Book Review: THE TAINTED CUP (Shadow of the Leviathan # 1) by Robert Jackson Bennett

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"What a tool cynicism is to the corrupt, claiming the whole of the creation is broken and fraudulent, and thus we are all excused to indulge in whatever sins we wish - for what's a little more unfairness, in this unfair world?... There can be no wrong doing in an Empire so broken."

I've been a fan of Robert Jackson Bennett ever since I read and fell in love with his Divine Cities Trilogy half a decade ago. 😍 Recently, his first book in The Shadow of the Leviathan trilogy, The Tainted Cup, won the 2025 Hugo Awards for Best Novel, and so I rushed to finish it.

(If you thought this was good, wait til you read City of Stairs and the rest of the previous trilogy!)

RJB is master of plot and personality, crafting stories that pulse with energy in worlds unique and unlike any other.

THE TAINTED CUP is a mystery novel set in a distant empire, where underwater leviathans constantly threaten to end all human life. When engineers essential to the upkeep of The Wall get murdered by mutant vegetation that hurriedly grow from their bellies, our young hero has to solve a crime that implicates the highest levels of government.

So many lines from the book resonate, especially in light of recent news involving corruption with our own nation's leaders and their contractors.

Patronage politics and selfish leaders make this spec fic novel feel so relevant, yet the exotic characters make everything seem fresh and new.

I also appreciated how, as was seen in another trilogy of RJB's, the main character just so happens to be gay, yet the author handles it matter-of-factly and doesn't make an entire subplot out of it. You only find out about his orientation towards the very end of the book. I feel that this is also a valuable form of representation: focusing on the hero's other qualities instead of merely emphasizing his gender. After all, citizens in the Empire of Khanum have more important things than pronouns to think about, like how death is knocking daily at their sea wall, and how deadly dapplegrass can grow unchecked and take over an entire country.

"Civilization is often a task that is only barely managed. But...the towers of justice are built one brick at a time."

You can never go wrong with a Robert Jackson Bennett book. Now, on to Book 2 (#A Drop of Corruption)!

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Book Review: ENDLING by Maria Reva

Endling by Maria Reva
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“It’s what you all do, in the free world. You waste your freedom and your clear skies on things that don’t matter, like politeness and the perfect lawn… is it better to live in a world where a gas station with nukes gets to call the shots?”

ENDLING was my fifth book in the Booker Longlist, and so far it has proved the most memorable, though decidedly not easy reading.

An endling is the last known representative of a species. When it dies, a whole branch of the evolutionary tree becomes extinct.

Author Maria Reva (born in the Ukraine, raised in Canada) has written what I suspect to be an autobiographical novel that manages to be both urgent call to action and an indictment on the apathy of the entire world. Reva points at the absurdity of our world where aesthetic Booksta reels coexist along with full-scale invasions in these contemporary, supposedly civilized times.

The novel is satire, awkward romance, and war epic all in one, as it jumps from the main narrative to chapters between author and editor. Memorable technical details include an ABOUT THE AUTHOR portion in the middle that had me flipping pages to and fro, panicking that the book had abruptly ended, as well as a chapter in the end written three different times.

Some books have clever details that sometimes come across as mere technical braggadocio, but in this book, it seems to highlight the book’s message: the impossibility (futility?) of crafting a cohesive narrative in the face of genocide. When the blood of innocents soaks the chernozem, Ukraine’s fertile soil, what is the point of writing, or even reading?

For Reva, she is torn between preserving memory, and railing at the craziness of Russia invading Ukraine, and how the rest of humanity is fine with the mass extinction of an entire country, an entire people. She shows how we cling to empty shells of what we think constitute a meaningful existence, lies easily torn apart in the face of the first enemy bomb.

This is the first time I’ve put down a book, doubting if it mattered. Perhaps my reading doesn’t. But her writing of this marvelous book certainly does. She writes now with anger, then with laughter mixed with tears, and all the vast ocean of humanity’s infinite heart lie within this remarkable novel. What a tribute to the heroes of Ukraine. What a strong contender for the Booker Prize.




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Book Review: PORTRAITS OF A MOTHER by Shusaku Endo

Portraits of a Mother: A Novella and Stories by Shūsaku Endō
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"With one single exception, there had been no mistakes or corrections in his father's life. What could possibly be the point for such a man to write anything?"

Reading this newly translated novella and 5 stories (the latest to be added to the list of books by the great Catholic writer Shusaku Endo) is an intimacy of an almost sacred kind. We peer through a glass darkly and find different poses and faces of Endo's remarkable mother, who emerges as the complicated, flawed, yet cherished heroine all throughout the autobiographical tales.

Like a theme with variations, the violin-playing independent woman who shapes the future novelist into being comes across as a force of nature, a gale whipping the pages into life.

"There is something higher, much, much higher... an asphalt-paved road is safe, so anyone can walk along it. There's no danger... but if a person turns and looks behind them, not a single one of their footsteps has been left on that safe road. A sandy beach by the ocean is difficult to walk along... but when you look behind you, every single one of your footsteps remains there...Please, whatever you do, don't live a worthless life by walking on an asphalt road."

For Endo, his mother is intricately tied up with his identity as a Catholic (not an easy religion to belong to, in wartime Japan). It's very poignant how he remembers his mother and his childhood priest in various points of his adult life.

But even if the reader were not Catholic, there is still much to relate to, in the universal struggle to form an independent self from a strong parental figure; in the burning quest to fulfill parental expectations after a parent's death.

And again, we see Endo at his excoriating best. For him, writing is his confessional, where he analyzes "the major rivers that have given shape to my life." He analyzes his weak deeds and thoughts, and in so doing, the book reflects the reader's own faults back to her.

Yet these faults are not irredeemable, as Endo constantly writes. And I suppose this is what makes Endo "Catholic," as he continues to find God in all things, even in the most wretched of men, even in the vilest and darkest night of the soul.

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Book Review: ONE BOAT by Jonathan Buckley

One Boat by Jonathan Buckley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"The Question of Questions wasn't 'Why are the stars in the sky?' but rather 'Why is anything anywhere?'"

I dove into the 3rd Booker Longlister's ocean of melodic phrases, swam amidst its memorable characters and emerged excited for the possibilities of language, especially its ability to preserve the fleeting flash that is one human life.

In ONE BOAT by Jonathan Buckley, our heroine (a lawyer with literary ambitions) is a divorced English woman who revisits a Greek provincial town after 9 years. The first time she was there, she met some of the townsfolk, healing a broken heart through the pursuit of human connection. The second time, she seeks a similar salvation through conversing with these same people: an old lover, a poet/philosopher, and the former waitress-turned-owner of the local tavern.

The story is simple enough, and yet there is a great deal unsaid, a lot of the story shimmering beneath the surface. What is the real reason behind the mysterious injury of the town poet? Did the random stranger confessing to planning murder actually carry out his revenge?

And through it all, thoughts of the female lead's dead parents arise. How she longs to share her experiences with her beloved mom and less beloved, yet dearly missed dad. How absence is presence, the blessing of memory. And how transitory a human life is, brilliant in its brevity until we all go "into the great indifference."

The novel becomes very meta towards the end, as all throughout the writer reinterprets her experience as she records her thoughts in her diary, later submitted for publication. I smiled as the editor (himself a Booker Longlister, who rewrote his book five times) suggested ways by which our heroine might try "increasing the 'narrative torque.'" But she lets the seemingly ordinary holiday remain as is, without embellishment. Because even in its most banal, a life truly lived (talking to people, looking at the sunrise, and being in the moment) is already an unearned abundance.

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Book Review: THE ANXIOUS GENERATION by Jonathan Haidt

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I finished this book on the day that a high school student shot a fellow student in Nueva Ecija, mere months after two knife stabbing incidents in local schools. Our children are not OK, and this book helps explain why, and offers a course of action.

I’ll just go out and say it: THE ANXIOUS GENERATION is perhaps this generation’s single most important book for parents, educators, and policy makers. Necessary and timely, it’s for anyone who has fallen asleep and woken up only to reach for their phone to check social media notifications, for everyone who has spent an inordinate amount of time online.

Social psychologist, parent, scholar, and professor Jonathan Haidt has written an extremely alarming book on “the psychological damage of a phone-based life.” The accessibility of his language in presenting scholarly findings makes it so that his message comes across even more urgently.

He presents scholarly research on how the deadly combination of underprotection of children online (unsupervised access to screens with Internet for hours), combined with overprotection of children in real life (preventing them from gaining feedback through overcoming meaningful challenges) has resulted in an epidemic of anxiety, depression, and mental illness in our youth. And the evidence he shows points to social media as the cause, not as a correlate.

Smart phones are “experience blockers,” Haidt explains, and the current epidemic of mental health goes hand in hand with too much screentime and too much helicopter parenting. From reducing our students’ interest in all non-screen-based forms of experience (I remember a student asking me what’s the point in going on a field trip to listen to World War II veterans when she can just watch a YouTube video online), to mass social media - induced illness (kids claiming to have Tourette’s after a German influencer who really had the condition went viral, or the sociogenic spread of gender dysphoria)... the book covers a lot of ground, but every page is important.

The book provides a historical background of a cultural shift towards “Safetyism” as well as a timeline of the rise of smart phones and social media companies deliberately targeting psychological vulnerabilities, or what he calls “The Great Rewiring.”
His closing chapter offers suggestions for collective action, on what parents, schools, and governments can do to fight this global crisis.

“The phone-based life produces spiritual degradation, not just in adolescents, but in all of us… There is a hole, an emptiness in us all, that we strive to fill. If it doesn’t get filled with something noble or elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage.”

The irony is not lost on me that I am posting this on social media, but perhaps this is the start: recognizing the evil that the algorithms have done in the past, yet using these same tools to spread awareness, to shed a bit of light in an ocean of doom and gloom.

And after posting this, I shall turn off my gadget and read. Or play the piano. Or do countless other life-giving activities offline.

In the book, Haidt quoted Thoreau: “The cost of a thing is the amount of… life which is required to be exchanged for it.” Life cannot and should not be lived online. Here’s to not spending a single minute on social media, more than is absolutely necessary.

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Book Review: AUDITION by Katie Kitamura

Audition by Katie Kitamura
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"I was used to people armed with tremendous will, I was frequently with people whose job consists of imposing their reality upon the world."

First of the Booker 2025 reads done and whoa, what a good start!

AUDITION is in two parts. The book is basically two different novellas, each featuring the same trio of characters, but changing in relation to one another.

We have the aging actress, her writer husband, and a mysterious young man, magnetic and beautiful.

It's a wonderfully written novel full of sharp observations and insights into relationships, the tells and minutiae of behavior that reveal the pecking order in our social lives. Kitamura writes unbelievably detailed yet piercing sentences on the power dynamics and interplay of desires that make up human interaction.

It's a reminder on how the quality of our existence depends on how we are treated by others, and how we are complicit in the narratives people tell of themselves. For in the telling of their stories, ours, too, is given meaning.

"What was a family if not a shared delusion, a mutual construction?"

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Book Review: KITCHEN by Banana Yoshimoto

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"But if a person hasn't ever experienced true despair, she grows old never knowing how to evaluate where she is in life; never understanding what joy really is. I'm grateful for it."

I used to see copies of this book everywhere decades ago, as it was one of the earliest to be translated into English, hence one of the pioneers of JLit or Japanese literature (which constitutes a lot of my reading these days).

I never liked the cover, and still don't, but finally got around to reading the novel and am happy to report that this is a prime example of never judging completely by the look of a book.

To my surprise, it's actually two works in one, a longer novella and a short story. Both talk of dealing with personal tragedy, and how one can move past the grieving and get on with the task of living.

I think this book would mean more to older readers, those who have tasted how bitter life can be, side by side with its sweetness.

There are no Hollywood happy endings, and cruel, crazy things happen to the best people without any warning. Pretty much like real life.

What I admire is how the author does not shy away from showing the consequences of tragedy, and offers a mature look into the pursuit of life amidst the trauma of loss.

"In the biting air I told myself, there will be so much pleasure, so much suffering. With or without Yuichi."

Happiness is a choice, and so, too, is sharing one's life and heartbreak with another. We need not be sad nor lonely forever, Yoshimoto shows in this short yet very wise book. There is, always, hope, with each new dawn, with each take-out katsudon. For even as we think we can't go on, sometimes it just takes a bite of ebi tempura "so delicious it makes me grateful I'm alive." Sometimes it's encountering a kindred soul who touches your life profoundly with a single conversation over coffee. Sometimes books can save lives, and I have a feeling this one has touched so many.

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