Erm, hello. Time is a construct. Every day has a sameness to it. What was March? I consume media, therefore I am. Carole Baskin killed her husband. 5G framed Joe Exotic. It's my turn to pick the feijoas off the lawn! Daddy, when are you finished in the shower? I'm hungry. I've never seen so much cheese consumed.That putting feijoa skins in a bottle with a bit of sugar, filling with water and leaving a couple of days actually does make a refreshing and delicious beverage. Why are there so many weeds when I'm always at home? Is Kim Wexler going to die or just be a stay-at-home mom / backroom legal mastermind in Breaking Bad? Why is Devs so bad when it shares so much of the good in common with Season 2 of The OA (and doesn't seem to be falling in the same traps - ie going way way way way overboard)? I haven't been more than 2kms from my house in three weeks. I haven't driven a car except to move it out of the garage so the kids can ride their bikes on a rainy day. Who knows if we'll ever start shaking hands again. Why do we now have more meetings rather than less? My wife is an essential worker, but that could me a lot of things. What the hell are we going to eat for lunch? Cheese? The time for making quarantine playlists has come and gone. The time for gatherings of 500 hundred people is a long long long long way off. Some days I forget to drink tea. Carole Baskin killed her husband. A tiger killed Kim Wexler. Inappropriate Quarantine Playlist. Hold On, I'm Comin'.Come Around. Touch Me. Harder To Breathe. Breathless. Waiting for the end of the World. Semi-appropriate Quarantine Playlist. Don't Stand So Close To Me. U Can't Touch This. Hands to Myself. Dancing On My Own. The Boy in the Bubble. Don't Come Around Here No More. Love Lockdown. Solitude Is...Bliss?
MUSIC
BOOKS
Middlemarch by George Eliot (novel, audiobook) - first third
I listened to, like, 11 hours of the audiobook and it was soooo good, but then my three week loan on Libby ran out and I only just got it back (12 April) so maybe it's a May Consumption Diary write-up deal.
Tell Me Lies by J.P. Pomare (novel, audiobook)
Another thriller from the scarily prolific Kiwi-in-Oz Pomare -- this one a straight to Audible exclusive. Suffers a little from being on the short side (but not as much as Dervla McTiernan's The Sisters), which limits the twists, turns and red herrings that the author can throw our way, but this isn't just throwaway pulp. Pomare is a sharp writer and has a long career ahead of him.
Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq (novel, audiobook)
Wow. I felt physically sick a couple times within the first half a dozen chapters. Knowing this was what Houellebecq was trying to do - stretching my tolerance to extremes to make a point - didn't really help. I can handle a vile male narrator-protagonist. The last thing fiction should do is shrink away from representing reprehensible behaviour. (Let me just pour one out for the homie-professors who ever try teach one of these books in a university rn.) But it was hard for me to locate where the character's reprehensibleness ended and the author's own blind-spots began. Flaurent-Claude's erstwhile girlfriend, Yuzu, is a receptacle for genuine misogyny and casual racism but at the plot level, what does it say about Houellebecq that she's named after a citrus fruit and her fatal flaw is (being caught at) bestiality?
The posture of Yep, the author is a flawed piece of shit too, because you're a piece of shit dear reader, is all well and good, but it quickly feels claustrophobic and solipsistic.
But somehow I stuck it out, and felt less of a snowflake. The novel becomes genuinely interesting and (almost) affecting when discussing the plight of the French farmer and it predicted much of the Yellow Jacket movement that emerged shortly after the book's publication in France.
But is it something I'd recommend you read? Will I rush back into Houellebecq's back catalogue?
Non.
An American Sunrise by Joy Harjo (poetry, audiobook)
History and biography merge. Poetry emerges.
MOVIES & TV
The Leftovers Season 3
Devs Season 1 (up to date)
Better Call Saul Season 5 (up to date)
The Stranger - Season 1
Tiger King - Season 1
McMillions - Season 1
Kiki's Delvery Service
The Quiet Ones
The Hateful Eight
Asterix: The Secret of the Magic Potion
I started listening to this while camping last month, when I couldn't sleep because of the logging trucks, but I started from scratch again this month and yeah, I'm glad I did.
Porter has a subversive streak, evident both in how he puts a page together and use of narrative... For the longest time, the 'disappeared boy' arc felt fresh and new. That it doesn't hold that line to the very end is a bit disappointing, but it's still fantastic overall.
The Teleportation Incident by Ned Beauman (novel, audiobook)
A colleague said my latest novel reminded him of Beauman's work, so of course I checked him out.
On reflection, this is not the way to attack a new author. It's like being shown a photo of a celebrity and being told you look like them. You'll only see how old they look, or how far short of them your own appearance falls.
For me, The Teleportation Incident held up a mirror to my own hangup about soggy middle sections...
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (novel, audiobook)
One of the gazillion 'great' novels I've never read but knew enough about not to skip the Introduction for fear of spoilers.
I enjoyed it, but the fact I moved onto Middlemarch next, in which the characters seem much fuller and there's a sense of humour and brio, means Bovary has already slumped in my estimations. Sorry Gus!
...
And then these books, which for different reasons (some of it is laziness!), I won't comment on here:
Drongo by Ian Richards (novel)
This is Pleasure by Mary Gaitskill (novella)
Mother Nut by John Jeremiah Sullivan (novella)
Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur (poetry)
The Book of Traps and Lessons by Kate Tempest (poetry)
MOVIES & TV
My Neighbour Totoro
Pokemon: Mewtwo Strikes Back
Logan Lucky
Uncut Gems
Skyscraper
Succession - 2nd half of season 1 and all of season 2
Rick and Morty - Season 4
Brooklyn 99 - Season 1
Better Call Saul - first 2 eps of Season 5 (i.e. as soon as new eps drop, we're on em in the Cliff household)
Medallion Status by John Hodgman (non-fiction, audiobook)
I really enjoyed Hodgman's previous book, Vacationland, when I read it in January 2018, and his follow up didn't disappoint. This was the first book this year that I found myself making time for, rather than it just being the thing that played when I had time to listen.
It's all about voice and tone. Hodgman is self-effacing, funny and just honest enough not to stiffle that humour.
Death is Hard Work by Khaled Khalifa (novel, audiobook)
Tonally, this comes across as a comedy in a tragic setting (contemporary Syria). It lets you slip into this world, and follow Bolbol and his siblings as they try and transport their father's corpse across the war zone, bear its frustrations and absurdities, and experience something of what it is like the have civil war take root in your country.
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (novel, audiobook)
It's very interesting to hear Vuong talk about the use of biographical fact for this novel and the power derived from this.
As a standalone work, it is powerful. It doesn't have a traditional narrative drive, which is probably what I was looking for at this time of year / in my mental state.
Doggerland by Ben Smith (novel, audiobook)
Smith tells his tale of the near future (probably a couple of decades hence) in simple prose. The protagonist is referred to as the boy. The business that he and his grandfather work for, maintaining an offshore windfarm, is The Corporation. But at a certain point this simplicity becomes vagueness - the social / economic / environmental breakdown that has occurred isn't ever really explained. And so the lasting memory of this book is one of vagueness.
FILM & TV
The Leftovers Season 2 - so gooood. The best description I've read about season 2 is that it's Damon Lindelof doing fan fiction based on Tom Perrota's novel (which season 1 was based on), just as he used the Watchmen graphic novel as a base to riff away and come up with the single season of goodness that was "his" Watchmen.
Silicon Valley Season 6
The Favourite
Mid90s
Avengers: Age of Ultron
Ghostbusters (original)*
Toy Story 3*
And a bunch of other forgettable movies watched at other people's homes during the summer break :)
20. Julia Jacklin - Crushing
19. Matthew Logan Vasquez - Light'n Up
18. Purple Mountains - Purple Mountains
17. Lana Del Rey - Norman Fucking Rockwell!
16. Jim Jones and the Righteous Mind - CollectiV
15. Sharon Van Etten - Remind Me Tomorrow
14. Jim James, Teddy Abrams & the Louisville Orchestra - The Order of Nature
13. Jenny Lewis - On The Line
12. Better Oblivion Community Center - Better Oblivion Community Center
11. FONTAINES D.C. - Dogrel
And a little slower for the top ten...
10. Death Machine - Orbit
This album came out in November and I only seriously listened to it in December. When I was playing with the order of my top 20, it cropped up and I had to drop something off, then it kept climbing when I compared it with albums higher up the list.
Maybe it's recency bias, but I just couldn't keep this Danish downbeat gem out of my top 10.
Perfect music for writing, or the arrival of a climate apocalypse.
9. The Murder Capital - When I Have Fears
Ireland produced the two great rock debuts of 2019. Where FONTAINES D.C. is more straight-ahead punk, The Murder Capital is post-punk - less angry, more articulate, but prone to the odd art-school-dropout overreach.
I'm excited to see where both these bands go next.
8. Big Thief - Two Hands
Big Thief put out their third album, UFOF, in May 2019, and it has some good songs and one great track ('Cattails'). But the band wasn't quite done after recording UFOF and went back into the studio to record its "Earth twin", Two Hands, which is the stronger, more cohesive, more urgent album.
Looking forward to seeing them in Wellington in May 2020!!
7. Orville Peck - Pony
Roy Orbison eat your heart out, cover your face in leather fringe and confess your love for a fellow cowboy!
I'm not averse to gimmicks and alter-egos in music (see the way Lana Del Rey always seems to squeak onto my best of the year lists), but the music has to stand on its own feet - and Pony certainly does that.
6. Angie McMahon - Salt
There are a lot of female singer-songwriters on this list. McMahon's sounds is probably the most rock-adjacent. There's echoes of fellow Australian Courtney Barnett in the self-deprecating humour (see 'Pasta'), but McMahon is a more traditional singer, which means she's good company in most any situation.
5. The Rails - Cancel the Sun
On first listen I thought, "This sounds like an updated version of Richard and Linda Thompson", and then I found out that the lead female vocalist, Kami Thompson, is their daughter. This is another husband and wife duo (the dude is James Walbourne) but it's not just a carbon copy of the previous generation.
It sounds fresh and timeless. Great stuff.
4. Marika Hackman - Any Human Friend
If Angie McMahon is rock-adjacent, Hackman is the pop-adjacent singer-songwriter on this list, with more electronic blips and beats and the kind of melodies you find yourself humming when hanging out the washing.
But it's when you focus on the lyrics, which are dark and mordantly funny, that these songs take on their full power.
'So Romatic' only has six songs, so it's better described as an EP than a full album. And the final track, a cover of Black Sabbath's 'Changes' I can take or leave. But the other five songs are so great, each a world unto themselves, that this feels like a major event.
I've listened to these songs so much over the last 11 months, and have no reservation putting So Romantic this high.
2. Pedro the Lion - Phoenix
I've praised Dave Bazan before on this blog (see: 2018's song of the year). I was excited about his return to the Pedro the Lion moniker, if only that it meant new material in early 2019. But Phoenix exceeded my expectations.
'Yellow Bike' is the greatest song about childhood and the melancholy of nostalgia. (Bonus points for my son, who got his first pedal-bike this year, liking the song, too.)
'Quietest Friend' might be the best song Bazan has ever written. 'Model Homes' is surely in his top 10.
Just a great fucking album from a new hero of mine.
1. Aldous Harding - Designer
I appreciated Harding's previous album, 2017's Party, without properly loving it. But in Designer, it felt like the weirdness and idiosyncrasy fully fused with the music and I couldn't help fall madly for this album.
My kids love 'The Barrel' (though the blue alien mask in the video freaks them out) and 'Fixture Picture' - a sure barometer of Harding's pop-hit chops. 'Zoo Eyes', 'Designer', and 'Pilot' compete for the best song on the album from an 'adult contemporary' perspective, if that category was applied to grown ups who enjoy being challenged (rather than the opposite).
These songs are great live - or maybe it's better to say that Harding is great live: no song is ever sung quite the same way. It's so powerful to see someone sit inside their oddness, to be their oddness, and make art you know will hold its power as the years pass.
There's no artist, from NZ or otherwise, I'm more excited about seeing where they go next than Aldous Harding.
Song of the Year
As with previous years, if an artist has an album on the list above they're automatically disqualified from this category.
In researching this year's winner, I grew to love the album on which this one song appears, but I figure it's better to have the number 1 song than an album somewhere in the 8-16 range.
Before I get to the winner, some highly commended ribbons:
'Scare Easy' - T Hardy Morris
'Exit Stations' - NE-HI
'Monster Moon' - Sun June
But the champ this year is 'I Get No Joy' by Jade Bird
Catchy, angry, ironically joy-inducing, in and out in two and a half minutes... what a single!
Jade Bird has such a great voice. Despite the song hurtling forward at 90 miles an hour, her phrasing is immaculate. The fast-twitch version of Phoebe Bridgers.
Check out her self-titled debut album, too, please and thank you. I certainly will be listening to it a lot in January.
Today, it's time to look at the books I enjoyed the most.
You can find similar lists for previous years here: 2018, 2017, (let's not speak of 2015 or 2016), 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010.
Boom - there's your best of the decade list right there.
In scanning through those best reads posts just now, some books have stuck with me more than others and I'd rejig there orders, but there's a lot of books I love on there.
Loved it... even more than I liked Autumn, which was in my top ten a couple of years back. It pushed a lot of buttons for me: it's about (partly) art and artists; narrative invention; a sense of whimsy without being flippant... Stuff it in my veins!
The combination of David Attenborough's narration, Baker's en pointe nature writing and the avian subject matter... och!
#3 Feeld by Jos Charles
This was my favourite poetry collection I read in 2019. I stick to 6-word reviews for poetry collections, coz I'm a bastard, and this is what I wrote in December:
Wow. I loved this. ...I was still like: How's he gonna land this plane? And he fucking does! There's so much heart in here it's easy to overlook the head required to corral so many moving parts.
#5 A Death in the Family (My Struggle Book 1) by Karl Ove Knausgaard
This is my annual multi-book fudge, as I read Books 1 and 2 this year and loved them both. Book 1 edges Book 2 because it felt more radical. I enjoyed Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet in 2017, but My Struggle is just extra.
So I've finally got around to reading Knausgaard. I resisted because did I really need to read the inner workings of another white male writer? But golly, is it good. It had me thinking about life (and Life) and writing almost constantly.
Book 1 hooked me with its obsession with death, particularly the death of a father, and the brutal honesty (or the convincing facsimile of brutal honesty) of being a writer.
Book 2, as the title suggests, is more concerned with romance and what comes on its heels (in Knausgaard's eyes: the emasculating labour of the modern father), and the challenges of balancing family and writing, doled out with equal depth and brutality. So, again, it spoke to me...
It only took me ten years to get around to reading the sequel to The Vintner's Luck but boy howdee this was good.
It sent me scrambling for reasons for how a sequel could be this good. Like, it helps when the main character doesn't age, so the sequel can take place at any time or place that takes your fancy up until the present day... but it still takes a massive amount of skill to pull off!
I was partway through this book when I did a wee "fave books" thing for the NZ Women's Weekly. I said: "I’m also loving my current read: Shayne Carter’s Dead People I Have Known, which struts and sneers and sulks like a great rock memoir should."
I meted out the remaining chapters, in part because it was such good fun, but also because there's a lot of darkness and loss in the book.
#9 An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by Cesar Aira
There's a particular kind of story that suits the level of compression and focus required to make it feel bigger than a short story but not leave you wanting more. The title of Aira's 2000 novel, translated by Chris Andrews and published by New Directions in 2006, tells you a lot about how this one works.
Like the slow food revolution for NBA-heads. A wormhole back to the not-too-distant-past when you had to take some of these feats on faith, until the VHS arrived with the proof. It helped reduce my screen time and open windows into a more creative application of my own NBA addiction.
...Would I have got more out of any of these stories if they were blown up to four-times their length so I could spend more time with the characters? No. Give me the bare essentials rather than bloat. Give me four high concepts for the price of one. Give me the hack to ensure my toaster can brown whatever the fuck I want.
41% of the books I read this year I rated 85/100 or higher (up from 38% in my August review). My ratings are unscientific - mostly just a way to help me choose my top ten - and I didn't say what percentage would justify a pass... but I reckon it's:
TARGET ACHIEVED
2. Read at least 52 books
Actual: 61 (16 physical; 45 audiobooks)
TARGET ACHIEVED
3. Read at least 10 poetry collections
Actual: 6
FAIL
The remainder of the 61 were made up of 26 novels, 6 story collections, 1 graphic novel & 22 non-fiction books.
4. Read more than 40% female authors
Actual: 48%
TARGET ACHIEVED
5. Read at least a third non-white authors
Actual: 25%
FAIL
This was interesting, as I read 27% non-white authors in 2018 without a target, but I only hit at 6% the year before that, so hovering around a quarter isn't that bad, though it's not that great, either.
6. Read less than 40% US authors
Actual: 31%
TARGET ACHIEVED
7. Read from at least 10 different countries
Actual: 14
TARGET ACHIEVED
8. Read at least 5 works in translation
Actual:7
TARGET ACHIEVED
9. Target median age of books read: 2009
Actual: 2018
FAIL
By decade:
2010s: 55 (25 just from 2019)
2000s: 3
1970s: 1
1960s: 2
The allure of the new and shiny is hard to resist, eh?
OVERALL
6 of 9 targets met. I think the first two are the big ones: quantity and quality. The rest were prompts for me to read diversely. And while I read a number of highly enjoyable books this year, something about these targets made reading feel a bit like box ticking. I'm interested to see how I go without explicit targets or mid-point reviews. So I only have one target for this year:
2020 target: read 70 books
But I will look at how I went against these other metrics at the very end of the year and do some trend analysis over the last 5 or so years.
So we made it. Forget about the end of the decade, I'm grateful for just making it through to the end of 2019. It was a rough one for me. Things need to change, and I'm taking a longish summer break to figure out which things, and how, but here's hoping 2020 is more fulfilling and creative.
I've got a few days before I take the family camping, so I'll knock out my best of lists for books and music this week.
But for now, here's what I listened to, read and watched in December...
MUSIC
BOOKS Dead People I Have Known by Shayne Carter (non-fiction, NZ)
I was partway through this book when I did a wee "fave books" thing for the NZ Women's Weekly. I said: "I’m also loving my current read: Shayne Carter’s Dead People I Have Known, which struts and sneers and sulks like a great rock memoir should." I meted out the remaining chapters, in part because it was such good fun, but also because there's a lot of darkness and loss in the book. This is not a drill: an Extinction Rebellion handbook (non-fiction, audiobook)
I read this tweet the other day:
I hear many say “2019 was the year when the public woke up to the climate crisis”. This is a misconception. A small but rapidly growing number of people have started to wake up to the climate crisis. This has only just begun. We’re still only scratching the surface.
I was interested in climate change, and long before that, apocalyptic thinking and doomsday preppers, before 2019 (Nailing Down the Saint features a group of eco-terrorists, Second Wave, whose methods are wrong but their message should be harder to dismiss).
I've become more pessimistic the more I've read on this topic. There's no way our political and economic systems can be dismantled and rebuilt fast enough to achieve the emissions turnaround required to meet IPCC recommendations - because the general public are too insulated from the effects. Look at the unchecked consumerism this Christmas. Or talk to your Boomer relatives. Nothing has changed. We only have another protagonist (Thurnberg) to fill our news bulletins with.
Extinction Rebellion talk a good talk about learning from indigenous peoples in "the majority world", but it still feels very Anglo, very middle class.
I think back to Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now, which I read at the start of the year, and struggle to square these two perspectives:
the world, as a whole, is a better place to live that its ever been
the world is fucked.
The Boomer view is people have been preaching the end of the world since day dot. They've lived through the nuclear crisis. They've seen the hole in the ozone shrink after we stopped putting CFCs in our air fresheners. Surely this latest bout of catastrophic thinking will all come to naught as well.
I hope they're right. I doubt it.
The Widow by Fiona Barton (novel, audiobook)
A pretty decent thriller, centering on the wife of the accused, though Barton includes other narrative perspectives (a journalist, a cop, and, briefly, the husband). I felt the first quarter was different, structurally and tonally to what followed, and wonder what it would have been like if we stuck with the first person narration of the widow throughout...?
Movies & Other Things by Shea Serrano (illustrated non-fiction)
I loved Basketball & Other Things earlier this year. The movie-based follow-up falls short of its predecessor because it's one thing to ask and answer oddball questions about sport, it's another to take that approach with the entirety of film (or even films from the 80's onwards to stick within Serrano's cultural wheelhouse). Where BAOT expanded the universe of basketball, MAOT contracts it, not just by limiting itself to essentially Hollywood films of the last 40 years, but by taking elements of those films and leaving the rest on the cutting room floor. It felt reductive rather than expansive.
That said, I still enjoyed it. I laughed. It's a beautiful object.
I'm just a curmudgeon.
10 minutes 38 seconds in this strange world by Elif Shafak (novel, audiobook)
How to describe this book? It's as if Rushdie took a Faulkner premise and a Pamuk setting... It's telling these three touchstones are male... but is a female-centred version of this kind of narrative (which we've seen over and over) enough?
Radicalised by Corey Doctorow (fiction, audiobook)
Firstly, is this a collection of four long short stories or four short novellas? I dunno. Some felt longer and more capacious than others, but all of them felt urgent and timely.
What sets these narratives apart from a handful of Black Mirror episodes? Well, firstly, until the most recent season, being compared to Black Mirror would be a compliment. But it's the depth you can provide in text.
I take issue with what Annette Lapointe said in the New York Journal of Books:"The stories themselves are simple, and the characters thinly fleshed: no relief there. When we tear ourselves free, we find that we’ve found nothing substantial. Doctorow would have been better served to render his ideas as essays, so that he could give them the complexity they deserve, and release his barely realized characters from their political pantomime."
Um, yeah, there's a big difference between an essay about the creep of Intellectual Property into everyday freedoms, like which bread you can put in your toaster, and how this unduly impinges upon the most vulnerable in society, and actually depicting this in narrative form.
Would I have got more out of any of these stories if they were blown up to four-times their length so I could spend more time with the characters? No.
Give me the bare essentials rather than bloat.
Give me four high concepts for the price of one.
Give me the hack to ensure my toaster can brown whatever the fuck I want.
The Peregrine by JA Baker (non-fiction, audiobook)
Okay, so it took 61 books, but I finally found my favourite read of the year. The combination of David Attenborough's narration, Baker's en pointe nature writing and the avian subject matter... och!
When I was researching Nailing Down the Saint I did Werner Herzog's Masterclass(TM) on filmmaking and he says at one point if you want to become a filmmaker, all you need to do is read The Peregrine (maybe he says read it once a year).
So maybe now I am finally ready to jump media?
FILM & TV
Watchmen – Season 1
The Leftovers – Season 1
The Movies that Made Us - Season 1
The Mandalorian – Season 1
Solo
Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse
Knives Out
Us
Frozen II
The Hitman's Bodyguard
6 Underground
My only public outing in November was for LitCrawl's "Lie Down and Listen" session at the Design Library. It was cool to take part in LitCrawl for the first time, after attending many events over the last six years.
I read the pornography section from near the start of Nailing Down the Saint and only found out there was a kid (maybe 11) in the audience afterwards.
Parents these days! :)
Lawrence Patchett reading from The Burning River to a very comfortable and relaxed audience at the Design Library
MUSIC
I saw Gang of Four live at San Fran. It took me a long time to decide if I was watching a good cover band that just happened to have the original guitarist or if this incarnation of Gang of Four was simply good.
Like, the smashing up a microwave bit was something I'd read about the original lineup doing. And to see the new frontman doing that bit, when he wasn't born first time around... it was weird.
All the fifty-something white dudes in the crowd seemed to be into it. Songs like 'Damaged Goods' were stadium-level singalongs. Maybe it was the older crowd's energy that finally won me over.
One thing's for sure: forty years on, Entertainment is a great album.
BOOKS
November was a weird month. I felt like I didn't get much reading time, what with all the reading I had to do (like judging the Sunday Star Times Short Story Competition and being the external assessor for a creative writing student's manuscript).
But then I started listing books and it wasn't as meagre as I'd supposed. (Some I'm only partway through and will include in December's tally.)
How to be Both by Ali Smith (novel, audiobook)
Loved it. I'm slowly working my way through Smith's books in a random way, and each one makes me think: why am I being so haphazard? Why don't I just devote myself to reading Ali Smith and only Ali Smith until there's nothing left?
How to be both - I liked it even more than I liked Autumn, which was in my top ten a couple of years back. It pushed a lot of buttons for me: it's about (partly) art and artists; narrative invention; a sense of whimsy without being flippant... Stuff it in my veins!
The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff (non-fiction, audiobook)
I had to hit pause on this book about halfway through in May. I finally returned in late October and
made it to the end in November.
It was interesting to recognise its language (like
"anti-fragile") being used in tweets by Jordan Petersen wannabes on
Twitter. One of the overarching points of the book is that an "us versus them" mentality is a cognitive distortion... but it seems so far past its tipping point,
can we ever "undistort" this way of thinking?
The Sisters by Dervla McTiernan (novel, audiobook)
A crime novel in four hours? How might this work?
Well, turns out
you do everything you'd do in a book two or three times the length, but when
you get to the first suspect who looks dead-to-rights like they're guilty you
don't provide a twist, you just make them... guilty.
Case closed.
Book done.
Next.
Social Media by Mary MacPherson (poetry, NZ)
Arch Kiwi poet of modern minutae.
No Friend But the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani (non-fiction, audiobook)
I finished this book just before it was announced Boochani had been allowed to travel to NZ thanks to the mahi of folks like Amnesty International and Word Christchurch. Then it was announced Boochani would also do an event in Wellington -- and I was like, "I gotta be there," only I had parenting commitments that night.
NFBtM is the kinda book that enrages and frustrates by virtue of its written intent and lived experience (though I did find the translator's long sections before and after the main text tiresome) and makes you wanna write fifth form essays about Man's Inhumanity to Man.
It demonstrates the power of literature to pierce through the veneer of "I know about that from the news" to actually confronting what has happened, and is happening, in Australia's offshore detention centres (and other Western border enforcement industrial complexes) and inside the rotten heart of "The Lucky Country" itself.
MOVIES & TV
The Irishman
Downsizing
I am not an Easy Man
Living with Yourself - Season 1
BOOKS
Another thriller from the scarily prolific Kiwi-in-Oz Pomare -- this one a straight to Audible exclusive. Suffers a little from being on the short side (but not as much as Dervla McTiernan's The Sisters), which limits the twists, turns and red herrings that the author can throw our way, but this isn't just throwaway pulp. Pomare is a sharp writer and has a long career ahead of him.
Wow. I felt physically sick a couple times within the first half a dozen chapters. Knowing this was what Houellebecq was trying to do - stretching my tolerance to extremes to make a point - didn't really help. I can handle a vile male narrator-protagonist. The last thing fiction should do is shrink away from representing reprehensible behaviour. (Let me just pour one out for the homie-professors who ever try teach one of these books in a university rn.) But it was hard for me to locate where the character's reprehensibleness ended and the author's own blind-spots began. Flaurent-Claude's erstwhile girlfriend, Yuzu, is a receptacle for genuine misogyny and casual racism but at the plot level, what does it say about Houellebecq that she's named after a citrus fruit and her fatal flaw is (being caught at) bestiality?
An American Sunrise by Joy Harjo (poetry, audiobook)
