February 16, 2025 · 2:23 pm

All the Worst People: In which you accidentally think something

Phil Elwood worked in PR for a lot of terrible people: dictators and tyrants and etc. Then he wrote a book about that experience All the Worst People. And in the book makes the argument that whoever controls the narrative controls what people think. So one cannot help but think that the book itself might just be one such effort to make us readers think particular things about Elwood.

While the explanatory frameworks of mental illness, or desperation, or youth make his individual actions comprehensible, the book casts the larger structures of extreme wealth and connection are the real problem.

And while I’m inclined to agree with the argument, in a book about how feelings and thoughts get constructed and manipulated, this reader could not help but be suspicious that the same was happening. All the while enjoying the narrative intensity of Elwood’s anecdotes of adventure and misadventure amid piles of cash or injections of ketamine (which, let me say, the book does a great job of convincing the reader is a Good Idea).

As I continue my tentative exploration into more non-fiction by way of very fiction-like non-fiction, I’ll say this one does much to build and maintain narrative and character.

That’s it – no strong endorsement one way or another. If you’re looking for that, the NYTimes put this in the top 100. Maybe 10? Who cares.

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February 3, 2025 · 1:32 pm

Onyx Storm: Extremely Silly

I don’t have much to say on Rebecca Yarros’ Onyx Storm other than it is an extremely silly, while also delightfully distracting dragon romance. Should you find yourself in need of temporary reprieve from the nonsense of every day life you could do worse than the nonsense of Xaden and Violet.

A few observations: I thought this was the final book in the series for some reason and so was – as I now understand many readers were – surprised (and annoyed) when the ending was a cliffhanger (AND to learn the next instalment hasn’t yet been written: how am I to live with such uncertainty. How.). So if you’re expecting some kind of resolution… don’t bother. Wait til book four is out and read them both then. Assuming, I guess, that book four is it.

Also: It had been a minute since I read book 2 and honestly? I could remember very little from the plot of book 2 and so spent the first 100 odd pages of Onyx Storm trying to remember who was who, and what the geography was, and what exactly was going on. Could it have benefited from a tiny recap? Maybe. So if you’re like me and not Deeply Steeped in the dragon romance world, you might consider reading a teeny summary of book 2 before you embark on 3.

Also: Xaden’s jaw is entirely too tense. So. Many. Descriptions. of his jaw ticking. And his tongue flicking. Like time for a quick trip to thesaurus.

As I – blush – preordered this one and now have a copy I will absolutely never read again, let me know if you want my copy and I’ll send it your way. And you will also, I’m sure, both enjoy it and find yourself deeply embarrassed by your enjoyment.

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February 3, 2025 · 1:22 pm

Poor Deer: Unsettling and Excellent

For months (years?) my mum has been reminding me to get Poor Deer from the library. I’ve ordered it twice, failed to pick it up once, and finally – finally – read it. And it was worth the wait and don’t make my same mistake: go get it!

Though maybe not. Depends on your tolerance for the weird and disturbing, I guess. As Claire Oshetsky’s Poor Deer follows four-year old Margaret during and after a terrible accident in which her neighbour dies. Margaret tries to explain what happened, but her mother silences her attempt and ever after Margaret stays silent on her role in the tragic death.

Told from Margaret’s young child perspective (well, written as confession by the adult Margaret but through her younger perspective) the reader is offered the view of how peculiar it is to a young child to be told that a friend has ‘gone to a better place,’ and to then… look for her because she must just be away for a little while. How confusing it is to be young (and old) in the face of death, and how much more confusing when adults both refuse to hear the child’s experience and feelings and to infuse the experience with obfuscation and euphemism.

The creepier parts are when Poor Deer begins to follow-haunt Margaret. A constant physical reminder of her guilt that relents for some periods of her life and returns demanding retribution.

The heartbreaking parts are the many occasions when adults fail her. Well meaning neighbours, teachers, an aunt – who very late finds a way to offer the consolation that was needed decades earlier. That in these adult efforts to protect the child they mistake kind words for kindness. What Margaret needs – what all children need – is truth from the adults around them, and the trust from these adults that they can handle these truths. What crushes Margaret is not the guilt, but the inability to speak her crime and have it heard.

And so enter the written confession. The insistence that the truth be heard – however many versions Poor Deer offers. Asking the reader to hold all the possible outcomes at once and to listen.

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January 31, 2025 · 1:09 am

Soldiers and Kings: If you can face non-fiction

Since November I’ve taken a bit of a pause from the news. But I had a problem: years of daily politics coverage on podcasts and newspaper replaced with: what? Surely not my own thoughts. And stipulated that music has its time and place, I’ve always been a talk radio person (for the Canadians in the room think of CBC radio one just quietly droning in the background) So. I turned to non-fiction audiobooks.

Any guys, while my first picked knocked it out of the park in terms of an excellent book, it was – far from – the reprieve from our political moment that I’d half-hoped the exercise might be (though I bear some blame as the title does suggest it may not be the lightest of content). Enter Jason De León’s Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Snuggling.

A cultural anthropologist, De León’s Soldiers and Kings, covers the years De León spent living with and learning from a group of Honduran human smugglers. Over the chapters the book brings the complexity of their lives and choices alongside the crushing structural impossibilities that make their lives what they are.

As the book follows many years we also see how changes to immigration policies, climate catastrophe, and demands on/for labour change – and worsen – the experience of those trying to find safety and to stay there. Which makes it a particularly hard book to read right now and to be reminded – albeit from the privileged distance from which I read – of the concrete lived suffering and death that recent political changes in the US – and the likely changes within Canada – wreak.

It’s beautifully written – with the men De León meets and works alongside full in their complexity and their dreams. While sharing with the reader the contradictions of their livelihood, De León’s manages to at once also describe and analyze the broader social and political context in a way that never reads as pedantic, only as illuminating.

So while it will not be a cheerful read, it is – I think – an important one.

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