Tag Archives: reading

November 8, 2025 · 3:25 pm

Dream State: Strong start and then

I made a mistake in telling a few friends to read Eric Puchner’s Dream State when I was only a third of the way in. It’s such a strong start – evocative writing, a pulling theme (how does one major decision or one major event shape the rest of your life?), interesting characters. Set amid the present and near future of climate catastrophe to make the aging of the characters over the course of the novel vivid against what can feel in our incremental experience of time unnoticed in the sharp changes for the reader between decades for a glacier or a lake or an endangered species.

And it’s not like the writing changed – the scene on the mountain with Elias is haunting and beautiful – it’s more I lost conviction that I knew why any of the characters were making any of their decisions. I suspect it’s a form thing – with the big jumps in time (with the exception of one incredible passage where the two children age together over summers over the course of the passage and the reader feels the slipperiness of time in the verb tenses and the dialogue) happen between chapters the reader is given snapshot moments to make sense of Big character decisions, and honestly, so much happens ‘off stage’ that it’s hard to believe the impact of those decisions on the characters and how they behave next. We have to take it on the faith of third person narration that yes, indeed, Garret and Cece still love on another because that’s what a long marriage means? I guess?

So sorry to M. and K. for forcefully recommending this one before reaching the end. If you haven’t yet started it, I’d say it would be a fine beach read, but not something I’d interrupt a year of comic book reading to go out and get.

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August 31, 2025 · 5:48 pm

Wild Dark Shore: Eco-parenting-elegy

I’m trying to remember the name of the book I reviewed here that was about the near future, climate catastrophe, parenting, and some biblical themes. I really liked it. The bible part is what did it: A Children’s Bible.

Why am I trying to remember that one? Because Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore reminded me of it – similar theme of how to parent amid the climate collapse, of how to not only explain to our children the destruction and loss, but to prepare them for the present and future of suffering and inequality and grief.

Wild Dark Shore manages to keep you reading what might otherwise be too overwhelming an indictment of our inaction and paralysis of the scale of the problem by placing the themes amid a gentle mystery and a (albeit somewhat implausible) romance.

The mystery: a woman washes up on the shores of Shearwater island – a remote island where there is one family who are there to protect Earth’s last seed banks until the seeds can be moved to a safer location (the sea levels are rising, permafrost melting and the seed bank is no longer safe) (if such a location even exists). As she recovers and we learn why she is there, she begins to uncover suspicious things and witness strange behaviours from the family. What, the reader wonders along with her, happened here.

From there plenty of implausible plot points follow – and I enjoyed and liked the book too much to take much issue with them – but there is a host of things that just… didn’t seem likely (at all), but I allowed because the writing was beautiful and, perhaps, because I wanted them to be possible (the romance not the least of them).

But what the book does best (at least, I think) is make palpable the choices that climate catastrophe have forced on those parts of the world already most impacted and will – are – forcing on the privileged like me through the pressing decisions around the seeds, but also – and most evocatively – in the choices about what to do with/for/by our children. What sacrifices ought we have made already or should we be making to the future (and no, this isn’t an argument for effective altruism, more a practical question of what can one generation reasonably do to better the outcomes for the next).

The climactic scene – while perhaps too on the nose and overly layered with Symbol – brings this question to a head and the reader is left mourning not just the particular loss for the family, but through this synecdoche our greater loss as a planet.

Anyway. It’s not a perfect book by any stretch, but it will make you feel something about our planet and our connection to it – and that is no small feat.

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August 10, 2025 · 12:51 am

The Emperor of Gladness: Such poetry in fast food

Ocean Vuong is a poet, and The Emperor of Gladness is a novel infused with poetry. Such beautiful writing. I was tempted to try to explain how beautiful, but the irony of poorly trying to explain poetic beautiful language was too great a risk. Suffice to say: gorgeous.

And such an odd little plot to have such beauty. The novel opens with our protagonist, Hai, perched on the edge of a bridge ready to jump. Saved instead by an old woman, Grazina, suffering from dementia and ready to be saved, herself, too. The rest of the book follows how they care for one another and try – often failing – to care for themselves and the people around them. Most memorable, I think, is the cast of characters at the fast food restaurant where Hai works – finding among the connection, reciprocity and care he’s been missing.

Of course in a book opening with a suicide attempt, much of the book is spent wondering if Hai will find a way back to stability – and how he will get there. And how Grazina will be allowed to live and die with any dignity. How any of his colleagues will find their way to their specific and relatable and earnest hopes – my favourite being starring in amateur women’s wrestling – along with the dignity of doing work that supports security. In a way I was reminded of Demon Copperfield in the way the novel holds up the failures of systems and structures – health care, justice, education, social services – and the way these failures are felt by individuals.

And so rather then believing in any system that you’ve been told you should trust, The Emperor of Gladness offers instead the fragile security of other people: flawed, ailing, constantly letting us down out of their own hurt and inadequacies – and yet better, ever better then the imagined farce that we can do any of it alone.

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July 3, 2024 · 4:16 pm

One Perfect Couple: Like its reality TV show counterpart, irresistible and terrible

I am way at a cottage with L. and B. and our kids and so wanted a book I could read in the four minute spurts between needing to find someone their bathing suit or reading someone else Robert Munch or chasing someone else with a bottle of sunscreen. Cue a best selling thriller – Ruth Ware’s One Perfect Couple.

What great timing for a book about a reality TV show that features couples brought together on a remote island to undergo some challenges and through the challenges break up some couples and couple-swap. Great timing because K. just recommended “Perfect Match” which is – minus the murder – the same plot of this reality TV show and so watching and reading them at the same time served to consolidate my sense of self-loathing for giving any of my time (never mind my reading and viewing time) to such terrible media.

Terrible in the case of One Perfect Couple because while the premise and opening chapters promise enthralling thriller where you can sink into a page-turning ripper it just… doesn’t deliver. I’d be more inclined to read the novel version of the reality show the novel begins with (but I guess I’m already watching the show). As the book progresses and the survivors of the giant storm are trying to keep alive, there’s a ‘murderer’ only it isn’t any kind of whodunnit so much as there’s a guy killing people and everyone else sort of lets it happen until they don’t. So maybe it’s trying to be an exploration of how good people stand by and let bad things happen? Or because it’s the women who ultimately come together to stop the Bad Man it’s meant to be a feminist take down? I suppose either are plausible, but neither really come together in the end. Instead we’re left with a sort of shrug of complicity and eventual spur to action with a less than satisfying climax where you can already anticipate how things will go.

Maybe the most interesting is whether I keep watching Perfect Match. Oh that’s true, as suspenseful as One Perfect Couple, which is to say: not at all suspenseful. Of course I will.

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