David Yoon

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.

Millennials graduated in the midst of a recession. They entered the workforce against the constant background noise of boomers boasting of their own “git-r-done” bootstrapping mentality that elided any sort of acknowledgement of how different wages vs cost of living was for their generation. Millennials are a product of helicopter parenting styles fuelled by the notion of “raising resumes” and packed lives filled with extracurricular activities that might put a sheen on future college applications. That “college-at-any-cost” mentality has left many with crippling debt paired with an anxious workaholic mindset. Now they're just trying to eke out a semblance of a living in spite of the rise of contract workers, high paid consultants shaving jobs and wages, the gig economy, unchecked capitalism and, lest we forget, “waves hand” all this.

And still they're dismissed as the “laziest generation.” OK Boomer.

The problems here are not unique to Millennials - work HAS gotten shittier, social media has created a sense of pervasive FOMO while turning meals, vacations and experiences into self-conscious, curatorial labour. We're sold the idea of “if you just work hard enough” success will find you while burning ourselves down to tiny nubs. And it's nothing we haven't heard before from erudite think pieces to Twitter hot takes and an abundance of internet memes. And sadly there's not much in the way of solutions here - more a sense of solace in being seen while advocating for, in peak millennial fashion, vague political action.

While the book didn't knock me out, Anne Helen Petersen still has one of the best newsletters out there with Culture Study. She's weekly thinking through everything she touches on in the book as well as bro culture, getting meeting'ed to death, the mental load of being “the Mom” and the invisible work of families as everyone struggles with the new WFH reality (and that's just in the last month). If you were even slightly interested in what this book might have to say, do yourself a favour and subscribe to her newsletter.

Having slipped past the mid-century mark myself, I was looking forward to some empathetic chuckles with a fellow middle-ager musing on turning 49. Gurwitch is a Hollywood adjacent, secular jew with a preteen son - not insurmountable differences, but apparently still a gap too wide to forge. This is in no small part due to the fact she's narrowing in on 50 as a woman. For women in Hollywood, as Gurwitch notes, 50 is the new 80 in actress years. Meanwhile Tom Cruise at 58 is no doubt in lifts, sprinting across some soundstage shooting Mission Impossible 15. Liam Neeson at 68 is still using his unique set of skills as a passable action hero even if it takes 15 slash cuts to shoot him jumping a chain link fence. Now I don't for a second fashion myself an aging Hollywood star, but it is to say different rules apply for men aging in our cultural consciousness. You could make a compelling argument that US citizens currently live under a male gerontocracy.

I have yet to spend a small fortune on facial creams and age defying unguents. I will never experience menopausal dry vagina. I don't yet have osteoarthritis. That shouldn't preclude my enjoyment of this collection of musings but it all felt a little too Borscht Belt, “take my wife, please” brand of humor. The broad swipes just didn't connect for me. But then again it could simply be as an aging male I tend to crotchety and cynical grumbling as I mumble into my porridge complaining that I'm not like those other seniors.

It's been seven years since Allie Brosh's incredible Hyperbole and a Half. Turns out she's been going through some things. A cancer scare revealing a fruit salad of tumors, the loss of her younger sister to suicide, a divorce and the subsequent struggling with loneliness. Hardly fodder for hilarity.

But this is warm and funny and somehow avoids maudlin sentiment. Drawing yourself as an ambulatory tadpole with anime eyes really manages to leaven the mood. But don't dismiss the drawings as completely juvenile, Brosh with a deft line manages to invoke cringey awareness, reckless glee and stunned confusion. Somehow her Vegas party-bros are spot on and she most certainly deserves the most prestigious of awards she has given herself for “fanciest horse drawing.”

We are all stupid, serious, mad little animals, and that is nowhere more on display than in these crazy cartoon caricatures where a dozen or so pages of this can just break my heart.



...seriously, you've been warned.

Here we find ourselves in the sleepy Californian village of Pine Cove, home to retirees, tourists and its frankly oddball assortment of denizens begrudgingly creeping towards Christmas. It's just the sort of place for me right now, a cozy community filled with its share of freaks and geeks set up for holiday hijinks.

This time out Moore gives us a smattering of the undead craving brains, not to mention the functional yet elegant furniture design of IKEA, a former B-movie actress barely managing to hold her sword and sorcery past at bay while completely off her antipsychotics, an ex-stoner cop hiding an absolute bumper crop, a talking fruit-bat, and the archangel Raziel who has found himself dirtside yet again.

Writing is hard, writing humor is trecherous high-wire act that treads the thin line between working and failing miserably. Given the grim dumpster fire of 2020 I'm inclined to be generous in the humor department. This is just the thing for those of you looking for a cozy zombie holiday fable.

What can I to say about this one? This was some formative sci-fi in my youth and while the details are murky the sentiment was clear - I loved this as a kid. It's been on the want to re-read shelf forever but you know how it is with things you loved as a child. I mean have you tried to watch Dukes of Hazzard as an adult? You wonder what kind of a moron you were in grade school.

The Atreides aren't just some good ole boys, never meaning no harm (my God, what sort of a hole have I dug myself here) and Dune did not disappoint. The first half had me hooked and I would have happily plodded along as House Atreides settled on Arrakis. I loved the political intrigues, the backroom dealings, and the strategies inside strategies. I gobbled up the pseudo-religious talk and the historical notes and read it again as an ecological warning.

I generally don't read these sort of sprawling epics and even now I'm hesitant to read any more of the series (though it looks like I'm in relatively good hands with the first trilogy) Even if my time with the Fremen ends here, this was just the sort of indulgent clunker of a classic that I needed right now and can only hope that Denis Villeneuve once again manages to film the unfilmable.

To be fair, when your exemplar of the form is All the Light we Cannot See, everything else suffers by comparison. It's clear this book is well loved and honestly, the hand-sell is pretty solid. WWII drama focused on three young girls struggling to survive and finding hope with the help of a bit of magical realism.

And yet.

Death and danger abound but it felt perfunctory. I felt no stakes even as the roster of characters is slowly whittled down.

These kids are just so remarkable. Julien is a math prodigy and an adept teacher. Victor a natural explosives expert with the French Resistance. Etti of course is nothing short of a full blown wizard able to conjure life itself. And Lea is in possession of a monstrously strong golem who spends most of the time making bread and dancing with a heron. Why are these two on the run again?

These trappings are more suited to a YA fantasy set in a some dire, post-apocalyptic world instead of trying to balance these fantastical elements against the real-world backdrop of Nazism. A bit of a swing and a miss for me.

Addressing a blind spot in my Australian author diet which till now consisted of Jane Harper and Liane Moriarty (huge fan of both btw) Claire G. Coleman is a Noongar Aboriginal, a people who have traditionally occupied the south-west corner of Western Australia long before history started being recorded there.

Terra Nullius is the story of Settler arrogance and their disdain for the Natives. Bending them to their language, their rules, their religion only to offer them a life of enslavement. Jacky manages to escape his Settler captors and makes a run for the bush which sets off a chain of events. I loved the mid-story turn but I feel this would have been better served as a short story or novella. The impact slowly trickles away with each subsequent chapter.

This harkens to the Residential schools of Canada, with a light dusting of Nickel Boys and a heap of the Southern Baptist faithful who interpreted the word of God as still allowing for the ownership of slaves and split with their abolitionist church goers in the north.

It seems colonizer narratives are sadly all too familiar regardless of what country you come from.

Forced from intensive farming, Isabella Tree and her husband give their 3,500 acres at Knepp Estate back to nature. Easier said than done when even our conception of nature leans to order. Giving weeds free rein and letting ancient trees topple and rot in place. Introducing native fauna like Tamworth pigs to root in the dirt, Exmoor ponies, fallow deer and long horn cattle to graze in the fields and resisting the urge to supplementary feed them, even if it means some will succumb to harsh winters.

The result, a proliferation of threatened species find a home in this wild estate. Turtle doves, purple emperor butterflies, peregrine falcons, multiple owl and bat species all find a place at Knepp. It takes on traditional notions of conservation that aims to save specific species in favour of building an ecosystem that allows endangered species to thrive. This explosion in biodiversity shows what can happen when people surrender the management of nature to nature. But this rewilding of Knepp estate delivers even more unexpected and significant changes right down to the soil itself and the land's ability to mitigate against flooding.

And while I admit that I might have initially found myself in the camp of affronted neighbours complaining of a weed covered landscape littered with dead trees, pats of dung underfoot and a veritable wall of insect life I found myself, in the end, swayed by Tree's persuasive arguments.

Bro! Hardly fucked by Fate, but rather hashtag blessed for this translation that gives zero shits. Our swole, sword bearing, son-of-a-bitch comes out swinging. Beowulf brings the beatdown, batters beasts, and bests the bringers of blood. Raring to be read aloud, voice raised over the roar of revelry. The song of sweaty soldiers with back slapping swagger who swear on the sword they saw it true. Headley is hard-core, heroic and hardly one to haver, hell-bent on hewing her own history here. Too much? Truly it is a touch too far at times but still a towering testament to her talent.

Beowulf rode hard. He stayed thirsty! He was the Man! He was the man.

It's another collection of stories shortlisted for the Giller Prize that seems an unlikely choice given the opening stories...

Distraught over the growing separation with his travelling girlfriend, guy organizes a Day Camp for tweens and falls for one of them. Followed by day drinking teacher cuckolded by his wife finds solace in “ample” coworker. Followed by grizzled cowboy in danger of losing his ranch screws rich paraplegic.

Do I really need to read about this sad parade of hand-wringing white guys?

But Bergen manages to nail the tone. There is this minor chord of entitled obliviousness that thrums in the background and the early cringey behaviour soon takes a darker turn with subsequent stories. Each unique and malevolent in their own way.

And then the titular novella about a Brethren girl questioning her faith and her place in the community. Coming to terms with her own feminist awakening and a stubborn refusal to merely submit to the ways of the patriarchal church. It feel like a stark turn from the previous stories and yet it's also faith, sex and being trapped within the narrow confines of our own histories but from a more traditional gendered lens.

Ok, maybe a bit of a stretch there - but nonetheless this collection is a polished effort with a high level of difficulty that Bergen manages to pull off.

It's a short story collection that brings together the worm pickers, nail technicians, bus drivers and farm workers at the edges of society. New immigrants creating space for themselves while struggling to retain their strength and dignity. And the following generation who are watching the world with sharp eyes, more conscious of the unsaid rules, attuned to how “other” they really are and their growing awareness of the gap that separates them.

I spent a lot of my time growing up paying attention. Coming from immigrants and surrounded by people who didn't look like me, I was obsessive about observing the world, paying attention to the social cues, the unsaid rules, the hurdles I had to face by being other. The characters here are doing the same thing, and yet still find themselves always a step behind. Without the benefit of a family network born and raised here for generations, or an easy familiarity with the language and WASPy customs they constantly stumble. Without the easy grace of seeing yourself reflected everywhere you look, they struggle to define themselves. And it's coming up hard against oblivious white mediocrity that wins the red yo-yo, gets the front office job, the manager position. Never done with malicious intent, just a willful blindness to the privilege they possess, certain in the fairness of this new world meritocracy.

These stories just hit me where I live.

Total “didja know?” sort of book. Selling time, second sleep, trains and timezones and that Frederick Douglass was the most photographed man of his time.

Photography proved a hell of a chapter. I learn how Kodak blithely ignoring complaints from black mothers in the 1950s and 60s. They'd argue that Kodak colour film left their children's faces underexposed with only the eyes and teeth visible against an otherwise featureless dark shape. This would contribute to damaging stereotypes that were perpetuated for years. The thing was that Kodak's film was calibrated to perfect the portrayal of white skin. It wasn't until furniture makers and chocolatiers complained in the 70s that the formulations were recalibrated to better show off rich walnut grains and melting dark chocolate - not to mention correct their initial bias.

And the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement. Caroline Hunter and her husband both worked at Polaroid when they discovered the company's involvement with South Africa's apartheid system. Polaroid's ID-2 camera facilitated the system of passbooks that controlled the movement of black South Africans. The creation of the PRWM and her continued protests would cost Caroline her job but her efforts would eventually lead to the complete withdrawal of Polaroid from South Africa.

Not all the chapters are equally strong but it was fascinating how Ramirez chose to come at particular stories from Edison to Muybridge and broaden their scope.

I mean it starts out as a story of family. Saskia is the frumpy, studious one, her twin Jenny the wild child narcissist. Meanwhile we have Sara, the sensual academic, caring for her mentally delayed sister Mattie. It's the push and pull of family and the love and labour between these sisters. But then tragedy visits both families and suddenly we're veering into unexpected territory. The sleepy interiority of familial musings turns into a mystery that leans into thriller.

Lyon is having a blast here keeping the reader guessing. It's an erudite K-drama that isn't afraid to take sharp left turns. You never know where you're going to end up and given the distance of time and reflection it's frankly wild how it managed to hold itself together. A Coles Notes version of this book with names and places stripped away would read like the plot of a modern day Telenovela. What can I say, I like me some literary crazy.

A collection of short stories with characters that reappear in subsequent sections and protagonists that tend to sound remarkably similar - which might explain why a writer named Kaie Kellough occasionally pops up as if to remind the reader that it is in fact someone else telling the story.

It is the Caribbean diaspora and how it has long insinuated itself as part of the larger narrative that is Canada.

What a drop-dead gorgeous debut!

This is a sensual love letter to our time before Covid. Where you could cook dinner for a stranger with the promise of something more. Where people could still traverse the globe, hopping from Lagos to Halifax and France. Quaint cafes invited close conversation over the steaming scent of tea and restaurants didn't reflexively evoke notions of failing hole-in-the-walls, roped off booths to maintain social distancing, and waitresses wearing facemasks and shields to take your order while you ponder viral loads and aerosol particles.

Here is catfish vindaloo, kimchi stew with pork belly, salted caramel chocolate cake, puff-puff, empanadas, overripe plantains, and egusi soup filling up your senses. This is musical prose that envelopes you. And much like the character Kambirinachi in the story, this is about wanting to live.

You see, Kambirinachi is an ogbanje - a spirit so tied to the other world they are born into ours only to die in moments, leaving anguish and tears in their wake. But Kambirinachi wants to live. She raises twin girls Kehinde and Taiye who are torn apart through horrifying trauma. After nearly a decade apart, the family finds their way home to Lagos.

From the small Canadian independent Arsenal Pulp Press, it's nonetheless an absolute crime this isn't getting broader acclaim. This book should be invoked when speaking of Yaa Gyasi, Bernardine Evaristo and dare I say, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Don't sleep on this one!

This is Nishnaabeg storytelling that isn't worried about making concessions to me. But there's enough here to grapple with, familiar snippets of Southern Ontario wrapped in beautiful poetry.

This is American Gods where the ancient deities move among us, not as rarefied icons bathed in golden light and imbued with glamour, but trudging among us looking for tarps to go on sale at Canadian Tire, cutting coupons, struggling with sobriety, hoarding knick-knacks. But still bigger, containing deeper histories.

There's sly humour here too, playing up stereotypes, winking at my need to see Indigenous peoples as tuned to the natural world, reading about trees ability to pull stress out of a body. But there's also riding around on a grey ten-speed Supercycle pulling an old kid's trailer to hold old toilets and sinks collected from rich neighbourhoods to place randomly on the reserve.

This isn't for me, but I loved it just the same.

Deborah Smith again translates with florid language, evoking a surreal landscape where phrases echo word for word throughout the novel. Stories overlap and intersect. Episodes overlay each other as if written on diaphanous paper filling out and filling in the larger narrative as each page is laid on top of the other.

You have to be in the mood for this. It's so contemplatively weird, intent on pushing you off balance and messing with your equilibrium. A hazy fever dream in the liminal space between waking and sleep. Honestly, how many more cliches can I jot down here. I enjoyed the experience, I'm just ill equipped to really talk about it without resorting to all this folderol.

“I've never known happiness from the moment I came out of my mother's womb” Lee Ok-Sun, now an octogenarian living out her days in the House of Sharing can hardly be blamed for that sentiment. Still active, still advocating for the rights of comfort women, still able to recall the horrors visited upon her. Snatched up on the road to the market at age 15 and shipped off to the Chinese province of Yanji, Lee Ok-Sun became a comfort woman - essentially a sex slave forced to service the Japanese Imperial Army during WWII in a massive, state sanctioned, human trafficking operation.

This is all told as Gendry-Kim coaxes the story from Lee Ok-Sun in the present day, offering at least something to anchor yourself to, knowing that Ok-Sun survived. But Gendry-Kim does not shy away from the horrors of her time in captivity and presents them in a blunt tone accompanied by stark images. Even as Japan surrendered, the plight of these women did not cease and Ok-Sun would have to endure so much more even in freedom.

Today the Japanese government, despite issuing numerous apologies, still avoids any mention of women being taken against their will. Some lawmakers go as far as recounting stories from Japanese soldiers who were adamant the comfort women thanked them for the chance to send money back home. The Japanese government continues to fight strongly against activist efforts to support and recognize these women. Lee Ok-Sun continues to demand that she and her ilk be recognized.

This graphic novel packs a massive punch and tells the story of one comfort women and her lived experience. Incredibly done, beautifully translated by Janet Hong with some astonishing artwork reminiscent of traditional ink brush painting, this is a powerful work that should be read.

Man this was a trip.

Yona Kim works for a Korean company called Jungle that curates inclusive holiday packages to disaster zones. She's been there for 10 years but is feeling like something has changed, that her position within the organization has subtly shifted. When she is sexually harassed several times by a fellow co-worker, who perhaps senses her diminished standing, we expect a certain type of book. But Yona isn't interested in joining her voice with the victims, with aligning with what she considers the losers. The incident becomes a launching off point to her taking an extended leave to a disaster destination called Mui.

Tribal slaughter to make the tourists shudder and a massive sinkhole - now a wide lake - to excite their imagination. The guests occupy beachfront bungalows with crisp white sheets, rose petals by the bath, a single guest consuming more water than an entire village. They are trundled out to witness the poverty of the locals with a scheduled day for altruistic labour in digging a well. But again, Yun Ko-eun has bigger plans than an indictment of Instatravel and white-knighting voluntourism.

Improbably separated from the rest of her tour and left behind, Yona sees what happens in the off season and finds herself having to justify a strange calculus of lives. (Pandemic economics anyone?) A massive, faceless corporation named Paul that despite it's humanizing name seems inevitable in its forward progress of business, widely distributed across thousands of people that are “just doing their job” harbouring no personal malice or ill will and yet inevitably streamrolling over anything and anyone that gets in their way.

And then, as if unable to support the massive weight of so much metaphor it has heaped upon us, The Disaster Tourist veers off into Kaufmanesque territory and embeds a meta lovestory amidst a fabricated disaster. It's a lot. Sacrilege to say but I think this would be even better as a TV serialization. This thing reads like a tight one season story arc filled with rich possibility and knowing winks. This thing could become even more scathing, hilarious and plaintive if given some real space to breathe.

There is a point in your life, perhaps it's when you have your first child, when you can better reflect on how you were raised. How love was shown in your home and what you carry with you as you build your own future.

Here our protagonist Madang has found himself a new home in a quiet rural outpost, but finds himself shuttling back home to Seoul to take care of his ailing mother. Navigating doctors, an alcoholic layabout of a father, and a somewhat resigned mother, Madang finds comfort in his rural garden and food. He reflects warmly about his mother's cooking and carries that love to his own family.

It's a simple story with pared down line art that turns our characters into anthropomorphized cats that nonetheless delivers a familiar gut punch of reconciling your past, actively turning from your parents to carve out your own space in life to the feelings of duty that come as they age. Wrestling with the economies of care, feelings of desperation and trying to find a way forward amidst the mess.

It's a revelation! After a month of reading Korean works in translation and just soaking in that feeling of “han” it's nice to get what is essentially a sunny middle-grade read! I mean it is still Korean, people get beaten and there's more than one brutal knife attack, but otherwise it's downright hopeful!

Yunjae has a brain condition called Alexithymia which means he doesn't feel fear or anger. He's not good at reading other's emotions either and has to be taught to fake it by his mom and grandmother. Yunjae's a teenager so you can imagine how his condition is quickly seen by his peers - and he is soon targeted by the bully Gon. But they soon form an unlikely bond, until Dora enters the picture.

Told from Yunjae's perspective, the English translation lends itself well to our emotionless protagonist, opting for a clean translation without the need for literary flourishes. The whole thing is a bit of a fairytale but I can't begrudge this uncharacteristically (for Korea) sunny read.

Patricia Campbell leads the picture perfect life. A house in the affluent Old Village suburb of Charleston South Carolina, hard working husband and two beautiful kids. She joins a book club with some of the ladies in the community where they escape the humming normalcy of their lives by reading pulpy true crime novels and books featuring serial killers. Things are great.

And then James Harris enters their lives.

Sure this is a blood soaked vampire horror story (though to be honest the most visceral episode in the entire story for me involved a single cockroach) but Grady Hendrix is playing with a lot of themes here.

The housewives may be in mortal danger from a vampiric creature but it turns out the real villain is the patriarchy. As vile as Harris is, it's the husbands that are the monsters here. The women's voices are all invalidated through gaslighting, violence, religion, and careerist concerns. The racial divide is also plumbed as the women can almost excuse their inaction when it's “just” the Black kids disappearing down on Six Mile. The families there are also slowly being displaced by an ambitious new development project called Gracious Cay being led by the charismatic James Harris. A project that makes the book club ladies and their husbands very wealthy to boot. It's easy to just go along with it all - but James harbours a hunger that can't be stopped. Patricia learns that her inaction has led to the horrors seeping into her's and her children's lives. And so she rallies the housewives along with the Black cleaning lady to mount an offence.

God, this whole thing is just a metaphor for white Republican women ignoring all the signs and warnings and willingly inviting a monster into the “House.”

I read Ha Seong-nan's first collection, Flowers of Mold, and the stories here are just as elusive. Most of them evade me and resist imprinting. All this despite the fact that I think I'm getting the hang of Korean short stories. You don't so much arrive at your destination as much as the bus just stops and boots you off and you're left standing at the side of the road trying to remember exactly how you ended up here with an odd sense of disquiet.

26 year old Margot Lee makes the trek from Seattle to see her mom in Los Angeles after she stops returning her calls. She discovers her dead in the apartment and begins to realize how little she really knows of her. Margot feels like a hand-waving chaos engine careening into a potential murder mystery, chasing down an elusive father, and uncovering family secrets. So basically K-drama in novel form.

This is contrasted as we hear Margot's mother's story. Mina Lee arrived in Los Angeles in the summer of ‘87 - utterly alone and bereft. She finds a job stocking the shelves at a supermarket and begins to find a measure of hope. Mina's story holds all the answers to the questions Margot suddenly finds herself asking, and maybe that makes for an unfair storytelling balance but I just wanted more of Mina's story. It's an Asian-American K-Drama - a specific difference I would have loved to have seen explored further.