The Night is Short, Walk on Girl

Walk On is a book in four acts, each with a bifurcated narration: the female protagonist and the male “pebble by the wayside” who is chasing her around, attempting to ask her out on a date. She’s sort of Goku-level blithely delightful, initiating her bipedal robot dance in moments of joy, collecting various trinkets on her adventures, stepping into main character roles constantly while uttering increasingly uwu portmanteaus like “funteresting”.

It was a bit of a challenge to get past the first act where she is openly groped by an old man–this type of thing is not my type of thing, and Walk On talks about physical objects of a prurient nature more than anything I’ve ever read–but outside the uncomfortably sanguine sexual assault, the book is pretty silly.

Read More
Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop

Few moments mean much beyond the transcription of events as they happen; there is little metaphor or symbolic interpretation at work within the pages. Character growth seems linear–again, like an RPG–where each character in the story has an issue that they confront and then resolve: being a part-time employee makes Jungsuh sad, but meditation helps her accept it; Yeongju want to run a bookshop but it is potentially unsustainable, yet she learns to accept the risk one day at a time; Mincheol feels like life has no broader meaning, but eventually finds meaning enough in simply existing. Characters grow into themselves in the same way a squire grows into a knight–none of them truly change, they just sort of prestige into the next tier of themselves.

Read More
The Divorce

The Divorce makes it pretty clear that Bea and Niklas do not belong together, and the specifics of that conclusion is my one real qualm about the story. I would have preferred a less clear, and thus perhaps less clichéd, presentation of Jacob—Bea’s sibling and Niklas’ erstwhile best friend—whose suicide was the meetcute for our future divorcees. They both come with intense baggage: Bea with her unmoored loneliness and Niklas with his self-abnegating sense of duty, gloming together into a pair unsuited to support each other in any way other than through conventional familial bonds.

Read More
More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

Anyway, there is simply no way you’re reading More Days without having read the first Morisaki–though I bet you could, and it might even be fun, but I find it so incredibly unlikely that anyone reading Morisaki 2 didn’t like the first one. Why would you even pick it up? Gosh, I would really hate trying to market sequels—you know exactly what you’re getting from reading the previous book, unless it’s wildly divergent, and then fans of the original would probably be displeased. But this book was a nice way to close out my summer of fiction–what, you don’t make yourself personal, overarching reading themes?—and it it felt like autumn, felt like a transitional text:

“I don’t have that many books yet. I don’t worry much about holding on to them, so I tend to gather them up and sell them.”

“I see.” Tomo fell quiet. “I’d better start selling more, or I’ll be in trouble. But once I like a book, I just can’t let go of it.”

Read More
David Dinaburgfiction, Japan, Bookstore
what I'd rather not think about

It is one of the those books that does not need to end. The scope of the page does not create a firm boundary of action or event; the book feels like it continues, even after the words cease. Never were a series of unpredictable or “important” events catalogued, but rather a feeling was captured, draped over some things that happened; mundanity poked and prodded until it formed the essential shape of a literary document...

Read More
My Year of Rest and Relaxation

In regards to our nameless narrator, she is so unlikable that at first I believed the book was going to be a coda on the prevalence, or perhaps inevitability, of choosing to excuse, overlook, or even come to appreciate the POV perspective of a story no matter how awful the thoughts or actions of the protagonist turn out to be. But no, the book is an internal journey through grief, not a media reflection on empathy; it encompasses how we spend time, surely, but moreso that the “how” matters less than acknowledging that each moment is unique, worthy of said acknowledgment.

Read More
David Dinaburgfiction, narrator, NYC
im a fan

I’m a Fan is an accelerant, poetry that will decohere on each page, etch through flame a singular image of someone else’s mind into you own.

Read More
David Dinaburgpoetry
The Guest

The Guest is set in the contemporary kingdom of what I am assuming is the Hamptons—“the city” is never quite named, but there is a passing reference to geographic directions (Alex is quoted as “out east”) and I spotted at least one ubiquitous Citarella shopping bag. It projects an aura of sadness; When Rand al’Thor is wandering around without any money and sleeping in hedges, it’s an expected part of an epic bildungsroman. When Alex does it, here at the beach, she’s tragically lost.

Read More
What you are looking for is in the library

What you are looking for is in the library falls directly into the path of “cozy” by way of social-structural integration. It is a delightful collection of interdependent stories, each one focusing on a character that “betters” themself through a quirky recommendation from an insightful buddha-esque librarian:

"Is being a sales assistant in a department store really not such a great job?”

I don’t know what to say. Ms. Komachi waits patiently for my reply.

“Well, I mean…Anybody can do it. It’s not like its was my dream job or anything I desperately wanted to do. I just kind of fell into it. But I live on my own, so I have to work to support myself.”

Each chapter, I found myself rooting for the character to find happiness. Each time, they did. The book is joyful, within the metes and bounds of proscriptive, achievable success. It is formalistic in a non-derogatory sense of that word: in the library overflows with comfortable and expected rhythms.

Read More
My Husband

nothing will come close to the early moment in the book where our narrator is at a small dinner party–it is still before her true internality has been reveled, so experiencing her interpersonal uncertainity and self-castigation over offering compliments (“In bourgeois milieus, people rarely compliment each other.”) might shunt us off into a class-and-standing novel, where the crux is an Eliza attempting to fit in with a My Fair Lady crowd. At the conclusion of one of the parlor games, the possibility that her perspective is accurate or even relatable has gone out of the window:

So my husband thinks his best friend is married to a pineapple, while he married a clementine. He lives with a winter fruit, a banal and cheap fruit, a supermarket fruit. A small, ordinary fruit that has none of the indulgence of the orange nor the originality of the grapefruit. A fruit organized into segments, practical and easy to eat, precut, ready for use, proffered in its casing.

Read More
I Do Everything I'm Told

Contemporary poetry now exists to me not as an abstraction I must force my way into (“April is the cruelest month”? Sure, I guess.) but in vibes I lived and can internalize, re-express and appreciate.

To want the same things as you age is not always a failure of growth. A good city will not parent you.

We know things, now, our generation of urban nomads and digital natives. We’ve lived our lives and want to see it spoken back to us in meaningful and cryptic ways, in flashes of emotion and broken shards of imagery that push deeper than expected.

Read More
David Dinaburg
Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

A wish fulfilled for fiction lovers–unlimited time with unlimited books. Outside of that singular moment with the spooky TV, I was never again outside of the pages; the book completely, and seemingly effortlessly, brought me into someone else’s life. Even though nothing particularly profound seemed to happen, the experience was pleasant enough.

Read More
Y/N

It lives in the beat between being graced with a haphazard “Be careful” and having the speaker finish the injunction, with specificity, clarifying of what one should be careful. You, the reader, are made aware something requires attention but are left to wonder whether it is simply the entire world of which one must be wary.

In thrall to the same lack of specificity that can shade a child’s world in unknowable and constant danger, the book opens with its title: here there are details of a subculture to be gleaned, but if you, like me, are a relative child within the genre, its signifier will land without even signifying that it is a genre’d work:

Read More
Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers

That’s sort of the theme of this book– “I dunno” with a mild shrug. I liked all the people. They’re likable. The villain is comically despicable so no one cares that he’s dead. Vera herself…oh boy, somebody put their finger on it. She’s a treat. Who doesn’t love a bossy, nosy old lady? More Vera Wong in more books, please. But aside from being a vehicle for platforming Vera, there’s not a lot I cared about here. The plot felt secondary to Vera being Vera.

Read More
When We Cease to Understand the World

That math is a fundamentally confusing false structure, superimposed on our world, makes it function similarly to a fantasy novel’s magic system. But, in reality, math needs to relate to something—to point to some underlying structure of the cosmos—to be consistent. It has to tie to some underlying process, unless it is solely solipsistic, and therefore functionally worthless in application. Consistency in the real world is power.

Read More
After Sappho

Originally Agamemnon was a story about Cassandra, but she was exiled from it by the history of literature. She was made a foreigner in her own story. On the border she stands waiting, century after century, while all of the other characters come home.

Everyone, including Agamemnon, was always telling Cassandra not to speak of this. Her mouth was full of madness and birds, the chorus was dismayed by all the blood and small bones.

The reader is to be forgiven for thinking that, while the narrator is to become Sappho, the author already embodies Cassandra. Each motion and movement on the page begets the next with such fluidity that I can’t help but want to read it again.

Read More
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

The two game developers, Sam and Sadie, could have been musicians working on an album, or visual artists painting the next Guernica (when Guernica was referenced, it did some actual heavy imagery lifting, which did not happen when alluding to Zelda or Mario games), or, heck, even a duo of authors writing a novel together. There’s nothing beyond a few bon mots about playing together being more intimate than sex and an overuse of the word ludic that makes this a book about video games:

“What is a game…[i]t’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”

Read More
David Dinaburgvideo games, PC
The House of Mirth

It is possible–really, truly, non-hyperbolically possible–that i will never read a book better than Mirth in my lifetime. Living under modern capitalism is a sickness that produces a “growth at all cost” mindset, and it can be slightly jarring to realize I might have already experienced the peak of reading fiction for pleasure for my entire life. But, again, I don’t think I’m going to win marathons and I still run them, so I think I’ve come to terms with the concept that things don’t have to be perfect to be worth doing; I am pretty sure I’m okay with reading books that place 6135th on the shelf. However, if I had read Mirth in college–if I was the same person then as I am now (I am not), if I knew how to read it in college (I did not)–I would have dedicated my studies to it. Honestly, I am slightly grateful for the travesty of literary education that didn’t lead me to it for forty years.

Read More
Fake Accounts

Imagine watching the Olympics. You see a peak athlete breeze through a mile. There is no context.

“I could run like that.” It skews your understanding of how fast a person should be. So you lace up some New Balances where the heels are worn down to a forty-degree angle, and attempt to push out an easy six-ten-for-four. Ten blocks out from the apartment, and reality sets in: a nine-minute mile would be a blessing. How much further is a mile, again?

Fake Accounts does that, but for writing.

Read More
Strange Weather in Tokyo

Right, so, cue this this book called Strange Weather in Tokyo. There’s a woman who is just sort of faffing about, working a job and existing in the normal—but not literary—sense. If she was just a person you knew, she’d be fine: a job, a home, stuff to eat, hobbies, etc etc. But if you’re reading about her, well, it seems a little flat. Something’s gotta happen, right?

Read More