David Yoon

It's a cozy crime read with a neurodivergent narrator in the guise of 25 year old Molly Gray. She's working as a maid at the Regency Grand, a five star boutique hotel. It's her only respite in an otherwise lonely world since her Gran passed away nine months ago.

Molly's an easy mark who struggles to pick up on social cues and read individual's intent. When she discovers the very much dead body of a boorish millionaire while cleaning his room, things start to unravel. In a life spent as mostly invisible and overlooked, it's clear the odds are stacked against her. Thanks to some found family, a plan is hatched to save her and nab the ne'er do wells.

Total feel-good arc concocted to be made into a heart-warming movie with an unlikely hero satisfyingly prevailing over a cabal of absolute cads with a host of quirky secondary characters. Pure confectionary light reading that doesn't bear too much thinking about, the bookish equivalent of a lazy Sunday afternoon TV movie.

Let's just start with this little nugget. “Almost one-third of all residential water use in the U.S.—clean, drinkable water—is dedicated to lawns... Americans use ten times more fertilizer and pesticide per acre of turfgrass than is used in corn or wheat fields ...and grass clippings and other yard waste constitute 12 percent of all the material that ends up in U.S. landfills.” Just wow.

As the dust jacket reminds us, this is after all a collection of essays on our human-centred planet. To that end there are stories about the discovery of the Lascaux cave paintings, the history of Teddy Bears, Piggly Wiggly and Monopoly, examinations on the Yips and the photo Young Farmers from August Sander. As a whole it is entirely enlightening.

But it is also warm and heartfelt and lovingly in awe with world around us. It is the ritual of biking to the Indianapolis 500 with friends, an unabashed love of Diet Dr Pepper, wrestling with anxiety and watching Harvey while dealing with depression that puts author John Green front and centre of these stories. I love his outsized love for his brother, his wife and children, his friends and English football. It's no mean feat to unironically wear your heart on your sleeve and not come of as narcissistic or unbearably saccharine. It helps that he's been living his values out loud online for some time now with VlogBrothers, Crash Course, Project for Awesome and now TikTok. To trust the world, to show it your belly despite the intensely fragile part of you that is terrified of turning itself to the world - that in itself is extraordinary.

Wall-to-wall WTF this thing dials it up to 11. Every chapter feels like it delivers an epic climax worthy of its own book, the boss fight to end all boss fights, and then just does it again and again. It's unrelenting.

An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties which prevents people from spreading it. Aggressive antimemes can be regarded, written about, drawn or photographed — but absent the actual object they are entirely forgotten, the words rendered hieroglyphic, the images blurred.

Already present everywhere on Earth is an antimeme threat labelled SCP-3125. The Antimemetic researchers in the book note the threat is omniversal-scale, endangering neighbouring realities, encroaching on universes that embed theirs as fiction. But how do you fight against a world-ending cognitohazard that is impossible to remember? That once acknowledged erases the individual and any memory of his or hers existence from reality.

How ironic that a book on antimemes has me thinking about it incessantly, I loved this read.

So Elsa is a Korean-American physicist who's escaped to the South Pole, which frankly is about as far away as you can get from your immigrant family on the planet. But there, in the waning last days of the Antarctic's endless daytime, she is visited by her childhood imaginary friend.

There's a lot going on here. The stories overlay each other and reveal something larger when combined. Elsa is researching neutrinos, elemental particles born from cataclysmic violence. Elusive and never seen they're called “ghost particles” From particle physics to ancient folklore and the Emmileh Bell which only finds its voice when a monk casts a child into the molten metal, its ring a child's call to her mother. All of it echoes the tragic history that burdens Elsa's own mother.

That puzzle box of a novel would be achievement enough but entangled within are the stories of Elsa's brother, more than a little messed up and rebelling against the cliched immigrant parent expectations. And Elsa's boyfriend, the wonderfully named Oskar Gantelius, the ethnically Korean adoptee of Swedish parents helping her unlock the secrets buried in her mother's folklore stories while figuring out who he is exactly. And don't forget that ghostly unseen friend that may or may not be her own lost sister from when her mother disappeared to Korea.

Technical difficulty is off the charts and the book rewards some close, considered reading.

Having never read The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G.Wells perhaps I'm missing out on the frisson of recognition when Moreno-Garcia harks back to the original. Maybe my understanding of the original as an outright horror story had me expecting a bit more bite here. This is a restrained tale that's less terror and more Tempest - especially when Carlota Moreau falls for the handsome Eduardo Lizalde, arguably the first man she has seen on the estate that wasn't her father or the tortured majordomo Montgomery Laughton.

There is so much table setting going on, the many pieces stacked up against one another, piled ever higher and higher as the story progresses and yet it somehow manages to resolve not with a bang but a whimper.

Every year there's a novel that's just everywhere in the bookish water you're currently swimming in. For me last year it was S.A. Cosby's Razorblade Tears which felt ubiquitous, as if it were algorithmically targeting me. It kept creeping in my feeds, insisting on being read but never quite making it into the cart. I'm glad I finally succumbed.

This is the perfectly violent, odd couple, revenge thriller. Ike “Riot” Randolph and Buddy Lee Jenkins are the most unlikely of companions. Sure they're both middle-aged men that have served hard time, but Buddy is an alcoholic, trailer park living redneck while Ike is trying to fly straight and narrow as an entrepreneurial Black man running a successful property maintenance business. It is only when their respective gay sons are brutally executed do they find common ground. The police investigation has gone cold and they're not content to let this heinous crime go unpunished.

It's a great premise that's easy to get wrong. Cosby shows great restraint portraying the oil and water buddy dynamic. We've seen countless iterations on screen and this could have been a cliched mess but every beat feels earned. Meanwhile the stakes keep getting ramped up. This is Elmore Leonard, meets Walter Mosley thrown in a blender with Quentin Tarrantino. While Ike and Buddy learn a little acceptance about their sons' lives it hasn't tempered their rage in any way and it makes for a satisfying ride the whole bloody way.

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.

Inspired by some historical non-fiction focused on German astronomer Johannes Kepler, this is far more fun than a 17th century witch hunt should be. Katharina Kepler is an independently wealthy widower who loves her cow Chamomile, swears by her herbal remedies, and has raised some capable children, one who has gone on to big city fame as the Imperial Mathematician. Clearly she's a witch!

Accused of poisoning Ursula Reinbold, a Leonberg Karen with eyes on Kepler's wealth and fuelled by a not insignificant amount of petty jealousy, Katharina is quick to dismiss the outlandish claims. But apparently you don't need social media and infotainment channels to stoke the fires of fake news. Pretty soon folks are coming out of the woodwork, certain that in light of this new information previously benign incidents could in fact be attributed to Katharina's witchy powers. After all, according to some residents, “The matter of how we came to know is simple — we already knew.” Who can argue with logic like that?

With the help of her neighbour Simon, Katharina shrugs aside the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and embarks on a warm and witty defence, going high when they go low. Four centuries later it still echoes our current climate.

Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

Hope is a curse. It's putting your faith in something outside yourself, beyond the current moment. It's that future state where your inbox is empty, your tasks well and tightly under control and your time, at last, your own to fully direct towards what gives you joy.

For the productivity minded among us, we live in a perpetual state of hope, inhabiting an imagined future where our lives are well and truly ordered and organized. We need to give up hope and simply do the work. The Germans have a word for it, Eigenzeit, the time integral to a process itself. If a thing's worth doing, it takes as long as it takes.

Aside from the Appendix at the end of the book that includes a list of 10 tools for “embracing your finitude” - tacked on as if to meet some self-help, productivity book criteria, this is more an entertaining philosophical treatise than time management system.

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Becoming more efficient only brings about more work. Your immediate email responses in the hopes of reaching inbox zero only invite further emails. Your FOMO is forgetting that your entire life consists of things you are choosing to neglect. The real measure of any time management technique, according to Burkeman, is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.

So embrace the limits of your life. Choose to fail at things. Limit technology in favour of savouring the mundane and get good at doing nothing.

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.

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.

Some serious Never Let Me Go vibes and an underlying current of anxiety that pervades the story. This future world finds 14-year-old Josie on tenuous ground after being “lifted”. There is the very real possibility that she might succumb to the treatment and there is this looming sense of impending loss. Klara, an AF or Artificial Friend, enters the picture to be Josie's companion and eagerly observes the world she now finds herself in.

And that's it. That's all I can talk about without spoiling the book really. Because I want to get into a discussion about how existentially dark AF this book is. About how it examines class structure and is a sharp reflection of the current dystopian hellscape we live in. How parents must face their own obsolescence while making life or death decisions for their children, and the complicated and often implicating motives therein. How we all end up on our own. Ishiguro may be a master of restraint but this thing has teeth, hovering at the periphery of this otherwise sunny, affectless, robot-narrated remembrance.

...and he dedicated the book to his late mother.

There will be no shortage of books written about our current year. Scientific examinations of the virus, stories focused on New York hospital's response in the early months of the pandemic, speculative fictions, alternate histories, intersectional narratives and more. Zadie Smith's Intimations comes out of the gate fast (Proceeds from the book are going to the Equal Justice Initiative and the COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund for New York) and has me pining for the bygone days that marked the height of blogging.

I don't mean it in a dismissive way. Smith is of course a polished writer, her six essays are snapshots of a moment, stolen fragments with a precise attention to the little details. But it has me remembering when I'd start off the day reading from a host of bloggers doing just that, boiling down personal moments into consumable online essays. It was for them, as it is for Smith, something to do. I realize I want more of that, a connection to how individuals are navigating this moment without grandiose statements around race, polarization, social media and American individualism. Just more pre-menopausal women clinging to the bars of the Market Garden staring at tulips.

“The two kinds of people in this world aren't good and bad — they're engines and fuel.”

9 year old Amir Utu washes up on shore amidst a mass of shipwrecked bodies, distended with seawater. Sprawled facedown, arms outstretched he is surrounded by the wreckage of the boat he once sat on. Police pull caution tape along the walkway that leads to the beach that lies in the shadow of a luxury hotel. The guest rumble about their ruined day, now confined to the hotel grounds. There are angry requests for refunds.

The boy opens his eyes and sees two men approach in baggy white containment suits. He runs.

Beautifully written with a spare storyline bisected into Before and After. After, we see Amir lost on this new island, helped by 15 year old Vanna. Before, we find out how Amir finds himself aboard the Calypso, crowded among the other refugees. They remain hopeful, armed with newly minted Western names, wielding crucifixes and memorizing mantras in English: “Hello. I am pregnant. I will have a baby on April twenty-eight. I need hospital and doctor to have safe baby. Please help.”

It's a simple story, that is devastating in its little details.

“The words merry Christmas were now hurled like a challenge. They no longer meant newborn kings, or the dangling silver notes of a sleigh ride, or high childish hopes for snow. They meant “Do you accept Herr Santa as the all-powerful leader of the new white ethnostate?”

The book is rich with these perfect digressions and Patricia Lockwood gets a ton of leeway for writing the absolutely fantastic Priestdaddy ...but this reads like an advanced AI was fed Twitter posts and Reddit memes and forced to regurgitate a tragicomic novel.

Lockwood is a Grand Master Twitter user and there is no shortage of fragmentary emissions here that will elicit an ahahahahaha! (the newer, funnier way to laugh - don't ask me about sneazing) But you still have to read this like a novel and not the endless doom-scrolling consumption the internet invites. And I think that's what broke me.

Besides, it's hard to keep up with the online easter eggs. While some memes like the “this is fine” dog can reach ubiquitous status so that even the normies on Facebook are gleefully reposting it as a reaction to the last year, most bits of online ephemera never rise above their brief, blazing week of relevance. We're all ants now? Big Hero 6 suddenly relevant? What's up with Ocean Spray Cranberry juice or Gorilla Glue? Is everyone eating ass now?

And just as Twitter can foster an endless stream of hot takes, irreverent shit-posts and ironic trolling it can just as quickly offer up flashes of sincerity and heart. Here too the book switches gears in the second half when the protagonist's sister's baby is diagnosed with Proteus syndrome - mirroring Lockwood's neice's condition that would ultimately take her life at 6 months of age.

Lockwood is momentarily seized with doubt “If all she was was funny, and none of this was funny, where did that leave her?” The endless scroll turns stream of consciousness and you remember that before she was writing enigmatic tweets like “can a dog be twins” Lockwood was a poet and memoirist of the highest order. The book didn't fire on all cylinders for me but I will still pick up anything she writes.

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.

Who am I to complain about a pulpy comic? The characters are all dialled up stereotypes, the conniving Nazi, the blowhard general, the abusive father, the do-gooder officer in love with the ever optimistic and beautiful wife (with hair that is always perfectly blown out). There's even your requisite magic Negro and the abused, man-child monster. You can take this tack but it argues for a lean and propulsive narrative to go along with it. Instead Monsters is a 360 page brick that lumbered along with a lot of overwrought hand-wringing, rendered in beautiful detail I'll admit, but an otherwise indulgent and plodding slog that barely manages to limp across the finish line.

Barry Windsor-Smith is an old-school legend with a unique and immediately recognizable rendering style that is part Neal Adams meets Bernie Wrightson, but as a writer he's stuck well in the past. It's a try hard comic with aspirations of importance that sadly falls short of the mark.

It makes sense that Cyclopedia Exotica got its start as a serialized Instagram comic. Every so often you get a quick four panel set-up and punchline, but it's at its best when it gets to stretch its legs and tell a story. Across a large ensemble it speaks to microaggressions, tokenization, self-loathing, and marginalization with cyclops as a clear stand-in for the other. But there's also stuff here about finding love, as well as worries about selling out, growing up and settling down. I'm not sure I need to know that male cyclops have two-pronged penises and that female cyclops have 3 vaginas which leads to (naturally) a second womb where a not-twin baby will grow simultaneously in embryonic diapause. I get it, they're different - they're cyclops! And yes, many a set-up and punchline fall flat and feel obvious, but on the whole the work is still a light distraction that never takes itself too seriously while poking at often serious topics.

This is a fearless debut, defying all conventions. Written in the second person where the main characters remain unnamed, the prose follows its own looping rhythm, often repeating words across sentences. It is a celebration of black excellence as Nelson invokes Dizzee Rascal, Kendrick Lamar, Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk, Zadie Smith, James Baldwin, Solange, Frank Ocean, Tribe Called Quest, and more. (Look for Caleb Azumah Nelson's Open Water Spotify playlist) This story, presented this way, would have never escaped the Iowa Writer's workshop.

It is a story on blackness and black masculinity that is vulnerable, emotional and remarkably chaste. It proclaims that you are more than the sum of your traumas but understands the consequences of being black. It is so intimate in its writing that I almost feel self-conscious, made a voyeur into a world I will never truly know, implicated by my own frame of reference and unconscious biases.

We've seen this story before - a young child with a tragic condition armed with a buoyant outlook on life, sprinkled with a preternaturally wise sense of the world. It's Wonder's Auggie Pullman or more recently (and Korean) Almond's Yunjae.

Here we have Areum. Diagnosed with progeria, Areum ages at an accelerated rate so at sixteen he's inhabiting the body of an 80 year old teetering on the brink of death. His parents, pregnant at 16, find themselves barely over 30 and faced with mounting hospital fees and the unavoidable certainty of their child's imminent death.

Areum is determined to write his own story and reconstruct the life of his parents meeting and having him. His tale also includes a quirky 60 year old neighbour and best friend, an inspiring TV spot and a secret admirer and Areum's parents just trying to do the best they can. The whole plot is almost its own genre and the story hits the expected beats with a few twists delivering just the right dose of heartwarming and hopeful without veering too far into misery and mawkishness. All you can hope for really.

It's called Mexican Gothic and right away it starts delivering on the title's promise.

A cryptic letter from her cousin Catalina complaining of restless dead, ghosts that whisper in the night, and a house sick with rot sends Noemi to El Triunfo.

There, set atop the sheer rock walls of the mountain and shrouded in a cold fog, lies High Place, a Gothic mansion complete with European dirt for the gardens. A bit of a conceit to sell the gothic story but I find that it's inspired by an actual place called Real del Monte, a British mining town in the highlands of Mexico complete with an English cemetery.

Inside the moldering walls where electricity is rationed necessitating gas lamps and candles, Noemi finds Catalina a pale shadow of her former self. Her English husband Virgil is irritatingly dismissive, there are eugenics journals in the library, and the pater familias Howard Doyle despite lying barely alive and afflicted by the ravages of putrefaction is still holding the house captive in his sway. Noemi soon finds herself victim to strange dreams and bouts of sleepwalking.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia doesn't miss a single gothic beat here and builds the mounting tension with a confident hand. I'd argue the climax switches from creeping gothic dread to tent-pole Bruckheimer spectacle but it'll make for great TV when the inevitable adaptation comes.

The Argus is poised at the very edge of the universe. Not metaphorically speaking in some far flung corner within the vast expanse of space, but quite literally at the edge of the expanding universe. The Argus is looking out into the dark nothing that sits beyond the realm of our known reality, guarding against the possible return of the Viators that took humanity to the brink of extinction centuries ago.

This space station is home to a motley crew of court-martialled space marines, Viator/human hybrids called Savants and an exiled royal heir to the empire. They are among the two thousand souls about to bear witness to the contracting of the known universe. The dark outer boundary seems to be moving inwards and wreaking havoc on the timeline.

Turns out that's just the least of their worries. Political machinations, unfathomable threats, and a healthy dose of WTF promises a wild ride. Sure Cavalon Mercer is somehow a rebellious anti-authoritarian who also holds doctorates in genetic engineering, astromechanical engineering, and astrophysics with a minor in ‘gravitational tempology.” And frankly it's weird that every chapter insists on pointing to something that is made of “aerasteel”. But this is equal parts The Expanse meets Battlestar Galactica and I'm fully on board for the ride.

“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.

It's a weird bit of cognitive dissonance in that it totally reads like a translated Korean novel. Simple sentences with lots of room to breathe, a bare atmosphere driven by the merest whisper of a plot, and a melancholic air to the whole thing. I'm thinking Untold Night and Day or the short stories of Ha Seong-nan, except this was translated from the French.

It is set in Korea however in the the seaside town of Sokcho, mere minutes from North Korea. We're introduced to a 20 something French Korean woman working as a receptionist at an aging guest house. She's back home after a stint at university and mostly bored. Her mother is working the nearby seafood market waiting for her to marry her absent boyfriend who's off modelling in Seoul.

Meanwhile she bides her time during the quiet winter off season cooking and cleaning for the few patrons still remaining at the guest house. The young girl recovering from plastic surgery and an enigmatic visiting French cartoonist. That's about the extent of it.

The whole thing, as slight as it is, still manages to get under your skin.

This reads like such a debut novel workshopped out of an MFA program where the POC author is forced to reckon with her Asian-American identity and biracial relationship by throwing everything she has out onto the page in a lightly fictionalized autobiography.

But as an Asian-American, bi-racially married dude working in tech this is just such a me book. The San Francisco tech environment with its open plan office spaces, standing desks and online watercooler chat fretting about the next round of imminent layoffs feels intimately familiar. The micro-aggressions experienced when travelling, the sixth sense of knowing just how much you might stand out in certain environments and how you contend with that in opposition to the blithe indifference whiteness can simply take for granted. And just the sheer fun of assembled “Snippets of Asian America” and how history has regarded the “yellow peril” over the years and how some have raised their defiant voices in demanding to be wholly seen. So yeah, I dug this book. Your mileage may vary.