Lemon (2021) by Kwon Yeo-Sun

Book Review

Lemon (2021) 

by Kwon Yeo-Sun

  The Kindle edition of this book had a blurb that said something like, "Favorite of BTS fans."  What does that mean?  I guess it means that Lemon was a big hit in South Korea with teens, even as the English translation is unlikely to escape the read in translation scene for the mass market.   Usually though it seems like the Authors who get their works translated into English are "serious" authors, even as foreign genre work proliferates in other mediums, particularly television.   Where are the foreign hits, I ask. 

  Nominally a work of crime fiction about the unsolved murder of a beautiful but absent high school student, Lemon is really about the impact of the murder on the victim's sister, Da-on. Her obsession with revisiting the events of 2002, the murder happens at the Apex of the Korean World Cup, colors her present, as she tracks down two of the potential perpetrators of the crime. 

A Natural History of the Future (2021) by Rob Dunn

Book Review

A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us About the Future of the Human Species (2021)

by Rob Dunn

   Rob Dunn, a biologist, has facts to tell us about the natural world, and how our actions influence the growth of life on planet Earth.   He is hardly the only such person, but as biologist with a solid grasp of explaining complex ideas to civilians, he is well situated to put the point across.  The main thrust of his thesis is trying to explain that evolution works much faster than we original theorized. Far from taking centuries or millennium of change that is invisible to the naked eye, it in fact appears that life, particularly microscopic organisms like germs and viruses, can evolve incredibly fast in ways that thwart human intent.

  The major examples include antibiotic resistant viruses in hospitals and pesticide resistant bacteria on crops, but as the book progresses he expands the thesis to include a thorough discussion of relative adaptability of life (or lack of it) and makes the disturbing point that a future of climate change means that ALL life will have to reconfigure itself to new environments or niches, and that humanity, despite its enormous success, has not managed to expand its basic range of inhabitable land.  Unlike antibiotic resistant viruses, we may not be able to adapt fast enough as a species, and it is this weakness, not client change itself, that may spell doom for the species. 

Laser Printer II (2021) by Tamara Shopsin

Book Review

Laser Printer II (2021)

by Tamara Shopsin

   American author/illustrator has produced a little gem of low-stakes fiction, about a young woman working at an Apple repair shop in Manhattan during the decade or so when such stores thrived. These days it is common place to read reviews of graphic novels that are treated like novels instead of comic books, but this is the first novel that seems more like a graphic novel- the pages are rich with fetishization of the iconic Macintosh products of the 1980's.  Laser Printer II is as much a story about the evolution of Apple itself- from a quirky, hobbyist friendly outsider to the behemoth of the Ipod and eventually, the Apple Stores that would forever render shops such as the one depicted in this book obsolete.

   Laser Printer II is 224 pages long but it feels shorter, the characters seem sketched in pencil, and it is really the machines- Apple manufactured printers, that feel fully colored in.