works of wanderlust

Tag: reading

  • book reviews: on down the river

    September may be the end of summer reads, but no doubt that I am still trudging through a reading list longer than I care to admit. My lack of completed tomes this last few weeks has less to do with the quantity of reading I am going and more to do with my ability to focus on just one book.  It would seem that my digital distractibility in this department is no less a problem than the analog version.

    That said, I have been reading. And reading. And reading some more. 

    And lately I’ve read…

    James by Percival Everett

    James is a horror story. Flipping the perspective on a book I literally just read, it instead retells the events of the famous Mark Twain novel Huckleberry Finn from the view of the runaway slave Jim.  But where Twain’s original text is merely a weighty adventure romp with a moral imperative baked into its layers, all of it nudging and imploring readers to examine their notions of the racial divide in the Americas of that time, James wraps Jim in a kind of fictionally-driven agency to offer a story that is both compelling in its context and chilling in its implications. It is made no better, of course, that the all-too-real monster chasing James as a runaway slave through the pre-civil war south is the great grand-pappy ancestor of the same monster now creeping out of the shadows and into seats of vengeful political power in the US in 2025. Being a white, middle-aged Canadian man leaves me in no good position to offer any opinion on what this book does right or what it is supposed to mean or how it should be read. All I know is that it shook me, shook me to the point that like a horror story I often had to put it down for days at a time to process the descriptions of inhuman cruelty written inside. It is a fictionalized account, of course, and rightly so told as it is as a counterpoint to a “great American novel.” My reread of Huckleberry Finn recently was still quite fresh in my head, of course, and having just revisited the raft ride down the Mississippi I was all too aware of the weight of that story in the modern context of American neo-racism and an orange menace normalizing two hundred year old ideas that should have long been sent to their grave. But naivety of reality is the greatest ally of the dark impulses of humanity and one’s greatest weapon is education of the horrors as painted in even just a fictional tale, and empathy for the fact that while James is fictional his is a story built upon more truth than many of us can stomach.

    Shit, Actually by Lindy West

    There are days when I fashion myself a humorist of a sort, attempting to write clever reflections of life, the universe and everything—but mostly books and video games if I’m being honest. But that said, even if I can’t always measure up in my own witty writing, I do have a vibe and am drawn to reading the kind of observational kinds of reviews that I wish I could churn out with my little keyboard here at a Starbucks. This book of clever film reviews of a bunch of movies, all of which I have almost certainly seen every last one (except Twilight, I’ve never seen that one!) multiple times, showed up as a recommendation in my audiobook feed—and there I was looking for a low risk, light-hearted listen with a credit burning a hole in my digital pocket. I am also, notably, a fan of the oft-chided podcast rewatch genre, which has led me into similar additional reading expeditions. In other words, this wee book checked a lot of boxes for me. I consumed the whole damn thing inside of two days, all seven hours of short essays read by the author, providing clever, witty and jabbing summaries spectacularly mediocre movies while sticking her finger into the gaping plot holes of the same. And what else is there to say. I was funny, sometimes laugh out loud funny, which startled me almost as much as it did the other people in the room where I was listening with headphones.

    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

    The day I finished re-reading this classic all tangled up in the history of American racism and slavery as it definitively is, the government of my (Canadian) province released a book ban list to the public, which given the company it would have been among—classics of political reaction like 1984, cautionary tales of amoral governments tangled up in religion like The Handmaid’s Tale—it was almost surprising that there was no Twain on the list. We live in dark times here in the mid-20s and while I’m not exactly sure the motivation for Twain to have written a book and a character like Huckleberry Finn, and can’t help but believe it was, too, a reaction to dark times. The book, obviously, is an indictment of American slavery told from the perspective of young adventurous Huck Finn whose adventures in a previous novel landed him a rich kid with an abusive, alcoholic father (all too normalized by the society in which Finn lives.). He escapes by faking his own murder and lands up in a classic travelling-the-river tale in the company of Jim, a slave who has also escaped. The duo’s adventures are a fictionalized glimpse at middle America of an era, one assumes, peppered with the moral maturing of Huck as he faces down the complex questions of right and wrong in a society that taught him that certain people are property and that what he is doing is abetting a crime the likes of which he figures will condemn him to hell, all the while we as the reader look at it from the modern perspective of Finn’s innate judgement being the right one. And still it is a hard book to read, not because of anything particularly narratively confusing, but if only because does at time feel as though the demon Twain was shining sunlight upon has risen up once again, never truly departed from this world.  It wouldn’t surprise me to see this wind up on the banned list of any American politician who had both read and understood its story.

  • book reviews: from a heat wave

    There is never a bad excuse to read, but hunkered in the cool basement to avoid the hot weather nursing a cold Coke and speed running some fanciful fiction is better than many. 

    I won’t tell you that there is either rhyme or reason to my recent picks besides that I’m on a bit of a first in, first out ebooks from the digital discount bin on the Kobo site or whatever pops up on my library holds list first. For example, I assume the original Jurassic Park book was on sale for a buck ninety nine a couple weeks ago because there is a new (eighth!?) movie in the franchise due in theatres imminently. The same reason that I bought a new Jurassic World game on Steam for less than a cup of coffee this past weekend. I’m just riding the shockwave of the cultural vibe, it seems. And I’m okay with that, too.

    These last couple weeks I’ve read:

    Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

    I’d be lying if I said my first read of this book—way back in the early nineties—did not influence my choice of post-secondary education. I remember that our high school librarian who knew that our little group of nerd kids were ravenous readers showed up at the side of the table where we were playing cards one lunch and held out a copy of the book with its stark white and black dinosaur bones cover to the group and asked who wanted to be the first to read it. I accepted. The novel and subsequent movie sparked a kind of renaissance in the popularization of genetic engineering akin to a 90s version of the AI goldrush of 2025: everyone wanted a piece and every piece of media—magazines, television, and more—were telling kids that biology was the career of the future. A year or so later, having devoured the novel and the concept, I was enrolled in a science degree program and the rest is a sad trombone of personal history. I can’t recall having read the book since high school, but Jurassic Park is one of those things like Star Wars—there’s been so many sequels and video games and theme park rides transect my life that, first, it was hard to recall if the novel had been one of those and, second, the source material was almost underwhelming with respect to both the official and head canon that has emerged and swirled through the decades in between. The novel is a romp. And by far lighter and less dense than I remembered, like a Grisham novel with science-ish concepts. And that’s fine. Though reflecting on the direction this book sent my life spinning felt a bit like I’d been chased along the way by a Tyrannosaurus Rex to only find out later it was little more than film prop.

    Vacationland by John Hodgman

    Over a decade ago we went on a vacation cruise in the Caribbean. The Kid was young. We were young, too, but kind of in that middle demographic of not young enough to be cool but not old enough to be completely out of touch. I had been listening to a podcast by John Hodgman (about a week before we left for Florida departure) in which he was talking about suspiciously similar cruise he was about to embark as well. Sherlock I am not, but I nonetheless figured out that the cruise itinerary on which we were coincidentally booked was simultaneously hosting the JoCo Cruise, a fan convention at sea for which at least half or more of the passengers were attending. We were not attending. We were like vacationers who show up for a quiet vacation in middle of comiccon. We spent our weekend spotting C-list celebrities from our deck chairs and watching convention-goers enjoying a completely different week than the few hundred rest of us were having on a much more typical vacation. Yet, (tho I knew he was aboard) I had not spotted Mr. Hodgman. Was he actually on this boat? Was he hiding from Wil Wheaton? Had he tumbled overboard, martini in hand, and been lost at sea? The second-last night of the cruise the convention was hosting a big party on the Lido deck but, as they were setting up, us normies were still allowed up there and so the fam and I went for a soak in the hot tub before we got evicted to the buffet. It was then, sitting there in a whirlpool in my swim trunks, drinking a cocktail when I happened to look up. There standing on the deck at parade rest in bare feet and a tuxedo was the guy himself. Just standing there. Sound-checking or vibing or just being him weird self. Core memory. My Kid, aged six, did not care at all. But if you enjoy rambling anecdotal vacation stories like this, stories that touch on odd confluences of priviledge and ecclectic knowledge, Mr. Hodgman’s book may be right up your alley.

    I’m Starting to Worry About this Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin

    My familiarity with the writings of Mr Pargin extends back to a fondness for the various essays and comedic observations he infrequently published pre-pandemic, and that twist through my complex relationship with the publication Cracked.  When a new article or guest podcast appearance bylined with his name on it I could always tell I would need to pay slighty more rigorous attention to the plot and his wry, pulse-on-the-zeitgeist observations which so parelleled a lot of familiar vibes I couldn’t always articulate on my own. There is, of course, always a danger in looking to a single source of understanding of anything, particularly in this vastly connected reality we share, but I will admit I felt a kind of abstract, quasi-celebrity kinship to this guy with whom I shared a kind of parallel upbringing and creative motiviation. That said, his resulted in a more successful (rightfully earned) outcome, and all of this background is relevant to the tone and substance of this latest of his novels, a standalone adventure-ish story that could easily be subtitled ”Or, why people on the internet are all nuts, you shouldn’t trust a word you read, and first thing’s first: take a deep breath and calm the fuck down!” Pargin has an acute sense of the moment in which we all live, and I suspect this is largely because he has spent enough mental processing cycles pondering the outrage engines and content factories to be a successful participant in the same if for no other or better reason than to promote his writing. That can’t help but leave a few scars on the soul of any author that surface in clever or disturbing ways through a thrillride of a novel that was hard to put down once I started reading.

  • book reviews: no rules

    Barely twenty four hours after I finished reading Dust (which I reviewed in a post now barely a day old) I finished yet another thick tome of a novel which I had been reading concurrently: the second book of the Hyperion Cantos.

    I don’t know exactly how thick. Digital books be bits.

    There are no rules about all this reading books and writing reviews, are there? If there are, I’m willfully ignoring them, going to read and post whatever I want. I mean, hell, I’m usually reading five or six books at any given time, random opportunity, and always depending on my mood. Sometimes I’m vibing for some soft nature comedy while other days I’m grooving on a juicy apocalyptic allegory.

    Similarly, there’s no rules that can’t say since I’m now apparently starting with a relatively clean slate with whatever novel I pick up later today, I can’t also clean off the ole review slate to go along with it. Thus, to round out the usual trio of reviews, I dug out a bonus pair of books that I had polished off and reviewed earlier in the year, pre this-blog-revival to add to the my list.

    The Taking by Dean Koontz

    If I asked an AI to write a paranormal thriller wrapped around a religious allegory and puffed up with so much flowery language that a poet would hold their hands up for a reprieve, there is a good chance the AI would spit out something very close to this book. I was feeling like I should do a survey. I have been writing a lot of paranormal science fiction lately, and like anyone who dabbles in anything it only makes sense to dip one’s toe into the pool of publicly available material that already exists in a category.  In researching the category of paranormal science fiction, I came up with Dean Koontz, so went to the used bookstore to hunt down a book or two. The story was something of a chaotic fever dream. The short chapters jumped from idea to idea, barely lingering on anything long enough to track the impact. Chekhov left a dozen guns at the scene and nary a one was fired. And the self-importance of humanity in the vastness of the universe that came gurgling out of these pages could only have been written by someone who was—wait for it—writing a science fiction take on the biblical flood. Zoinks! I should have seen that coming. Gah! I’m sure some people like this schlock but it wasn’t my jam.

    1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

    It had been a long time since I read 1Q84. And strictly speaking, I listened to it as a very excellent audiobook shortly after it came out fifteen years ago. I was a different person then, half my adulthood ago. I didn’t remember it. I mean, I thought I did. I thought I had an impression of the story, but I had convoluted bits of it in my mind and confused it with other things I must have read since or before or whenever. Murakami drops hints to his methodology in the story, and the surreality of the plot seems to sweep by and if you aren’t paying attention maybe you miss these things. I wrote a one pointthat this book seems like a descriptive stew pot with morsels of plot mixed in. It is, after all, as much a sensory experience reading this tome of an 1155 page novel as anything else. The author has one of his characters spend months reading slowly through Proust and reflecting on that experience, and I think that this book might be a kind of modern, surrealist response to Proust in some ways. (In fact, I reserved a copy of Proust from the library to poke my nose into that to see if I get the same vibe from weird translated French literature as I do from weird translated Japanese literature.) I don’t want to spoil the book by degorging the plot here though. It is a meditative slog through a closely parallel world from which the protagonists are seeking parallel escapes, each other, and understanding. And in all that, all those 1155 pages almost nothing happens and yet it is filled with life and action and heavy beats of human footsteps through time and reality. It’s worth your time to read this.

    Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons

    The sequel-slash-second book of the Hyperion Cantos takes off mere minutes after the first book ends, but is marked by a stylistic shift that would almost make them feel like completely different series if not for the rich characters we have been following. Where the opening novel is a book of “tales” and backstory as the key players make their way like set pieces to the larger game, this one is a more traditionally linear story jumping from and around the various perspectives of the original characters and a small cast of others as a complex galactic-scale mystery unfolds. Hyperion is a kind of cautionary tale about the yoke of technology around the neck of humanity, and the slow realization that the conveniences and advancements that have been offered by technological tools can often be mistaken for progress. Simmons, as much as he is an author of hard technological science fiction, might just have been waving a warning flag to a society on the cusp of an information age that was just arriving as these books were published. The highly advanced data networks and frightening artificial intelligences that are key players in the story have very clear and obvious analogs to our modern age, and in the context of a world shifting and changing under the influence of unrestrained social media and the exponential growth of systems that increasingly do our thinking and creative work for us is a message that Simmons was probably decades ahead of his time in offering.  I assume countless other science fiction authors have trod a similar path to shout an identical message into the void, and sadly it seems as though very few of us are listening.

  • book reviews: fathers day

    Coinicentally perhaps, all three of the last trio of otherwise-disconnected books I recently read had a thread of fatherhood-related importance running through them. 

    It was Father’s Day yesterday, and my last as the dad of a kid (because The Kid will be An Adult in a couple months) so while I’ll be a dad for the rest of my life my role is changing a little bit this year, and I’m not sure what that means yet. The fathers in each of these books were important narrative elements but each in a very different way, one a paragon, one a lunatic counter-example,  one a steady hand in a storm.

    Hyperion by Dan Simmons

    I have listened multiple times to the audio version of the entire Hyperion Cantos, a four book hard science fiction series set roughly six hundred years in the future in a society of humanity resettled onto hundreds of worlds interconnected by technologies, both alien and AI, that they don’t truly understand. This first book is a kind of Canterbury Tales story, a collection of backstory narratives told by a collection of pilgrims—one the aforementioned father travelling to complete his daughter’s journey—travelling towards certain doom towards the mysterious shrine of a threat that has defined each of their lives yet which is understood by none of them. The Shrike is a kind of technological demon of unknown origin, built by aliens or sent back from the future, with control over time and space and a merciless agenda the pilgrims can only speculate upon. I decided to read the text version of all four books after I obtained a complete ebook collection, and even though I’ve heard all four novels more than once I find I am reading more details on this pass though. The author incorporates as both a theme and a character throughout the novels a kind of embodied homage to poet John Keats who died tragically of tuberculosis in the early 1800s at the age of 25, and while visiting the Spanish Steps in Rome in 2023 I happened to see the commemotation of this marked upon his final home, if nothing else grounding this now-comfort read for me and urging repeated readings of this wonderful collection.

    The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux

    If you have seen the 1986 film adaptation of this book which stars Harrison Ford as a misunderstood inventor driven mad by his pursuit of a Swiss Familiy Robinson-like escape from america to the jungles of Honduras, you’ve been misled about the tone of this novel. The novel is decidedly darker, and whomever turned this into a PG-13 romping adventure into the wilds did the source material a deep disservice. The novel’s protagonist Allie Fox is witnessed through the eyes of his fourteen year old son-made-narrator who details with gaslit devotion the madness of his father as he rages against the world as he flees with narcissitic paranoia further and further off grid to escape the perception of modern society as a prison. In a modern parlance we would recongnize these sorts of men who rule their families with thinly disguised emotional abuse as fountains of toxic masculinity, ripe for the propagandas of the right wing sovereignty cults or the red pilled movements. Seen from the eyes of his son, the collapse of this man into destructive madness is simultaneously pitiable and fearsome even knowing what such men have done to our societies over the last couple decades when they don’t take flight from their own shadows. This book shook me.

    Dust by Hugh Howey

    I did it. I sunk my teeth into the final book of the Silo trilogy and read the conclusion to this dystopic tale of society’s collapse at the hands of madness and righteousness. Even more than the previous two volumes Howey seems to lean into the misguided evils of people who blindly believe in things: their own infallibility, patriotic furvor, religious ideologies, among other subtler concepts. All of this emerges from the narrative web that Howey wove with the rich collection of characters and stories that only just started to interconnect even as the second book concluded. In the third and final installment the disparate storytelling becomes an obvious whole as the plot bounces between the characters and their chances of fortune that have led them on a plot-based collision course with each other and the ultimate conclusion of the story. The author isn’t shy about raising the stakes with any and every chapter, beloved characters meeting fatal fates with a regularity that would make Game of Thrones readers blush, but the harsh reality at the end of the world is that between desperation and ignorance is the rawness of survival against the odds. I wonder how the mini-series that prompted me to dig deeper into the orginal novels will handle it all.

  • book reviews: may the forth

    (…be with you!)

    It’s Star Wars day and I haven’t done much of anything intergalactic, but I have been doing a lot of reading lately.

    A lot of science fiction, too. So. Almost?

    Worse than my neglect of Star Wars, I checked out a bunch of library books and in such a flurry that a couple have expired before I even got part way through them. I could be here writing a bunch of different reviews if it were not for my distracted self bopping and hopping between titles, I guess.

    That said, the last couple weeks I’ve read:

    Axiom’s End by Lindsay Ellis

    I don’t know if you’d call Ms Ellis a film maker, reviewer, or an influencer, but it turns out that she’s a helluva author. I’ll be honest, I put this book on my list way back when the algorithm was dropping her video essays into my feed with more frequency and yet my lazy, distractible reading brain took over four years to clamber this clever first-encounter-kinda story to the top of my book stack. But the story sucked me in from the start when I finally started reading it, twisting through the tale of a young woman who finds herself at the centre of an alien government entanglement. It evoked emotions. And it left me adding the sequel to my reading list (though if I’m continuing the trend of being completely honest, it may take me another couple years to finally get around to that one.)

    I Want To Go Home by Gordon Korman

    And speaking of algorithms, whatever secret formula was recommending me digital titles in the Libby app connected to my library account must have pegged me as a middle aged Canadian and realized that I, like a million other Canadian kids who grew up in the 80s, lived on a steady diet of Korman’s goofy stories. I have a whole writer-origin story that revolves around this guy that I’ll happily share in detail to anyone who asks, and so by the way that algorithm might have been onto something. Yeah, this is a kids book and yeah it was a still a little corny like it was when I read it forty years ago, but there is something about the over-the-top silliness of a kid trying to escape sleepaway camp that evoked not only memories of my own childhood reading this same book until the pages were falling out, but the aching familiarity of a youth spent in scouts and church camps I would have fled were I more resourceful. A quick read, but I won’t begrudge the algorithm for taunting me with my lost youth.

    Wool by Hugh Howey

    A different sort of algorithm sucked us into watching the Apple TV adaptation of this decade old collection of linked dystopian science fiction novellas, more plainly called Silo. I had read Wool, the first in the trilogy that is the basis for Silo, waaaaaay back when it first came out and have been telling people to read it ever since. It’s a fantastic story, particularly if you like dark science fiction driven by strongly developed and complex characters. I had told all sorts of people to read it, but sadly I had never read it since. Nor had I read any of the sequels. Having finally caught up with the show, then, I loaded it up and decided to work my way through all three books. I finished Wool this very evening and was reminded of just how much I like this story. I mean, I may let it breath before I jump into book two, but like months. Only months. Not ten years this time, I promise.