Helen Macdonald - Vesper Flights
This is a beautiful collection of essays that made me want to feel more present in my life and more aware of the life surrounding me.
Carly Finlay (Ed.)Â - Growing Up Disabled in Australia
I have dipped in and out of some of the other titles in this âGrowing Up ____ in Australiaâ series previously, all of which I have enjoyed reading and consider to be invaluable resources for teaching and learning, but this one might be my personal favourite so far. The intersectional nature of disability creates space for a really diverse selection of authors, stories, and narrative forms here, and I look forward to continually returning to these short works of memoir in the future.
Billy-Ray Belcourt - A History of My Brief Body
Where to start? The British punk band IDLESâ 2018 album title, Joy as an Act of Resistance, perhaps works somewhat as a shorthand, distilled and decontextualised, summary representation of Belcourtâs perspective throughout this memoir, which reads just as much as manifesto than it does memoir: âMy thesis statement: Joy is an at once minimalist and momentous facet of NDN life that widens the spaces of living thinned by structures of unfreedom.âÂ
Belcourt is a First Nations, Driftpile Cree, queer scholar and poet, and this collection of lyric essays is largely concerned with a metaphysics of joy: âIn this book, I track that un-Canadian and otherworldly activity, that desire to love at all costs, by way of a theoretical site that is my personal history and the world as it presents itself to me with bloodied hands. To my mind, joy is a constitutive part of the emotional rhetoric and comportment of those against whom the present swells at annihilating pace. With joy, we breach the haze of suffering that denies us creativity and literature. Joy is art is an ethics of resistance.â
Wiradjuri writer, poet, teacher, and academic Jeanine Leane has written about Belcourtâs book, published in Australia by UQ Press, for the Sydney Review of Books, much better than I can hope to speak to the text here, and she offers the following understanding of Belcourtâs representation of joy: âJoy... is internal consistency â a personal and purposeful choice to refuse to be either silent or erased by the nation state.â
I have developed an annotation system where, in addition to underlining passages, Iâll place an âXâ in the bottom corner of pages that contain particularly significant pages for quick reference; there are too many pages of this book which Iâve felt compelled to mark with multiple âXâs to the point where to quote them all here would feel like a definite copyright infringement. Nonetheless, here is just one more of the passages that I want to hold on to: âTo care in a more feminist sense is to think outside of a singular life, and to do this is to participate in a process of self-making that exceeds the individual. With care, one grows a collective skin: âthe fact of being touched by what we touch.â Care denotes that which precedes it; it pulls us outside our bodies and into that which one canât know in advance.â I am really grateful to have read this book, and feel that I am still only beginning my process of reflection.
In the meantime, hopefully without the risk of atrophying that process for myself, Iâll finish by quoting the ending of Leaneâs own review: â...the overwhelming message, to NDNs for whom he writes first and foremost, and to First Nations peoples on stolen lands never ceded, comes from his essay, âPlease keep Lovingâ:
âNDN youth, listen: to be lost isnât to be unhinged from the possibility of a good life. There are doorways everywhere, ones without locks, doors that swing open. There isnât only now and here. There is elsewhere and somewhere too. Speak against the coloniality of the world, against the rote of despair it causes, in an always-loudening chant. Please keep loving.ââ
Jeanette Winterson - Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
I am so glad that I read this book, which, surprisingly, makes for an excellent companion piece with bell hooksâ All Above Love: New Visions. After reading Winteronâs autobiographically-inspired first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, last year, I felt urgently, though somewhat sheepishly and self-consciously, drawn to Wintersonâs writing. There are simply too many passages that I underlined for me to share them all here; this is much more than autobiography. Here are a few of the passages that I want to remember:
âThere are so many things that we canât say, because they are too painful. We hope that they things we can say will soothe the rest, or appease it in some way. Stories are compensatory. The world is unfair, unjust, unknowable, out of control. [...]Â When we tell a story, we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, can be retold. [...]Â When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of the silence that can be spoken.â
âAll of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get out language back through the language of others. We can turn the poem. We can open the book. Someone has been there for us and mined the words.â
âReading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, the the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become.â
âThe love-work that I have to do now is to believe that life will be all right for me. I donât have to be alone. I donât have to fight for everything. I donât have to fight everything. I donât have to run away. I can stay because this is love that is offered, a sane steady stable love.â
âAll my life I have worked from the wound. To heal it would mean an end to one identity - the defining identity. But the healed wound is not the disappeared wound; there will always be a scar. I will always be recognisable by my scar.â
After reading Richard Normanâs analysis in On Humanism last year, I was eager to experience reading this novel for myself. The premise is simple, in the sense that thereâs an instigating incident early in the story that invites and explanation of cause and effect. However, Swift zooms way out beyond the immediate scope of the subject matter into history, attempting to complicate any simple answer to questions of causation or resolution: â...shall we go back to the beginning? But whereâs that? How far back is that?â The constant shifts in time, as Norman has identified, wonderfully captures the phantasmagoria of phenomenon that characterises when we call experience and history, and which can only be seen to explain, as Swiftâs narrator says, âa knowledge of the limits of our power to explain.â I loved reading this book, and the feeling it gave my mind of being disassembled, dissected, and suspended in various positions that possessed their own coherence through a unifying incoherence.
The narratorâs view of his brotherâs intellectual disability is unsettling, and feels perhaps more disturbing in a moral sense than the author intended. Here I am, though, guessing at a complete strangerâs intentions. Itâs not exactly like the narrator is presented as a paragon of virtue. I guess Iâm just feeling particularly aware of certain ableist patterns of perception and representation that exist throughout literature at the moment, for the first time, and am starting to feel  weary and wary already.
Linsday Ellis - Axiomâs End
This is a lightânâbreezy YA-adjacent sci-fi novel that I enjoyed. Superficially, it is about falling in love with an alien. There is also some business to do with language and communication - but themes are for eight-grade book reports, so never mind about that. Nothing to see here; focus on the aliens! Theyâre totally not metaphors! I am unsure if I will read the forthcoming sequel, though I suspect I would enjoy watching a film adaptation because, once again: aliens!
Kurt Vonnegut - The Sirens of Titan
This novel was more generic - in the sense of possessing and adhering to established genre patterns - than I had expected from Vonnegut, though I didnât realise it was one of his earlier works when I first picked it up. I remember enjoying the story well enough, despite the relative lack of depth and complexity if compared to Slaughterhouse-Five and Catâs Cradle. However, I was particularly moved by one line of dialogue, late in the novel, which reads like a humanistic interpretation of the proximity principle, and has since stayed with me:Â
âIt took us this long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.â
As a side note: by contrast, a certain Ben Folds and Nicky Hornby song, which came out when I was finishing high school, has been coming to mind lately as an example of perhaps what I feel is one of the silliest, and perhaps most insidious, perspectives on love that I have (shamefully - and I mean that genuinely, as I believe the framing around the idea, in this instance, inevitably invites some pretty toxic patterns of thinking and behaviour) previously entertained. It is a bop, though, so plug your ears, lest ye too be tempted to indulge in problematic, harmful, self-destructive, adolescent fantasies!
Alan Dean Foster - Alien: Covenant
I hadnât read a novelisation before, but I wanted to revisit the story of Alien: Covenant ahead of the recent Blank Check podcast episode without actually having to rewatch the film, so I read the novelisation instead. I was thinking it might further develop some of the filmâs themes, but I was mostly just looking forward to taking my mind off work as my holidays began. I had not read a novelisation before. Unfortunately, the experience felt not dissimilar to the moment in an episode of Arrested Development when Michael Bluth opens a brown paper bag stored in the fridge with the label on that says âDEAD DOVE, do not eat!â and then looks in it anyway, before sighing and saying, âI donât know what expectedâ. From what I could remember, the novel was almost exactly the same as the film in both subject matter and structure, with Foster even âcuttingâ between the points of view of various characters at roughly the same times. I gained a clearer understanding of the plot, maybe, but not much more of an appreciation of any of the ideas the film contains. The writing style is competent and unadorned. However, it did successfully take my mind off of things as the holidays began.
N. K. Jemisin - The Fifth Season
N. K. Jemisin - The Obelisk Gate
N. K. Jemisin - The Stone Sky
I was scrolling through the list of Hugo Award winners from previous years, and it was hard not to notice the three-year winning streak that Jemisin holds from 2016-2018 for her science fantasy Broken Earth trilogy. Reading the three post-apocalyptic novels over a fortnight was emotionally draining to the point of numbness at times - somewhat of a âwhat came first, the music or the miseryâ situation, though. (Iâm writing this in the midst of another lockdown.) Genre fiction seems to do this to me, but the structural ambition of the first novel sustained me through this initial period of uncertainty.
The tragedy of the first book felt stunningly orchestrated, but reading the second novel afterwards felt particularly bleak and harrowing - probably because I thought that such a narrative coup d'Ă©tat wouldnât seem possible twice, and probably also because I missed the humour of one of the characters focalised in the first novel. This is, I suspect, by design; finishing the series, the weight of the suffering represented in the middle section doesnât feel overshadowed or diminished by the ending.
Unlike the unfinished Game of Thrones saga, which is the only other fantasy series Iâve read in recent years, this story does possess resolution. (Is calling it a âshatteringâ conclusion too on-the-nose, considering that the instigating event within the novels is called The Shattering?) Subsequently, I am glad that I saw the series through, especially as I donât think I would have appreciated otherwise the full extent of the metaphor(s) at its heart, or had the chance to enjoy the catharsis of the profoundly hopeful resolution.
George R. R. Martin - A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
Every now and then I accidentally get to wishfully thinking about The Winds of Winter. In its ongoing absence, I try to fill the void with other ASOIAF-related narratives of varying degrees of quality. I enjoyed the first novella of the three that are collected under this title, and the third one, too. I donât remember Egg having much to do in the second one, though, which felt somewhat staid; Dunk is a character who, without a witty foil like Egg hanging around and stirring up commotion, leaves much to be desired. Speaking of eggs, and chickens, and which of them came first, Iâm yet to decide whether I turn to Martinâs work when Iâm feeling depressed, or whether his work affects me that way. I just feel kind of numb while reading his work, sometimes...
Madeline Miller - Song of Achilles
By contrast, Millerâs work feels full of life. Her writing is sensory and naturalistic, and sensual, too. I am taking a circuitous passage through the Greek myths, starting with the contemporary revisions and working my way back to the earlier texts; I will read Homer and Ovid soon, possibly. I think I was once the kind of person who, without having read any of it, would have been sceptical of Millerâs work, considering it derivative and watered-down - vulgar, in some sense. It is nice not being that person anymore, and I am glad I read this book. I was moved by it, and I believe that I will enjoy it even more once I gain further understanding of the ways in which it adheres to and departs from the classics.
What a delight. This was the perfect book to read after Song of Achilles, as it begins with that novelâs concluding events. Mostly, it is the story of Priam, King of Troy, seeking back the body of his slain son, Hector, from the Greeks. However, it is equally a story about humility, reconciliation, and the joys of dipping oneâs feet into cold streams of water. Itâs a such a short and giving book that I feel like I will read it again many times in the future.
For a long time, my favourite songs were all about trying to do things. âBut I try, I try,â sings David Bowie. âI try and I try and I try and I try,â sings Mick Jagger. âIâve been trying,â Curtis Mayfield sings. Itâs a more specific concept than perseverance, because that word, to my thinking, anticipates success. Trying, on the other hand, is indefinite. Itâs for now, possibly forever, and holds no promise. Itâs a state of vulnerability, and itâs a choice. Itâs the commitment to imagining Sisyphus as happy. And in the words of Circe, ruminating on something Prometheus says to her about the nature of mortal life early in this novel: âWe bear it as best we can.âÂ
Needless to say, I really enjoyed reading this book. Itâs of the kind that I feel somewhat melancholy while reading because I realise that, at some point soon, I will be finished reading it - and cannot read it again for the first time. Perhaps having a bad memory is a blessing in this respect; it will be new again soon enough.
Margaret Atwood - The Penelopiad
Reading The Penelopiad felt like I was traveling down the surface of a horizontal cylindrical shape, and Atwood was periodically rotating the ground beneath me, swivelling my point of view between the characters in a way that worked towards achieving a remarkably holistic sense of narrative. I liked it! It made my brain smile! Atwood is such a dexterous writer.
Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
I wanted to read something that had a reputation for being really, really well-written at a sentence level. In that respect, the novel did not disappoint! This passage, for instance, took my breath away:
âThere was still that stream of pale moths siphoned out of the night by my headlights. Dark barns still propped themselves up here and there by the roadside. People were still going to the movies. While searching for night lodgings, I passed a drive-in. In a selenian glow, truly mystical in its contrast with the moonless and massive night, on a gigantic screen slating away among dark drowsy fields, a thin phantom raised a gun, both he and his arm reduced to tremulous dishwater by the oblique angle of the receding world,--and the next moment a row of trees shut off the gesticulations.â
Thereâs an annotated edition, published by Penguin, floating around that I assume provides some insightful analysis of this linguistic wizardry.
What I didnât expect, naively, was for this to be a novel about language, and the ways in which language can obscure reality - or, even more broadly, as Craig Raine writes in the afterword, âthe discrepancy between the dizzy desire and the dingy truthâ.
Neil Gaiman - The Ocean at the End of the Lane
I was interested in reading Neverwhere, or Good Omens, as my next Gaiman novel, but I borrowed this book from a friend at work after I saw that the previous person theyâd lent it to had left sticky-noted annotations throughout it; the thought of reading the story and someoneâs thoughts about the story at the same time was too good to refuse. Here are a few of my own thoughts, sans sticky notes:
- About halfway through the book, the villain says, âEverything here is so weak, little girl. Everything breaks so easy. They want such simple things. I will take all I want from this world, like a child stuffing its fat little face with blackberries from a bush.â (somewhat confused about villainâs nature and/or motivations - seemed to set up a similar thematic focus to Coraline at first?)
- Towards the end of the novel, the narrator says, âA story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.â How true is this? This does not feel true to me. How is not changing not simply a form of change? The dichotomising of stasis and change at the heart of this statement does not seem to take into account the significance of context, or the experiences of continuance, prolongation, and liminality. I am unsure as to whether this passage is intended didactically, or whether it is actually intended to be more ambiguous in nature. I suspect the latter, and appreciate the way it functions as a provocation, regardless of whether or not this idea is explored within the narrative.
- I like that the identity of the person whoâs funeral the narrator has been attending before the prologue and epilogue is never explicitly revealed - it lends the narrative the feeling of incompletion in a way that feels true to the experience of being alive.
- Gaiman and/or his publishers are very fastidious and consistent with the use of commas within his sentences. Many excerpts seem like they would make for instructive exemplars for writing and grammar courses.
Annie Proulx - Brokeback Mountain
I was curious to see how a short story can contain the potential for a feature-length film adaptation; I donât think Iâd ever read a short story that a film was based upon before. The jumps forward in time are all here, and they feel just as seamless as they do within the film. The only scene that I could remember being in the film that isn't alluded to in this short story is the one where Ennis is out with his family when he gets into a fight with two men as fireworks explore behind him - a wonderfully cinematic moment. I really enjoyed Proulxâs writing, and I look forward to reading more of her fiction soon.
(Also, god bless Michelle Williams for doing her best to deliver the impossible line, âJack Twist? Jack Nasty.â Not since Paul Thomas Anderson made Melora Walters say that line from an Aimee Mann song in Magnolia, âNow that I've met you, would you object to never seeing each other again?â has an acting professional been so unnecessarily tortured by a directorâs insistence upon adhering to the source text.)
Briony Stewart - Kukimo and the Dragon
This is a delightful childrenâs book - the kind where the antagonistic force turns out to be a new friend. It possesses tension, but is wonderfully free of conflict. The back cover says itâs recommended for readers over the age of seven, and the book is published by the University of Queensland Press.
Charlie Mackesy - The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and the Horse
This books is full of lovely illustrations accompanied by generalised, platitudinous assertions that make me feel anxious. âYou are loved,â the author insists. But by who, how, to what extent, and why? These are perhaps unfair question to expect a childrenâs book to answer. They are important questions, though, and I think people (especially little ones) deserve a clearer, more self-aware and critically-informed presentation of a framework by which to understand this phenomenon. bell hooks has much more interesting things to say about love and self-respect, so Iâm curious to read some of her childrenâs literature in the future.
Kae Tempest - Brand New Ancients
âItâs like Howl, I guess?â - my unfair response to too, too many works of poetry.
Qin Xiaoyu - Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry
If it werenât for Rhian Saseen, an editor at The Paris Review, mentioning this one in their list of favourite books of 2020 (ârequired reading for anyone who owns an Apple product or a fast-fashion clothing itemâ), I donât think I would ever have stumbled across this collection, translated into English by Eleanor Goodman. There are many great poems in this collection. However, there is one poem in particular, âMeaningâ, by Chen Nianxi, that I think about often. It describes the authorâs experience as a demolitions worker in a coal-mine. Without wanting to fetishise the work, it is one of the bleakest poems imaginable.
Yuval Noah Harari -Â Sapiens: A Graphic History (Vol. 1Â & 2)
Sometimes, we need some pictures to help us eat our vegetables. Sapiens was was the kind of book that I knew I wasnât going to read myself, and was waiting for a podcast to summarise. The artwork within this graphic version looks great, and, subsequently, I feel like I genuinely remember more ideas from this book than I would have from reading the original.
Brian K. Vaughan - Y: The Last Man (Vol. 4 & 5)
I grew weary waiting for the next instalment of Saga and decided to finish reading one of Vaughanâs completed stories - I had tried previously, but the library didnât have copies at the time, and, from what I can remember, there was trouble ordering one in because it was, at least temporary, unavailable from distributors. Anyway, Iâve left writing this reflection too long after finishing the series other than to say: I liked it! And that I tried to watch the television adaptation a few nights ago, and thought it was not very good.
Julie Doucet - My Most Secret Desire
It took me a while to pick up this one again after I first purchased it a few years ago; I didnât give it much of a go the first time I attempted to read it, and felt disappointed by the brevity and absurdity of the some of Dulcetâs earlier comic strips. I was hoping for a more long-form autobiographical work, I guess. Anyway, my expectations were all wrong. I really enjoyed diving back in to this book recently. It reminded me at times of Alison Bechdelâs Are You My Mother? in the way that it treats dreams, and the subconscious, as subject matter worth exploring. The strips towards the end of the book, from the mid-nineties, were my favourites. In particular, thereâs a recollection of a dream about a Nick Cave concert that then is interrupted by a leap forwards in time, with Doucet reflecting on it years later, in the present - itâs more of a traditional memoir work, I guess, which is less perhaps radical and innovative, but it is nonetheless very satisfying. Iâm looking forward to reading Dirty Plotte and some of her more recent work as soon as possible.
Alison Bechdel - The Secret to Superhuman Strength
Like the Winterson autobiography, this one felt cosmically-targeted towards my current state. I think thereâs a word for this? I canât remember the word, or term. Something that involves the prefix âsync-â, perhaps. Synchronicity? I thought there was something even more specific. Nonetheless, I loved reading this graphic memoir, and this passage knocked me out of my head:
âI see now that my yearning for self-transcendence is in some ways an attempt to avoid the strain of relating to other people. If you can manage to see past everyday reality, where subject and object hold sway to the view where itâs all one thing, unified and absolute, thereâs nothing to relate to. âSelfâ and âotherâ might very well be illusions. But I was still going to have to grapple with them.â
Adam Nayman - The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together
Not much to say about this one other than I thought it was very good and that I look forward to borrowing out Naymanâs subsequent book on Paul Thomas Andersonâs films whenever it, too, hits the shelves of the local council libraries around here. Actually, hereâs something: this book finally gave me the much-needed motivation to watch Blood Simple for the first time, which I enjoyed immensely. That film has maybe one of my favourite ever cuts to credits: âItâs the same old song / but with a different feeling since youâve been gone...â
Richard Ayoade - Ayoade On Top: A Voyage (through a Film) in a Book (about a Journey)
In the least-hubristic way possible, this felt like the kind of absurd and ridiculous monograph I might aspire to write someday. Needless to say, it tickled me endlessly. I enjoyed the autobiographical sidebars the most. Hereâs a short excerpt that felt like a personal attack:Â
â...to be fair...we all bifurcate ourselves. When I buy Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, the acquisitive part of me is buying it for the deluded part of me that thinks Iâll read it one day, while the archivist part of me keeps it on a shelf with all the other books I havenât read, so that one day it can present a logistical problem to those who survive me.â
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And I have currently started reading, all the same time (I know, itâs a terribly slow, hazardous, and unfocused approach) the following:
John Armstrong - Conditions of Love
Tony Birch - Dark as Last Night
Lesley Chow - Youâre History
Jonathan Franzen - Crossroads
Stan Grant - Australia Day
Joan Lindsay - Picnic at Hanging Rock
Jonathan Rayner - The Cinema of Michael Mann
Tobin Siebers - Disability Aesthetics
