David Yoon
This was wild! And as crazy as it was, the story just keeps on getting wilder with the case against Elizabeth Holmes going on as we speak. She's got a new millionaire boyfriend with their first child born mere months before potentially facing 20 years in jail, a disguised father-in-law hobnobbing with the press and Theranos CEO superfans otherwise known as Holmies. But all this started with author John Carreyrou's front page Wall Street Journal article that pulled the veil from this Silicon Valley health startup darling and its one time 9 billion dollar valuation.
It is a turtlenecked cult of personality that managed to hoodwink an impressive and ever growing list of board members and investors that included former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger, and George Schultz, former secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, former secretary of Defense James Mattis, heirs to the Walmart fortune and Rupert Murdoch who would all subsequently sink $900 million in the blood testing company.
It's also about some dogged journalism facing off against a massive corporation with millions to ward off inquisitive minds and billions to lose. A pitbull lawyer relying on surveillance, NDAs, massive lawsuits and heavy-handed tactics to shut down would-be whistleblowers. Walgreens ready to roll out an untested and unreliable blood testing device nationwide for fear of missing out, unable to hear dissenting voices.
Behind it all is a CEO with delusions of grandeur, escorted everywhere with a phalanx of bodyguards who referred to her as Eagle 1, flying off in private jets to deliver TedTalks and press junkets with Vice-Presidents. All the while lying to investors, firing dissenting voices, hiding the truth and speaking at an affected lower vocal register for some reason.
It's the power of connections in this world, the pervasive tech mantra of “fake it till you make it” and the success at all costs mentality we've so readily adopted. In hindsight it seems inevitable that Theranos was destined to come crashing down, but the book feels like a blueprint to countless other VC backed unicorns that are moving fast and breaking things with valuations based more on hype than high performance.
Haig himself admits it's a mess of a book. Short page or two chapters musing on places he's had panic attacks, what people on social media think about social media, how to stop worrying about aging, the stigmas around mental health, how algorithms eat empathy, and how we all need to take a break from our phones.
If I'm being snarky, it's nothing more than Rupi Kaur's brand of earnest Instagram poetry fleshed out to blog length. And yet it's strangely soothing. We know that social media is a dumpster fire, that everyone is faking it, that the world can be a toxic, anxious place filled with smooth-brained and superstitious monkeys but it doesn't hurt to be reminded to get outside, leave our phones behind, and be kind to one other. It's the Simple Abundance Daybook for the new Millennium. A simple book of reminders to keep moving forward.
Nora Seed has decided to die. No spoiler here, the book opens the early chapters with an ominous countdown to her death. In the ensuing hours Nora is let go from her job, we are reminded of the fiancé she left at the altar, the record deal she wouldn't sign breaking up a her promising band and estranging her from her brother, the Olympic swim dreams sidestepped, the lone friend on the other side of the world and to top it all off the death of her beloved cat.
In death though, she finds herself in a massive library filled with an infinite number of books tended by her grade school librarian Mrs Elm. Each book represents a life. A different one driven by different choices made where she becomes a wife, pursued her Olympic dreams, stayed on as the lead singer of her band and most importantly, saved the life of her cat.
Spoiler! Fame and fortune isn't a guarantee of happiness. Olympic medals, sold out international concerts, influential TedTalks aren't fulfilling on their own. Those paths not taken are no less fraught, not necessarily better. Blah, blah, blah - we've heard it all before. It's a 300 page Live, Love, Laugh poster. It reads like a novelization of a self-help book, Lord knows Matt Haig has made a name for himself examining his anxieties and working through his depressive tendencies.
My rational, judgy, cynical mind knows this and is ready to dismiss it out of hand - but I'm won over by the complete earnest, unironic commitment of it all. As Haig puts it - cynicism is a luxury for the non-suicidal. It's a self-help genre novel. You know how it's going to end, the conventions it's going to explore. It's a riff on It's a Wonderful Life set in the internet era. But the getting there is no less fun. It's a mystery to unravel each life Nora slips into. What were her expectations with this choice and how will it ultimately fail her? I blazed through this in a weekend. Reading it I was gently reminded that I am enough, that we all matter in the world and there's space ahead to make changes ...but I gotta be honest, that life on a winery sounded pretty damn good to me.
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.
I'm not out here trying to offer up hot takes. This is a Pulitzer Prize winning book after all, so if anything the fault is probably mine if this elicits a noncommittal shrug from me.
I'm supposed to effuse about how I'm in good hands with this cavalcade of characters that traipse across the page. Thomas Wazhashk, based on Louise Erdrich's own grandfather, the night watchman and Chippewa Council Member for the Turtle Mountain clan fighting against a government bill of “emancipation” His niece Patrice, working the factory setting jewels where she's caught the eyes of the white boxing coach Lloyd Barnes as well as the boxer he's training, Wood Mountain - who joins Patrice as she sets off into the city to find her lost sister Vera. There's the pair of Mormon's cursing the cold and trying to convert the Indigenous Lamanites while secretly loathing each other, and graduate student Millie Cloud come down to fight the bill on its way to Congress.
Not to mention the ghost of a dead boy, a waterjack, and a gun toting Puerto Rican nationalist. And yes, Erdrich does manage to give each their due and clearly delineate them on the page. But I still found it plodding with multiple strange digressions and meandering threads that are simply noted in passing.
Stories built up over pages are resolved with a sentence or two and set aside. Perhaps a nod to the direct way the Indigenous folks in the story simply note things as they are in plain spoken English in contrast to the flowery word-smithing of senators hiding daggers in their innocuous ten-dollar words, looking to “emancipate the Indian.” But I kept wanting more to grab onto here, something to warrant higher praise than “it was fine.”
16 year old Rye Dolan and his older brother Gig are a part of the cold millions, two orphans among the thousands of wandering labourers looking for work at the turn of the century. We find them in Spokane Washington, Gig's head filled with the righteous fire of the Industrial Workers of the World or the Wobblies. They're a labour movement looking to organize mine workers against corrupt employment agencies, the brutal tactics that steal their wages and the dangerous work they're subjected to. The Wobblies gathered in protest and hundreds were subsequently beaten and jailed in brutal, inhuman conditions.
It's slow going for the first half with countless character digressions and backstories. The book seems almost unwilling to set clear stakes and move forward but Walters is just setting the scene and building tensions across a slew of characters. It's when Rye is released from prison that things start to pick up steam. Freed on account of his age, Rye finds himself travelling with the “East Side Joan of Arc” the “she-dog of anarchy” a feisty union organizer and labor activist who happens to be 19, pregnant and very real. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was very much a leading member of the Industrial Workers of the World and would go on to be a founding member of the ACLU.
We have a rich mining magnate, double-crossing agitators, thuggish police officers, a burlesque actress, and lots of murder and mayhem to close the book off. Rye is caught in the middle of all of it all but as Gig wrly notes; “We were flies buzzing around the heads of millionaires, fooling ourselves that we had power because they couldn't possibly swat us all.” Disinformation campaigns, the downtrodden working against their own better interests, moral compromises and the heavy gravitational pull of the wealthy sounds just as familiar a century ago as it is now. A great read but one I couldn't help but wish was a little tighter in the telling.
Maybe I'm just a sucker for nature writing. What we have here is a collection of essays using nature as a a springboard. Talk of peacocks, corpse flowers and fireflies are a useful jumping off point to discuss growing up a latchkey kid, reflecting on otherness and what love means. All with the thoughtful and reverent wonder of a poet. It is a deft exploration of our connected lives and how nature, when considered more closely, can frame our experiences without devolving into cloying bromides and crunchy platitudes.
Fumi Nakamura provides the accompanying illustrations that preface most of the stories — and while beautiful, they don't fully express the biting sharpness of her original artistic works that are certainly worth checking out.
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.
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.
It's a bit all over the place with its numerology, Malay superstition, Confucian virtues, colonialism and a weird step-sibling will-they-won't-they romance thrown in.
We kick things off in 1930 Malaya and the orphan houseboy Ren, tasked by his dying master to find and return his severed finger within 49 days so that his ghost isn't doomed to wander the earth forever. An impossible task and yet we are introduced to the inevitable converging thread of Ji Lin, a dancehall girl who finds herself inexplicably in possession of a severed finger in a glass tube. Together with their siblings they make up 4 of the 5 Confucian virtues. Meanwhile there is an elusive notion of a weretiger possibly lurking the jungle nearby while the body count continues to grow.
Suddenly we find ourself in a supernatural thriller. Ren's dead twin Yi keeps appearing in dreams, visiting Ji Lin as well. There we find a train to the land of the dead and an ominous shadow lurking in the water. Are the dreams offering clues or warnings? The veil between worlds somehow thinner in Malaya. Who is the 5th Confucian virtue that will complete this fractured body?
Matters are resolved but hardly in the same tenor as the build-up would have you believe. The mythic gives way to the mundane and it's like the story decides to shake itself awake from the dream it was having. Still, I enjoyed Ren's company and can't begrudge the richly rendered world of Malaya that leapt from the page.
By the 1920s the Osage were the wealthiest people per capita in the world, sitting on the oil-rich sands of Oklahoma. And yet they were not deemed competent enough to spend their own money so the federal government magnanimously appointed legal and financial guardians for them. Almost all white. Naturally this went about as well as one might expect.
Between 1921-25 dozens of members of the Osage tribe were murdered, shot execution style, poisoned and blown-up. It was an era when law enforcement barely existed and forensic science would be years away. The then sheriff of Osage County weighed in at 300 pounds and was known to be friendly with bootleggers and gamblers. Questionable sheriffs and shoddy investigative practices were hardly a viable recourse to justice.
Meanwhile in 1924 J. Edgar Hoover was appointed the director of the FBI. He would argue the need for a national police force. Enlisting former Texas Ranger Tom White to put together a team and uncover the root of this Reign of Terror in Osage County, Hoover hoped for an early win for his nascent FBI.
It was a Herculean task. Corruption was everywhere and it was impossible to know who was liable to double-cross you or steer you astray. The sheer amount of money on the line motivated numerous crimes and betrayals and it seemed those on the take would stop at nothing to keep their long running grift going.
So it should have been more gripping. We've got private eyes and bootleggers, safecrackers and explosives experts, cowboys and conmen peopling the pages. But it's trying to do too much with too many characters and keeps jumping all over the place. And then when it seemed like we could chalk up a win for the FBI, the story continues with author Grann inserting himself into the narrative. He would go on to uncover hundreds more potential deaths through dogged research and digging in the library but by that time it felt like we'd long overstayed our time at the party.
It's a near future dystopian Toronto that finds the white colonizers backed into a corner after a devastating flood which prompts the Renovation. Politicians couch their words in the dog whistle rhetoric of only being concerned with protecting the interests of “True Canadians.” There is a symbolic joining of hands with Americans under the slyly subversive mantra “Two Nations, One Vision.” Soon a jackbooted militia referred to as Boots brings their heavy-handed “order” to bear with thuggish tactics that target people of color and those with disabilities or on the LGBTQ2S+ spectrum.
Forced into work camps or sent into hiding, these “Others” rely on each other, with the help of allies that aren't trying to center their own voices or white knight their way into some kind of cathartic redemption. It's a powerful story that provides countless moments that feel all too horribly plausible.
But what was bothering me about the story was clarified when I found out that author Catherine Hernandez is a dramaturge. That theatre background shines through. The beats are bigger and boisterous - the emotion front and center and always out loud. There's a clear eye to the physicality of many scenes and you can imagine certain lines being expelled from the diaphragm to play to the cheap seats. Her intersectionality informs the casting and we're careful to check all the boxes from the obvious racialized communities as well as queer, trans, and gay to the neurodivergent, disabled and deaf. You're building to that big theatrical payoff at the end where these “othered” take the stage, spotlighted and proudly defiant in all their diversity in a rousing chorus that builds to an epic crescendo, hold for the requisite triumphant bars, and then the curtain falls as the house lights go dark. Beat. Roaring applause.
Short collection of pop culture mash-ups roving from Sweet Valley High to David Hasselhof, Dirty Dancing to Dr Phil.
Sometimes it's gleefully off kilter like the corporate business consultant hired by Jim Henson to “maintain financial viability in balance with artistic integrity” who wakes up having been turned into The Electric Mayhem's id-fuelled drummer, Animal. Or the 180 foot tall cock rock god rampaging downtown Tokyo while whaling out hits from KISS, Warrant and AC/DC.
Perhaps no one explains it better than the author's possessed Auntie Wei who, while buttering her muffin with a crucifix screams “my work on the this collection demonstrates that I am capable of: 1) producing a body of short works that are thematically linked, and 2) working productively with the assistance of arts funding support.”
Yeah, it's a lot. Maybe it's the hyper-sensitivity of the migrant experience where it feels like all the clues to fitting in are there in the culture around you — or maybe it's just that when you gaze into the muppet's eyes for too long you find you've become the muppet.
The book grew out of a viral essay of the same name that appeared in the New Yorker. It's about growing up in Oregon with a white father and Korean mother. A mother whom Michelle lost to cancer when she was 25.
We see her mother succumbing to the cancer and Zauner navigating that time with her father. In that sense it is a novel exploring her grief, but for me it's the recollections of food that evoked such strong memories of my own. So much shared experience buried in the food. The miyeokguk served on birthdays, the bitter herbal remedies insisted upon, the foraging of banchan in an aunt's fridge, the quick comfort found in jjajangmyeon, the long unbroken apple peels. Even the discovery of Maangchi and her enthusiastic recipes for Korean food follow a familiar to me trajectory.
It is also Zauner discovering her own Koreanness that hit home. Recollections of Hangul Hakkyo, her pat Korean phrase to explain her lack of fluency, and growing up in a mostly white suburb. In writing a deeply personal book Zauner manages to evoke an incredible amount of resonant emotions. It's not going to hit the same way for everyone else but I couldn't help but love this read.
For a biting epilogue that shows how sharp her writing remains, read her essay in Harpers Bazaar (When My Mother Died, My Father Quickly Started a New Life. I Chose to Forgive Him) where she writes about how her father moved on after his wife's death by dating an Indonesian woman 7 years younger than Michelle herself.
The title story is a proposal commission - something meant for one person to read to his prospective bride. It tells of a groom-to-be on an 8 week Orbit of Waiting rocket that sees him travelling at the speed of light for an equivalent 4 years Earth time. He's hoping to precisely time a reunion with his travelling bride who is headed on a round trip to Alpha Centauri with her family. Things go wondrously awry.
The collection is bookended with On My Way To You that details the story from the bride-to-be's perspective, written as an anniversary gift to the original couple since married and with a 2 year old. Both are wonderfully realized stories following a familiar narrative structure unlike some of the more oblique Korean short stories I've read in the past. Loved them both for what they are.
Sandwiched between is The Prophet of Corruption which was a little more challenging for me to parse. I loved the concept of our mortal Lower Realm as a school inhabited by members of the the Dark Realm. These handful of fourth dimensional Prophets become each other's mothers and sons, tormentors, saviours and killers - a vast interconnection of lives. It reminded me of a Buddhist spin on Andy Weir's classic sci-fi short The Egg.
Just some great old-school feeling sci-fi reads — and I really appreciated the copious author and translator notes that round out the collection.
“Lord, give me the confidence of a mediocre white man.”
White male mediocrity is the baseline of Western culture and everything in our society is centred around preserving white male power regardless of relative skill or talent. This isn't about neo-Nazis or Klan members but the systemic prioritization of whiteness in classrooms, politics, popular culture, boardrooms and more. And beyond the marginalization of cultures of color, this harms white men all the same.
White men see themselves as the fiercely independent conqueror, absolutely certain that they are the hero of a continuing violent American mythology and are deserving of all the greatness that comes with that. And when that doesn't pan out it creates anger, desperation, disappointment and despair. Suddenly women, people of colour or someone “other” become the scapegoats for all the ways they have been cheated out of what they believe they are due. The born leaders, the muscular crusaders, the innately talented white men are at the same time the fragile, petulant crybabies when things don't go their way and they lash out with terrifying frequency.
“Works according to design.” That's the realization Ijeoma Oluo comes to early in the book and the subsequent 300 pages are how we inevitably got here and how we continue to uphold these damaging structures. From Buffalo Bill to Bernie bros. white men continue to fashion themselves the hero of the ongoing American narrative.
Sure this is SJW catnip and a rousing articulation of what many of us intrinsically understand, but I doubt it gets in the hands of the many it needs to convince. Enjoyed it immensely nonetheless.
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.
Julia Power is a maternity nurse working out of a repurposed supply closet that barely holds three beds and functions as a makeshift delivery ward. The book covers a mere three days in the midst of the 1918 flu pandemic in Ireland. The writing is breathless and steamrolls relentlessly forward. It starts to feel as claustrophobic as that tiny room and one wonders if author Emma Donoghue had stumbled across a turn of the century gynaecological manual in researching the story and is now intent on stuffing every page of her book with all manner of birthing catastrophes and unorthodox delivery procedures.
Still, amidst the turmoil of a mother gripped in fever coughing violently in one cot, another mourning the loss of her child and a third screaming through contractions, Julia strikes up a warm familiarity with her orphaned helper Bridie Sweeney. Their growing relationship a bright spot in an otherwise calamitous read.
I struggled at the onset, feeling it important to situate myself in this new space, to know where I was in relation to the third Northern Hall and the Ninth Vestibule with flooding in the Lower Staircase. Like this was some physical zodiac with clues to something larger, a riddle to be unraveled, a text to be interpreted. Surely all this points to some hidden Knowledge or greater mystery. I am the Other dismissing the rooms full of decaying figures covered in bird shit, mere scenery that obfuscates something truer. There are scattered letters, messages in chalk, words formed by pebbles and ideas transferred through the language of birds. To speak more to this puzzle box of a story is to spoil it.
I will say Susanna Clarke laboured through the writing of this while suffering debilitating chronic fatigue that trapped her at home, a situation not unlike what many of us found ourselves in this past year. Despite the confining situation, like Piranesi himself, there is still the opportunity to bear witness to the splendours of this world. Just lovely.
I really didn't want to read this. The black and white cover and the story of a Glasgow boy growing up gay with his alcoholic mother. Literary misery porn parading gay suffering. When it wins the Booker it only confirms my suspicions about how inevitably bleak and dire the story would surely be. And then I'm tasked to review it for the Booktube Prize so I begrudgingly pick it up.
I'm immediately hooked. Shuggie is growing up in council housing surrounded by unemployed miners, dirty faced kids, drunken gossips and folks prying open electric meters to steal the coins within. Meanwhile Shuggie's mom is drinking herself into a stupor, screaming into the telephone, raging against the men she's hard done by, putting her head into the oven, setting the bedroom on fire, and driving away her two eldest children. Agnes is just a huge character on the page. Despite her faults Shuggie remains steadfast, can see the effort she puts into appearances, her fierce unbroken pride that stands with her back straight even as she's sinking in the grey.
It's less gay trauma and more the resilience of love even in the face of a challenging person, clear eyed about their flaws and faults and loving them just the same. It's heartbreaking but comes from a place not intent on mining Agnes or Shuggie's misery in some showy literary way but instead a confident portrayal - warts and all - of a complicated woman. Pure gallus.
It's a confident debut that namedrops Goethe, Nietzsche, Judith Butler, Ai WeiWei and Mo Yen. It was inspired by the films of Wong Kar-wai and written as part of Sheung King's Masters thesis - and despite all this, avoids coming across as insufferably pretentious. That doesn't make it any less challenging a read though.
“In the Meiji Era, Natsume Soseki translated the English phrase I love you as The moon is beautiful, isn't it? He believed that feelings should be expressed indirectly rather than directly. And to him, that question—the moon is beautiful, isn't it?—perfectly captured the state of affection known as love.”
That is how the book reads to me. My normal galloping pace of reading renders the text inscrutable and opaque. (I know I said it wasn't pretentious, but I love this paragraph and how it fits into the larger story) If only you'd sit with it a bit it could bloom in understanding and significance, but I'm already 2 pages past that. The fault lies with me and my inability to slow down, reread and consider what is being hinted at here. In that sense it's closer to poetry and its need to be more closely considered. Right book at the wrong time for me.
Edie is 23 and embarking on a probably ill-advised date with a middle-aged and married man who decides they'll meet at Six Flags. The writing is sharp and funny. Edie is a bit of a mess, a lowly functionary at a publishing company living in a roach infested apartment and making horrible choices, branding herself the “office slut.” And I get stopped up short, suddenly this starts reading like she's being written by Eric the affluent digital archivist. Like the prose has suddenly been infected by the same white middle aged men it seemed ready to lampoon, and the sharp wit of the story is suddenly blunted and mired in MFA workshopping. Of course Edie is into some casual, sometimes brutal sex with a controlling and aloof older man - but she's also an artist!
And Rebecca the wife is some weird amalgam, thrashing topless in mosh pits and excavating bodies in the morgue, she feels less like a person and more an interesting idea. Fine with her husband's extramarital affairs while raising an adopted black girl, she's what the manic pixie dream girl becomes after 20 years of marriage, countless miscarriages and the numbing comfort of wealth.
So maybe all these sharp edges and the full on dumpster fire of choices Edie continues to make in increasingly improbable scenarios is speaking to some millennial angst that I can't quite tap into. Still, can't wait to see what Raven Leilani has in store next because the writing, when it isn't contorting itself to fit the convoluted meanderings of the story, is incredible.
A memoir about growing up in the sweltering heat of Trinidad, the island patois singing in my ear. Little does our narrator know that in the short time left to him there his beloved grandmother would be arming him with the tools he'd need to survive and flourish in this life - music and storytelling.
At 11 he finds himself in the frozen and completely foreign tundra of northern Canada in the care of a God-fearing, Aboriginal-aiding aunt, in what could barely be considered a hamlet. From that frigid introduction to Canada, Antonio Michael Downing would eventually find himself in my hometown of Kitchener Ontario.
Along the way he adopts a series of personas to better understand the world around him and his place in it from Tony to Mic Dainjah, Molasses to John Orpheus. These names both a refuge and an escape.
It's a raw and moving memoir about survival, starting over again and again and finding your own path through trauma.
Casey Peabody is a writer labouring over her novel for the past six years — long after her peers in writing class have moved on, married up, gotten their real estate license and put their novels away. In that time she's endured listening to male writers who feel they should already be famous, men dismissively wondering what she could possibly have to say while living in a potting shed that smells of loam and rotting leaves. She's barely covering her student debt working as a waitress serving grabby patrons at an upscale Harvard Square eatery and occasionally walking her landlord's dog. Getting health insurance only seems to reveal a litany of potentially life changing ailments at the hands of indifferent doctors. And still she writes.
Amidst all this Casey finds herself caught between two men. Oscar is an older widower with two precocious but adorable kids. He's an established and successful writer who has invited her into his little life. Meanwhile there's Silas, a high school teacher and struggling writer with a chipped front tooth and a rusted out car. Silas is a bit flaky and bails almost immediately after a first date.
All of this paints a bleak picture of the struggling creative class in America. So much so that I distrusted how it all ends. I felt manipulated even as I cheered Casey's every decision and win. It felt like a bit of fantasy in an otherwise grim accounting, and if King's writing didn't completely beguile me I'd otherwise begrudge her upbeat ending.
In the meantime the book has been optioned by Toni Collette for her directorial debut and I can't wait.
I'm more than a little gobsmacked by this one.
When did Malcolm Gladwell get red-pilled into a right wing apologist? Or is it just after countless bestselling books and a lucrative podcast empire he thought he'd just go for it with this Fox News ready hot-take?
I mean it starts with Sandra Bland, pulled over in Texas, arrested, jailed and found dead by suicide in her cell three days later. In a book called Talking to Strangers about our inability to properly communicate with people we don't know, this seems a narrow view of the whole interaction. It's like the conversational equivalent of “you shouldn't have worn that dress.”
Let's ignore the fact Bland was jailed 3 days for a failed lane signal. That Starbucks baristas have better de-escalation skills than the arresting officer who was, let's not forget, indicted for perjury. This reads like yet another story of “driving while Black” not one of crossed wires and an incomplete transfer of information.
But then Gladwell decides to weigh in on the case of campus rapist Brock Turner.
Brock Turner of course is the former Stanford University swim star, son of a civilian contractor for the United States Air Force who was charged for “20 minutes of action” and served 3 months of a six month sentence after Judge Aaaron Perskey (a Stanford Alumnus himself) felt that prison would have a severe impact on him.
And here comes Gladwell using this, of all incidents, to put forward the notion that sexual assault is a failure to agree on the rules of consent because alcohol causes mental myopia. That Brock Turner simply was ill-equipped to know what he was doing when we was raping an unconscious woman, neglecting the fact he still somehow had enough of a self-preservation instinct to try and run away when he was discovered.
That we're to minimize this is a crime of violence where individuals exert their power and control over another individual sexually and instead speak of it as miscommunication - to shifting the blame to the victim for their failure to communicate clearly is a hard fucking no. And it's not just reprehensible on the page, it has real world ramifications. In fact, just this year the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that it isn't rape to have sex with an unconscious woman if she's gotten drunk voluntarily. What.The.Fuck.
And there the book goes from being willfully dumb, narrowly focused, and cherry picking whatever helps the preexisting argument to downright dangerous. I've just read a 300 page opinion piece from a Conservative rag with all the hard-hitting, well-researched rigour of an online anti-vaxxer. Hard pass.