 studies examining over 3 million subjects, what becomes clear is that isolation kills. Those experiencing feelings of loneliness were more likely to be dead by the time the studies were over. Radtke also cites political philosopher Hannah Arendt who notes that loneliness is the common ground for terror. When we lose contact with one another, so too do we begin to perforate ourselves from reality. The feelings of being alone can morph into the more antagonistic “everyone is against me”. This can lead to defensiveness and an inability to try and connect meaningfully with others, evolving into extremism, partisan rhetoric and even violence.
Radtke is happy to explore this idea of loneliness into whatever nooks and crannies her research takes her. From the advent of the laugh track and it's triggering of the premotor cortex releasing endorphins and maybe unconsciously “coaxing a solitary viewer into a sense that she isn't, in fact, alone.” To our culture's fixation on bootstrap ideologies and the stoic loner staring off into the middle distance, the gritty cowboy riding into town alone. And the pioneering, and massively problematic not to mention wildly unethical studies of Harry Harlow who nonetheless changed our understanding of affection and “quite literally proclaimed the power of love.”
It's an intimate journey, beautifully rendered.
This is essentially an endearing desert fairy tale, made ever more remarkable in that it was imagined while the author endured 15 torturous years in Guantanamo Bay which was the basis of his previous work Guantanamo Diary.
Ahmed is a Bedouin camel herder in search of his prized camel Zarga, promised to his son Abdullah. Ahmed and his faithful camel Laamesh set off into the Sahara armed with the songs of his father. He will encounter poisonous snakes and barbaric nomads while navigating the unforgiving environment of the desert landscape. He is shored up by bedouin hospitality and the occasional tea and smoke. And while he attests to the absolute truth of his tale, sworn on the belly button of his only sister and the Sixty Holy Chapters, in the end he admits that a little pepper and salt never hurt any story. This was a tale well seasoned and easy to relish.
I've been reading a lot of lyrical fiction lately so it was hard making the transition here. It's personal anecdotes as written by Sheldon Cooper with a dose of Raj Koothrappali thrown in. The writing is flat and precise with an analytical bent sprinkled throughout with per-pubescent 12 year old boy that's still obsessed with boobies.
This seems no different than a host of humble brag blogger books - with the exception that Mr. Feynman is a Nobel Prize winning physicist with a penchant for cracking safes, playing bongos, learning to draw, deciphering Mayan hieroglyphs and more. I guess I can appreciate his boundless curiosity and his eagerness to explore, not to mention his firm adherence to logic in the face of politics, grift, assumptions and simply following the crowd.
The erosion of faith and community has left a vacuum for people starved for connection. A distrust of traditional institutions and a need to belong has proven fertile ground for the growth of cults from the tame to the terrifying. And it's not just credulous smooth brains — the people most likely to join a cult are generally intelligent, cheerful and most of all, optimistic. They are seeking some better way. And whether it's Scientology or SoulCycle, cults and cult-like brands rely on language to reel us in.
From love bombing to the aspirational slogans in the MLM world like “Build a fempire!”, “Be a mompreneur” moving to the thought-terminating cliches built to shut down analytical thought like “trust the plan”, “Don't be ruled by fear” and “the awakening is bigger than all of this” — these linguistic patterns are made to ensnare. Cultish language Montell writes, does three things; it makes people feel unique while connected to a larger community; it encourages people to feel dependent on a particular leader, group, or product and it convinces people to act in ways that are often in conflict with their former sense of self. Language works to clearly demarcate believers from non-believers and establishes an us-versus-them binary.
Cults exist on a continuum so before you go off feeling smug about how you are too smart to be taken in by simple linguistic tricks examine how your own language reinforces your allegiances and defines your tribe. Do you disparage the sheeple, the SJWs who need to be red-pilled and join the Trumpire? Or are you circling back to get buy-in on the low hanging fruit to become the next disruptive change agent on the bleeding edge of tech. (sorry, I just threw up a little in my mouth there) Still a far reaching and fun read.
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.
In a just world the more recognized and lauded professor to emerge from the academic halls of the University of Toronto would be their professor of Philosophy, Mark Kingwell. He's been writing rigorous and thoughtful books for years, here tackling the notions of risk, especially pertinent during the pandemic dumpster fire of 2020.
Kingwell argues that we are just incredibly bad at assessing our own interests and misreading the baseline facts, distracted by an affinity for narrative construction instead of rigorously assessing available data. Add to that a tragic combination of behaviours fuelled by risk aversion (self-isolation) and risk tolerance (sending kids back to school) and we see the growth of meta-level risks that can create net negative results. These tend to congregate around different populations since, while theoretically neutral, risk is still unequally distributed.
So you see Kingwell is clearly a thoughtful writer thinking through available data and presenting it in all its complicated and nuanced glory. It's not easy reading and is inflected with philosophical tones that can sometimes be a challenge to parse as we have an affinity for narrative construction as he puts it.
And so the world betters knows of the University of Toronto's professor of psychology, Jordan Petersen instead. Throngs understand his brand of reactionary politics and polemical stance against the looming threat of social justice warriors, political correctness and, somehow, his perceived threat of incarceration for refusing to use transgender pronouns. He espouses easy bromides like “Clean your room” to rabid fans that are groomed to want easy soundbites and fist shaking diatribes.
None of that here, just the clear-eyed, if densely worded examination of risk and where we might seek answers. It's worth the effort and you'll feel less dirty after reading.