Stephen Tyler

Surprisingly relevant for a twenty five year old book (it has received a couple updates) and exceptionally actionable. Highly recommended for marrieds are want-to-be marrieds.

Winter in Sokcho: Kerrand's Review


Winter in Sokcho, the debut novel from author Elisa Shua Dusapin, is the first-person narrative of a young French-Korean woman (whose name is never revealed), educated in Seoul but having returned to her unremarkable hometown of Sokcho. The book mainly revolves around her emerging-but-awkward relationship with a French artist. His name is Kerrand. And that's me. 


It makes sense that she wrote about our encounter. If I were not French, I would be tempted to say our time together was the epitome of je ne sais quoi, but of course being French I could not descend to such cliches. It was strange and powerful. A few minutes searching synonyms on the internet shows me that the English word I'm looking for is “ineffable”. The ineffable, fleeting collision of our lives. 


Elisa (I know I should use her last name, but it's too odd for me, as I never learned it until the book) writes beautifully. I'm an illustrator, not an author, but I find her style to be crisp, rhythmic, and yes, even pretty. In length, it can only be considered a novella. It clocks in at under one hundred and sixty pages, but with dozens of chapter breaks (shrugging off the convention of being named or numbered), it reads even shorter.


The narrative made me sad at times. Why didn't Elisa name the protagonist? At first I thought it may have been a problem as to the continuity of the story whether she should have a French or a Korean name. However, I realized later, it was central to her theme. A woman with no name might be seen, but she cannot be known. 


The issues with body image, female relationships, and food all were concealed behind her curtain of beauty and wit. I never saw them. It's strange – every time I come to know a woman who does not mention these things, I still assume it means they do not experience them. I should have learned their universality by now. Why could she not? For the same reasons she felt she could not speak to me in French? 


I was shocked that the narrator never explicitly mentions our age gap, simply making a factual statement as to the year of my birth on page one. It was my primary concern throughout and surely was the driver of my mercurial behavior toward her. Her youth, expressed physically and emotionally, was ever before me. I could not see past the decades of inkstain on my hands, the ache in my back from twenty years (which was the distance between us) of huddling over sketchbooks, and though my body is lean, it is soft from a steady diet of packaged pastries, as Elisa uncovered to all. I thought her merely polite in not teasing me for being near her mothers age. Why had I assumed so much? 


Of course, no, my name is not Kerrand. I appreciate the attempt to cloak my identity, though anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the graphic novel genre would immediately recognize me from the description of my work. And it is the descriptions of my work which I found most breathtaking. The care and attention with which Elisa depicts my physical form while creating my art was an out-of-body experience. The words melting into the motion of my pen, the dripping of the ink, the curve of my hand. And the sounds? How had I never considered the scratching of my pen as the requiem for my hero's conquests? These passages compressed and reformed into images such that I'm not sure I remember the words at all. 


I did not want to like this book. As you can imagine I was uncomfortable with the very idea of it. But I cannot lie. What I experienced in Sokcho, I see now, was the inevitable result of a longing. That is the soul of Winter in Sokcho. The longing for knowledge of oneself, and the longing to have oneself be known. 

I don't know what to do with The Stranger.

If The Stranger is Camus' exploration of the absurdity of existence through a sociopathic neurodivergent protagonist whose idiosyncracies represent the strengths and weaknesses of nihilistic worldviews, then this is a five star novel, worthy of its place in the canon.

If The Stranger is Camus' exploration of the absurdity of existence through a brave young protagonist whose disinclination to follow social norms is employed as a referendum against such passe conventions, and whose enslavement to his personal appetites is portrayed as an elevated consciousness, than I say this novel can drift in the way of all nihilistic thought: into circular, self defeating irrelevance.

The writing I enjoyed. The wrestling with authorial intent I enjoyed. The protagonist, Meursault, I did not enjoy in the least, and still am not sure whether or not that was Camus' intent.

It's short and sharply written – read and decide for yourself!

A tough one to judge. Band is Brothers is a terrific tale of extraordinary soldiers, a study in leadership, and a survey of military operations in the European theater of WWll. Band of Brothers is also a case study in deep lapses in authorial objectivity.

Though I found the stories of the 101st, 506, and E Company engrossing and exceptional, Band of Brothers consistently drifts into flag-waving and hero-worship territory. This is an author's prerogative, of course, but when the author proclaims himself an historian, such clear biases are off-putting.

The book is written along a linear timeline, which is sensible, but it presented Ambrose the significant challenge of maintaining narrative tension – a challenge he unfortunately failed to fully overcome. While there are plenty of interesting anecdotes in the final 25% of the book, there's really no compelling drama or narrative tension to move things along.

I did particularly found Winters and Webster to be fascinating characters. In an example of life imitating art, these two soldiers represented total opposite approaches to compulsory service in the war.

As a matter of general, national, or personal interest, this is a worthwhile book. It is simply unfortunate that Ambrose descends to the level of fandom in his narrative.

Come for the themes of isolation and desperation, stay for the multiple POV masterclass.

Ishiguro's complete habitation of the protagonist Mr. Stevens is masterful, the existential themes and the mechanisms of delivering them are brilliant. I just found Mr. Stevens rather boring. I might call this a very good novel that I didn't enjoy very much.

Listened on audio. Whoa. I definitely need a physical copy. Absolutely bursting with provocative thought.

Maybe the loveliest book I've ever read. 5/5,10/10, 100/100.

Let us begin this review of A Brief History of Seven Killings as we should. With a glib remark on the irony of the title? No. With a plot synopsis? Negative. With a review of the author's biography, previous work, and general critical standing. Stop. None of this is what matters. No, let's begin right where we should and state the objective fact: A Brief History of Seven Killings is just Marlon James absolutely flexing on everyone.

PROSPECTIVE READER: Marlon, surely you won't write two-thirds of the book in varying depths of Jamaican patois?
MJ: Yes, I think I will.
PROSPECTIVE READER: Ok, but obviously you wont end a section of the novel with back-to-back-to-back-to-back chapters of gangbangers being fed cocaine and having their nascent addictions leveraged to coerce them into murder?
MJ: Absolutely I am going to do that, yes.
PROSPECTIVE READER: Stream of consciousness first person accounts of the deaths of those same addict gang members?
MJ: YOU KNOW THIS.
PROSPECTIVE READER: But surely it would be too much to include frustrated CIA agents, floundering American magazine journalists, and cryptic Cuban terrorists?
MJ: LIGHT WORK SON.
PROSPECTIVE READER: Do you really think you can weave a seven hundred page tapestry of dozens of characters around the figure of Bob Marley, only never call him Bob Marley, call him simply “The Singer”, somehow making him both the central figure of the book, but also less a character than a spirit haunting the spaces between the characters, the chapters, the words?
MJ: HOLD MY BEER.

A Brief History of Seven Killings brims with style, with skill, and with ambition. It's more self-assured than a debut and overflows with the audacity of a young author drunk on the discovery of his literary powers. Could it be shorter? It could be. There are one or two extraneous characters and threads of story. Still, these are minor quibbles given the book's overarching excellence in voice and affection.

It is long, and it can be difficult, but it is artful and it is rewarding. Find yourself feeling warmly towards horrible, murderous men. Find yourself tangled in the life and mind of Nina, the complicated female lead. Find yourself using pidgin profanities like “bombocloth” and decrying minor inconveniences as “Babylon business”. Find yourself between the pages of A Brief History and find yourself thankful for it.

4.5/5

A worthy adaptation.

Creation Lake is complex. It contains multitudes. It is anthropology. It is ethics. It is ecology and politics. It is inter- and intrapersonal. It is contemplative and it is urgent. It is written wonderfully.

It asks the reader to do some work. To meet with the text, to engage with it, not just consume it like yet another digital flicker on a screen. But it will reward such readers.

I enjoyed it thoroughly. I will read it again, and I'd be thrilled if it won the 2024 Booker, for which it is shortlisted.

5/5

In 2020, Callan Wink gave us August, a moving coming-of-age work that showcased Wink's promise as a novelist. In Beartooth, he follows up with a darkly rich story of two brothers, Thad and Hazen, and their attempts to grind out a liveable existence in rural Montana.

Reading Beartooth was a lot like spending time in Montana and the adjacent parts of Idaho and Wyoming. Like a mountaintop vista on the Continental Divide, its prose regularly skews poetic, and invites the reader to sit in a sense of wonder. Like a brutal cold winter in Island Park or Ennis or Hoback, it is harsh in its portrayal of nature's realities. And in the same way that a traveler can have a warts-and-all appreciation of a small Montana town, this reader could not help but come away with admiration for Beartooth.

While not a perfect work, Beartooth is a step forward for Wink's literary craftsmanship. The delivery of dialogue is improved from his debut, and the interstitial monologue provided by Sacagawea was an audacious, McCarthyesque stroke. There's a Dickensian touch here, too: our impoverished, downtrodden protagonists on the margins of a world which seems to have passed by men like them, and poses the question of whether it needs or even wants them at all.

I enjoyed reading Beartooth so much that I inhaled it like a child who can't help but eat all their Halloween candy in one sitting and has none left over, while all their friends and siblings are snacking for weeks. I'm certain I'll read it again, and soon.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced e-copy for review.

4.5/5 stars

Rivers are fluid bridges – channels of communication between separate worlds. They link one bank to the other, the past to the future, the spring to the delta, earthlings to celestial beings, the visible to the invisible, and ultimately, the living to the dead.

Water, and rivers in particular, dictate more of our lives than most people realize. Cities, especially those founded before the proliferation of the railroad, need water and are very often situated along rivers. Our highways and railways often parallel rivers, taking advantage of prehistoric pathways the water has carved over millennia. I've spent much of my life in and around rivers – in them, I find orientation in a disorienting world. I'm a river person, and as such, I'm aware that many of our rivers are under various threats. Pollution, impoundment (damming), and rising water temperatures threaten both the quantity and the usability of our planet's freshwater, as well as every organism that relies on that water for survival. Like us.

I don't particularly like thinking about these things.

There Are Rivers in the Sky gave me no choice. Elif Shafak's novel is so finely crafted that we are confronted with these unpleasant truths, but she makes us want to sit with them. Both elegant and compelling, There Are Rivers combines multiple storylines told over a couple thousand years, the common thread between them being a single drop of water. Maybe this sounds a bit twee (it did to me, at first) but Shafak masterfully weaves the stories with a sleight of hand. Plot developments feel organic, natural, never forced by the author's storyboarding. Much of the story also revolves around the Epic of Gilgamesh, a Mesopotamian epic poem whose origins around 2100 BC likely date it as the oldest written poem in the world. This has the effect of somehow grounding the novel, like giving it an ancient air of authority.

I found There Are Rivers in the Sky to be a nearly perfect novel. The prose is artistic but not overly florid. The plot moves but doesn't lean on cliffhangers or other devices to artificially hook the reader. The sentences, the story, and the characters do the work, and do it well.

A poem is a swallow in flight. You watch it soar through the infinite sky, you can even feel the wind passing over its wings, but you can never catch it, let alone keep it in a cage. Poems belong to no one.

Like poems, rivers may be experienced, they may be temporarily impounded, they may be fought over, but we can never catch them, and they belong to no one. Elif Shafak reminds us we'd do well to remember this.

4.5/5 stars

In June of 2020, Sebastian Junger nearly dies. After finally making his way to the hospital, his blood pressure is at rock bottom, he has massive internal bleeding of an unknown origin, and doctors are trying to insert a catheter into the side of his neck. In the midst of this, a void appears to open up to him, and then above the void, his father – who is dead – also appears, and communicates to Sebastian that it's okay, he can go into the void.

The younger Junger does not die, though, and In My Time of Dying is the account of the author's near death experience and his subsequent obsession with the vision of his father. In exploring research and accounts of life review (think: “my life flashed before my eyes”) and near death apparitions, he stumbles into an existential crisis.

Junger's existential crisis eventually brings to bear fundamental questions about existence itself, and in keeping with his self-described atheistic, rational upbringing, these questions soon have him swimming in the deep, fraught waters of quantum physics. He throws an arm around the reader and pulls us along on this trip, an experience I found compelling, but also fear will lose the interest of many. Discussions of Plancks-lengths, quantum of action, and Schrodinger's cat are not the most digestible reading.

In My TIme of Dying captured my attention completely and rattled around my mind during breaks in reading. Junger's story and subsequent seeking are deeply personal, yet encompass timeless universal concerns. He seems to take great pains to shrink his own confirmation bias and trade it for a willingness to consider the potential origins, purposes, and meanings behind ideas and visions of an afterlife.

I enjoyed this small book, and rate it highly, though one issue keeps me from a full-throated five star review. Junger's conclusion, while scientific in nature, is not testable, repeatable, or observable. He knows this, and yet seemingly avoids or cannot bring himself to say the F-word...faith. While I have no issue with the author's adoption of an unobservable end-of-life belief, Junger misses the mark by presenting himself a rationalist, adopting an irrational conclusion, and making no admission of the leap of faith required to do so. I feel this is why the book ends rather abruptly. Junger's suspension of confirmation bias can only go so far. It's a gem of a book and recommended reading nonetheless.

Kevin Barry. Kevin Barry! Wherefore art thou Kevin Barry? If you were not Kevin Barry – if you were of a name more memorable, more singular – perhaps I and the rest of the reading world would not so easily look past you. If your name had a barb on its hook, maybe it would not so easily slide out of the mind. If your name was not beige; if it had the color and sound and shape of your writing, perhaps your books would populate a hundred thousand more shelves. Why I'm just now reading Kevin Barry, or why his name is not surrounded by grander accolades, I can't really say. I can only say it's not on account of any defect in his writing, because there isn't any.

The Heart in Winter is Kevin Barry's novel featuring a turn of the nineteenth century Butte, Montana as its central setting and its Irish immigrants as the central cast. Most of the Irish populate Butte as laborers for the mining boom, but Tom Rourke isn't much for physical work and scrapes by as a man of letters and songs (and opium, too). Before long, Tom meets Polly, and the two ignite a love affair that is as ill-advised as it is inevitable.

The novel follows the journey of our fated lovers, with Barry as the orchestrator of words and sentences and chapters that never miss a note. Like a jazz ensemble, The Heart in Winter takes exciting small turns, twisting tempo and tone but never losing the beating heart of the story. The prose is masterful, always razor sharp while remaining loose, fluid, and elastic.

“She lay in the darkness and sermonized against herself. If you are of the kind that throws yourself to the fates of the earth then you better watch out. If you are of the kind that takes notions in a life then you just got to accept all of that life's capricious outcomes. If you are of the kind that throws all cares to the wind don't go complainin when suddenly you are off your goddamn feet and spinnin out forever in the crazy fucking wind.”

Goodbye now, if you need me, I'll be in Kevin Barry's backlist to find who else he has beautifully thrown to the fates of the world, to life's capricious outcomes, and I look forward to basking in their tales of spinning forever in the wind.

An enjoyable - but for me, fatally flawed - novel.

I had an affection for the main character, she of multiple names: Lamentations, Wench, Zed, and others. I appreciated the premise and the start-in-the-middle structure was well executed and mostly maintained tension throughout. The writing itself, while once or twice slightly overreaching, was often poetic and quite beautiful.

My issue with The Vaster Wilds, and I fully realize this may be a highly individual complaint, is that I was absolutely confounded by the way Groff wrote about wild places, geography and topography. My life has been one largely spent outside, and I found myself constantly disoriented by her descriptions. I was unable to suspend my disbelief in places where the events are simply not physically possible, like maintaining a fire inside a hollowed out tree that is also providing total shelter from torrential rain, somehow allowing enough oxygen for the fire the burn and having an exhaust for smoke to escape, yet remaining water tight and also managing not to catch the tree in fire from the inside out.

It bums me out to feel like I'm being pedantic, but so many passages just left me pulling out my hair. For me, Groff needed a great deal more personal experience alone in wild places in order to make this the gr at book it could have been.

Rural North Dakota, circa 2008-2009. Small-scale tragedies – loss of life, loss of money – have visited the farming community of Tabor. Large-scale tragedies – threats of ecological and economic disaster – are in the air and unavoidable. Inside a full cast of characters from Tabor, we have eighteen year old Kismet Poe, and her mother, Crystal, as the narrative nucleus to Louise Erdrich's The Mighty Red.

The Mighty Red moves quickly, with a straightforward structure of mostly short chapters. Erdrich weaves the characters and plot like the master she is, moving the story forward by keeping most narrative strings under great tension but always allowing for enough revelation and release. There's a solidity to each character and an unshakeable sense of place that cannot be attained by research alone. It can only be borne of a writer with a deep well of experience with such characters and in such a place.

While the characters shine bright, the real star is the land, and the “mighty” Red River which runs through it. Erdrich rages against the monoculture machine bluntly at times, though these on-the-nose critiques are tempered by some lovely metaphorical allusions to returning to the old ways.

There was a major plot twist which I foresaw and felt a bit deflated by, but I should have known better. Erdrich – with glee, I must imagine – later yanked the rug out from under me with a delicious twist within the twist. Outstanding.

The Mighty Red is a novel about loss and despair, about love and resilience. It's about people and the planet, about the ways both will change, and the ways both will not.

Adored this. Full review to come.

DNF at less than 10%. I was intrigued by the structural premise; I did not at all enjoy its execution. Just not for me, might be fabulous for readers with different preferences.

3.5/5, rounded up.

Frank Bruni writes a coherent and fair evaluation of the myriad ways Grievance is weaponized in recent times, particularly by and against Americans. That an excessive, malevolent Grievance exists in our modern United States is not terribly revelatory, but Bruni does provide both a depth and a nuance that makes the book worthwhile.

The author's proposed solutions, while perfectly sensible, feel both big and too small. The systemic solutions are daunting to the point of impossibility, and the personal solutions are so small one struggles to imagine them influencing the larger system.

That criticism aside, this is an important book as a signpost of the mid-2020's. Recommended reading for all Americans.

Wandering Stars is Tommy Orange's follow-up to his acclaimed debut, There There, a Pulitzer finalist in 2019.

Orange's new novel is equal parts sequel and prequel, rewinding to the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre as its starting line, and moving chronologically through generations until catching up with Orvil Red Feather and his family in the aftermath of the Oakland Pow Wow that was the climax of There There.

As the book travels time with its characters, Orange explores themes carried over from its predecessor, namely the Native experience, grappling with identity and meaning of ones heritage in a world that wasn't built by or for people of color. The bullets imbedded in the bodies of both Jude Star and Orvil are a moving metaphor for the inextricable, damaging intrusion of white Eurocentric values and practices into the collective Native experience. This novel is again set largely in Oakland, although the other city by the bay takes a smaller role than in the previous work, Orange still takes care to illuminate the “there” that is “there”. Addiction becomes the major theme in Wandering Stars, the myriad expressions of addiction and its tentacles that spread across the specific geography of Oakland and into the characters lives.

Stylistically, Orange weaves in and out of first, second, and third person points of view. He again demonstrates true mastery of the description of his characters interior lives. His skill in this method is unsurpassed. Entire pages fly by without any real dialogue or events, just beautiful and painful insights into the inner workings of the character's mind and hearts. With that in mind, it must be noted that where Orange's interior descriptions seamlessly soar, chapters based on dialogue tend to dip, conversations clunky in ways that contrast unfavorably with the bulk of the novel.

Wandering Stars closes unevenly, the penultimate chapter from Orvil feeling a bit too on-the-nose, more like a museum exhibit on the oppressive practices of the American government toward its indigenous populations than an artistic exploration of that oppression. But Orange triumphs in the final chapter, an epistolary, metaphysical treatise on self discovery, family, and love that tips the scales and elevates this work from good to great.

Wandering Stars is a rewarding, heartbreaking novel which has this reader already anticipating what Orange will gift us with next.

“Healing is holy and if you have the chance to not have to carry something alone, with people you love, it should be honored”

Oh, Martyr! How I wanted to love you.

Cyrus, you were a fine character. Messy, frustrating, beautiful and human. As unattractive as your selfishness could be, let's be honest, it was also relatable. We're all too interested in ourselves and not enough in others. Your moments of clarity were near ecstatic and I don't believe a reader could ever stop rooting for you. Zee and Roya exuded humanity in their specific ways as well, and Ali too, though perhaps to a lesser extent.

And Cyrus, your dreams! How divine. Capturing both the absurdity of our unconscious orchestrations and the way we earnestly accept them, no matter how outlandish. These sequences were sublime.

I loved the voice, language, and characters of this book. And I almost loved the story, but late in the game, a crucial plot development left me cold and incredulous. I was devasted by this authorial choice, and though there was so much to love, for me the story problem tarnishes the novel.

A sad, reluctant 3.5 stars.

Update: Longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction.

I expected to love this novel, and perhaps expectations are to blame. It is amazing on a sentence level. The prose is exquisite and superbly creative with language – quite like Cormac McCarthy at times in its stripping away of the physical world in exploration of what lies beneath. In spite of this stripping away of the physical world, Robinson still creates a solid sense of place; her fictional town of Fingerbone and its lake were fully crafted and central to all that happens in the book. But unfortunately the story never goes anywhere. The cast is slim, and the few characters who move at all could be said to drift more than they arc.

Given her significant power with language, I'm sure I'll read Robinson again, whether Gilead or some of her well-regarded non-fiction.

Not sure how this book never popped on to my radar before now, but I'm glad it finally did. Skye Jethani concisely presents four typical, but broken, relational approaches to God, and then offers a fifth way: life with God. It's well researched but not overly long, rigorous but accessible. Recommended for anyone with any interest in the Divine and what it would mean to live in accordance with it.