I tried to read this in 2024 to mark a good few years of Reading Books by reading the Booker Prize winner in the year it won but bookshops were sold out! Foiled!
I tend to like the Booker winners. I don’t know if it’s a British thing. I like the Mercury Prize-winning music too. I find those prizes are a reliable way for me to discover new authors or artists that I like, and I like discovering new things. And as I have decided this year to stop letting algorithms suggest things that are similar to each other that make me sad and bored (bye to social media and streaming services), I am explicitly seeking out human-curated recommendations to discover new things.
Underground Lovers – Encounters with Fungi by Alison Pouliot
January 5, 2025 – Northcote
I'm trying to get off Instagram. Facebook too, ideally, although there still feels like too many people I am only connected to on these platforms that I might regret being more disconnected from. I want less time on the algorithm of banality rectangle and now time reading books and looking at wild and rare mushrooms.
I read this in a cabin in Romsey, stopping every now and then for a trip to a little town, lighting a fire or a hike through the bush on the property. I also found myself pausing to look up photos of the fungi mentioned in this book, getting distracted by things like frog songs or watching the local kangaroos and cockatoos and kookaburras.
This is the driving question of Charles Yu's experimental novel Interior Chinatown, where Willis Wu yearns to be more than A generic Asian stereotype in the screenplay of his life.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
October 26, 2024 – Northcote
Almost dropped this so many times but hate-read it until the end. Perhaps got better on the last act or so. Found all the references to games and coding deeply cringe. Almost threw the Kindle off the balcony after the horrific sex scene. Hated all the characters. Got mad about how I could be reading something better many times. Became obsessed and confounded by why so many other people loved this but I despised it. Found the friendships insipid and trite. I have worked in tech and been a designer and run companies and moved cities and had deep friendships and suffered chronic health problems and pain and experienced depression and grief and yet this just felt like a horrible soap opera making fun of the depth and awe and horror and joy of those experiences. Remarkably boring, benign and self indulgent, felt like the author romanticising a life they haven't led. Absolutely not for me. Sorry!
Quite a beautiful read, a book that goes deeper than we have ever gone into an oceanic trench and further than we have ever travelled into space. We accompany Leigh, our protagonist; relatable, lonely, awkward, smart, introspective or perhaps neurotic. She's a scientist and a sister and a human being living through a technological advancement that changes her life.
This book is about scientific curiosity and it's also about life, death and being made of the same stuff as stars. It's about the specific and strange experience of swimming in the ocean and it's about never really knowing other people.
As we are paying Brussels a visit I thought I'd read a Belgian author. I seem to be developing a taste for dystopian sci fi, with an interest in non-male protagonists.
This was honestly very grim. But surprisingly readable and entertaining. 40 women live in a bunker, unsure of how they got there or where it is, policed by silent male guards with intimidating whips. The youngest of them is our narrator. When the bunker suddenly opens, the story moves to the surface with still more questions than answers.
I knew I'd read this, although I was not sure I'd read it so fast. Digested between Melbourne and Heathrow, I found it charming, rich and sweet, like a decadent croissant.
I have often felt like I'm old for my age, and that's not really a brag. I worry I will head into peri early, and that I have spent a lot of my life preoccupied with work, which feels increasingly grim. I have felt for a long time that my life has been on hold, from illness or work or lockdown or grief. I've not been interested in marriage or children because I've felt like I've not yet had my own life, and am not ready to give it to someone else. I too would like to have my cake and perhaps even eat it. After all, what's the point of having cake you can't eat?
This took a long long time to get through. It's been a rough year. It started out slow, introducing all the characters who would eventually weave together into an exciting story about trees and activism and hope and nature and humanity. It ended kind of slowly too, as if it had used up all its energy in the crescendo.
I think I enjoyed it, especially in the middle. But overall I was a little surprised by how some of the stories didn't seem as well thought through. In particular, I had so much interest in Neelay and his game, but that whole arc kind of dwindled into .. something something AI? 😑
Reading this made me feel like I was having a stroke. I loved it. I don't really know how to describe it — the art style is off-putting and purposefully ugly; the stories are oddly erotic, alien and surreal, all loosely based on the autobiographical character of the author's namesake. It made me grateful for weird people who make art and the good people in my life who share that art with me ( 🙏🙏 to my sister, Sophie).
Seek You – A Journey Through American Loneliness by Kristen Radtke
March 11, 2024 – Northcote
A new(?) genre (at least for me) — long form graphic essay — exploring loneliness with a focus on North America. From cowboys to dating apps, Radtke wants to understand the specific flavour of American isolation that drives behaviour, diagnoses and, ironically, connection.
I used to subscribe to The Believer and have been enamored by the art style for a long time, so for me this was a visual treat. Add to that the actual content, well written, handled with deep curiosity and meditation, this was engaging from start to finish.
I Don't – The Case Against Marriage by Clementine Ford
March 3, 2024 – Northcote
It's taken a while to get through this one. We moved house, there's a genocide happening and I've been distracted. I think dealing with all that and digesting the content of this was too much for me.
I saw Clem launch this and was so impressed with her knowledge and eloquence and already am on this side of the argument so was keen to really feel connected with a point of view I've held for a long time.
After enjoying Exhalation so much I picked up Ted Chiang's other book, which includes the story the film Arrival is based off.
Ostensibly this is a sci fi short story collection but Chiang has a really curious and fascinating style where he takes an obviously untrue thing and extrapolates what if that were true? What would the world be like if that were true? In Exhalation he explores this with creationism, and in this book there are stories of angels, aliens and more. And they all really surprise and challenge you with the depth of thinking and imagination.
Eventually Everything Connects – Eight Essays on Uncertainty by Sarah Firth
December 16, 2023 – Thornbury
Such a beautiful and deeply relatable book of personal essays. I feel like this book articulates a kind of maturity that I strive for this kind of flexible thinking and stoicism, self awareness and analysis.
Sarah manages to touch on very modern themes without crossing over into cringe, or perhaps transcends it into a lovely, vulnerable place that feels like making a new friend.
See What You Made Me Do – Power, Control and Domestic Abuse by Jess Hill
November 26, 2023 – Thornbury
This book is my villain origin story. It broke me over and over again. I've been reading it for months, picking it up and then needing to take a break, over and over and over again.
The scale of this is so big, and the violence so stomach churning, it becomes hard to take in. But how you can read this and not become radicalised is beyond me. It's so extreme, the fact that it's not a national emergency seems wild to me.
I kind of knew I'd love this but wow I really really loved it. It reminded me a lot of Italo Calvino, although with a Charlie Brooker speculative sci-fi kind of vibe.
Each of these stories is impossibly good, so perfectly constructed that it makes your head spin a little.
We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby
September 19, 2023 – Gold Coast
Hilarious and oddly moving. Personal essays about surviving under late stage capitalism with your mean cat and dark sense of humour. Much needed levity in my weirdly dark reading diet. Thanks to Karolina for the rec/loan.
An absolute delight. Funny and touching meta art theory heist story. I loved this. @worf_episode's art style, writing and ability to weave in-jokes and narrative together seamlessly is masterful.
The Reckoning – How #Metoo is Changing Australia by Jess Hill
June 27, 2023 – Thornbury
The weird thing about the Australian news is that everything seems filtered, muffled, refracted through politics of politeness and prime time manners. Brittany Higgins, Grace Tame, Christian Porter and the other stories that have floated off and on our screens in between COVID news — those who we marched for, have seemed frankly so thinly reported that their stories have been just enough to evoke discussion and doubts.
Intact – A Defence of the Unmodified Body by Clare Chambers
June 26, 2023 – Thornbury
So I have actually read books this year despite failing to post! I seem to be reading a lot of philosophy? Starting with this, which I heard about via Jessica DeFino.
Clare Chambers is interested in why some body modifications are "good" and others "bad", and how we might look at different forms of body modification — from cochlear implants to mastectomies to bodybuilding to makeup to circumcisions — and draw out a theory of ethics.
I don't want to have kids, but I'm increasingly interested in motherhood and its role in feminism and its ability to transform women.
There's something about it that appeals to me on a level of radical politics, bodily autonomy, care and community. There's something that's clearly radical in getting familiar with the trauma and viscera of birth, which is often edited out. There's something important about labour and (re)production that is deeply political.
Leigh brought this to Christmas, I just devoured it in a couple sittings. Such a good reminder of the rich and charming experience of graphic novels. This is an exploration of family through the eyes of a creative, cheeky, adventurous child - and the stories of the women in her life finding themselves through love, grief, care and family. Makes me want to draw again.
At family Christmas in the Yarra Valley I think every person would have loved this book. My mum, a science teacher, my dad, a history buff, my sister who works at CSIRO and her partner, an artist, as well as Christopher, an engineer.
I loved New Dark Age and knew I'd love this too. Bridle uses his beautifully curious writing style to take you on a journey from a DIY self driving car to cheeky octopus behaviour to plant communication, an internet of animals and a history of non binary computing. This is a book deeply interested in what it means to be intelligent, human, artificial, animal, plans or ecological. Whether other intelligences exist in ways so different from our own that we perhaps fail to perceive them, as an alien might mistake us for simple livestock.
I feel like the content of this book has been carefully avoided in its publicity in some ways — I was not really expecting it to go where it went.
In the paperback it's a delightful light pink. The title refers to a legal concept about the nature of a victim, but without that context appears poetic; the illustration and the text on the cover gives it a kind of girl power energy that led me to think this was a kind of self help book. It's not.
Not a bad book to read while being covid positive on the back gardens of friends and family in England in summer.
Haven't read much fiction recently so this was a nice change. I really enjoyed the writing style, and the story itself crosses over with our current pandemic reality a few times but primarily paints a picture of a post apocalyptic world, where electricity, the internet and civilisation in general have ceased to exist after most of the human population is wiped out.
Finished this last week with an old man reading over my shoulder on the plane. Hope he enjoyed it.
As I understand it the eponymous essay that this book started with was a response to the Brock Turner case, which has occupied many pages in recent feminist literature. That essay is good, although the following, more freeform reflection on the backlash to that essay is probably more interesting.
Come As You Are – The Surprising New Science That WIll Transform Your Sex Life by Emily Nagoski PhD
April 18, 2022 – Thornbury
I'm not joking when I say everyone needs to read this as soon as possible.
I consider myself pretty sex positive and open minded, but after reading this book, the amount of misinformation I have discovered I had sitting around in my subconscious is a lot more than I could have expected. I am glad to have swept a little of it out.
Against Empathy – The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom
April 6, 2022 – Thornbury
I'm a typical leftie nerd so I listen to Sam Harris and Very Bad Wizards and have always found Bloom quite engaging. This is my first of his books and it's close to my heart as a designer in tech.
Let's clear up the obvious spiciness: Bloom is talking about the difference between "I feel things that I think other people feel" and proper cognitive empathy. As in the former bad, the latter ok. But more than this, he argues that empathy, as heartwarming as it is, is shipped with some serious bugs: it's biased, with much more if it given to those similar to us, and it's irrational, and in particular, innumerate, tricking us into privileging the plight of one over the more utilitarian many.
Bullshit Jobs – The Rise of Pointless Work and what we can do about it by David Graeber
March 25, 2022 – Thornbury
Such a good book to read in the lead up to starting a new job...
This starts with an inventory of different types of bullshit jobs, interwoven with testimonies of various people. Kind of amusing. But when I got past this section and into the real guts of this book I put it down and said out loud, "Wow, this just got super interesting."
Tomorrow Sex will be Good Again – Women and Desire in the Age of Consent by Katherine Angel
February 17, 2022 – Thornbury
I picked this up because the concept is intriguing: that sexual response is fundamentally different for women. This book tries to unpick a few tricky knots which I may or may not be able to communicate properly here.
In its most controversial argument, it argues that affirmative consent is problematic because it requires a kind of self knowledge that may not be possible. "Do I want this?" isa question Angel believes we sometimes can't answer as well as the law believes we can, and moreover, sometimes its ambiguity and fuzziness is inherently erotic.
New Dark Age – Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle
February 10, 2022 – Thornbury
A few years ago you might have read an article about some truly disturbing algorithmically created YouTube videos for kids — this is that author's book, exploring the new era humanity heads into as we hand over control to automation, big data and a networked world.
This is a Verso book, so expect a level of dense, but I will say I found this extraordinarily readable and deeply interesting.
Stolen Focus – Why You Can't Pay Attention by Johann Hari
January 29, 2022 – Thornbury
It would have been ironic if I didn't finish this but thankfully it was a pretty engaging read. I did put my phone at least a few metres away from me to stop my brain finding excuses of things I needed to look up or buy or browse...
I've noticed a fairly big degradation of my ability to focus. Perhaps it was bad before, but over the last few years, this glowing rectangle seems to offer more mindless self soothing comfort than is perhaps healthy.
We generally seem able to identify misogyny, but often struggle to understand its purpose. Certainly I do. I'd even say I've come to be able to predict it and accept it when it does occur. I've grown able to depersonalise it; to understand when I am the target of it that it says more about the speaker than about me — and yet I find myself sometimes confounded by it, in particular when it offers what seems at first glance to be a logical contradiction. For example, I've been told I'm both "too emotional" and "not emotional enough" by male superiors. How can both be true?
Kate Manne theorises in this book that misogyny is the policing arm of patriarchy, in that it serves to reinforce the power structure by regulating the economics of feminine coded goods (namely love, affection, caregiving) and masculine coded rewards (power, status, influence).
The Hype Machine – How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy and How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral
January 7, 2022 – Thornbury
This was interesting - dense, academic, footnoted and referenced, citing many, many studies and looking verrrrry closely at the effects and emergent behaviours generated by the various networked apps and platforms we use online. Nerdy review because this is the area I work in.
If you've read Mike Monteiro's book Ruined By Design it describes, very convincingly, the harm being done by these services and the culpability of those working in tech. This book tries to answer the question of how we might start to unpick this mess, starting with a deep understanding of the mechanisms at play.
And now for something completely different. Curious if anyone else has read this? Recommended by @chizr, this is the first novel by Iain Banks. He writes as Iain M Banks when he's doing sci fi, including "Player of Games" which you may recognise as Grimes' latest song title. I admit I haven't read anything else of his.
This is just so impressive as a first novel. It is probably also the first horror fiction I've read, maybe except for American Psycho. I actually like horror films so I'm not surprised I liked this too.
Read in one sitting; an erudite and intelligent, empathetic and sensitive interrogation of money and its tendrils into our psyches. Surprisingly not deeply focused on class or even capitalism, but a more tender approach via the emotional layer.
A helpful salve for anyone who, like me, finds money a little triggering, anxiety inducing, sometimes overwhelming and often confusing. This can be a difficult time of the year for people with uneasy relationships with money and it felt like a meditation.
How to Do Nothing – Resisting the attention economy by Jenny Odell
April 13, 2021 – Thornbury
As my friend Georgia said, this book is a trojan horse. It looks like a self help book aimed at women with its fancy floral cover, but it's actually an incredible anti-capitalist manifesto drawing on art and literary theory, philosophy and more. It's so up my alley I'm mad that people didn't explain this earlier. From Diogenes to Hockney and everything in between, Jenny Odell is so well read and so interesting, I'll be eagerly awaiting her next book.
The theme of connecting to place and the natural world makes it a perfect companion to Sophie Cunningham's City of Trees, also highly recommended. If you're looking for a how-to, this ain't it, but if you're looking for a theoretical grounding to help you mount your own resistance against the attention economy, please read it!
This is not Propaganda — Adventures in the war against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev
March 21, 2021 – Thornbury
Good. Confronting, also depressing. The cold war tactics haven't died, they've just morphed and augmented for the internet audience. Feels like Adam Curtis' documentaries. The scale of disinformation and state-led manipulation on social media (just not your state necessarily) is pretty wild.
