THE FIRST EVER YEAR-LONG SCAVENGER HUNT!

The animal sidekick in question is North’s beloved and, sadly, only just recently departed doggo Noam Chompsky, and if you find yourself asking “Can an author’s real-life pet really count as an ‘animal sidekick’ for the purposes of a scavenger hunt?”, I will rebut:
-1. What are you, a cop, and
-2. At one point in the book, Chompsky appears and has a Socratic dialogue with another speaker about whether water wheels are superior to windmills as a source of steady, renewable energy. The winner gets belly-rubs, and you’ll have to read it to find out.
This book is rad and I recommend it for anyone who, like myself, loves to learn but doesn’t actively read a lot of nonfiction, because it’s laid out very intuitively, the explanations are detailed and chunky enough to leave you satisfied and pulling bits out of your teeth later but not enough to overwhelm or bore (and extensive further reading notes are included), and it is hilarious, in case the bit where the author’s dog–who once stole a live fish out of a fisherman’s bucket and fucking hightailed it for Ottowa–engages in one of the oldest forms of rhetorical education didn’t clue you in. This book taught me that my pinky finger is just about six centimeters long! And also how to make lye, set a broken bone in what seems like the most painful way possible, and eventually build a computer!

This is not a “true story” in that it didn’t, how you say, “happen”, but it’s a true story in that “shut up”, it “made me cry”.
Set in 1950’s Japan, AJOMF deals with a barber and his family in the waning days of the post-WWII American occupation of Japan–oh, were you not taught about that in school? Me neither!–and how a man struggles to provide for his family, who in turn feel distanced from and ignored by him for it, not in an ungrateful way, but in the way that it’s hard to love and appreciate someone you never see, and as his son grows older throughout the story he has to deal with that and its consequences.
The son–now a grown Tokyo salaryman–returns home for the first time in more than a decade when his father dies, and in handling the funeral learns that his father was much more than the workaholic he remembered, as he is loved and eulogized by people who knew him in the life he had before and after his son.
This was an extremely rough read for me, just because I found it very relatable and guilt-inducing not because it’s a mean book interested in guilting you, but because I am also a bad son whose relationship with his father could be best described as ‘complicated’ unless you’ve got three fucking hours for me to map out my very biased, one-sided perspective on it.