en-US Thu, 27 Mar 2025 06:28:42 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Friend1419329378 Thu, 27 Mar 2025 06:28:42 -0700 Review7369392706 Sun, 02 Mar 2025 13:09:11 -0800 /review/show/7369392706 David gave 4 stars to Hair for Men (Paperback) by Michelle Winters
Michelle Winters was interviewed about the novel and mentioned that the epigraph was almost “Indelible in the hippocampus is the sound of laughter.� That was what Christine Blasey Ford said when asked what she remembered from the sexual assault committed by Brett Kavanaugh during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing for his nomination to the Supreme Court. That she could still so clearly hear that laughter haunted Winters.

Our protagonist Louise still hears that laughter and can never shake the shame and anger that sits in her bones after her own high school humiliation. She finds solace in the punk scene and the words of Henry Rollins whose quote "my optimism wears heavy boots and is loud" which instead became the epigraph Winters would eventually use.

And while it is the story of Louise becoming a barber at Hair for Men before fleeing to the East Coast to work a small marina where she finds herself on the day of the Tragically Hip's 2016 farewell performance � it is also an examination of a culture that needs better models for its men.

There is Louise travelling with her charismatic father who sold shampoo to the fawning and flirtatious stylists with a wink and some knowing banter, leaving each salon wiping lipstick from his cheeks. At Hair for Men, Louise is part of a cadre of women working a luxurious salon. There the women create a safe and welcoming space where the male clientele can open up and share in a way they might not be able to at home or with their friends. At the marina, Louise sees how a shrugging noncommittal dismissal of a young boy creates a vacuum where ugly things can begin to fester.

And that boy from high school. What does it mean to apologize for the specific action yet still hold to the entitlement that it sprung from. What happens when he becomes a father to a little girl? The notion "boys will be boys" abdicates any responsibility to something better, to submit to a patriarchal status quo that leaves men ill equipped to truly examine their internal landscape.

And there is Gord Downie backstage the night of the Tragically Hip's final show. He is in a silver suit and flat-topped white hat. Amidst the roar of the crowds outside, he turns to bandmate Rob Baker, taking his face in both hands to kiss him gently on the lips. The band in turn showing clear, naked affection for each so at odds with what we think of from a rock band, from men. ]]> Review7347708535 Sun, 02 Mar 2025 06:21:11 -0800 /review/show/7347708535 David gave 3 stars to Long Live the Post Horn! (ebook) by Vigdis Hjorth
It's the story of a PR firm working with the Norwegian Post Communications Union opposing an upcoming EU directive involving letters weighing less than 50 grams.

Fine, let's take a look at it through a more critical lens. Ellinor is the 35-year old co-founder of the aforementioned PR firm. She's recently uncovered her old diary from 2000. She can barely recall the events recorded therein but is sickened in the reading of it. "The names were interchangeable, as were the dates, there was no sense of progression, no coherence, no joy, only frustration; shopping, sunbathing, gossiping, eating."

Not much has changed in the ensuing years. She's barely able to go through the motions. She is in a constant daze, zoning out as people try to talk to her, her writing filled with obvious typos, living a small, grey life. Forced to perform at enthusiasm for her job and her relationships. She's beyond pretending to care. As she puts it, "my life is too banal for my despair."

But the PR job opposing the EU directive, almost certainly doomed to failure, begins to stir something within Ellinor. A postman's story of turning dead letters into living ones speaks to the idea of individual effort and care. Of being a dedicated and invested part of a larger community. That there is hope in pushing back against the inexorable tide of capitalism and a disengaged government. That there is worth in sticking your neck out, sharing your story, and not giving into to resigned apathy.

Weaved within that awakening� prior to the revival of something previously dead to living � we find Ellinor failing at her DIY magazine. Her copy is riddled with typos and errors, the words listless on the page. She struggles with another project, a chain called The Real Thing. She only finds renewed purpose with the postal initiative, ensuring that people can continue connecting, one on one, with other people. Metaphors abound! Admittedly there is some fun to be teased out and uncovering the underlying ideas hidden within. In that sense, given the current moment of history we're living through, the story here feels incredibly timely after all. ]]> Review7365429030 Sat, 01 Mar 2025 08:31:44 -0800 /review/show/7365429030 David gave 4 stars to The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth (Hardcover) by Zoë Schlanger
Climate journalist Zoë Schlanger was burnt out of disaster reporting, dutifully marking every grim benchmark on our inexorable slide to catastrophe. So she packed it in and went on a five-year global journey pursuing the lush possibility of our global flora, seeing in plants "a masterclass in living to one's fullest, weirdest, most resourceful potential."

She would soon find the realm of plants was riven with controversy. Contentious debates, strictly policed funding, careers tainted by scorn and dismissal. All thanks to an ascientific collection of beautiful myths called "The Secret Life of Plants" which convinced us that plants enjoyed being talked to and favoured Bach to Bon Jovi. It tainted the entire field of plant behaviour and led to a decades long freeze on meaningful research, and even now plant scientists remain tentative and guarded.

Schlanger knows that our tendency to anthropomorphize plants is dangerous territory, even the term plant behaviour is contentious, and yet each chapter is loosely based on human senses and behaviour. I can forgive the inconsistency as it is bolstered by sheer enthusiasm and, not for nothing, provides a handy bit of categorization to frame the narrative.

Can plants not "hear"? Reacting to the chomp of leaves being eaten or growing roots towards the sound of running water underground. Is it not communication when plants pump chemical gases into the air to warn others of the impending threat of leaf-munching caterpillars so they can change the chemical composition of their leaves or excrete gases of their own to lure natural predators to the caterpillars. Maybe it's not "sight" but then how does a unique vine in Chile change it's appearance to match the leaf shape, color, and vein patterns of nearby plants, often mimicking different plants on the same vine. How do plants recall the time of day when pollinators visit? Are they showing evidence of memory? What about the appearance of cooperation with similar plant species sharing resources as to not crowd out or shade others of their own "family". All this sends plant scientists into a tizzy with a host of "well actually" and "yes but" barely contained behind their lips. I like to think of it in terms of the Buddhist Sutra remarking on a finger pointing at the moon � we need to obsess less on the finger and more at what it's trying to point at.

I loved this read. Not for nothing a lot of this was prompted by the realization that one of the founding members of the Society of Plant Signaling and Behaviour is a cell biologist at the University of Bonn where my daughter is currently working on her Masters in, appropriately enough, Plant Sciences. She has a healthy skepticism for this renewed enthusiasm for plant signalling and will stick with polyploidy self-fertilization rates through runs of homozygosity ratios - just don't tell her I think Schlanger's stuff is more readable. ]]> Comment287671861 Thu, 27 Feb 2025 04:17:53 -0800 /review/show/7355435352 David's review of Ice Planet Barbarians (Ice Planet Barbarians, #1)
by Ruby Dixon

Amanda wrote: "🤣 Whoever picked that book for your book club is seriously into torturing their fellow members. That's a funny review, David!"

It's a slippery slope, I mean we haven't even gotten to minotaurs. Minotaurs are a whole thing. ]]> Review7358031007 Wed, 26 Feb 2025 15:15:41 -0800 /review/show/7358031007 David gave 3 stars to Mickey7 (Mickey7, #1) by Edward Ashton
Here to see the source material that prompted Bong Joon-ho to base his next movie on. It's clear he's using it as a jumping off point and can guarantee he's going to take some liberties. Mr Ashton, get your bag with the adaptation rights, but honestly the story here is pretty meh.

The potential is all there. Ship of Theseus, immortality, colonialism, capitalist exploitation, beautiful extra-planetary disasters, first contact, surreal threesomes and more. So much meat on those bones but instead it felt more like listening to Mickey bitching about caloric intake and lame friends. I mean the difference between Mickey7 and 8 was pretty profound when you consider they only differ by a handful of days at best. Maybe there's cognitive drift with subsequent iterations, but Mickey8 is a bit of a dick.

The moral of the story is that individuals with humanities degrees are completely expendable in the distant future. ]]> Review7355435352 Tue, 25 Feb 2025 17:02:40 -0800 /review/show/7355435352 David gave 3 stars to Ice Planet Barbarians (Ice Planet Barbarians, #1) by Ruby Dixon
This is clearly Avatar fan-fic harking back to an Ice-Age era Neanderthal ancestor of the Na'vi filtered through a tradwife lens that wants women barefoot, pregnant, and totally dependent. Of course this is about as relevant as dissecting your pizza deliver guy porn plot as a metaphoric reaction to a problematic gig economy. Folks are here for the ribbed-for-her-pleasure, seven-foot tall, blue alien simp. This is porn with a plot. Sci-fi smut. Alien erotica. ET with BDE. What boggles is that there are 22 books in the series. I could get a boxed set of Na'vi nookie.

Yes it was a bookclub pick, thankfully our other bookclub's foray into inanimate smut featuring deviled eggs and a wider universe that includes suntan lotion, dryer lint, and the Kool-Aid man doesn't quite warrant a book review, coming (hah) in at under 40 pages. But at almost 200 pages this one qualifies � though given the BookTok glow-up and discourse I doubt if I'm bringing anything new to the table. You already know if this is for you. ]]> Review7352295002 Mon, 24 Feb 2025 15:59:16 -0800 /review/show/7352295002 David gave 3 stars to How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking � for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers (Kindle Edition) by Sönke Ahrens
Like I need yet another hack that inevitably leads down a rabbit hole of imagined productivity. I've dabbled in Notion, tried Evernote, considered bullet journaling, or keeping a commonplace book. Anything that mitigates my fraught memory and helps me retain a fraction of what I read. And so I tumble headlong into the world of Zettelkasten. I think it has the potential to upend my way of reading.

Zettelkasten sniffs at those of us that merely highlight passages as we read. Less than useless it proclaims! We need to write to think. It is only when we take the time to consider these passages and render them in our own words on the page (digital or otherwise) do we hope to have a chance of retaining them. These notes become an external scaffolding for our thoughts and we connect these ideas to build new concepts that can lead to further inquiry. By creating a standardized framework we improve our chances of recalling these ideas as well.

It's such a compelling concept even for someone like me that has no plans to publish scholarly articles, write non-fiction, or even flesh out an especially erudite Substack. I admit, the book is a bit vague in the actual rendering of individual notes (unique IDs, relational linkages, keywords and indices!) which led to googling Zettelkasten explainers, debating the best methods to retain information on these "slips", and of course a flurry of tabs exploring Obsidian workflows as I download yet another note-taking app. Honestly, it's all geek catnip. This will likely involve stationary and buying new pens somehow � and I'm not mad about it. ]]> Review7347708535 Sun, 23 Feb 2025 07:07:21 -0800 /review/show/7347708535 David gave 3 stars to Long Live the Post Horn! (ebook) by Vigdis Hjorth
It's the story of a PR firm working with the Norwegian Post Communications Union opposing an upcoming EU directive involving letters weighing less than 50 grams.

Fine, let's take a look at it through a more critical lens. Ellinor is the 35-year old co-founder of the aforementioned PR firm. She's recently uncovered her old diary from 2000. She can barely recall the events recorded therein but is sickened in the reading of it. "The names were interchangeable, as were the dates, there was no sense of progression, no coherence, no joy, only frustration; shopping, sunbathing, gossiping, eating."

Not much has changed in the ensuing years. She's barely able to go through the motions. She is in a constant daze, zoning out as people try to talk to her, her writing filled with obvious typos, living a small, grey life. Forced to perform at enthusiasm for her job and her relationships. She's beyond pretending to care. As she puts it, "my life is too banal for my despair."

But the PR job opposing the EU directive, almost certainly doomed to failure, begins to stir something within Ellinor. A postman's story of turning dead letters into living ones speaks to the idea of individual effort and care. Of being a dedicated and invested part of a larger community. That there is hope in pushing back against the inexorable tide of capitalism and a disengaged government. That there is worth in sticking your neck out, sharing your story, and not giving into to resigned apathy.

Weaved within that awakening� prior to the revival of something previously dead to living � we find Ellinor failing at her DIY magazine. Her copy is riddled with typos and errors, the words listless on the page. She struggles with another project, a chain called The Real Thing. She only finds renewed purpose with the postal initiative, ensuring that people can continue connecting, one on one, with other people. Metaphors abound! Admittedly there is some fun to be teased out and uncovering the underlying ideas hidden within. In that sense, given the current moment of history we're living through, the story here feels incredibly timely after all. ]]> Review7305985180 Sun, 09 Feb 2025 11:58:15 -0800 /review/show/7305985180 David gave 3 stars to Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Paperback) by Mark Fisher
Much of it is a form of closely observed and serious music writing that used to occupy the pages of NME and The Wire a lifetime ago. It can feel a bit inscrutable, often referencing things like a "Ballardian infrastructure of British post-Fordist capitalism". Ballard is a particular touchstone. He along with Burroughs will be name-checked over a dozen times, invoking something that I guess I should know. Fisher is interested in the post-punk, a world where the possibilities have expanded and there is the chance of something profoundly new appearing. And it extends beyond music as well, exploring British TV nostalgia with Sapphire and Steel, and more recently Life on Mars, Christopher Nolan's Inception, and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.

It feels like a collection of Substack missives from someone interested in exploring their own taste in opposition to the algo-slop we're unconsciously consuming in our current period of cultural stagnation. (In fact it is a collection of writings from his blog k-punk back when blogs were a thing)

I appreciate it introducing me to the uneasy nostalgia of Ghost Box Records and The Caretaker, as well as the melancholy crackle of Burial and Black to Comm. It was also lovely to see a chapter devoted to the synthpop Canadiana of Hamilton Ontario natives Junior Boys. (So This is Goodbye has long been a favourite)

Mark Fisher is clearly a revered figure. I'd come here after reading a chapter in Phil Christman's How to Be Normal where he talks about Mark Fisher's death by suicide on Friday, January 13 2017. The following Monday his students, both current and former, showed up for his class. They would return for subsequent Mondays to grieve and read their way through his remaining syllabus. I wanted to join in that conversation and understand where that reverence comes from.

As Christman notes about Fisher: "he cares. He cares about books, he cares about records, he cares about friends, he cares about students, he cares about ideas, he cares about the world. He cannot write indifferently."
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