Matt's Books and Music

Here are some of the highlights, and one notable low-light, from the past month of my reading life.

Nine Raves

Father Material (London Calling 3), by Alexis Hall (2026)

Premise: Happily tucked into their committed unmarried life, Luc and Oliver consider big next steps

Review: I was uncertain whether we needed another book in this series, and I certainly didn’t need to see Luc perpetually screw up fatherhood for laughs. But this absolutely blew me away, and what I got was a far richer and nuanced story than I’d expected (and still very, very funny). I loved the way it flipped the script on the earlier books, with Luc finding himself more in his element than his perpetually competent boyfriend. A truly wonderful reading experience.

Bookish Pair: For another book about millennial aging, Dolly Alderton’s Good Material (2023).

The Typing Lady, by Ruth Ozeki (2026 🇨🇦)

Premise: The audacious novelist shares her first collection of short stories.

Review: Ozeki’s novels share a thematic maximalism, so it was interesting to see her turn to short fiction, which is by its nature more focused. And I couldn’t have been more impressed. In a year in which short stories haven’t been working super well for me, I really loved this collection, with most of the stories leaving a big impression.

Motherclown, by Harriet Alida Lye (2026 🇨🇦)

Premise: A young woman who goes to Paris for school and to find herself shortly after the death of her father is shocked when her still-grieving mother shows up on her doorstep.

Review: Don’t be fooled by the awkward title; this is a very special book. The two POV characters are both wonderfully developed and sympathetic even when they (especially the mother) make mistakes. It’s a double coming of age story, as well as a mother and daughter story, and I enjoyed and was moved by every page.

Bookish Pair: Ordinary Saints, by Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin (2025)

Dungeon Crawler Carl (D.C.C 1), by Matt Dinniman (2020)

Premise: When aliens destroy human civilization, an average Seattlite and his ex’s cat find themselves trying to survive a life-and-death video-game-like reality show set in a terrifying dungeon inhabited by all kinds of monsters.

Review: My biggest question going into this book is whether it could live up to the hype. For me, the answer is *mostly* yes It is the A+ version of what it’s trying to be: It captures the RPG feeling perfectly and is a lot of fun. And so it’s definitely a 5-star read. That said, at times it does just read like an endless string of plot devices, and since there really isn’t a positive outcome possible, I wonder how it can keep it up for the apparent ten books that will be in the series. I’m sure I’ll read on at least to book 2, but after that? Who knows.

Bookish Pair: John Sclazi’s The Kaiju Preservation Society (2022)

Life Class, by Pat Barker (2007)

Premise: The outbreak of WWI disrupts the lives of a handful of fine arts students.

Review: i have mixed feelings about this. Pat Barker handles this material with her usual skill. But these are hardly fresh themes, and I’ve seen them all handled more successfully elsewhere. So this was very good but hardly felt needful. Polite golf claps from me.

Bookish Pair: In Memoriam, by Alice Winn (2023)

Deviants, by Santanu Bhattacharya (2025)

Premise: The stories of three generations of gay men in one family reveal the quickly changing realities for queer folk in India over the past forty years.

Review: This is exceptionally well done and does a brilliant of showing the evolution of queer rights, attitudes, and traumas across the decades. It’s a particularly meaningful piece of queer fiction because it in no way centres the Western gaze or expectations. While it excels in its characters and descriptions of complex relationships, I don’t think man readers will resonate with all three timelines. Overall this is both well done and important.

White Nights, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1848)

Premise: A lonely man makes an instant connection with a charming, but unavailable, young woman over three nights.

Review: From a 2020s perspective, the main character here is pretty insufferable, a borderline incel. But if I can put on the lens of 19th C romanticism instead, this novella really sparkles as something really special and timeless. And the ending is perfect.

Palm Meridian, by Grace Flahive (2026 🇨🇦)

Premise: In the near future, a resident of a very special retirement community hosts a party for loved ones new and old on the night before she’s scheduled to die.

Review: This was a pleasant surprise for me, both in terms of its emotional and psychological heft (especially its nuanced handling of complex issues surrounding dying) and large cast of compelling characters. It also presented the most realistic vision of near future implications of climate change that I’ve seen in fiction. And, kind of randomly for a book set in Florida, it’s secretly a great Montreal book. This was well on the way to being a five-star read for me, but unfortunately one big swing of a plot choice towards the end really didn’t work for me.

Loved One, by Aisha Muharrar (2025)

Premise: In the aftermath of her recently estranged best friend’s sudden death, a Los Angeles woman travels to London to collect his belongings from his ex-girlfriend, only to find everything about his relationships was more complicated than it appeared.

Review: This has been a polarizing book, but it really worked for me. The characters and relationships were all complex and the discussion of grief was appropriately nuanced. I loved it.

 

And One Pan

Neom, by Lavie Tidhar (2022)

Premise: In the distant future, the city of Neom, sitting along the Red Sea, is a prosperous playground for the wealthy, where war is a distant memory. But then as now in SW Asia, the wars of the past are never far away. As ancient robotic relics emerge from the desert people are left wondering whether the city will survive.

Review: Okay, so this isn’t quite a ‘pan’, since I did enjoy this. But as much as this book has brilliant and lyrical world building, I’m afraid it doesn’t have much else. There is little plot or character development, and when something that looks like a plot appears, the book quickly pivots away. I’m not quite sure what the author intended to do here, but I’m at least intrigued enough to be glad to have read it.

Bookish Pair: This shares some themes with the Monk and Robot duology by Becky Chambers

 

Notable Non-Fiction

52 Ways to Reconcile, by David A. Robertson (2025 🧡🇨🇦)

Premise: A prominent Indigenous author and speaker talks about 52 simple and concrete ways Canadians can engage in reconciliation.

Review: David A. Robertson is someone I respect a lot, and this was as practical, helpful, and generous as I’d expected. If you’ve done a lot of reading on reconciliation efforts in Canada, this will be pretty basic, but if you’re still trying to figure out where to start, this is a great beginning.

Bookish Pair: 21 Things You May Not Know about the Indian Act, by Robert P. C. Joseph (2018 🧡🇨🇦)