Happy New Year everybody! There are a lot of things that can be said about this year just passed, as there always are… but the best of them is this: it was filled with so many good books! We hope you’ve had a chance to reflect on your year’s worth of reading, and we hope (sorry!) that you’ve had a hard time trying to figure out just which book was your 2023 favourite! Goodness knows we’d be hard-pressed to pick just one ourselves.
Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly Mcghee
Anyway, on to another year of fantastic reads without delay! We’re kicking off 2024 with a pointed, hilarious and psychically resonant takedown of capitalism – what better way to start the year? – that’s tender and scathing and brilliantly inventive in equal measure.
Have you ever looked around your workplace and wondered to yourself just what’s going on in the unseen minds of your coworkers? Of course you have. Who hasn’t? What if there was a way to find out? And what if it was your job to find out? And then, what if, to do that job you had to go into their dreams?
When we meet Jonathan Abernathy, he’s completely screwed. Behind on student loan repayments, suffocating under an avalanche of debt, he has no job and no prospects. He’s an abject failure. He barely believes the affirmations he tells himself to get through the day.
But when he gets an incredible job offer from a “government loan forgiveness program”, he starts to think, at last, that things are looking up. Here’s his chance. All he has to do is slip inside the minds of workers while they sleep and remove from their subconscious anything that might decrease their productivity: anything nightmarish, anything iffy or troubling from their waking lives. And how complicated could dream auditing possibly be?
It doesn’t take long for Jonathan’s sense of reality to fold in on itself over and over again. Soon he can’t distinguish time spent dreaming from time spent living or real relationships from unconscious wants – and before much longer he can scarcely tell right from wrong.
Incorporating so many themes immediately recognisable to almost all of us – reality, morality, blurry work/life boundaries, inescapable debts – Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind hits so many sore spots and pokes so much piercing fun at the states of life today that you won’t want to leave its hazy territories for anything. It’s a first-class debut… and, let’s face it, we’d all do well to start off the New Year cutting eye-holes in the fabric.
Should her future work turn out to be as memorable and thought-provoking as her debut, McGhee will certainly be one to watch.