7. The Alienist

 By Caleb Carr

Had this on my list for a while, but when I saw that Netflix had adapted this into a series, I promptly ordered it so I could read it first.

6. Ask The Dust

 By John Fante  

 

5. Freedom

By Daniel Suarez 

4. Daemon

By Daniel Suarez

 

3. The Wild Beasts of Wuhan

By Ian Hamilton

 

2. Ready Player One

By Ernest Cline

My BIL got this for Olman for Xmas.

 

1. Replay

By Ken Grimwood   

Amazing.  What a way to start off the year - a great contemporary fantasy novel with a great premise that was really well-executed.  I would not have read Replay if it hadn’t been for my boss Louis, who had originally lent me Dark Matter, which I really enjoyed.

 

When I later googled Dark Matter, I learned that Ken Grimwood’s Replay was a big influence on Blake Crouch.  When I was in Berkeley, I found two copies of Replay at Dark Carnival – one was a vintage hardcover edition that was $50, and the other was a 1987 paperback edition that cost several bucks.  I went with the paperback and must have started reading it not long after I returned to Montreal. 

 

Naturally, back at work, I ended up lending Replay to Louis, telling him that this was the inspiration for Dark Matter.  A fellow co-worker Mikael observed our exchange and mentioned how much he loved Replay, which seemed to cement the deal.  Little did I know that Louis’ life was about to get busy and that his contemporary sci-fi reading blitz was about to slow down quite suddenly….

 

Weeks and months went by.  Although he had started Replay, he never ended up reading it. I’d ask him once every now and then about his progress, but at some point I just stopped asking because it got too awkward.  Then the pandemic happened, 98% of my team have been WFH ever since, and I kind of forgot about Replay, or more like, given up on ever getting my copy back from Louis.

But fast-forward to October 2025 (I’m actually writing this review in November 2025). A Flame All-Hands was being planned for October 30^th.  I had only thought of Replay because I was writing about how The Midnight Library reminded me of a feel-good version of Replay. A few days before the All-Hands, I pinged Louis on Slack and asked if he could bring Replay with him, but mentioned that if he couldn’t find it, it wasn’t a big deal (it has been, like, several years since I first lent it to him!).  Sure enough, he found it right away and said that he had put it inside his bag so he won’t forget to bring it to the office on Thursday.  So I finally have Replay back and I can take a photo of the cover and put it up because I can’t find an image of this edition on the internets at all.

 

It's also been so long that I can’t be bothered to write a review.  I remember the premise and some details, but I may just end up re-reading it one day!

7. Wolf in White Van

By John Darnielle                   

Disappointing.

Here I am exactly three years later retroactively adding this as an entry and I cannot for the life of me recall what this novel was about.  It has such a great cover though.

Author John Darnielle is also known as a key member of the music band, The Mountain Goats, a self-described "indie rock icon whose vaguely anguished and kinda pissed-off voice is instantly recognizable."

 

According to Wikipedia, Wolf in White Van tells the story of Sean Phillips, a reclusive game designer whose face has been severely disfigured. The plot, which is told non-chronologically, alternates between Sean's childhood, adolescence, and adulthood to describe the circumstances surrounding the incident that disfigured him (he shot himself in the head when he was 17). 

 

While recuperating in the hospital, Sean develops the play-by-mail role-playing game,Trace Italian, from which he earns a small income. The objective of Trace Italian is to traverse a post-apocalyptic United States and locate a fortress after which the game is named—a fortress that Sean claims no player will ever penetrate. Sean describes the correspondence he has with players, in particular two teenage players who attempt to carry out the game's actions in real life. One dies and the other is injured, and Sean is charged in court by the players' parents but is found not guilty.

 

The title Wolf in White Van is a reference to the practice of backmasking, hiding messages in audio or visual media, as the phrase "wolf in white van" can allegedly be heard when the Larry Norman song "Six, Sixty, Six" is played in reverse.

 

I don’t know what was disappointing about Wolf in White Van for me.  There were some cool ideas and the writing was good, but there was a self-consciousness and faux angstiness that just didn’t work for me.

 

 

6. Through Black Spruce

By Joseph Boyden

Picked this up at a secondhand book shop in Charlottetown a couple of years after reading the excellent Three Day Road.  I think I would have read this sooner had I not learned about the controversy of Boyden’s indigenous ancestry, which blew up in 2016.  I remember talking about this with an old friend who was visiting from Winnipeg. 

She still recommended that I read Through Black Spruce, saying if I liked Three Day Road, I’ll like this one too, as she thought TBS was even better. 

So I finally gave it a go, and was disappointed with the book as a whole.  Although it was meant to be a follow up, as the son of the protagonist from TDR, Will Bird, is now an old bush pilot who spends most of the novel in a coma at the hospital. The narrative weaves between Will's life before his accident and his niece Annie, who is looking for her sister, a model who went missing in NYC. 

As you can tell from the summary,   was not like Three Day Road - at all. It was inferior in every way, from narrative cohesian, characterization and quality of writing. The one aspect I did appreciate was seeing how First Nations characters who are at home in the wilds, but can also navigate the urban streets of Toronto and social in-circles of Manhattan. 

But compared to brilliance of Three Day Road, I found Through Black Spruce rather superficial, lifeless and boring.  I had trouble getting into the character of Annie.  The writing was very distant and unrelatable, and because I didn't really care what would happen, I had to force myself to finish the book.

5. The Last One

By Alexandra Oliva

The second loaner from my boss L.

Almost 3 years later, I had to look up the premise of The Last One to remember what it was about.  Since L. was quite stoked that I enjoyed Dark Matter so much, he immediately lent me this “literary” post-apocalyptic novel about Survivor-type contestants.  

Sadly, The Last One proved to be a mild dud.  I recall not enjoying the inner dialogue of the protagonist and finding the secondary characters annoyingly two-dimensional.

4. Dark Matter

By Blake Crouch 

My colleague/manager L. lent this to me.  I think we were talking about books we had read, and how he likes to follow up on amazon recommendations for contemporary sci fi.  He actually likes to purchase hardcovers as he prefers the bigger format.  He was psyched to lend me Dark Matter, which turned out to be a big hit with both myself and Olman, whom I lent the book to after I was done.   

I read the book over the weekend; I think OIman read it in a single evening!  That’s how tight and gripping a thriller it was. 

Crouch also wrote the series Wayward Pines.