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The first quarter of 2026 in review

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I seem to be habitually later than intended with these quarter-wrap posts, but here, as April has drawn to a close and May is already underway, is my overview of the first quarter of this year (which I've designated as 27 Jan - 29 April, given that January was summer break and thus captured in the quarter 4 wrap). I'm going to go ahead and call quarter 2 the period from 30 April - 17 July, because that's a neat division given my life events. This has been an incredibly busy and momentous quarter for my whole family. My two elder daughters both moved out of home, within a fortnight of each other, in late Feb / early March. My eldest daughter graduated with her Honours degree, and is well into her PhD program now. My youngest finished the first term and first round of assessments for year 12, while my middle started and is thriving in her fulltime graduate role. For both my husband and me, it was a hectic quarter in terms of work. We have each had demanding projects afoot, an...
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Two SFF books I really liked

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  I picked this audiobook to listen to because: 1. It is narrated by Nathan Fillion, who has one of my absolute favourite voices to listen to; and 2. I was kicking my heels waiting for the new Murderbot book to be released, and this sounded like it might be in roughly the same wheelhouse. It turned out to be a great decision. In terms of style, story and affect, it's what would happen if Murderbot, Firefly and little hints of The Expanse had a baby, with an occasional Scalzi-ish flourish. Its distinguishing hook was one that aligns perfectly to my other biggest literary interest (aside from SFF) as a poetry writer and reader - Amber Rose, the digitised human overseer ("OC") of the expedition, is a poet, and its poetry, as well as great poetry of the past, is woven into the text and forms a delightfully intrinsic part of the denouement and solution. I thought the first part of the book was excellent - the scene-setting of the salvage crew arriving on and coming to grips wi...
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Booker Winners 1973-1983 project: The Holiday + Heat and Dust

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I have been continuing (slowly, in the background) my mission to read all the Booker prize winners from the decade of my birth. Here are two I have recently finished: one which I thought was dated but interesting, and one which I thought was pretty bad (the first one I've encountered so far in this project that I'm baffled by its Booker win!) Reading this book in 2026, I found it dated, but also an easy and quite interesting read. I'm sure that when it won the Booker in 1975, it seemed very modern, picking apart the problematic paternalism and racism of the British in 1920s India through the eyes of a contemporary (1970s) protagonist (which it certainly does do, and quite effectively). Now, the text reads as absolutely infested with the particular kind of Orientalism that characterised 1970s attitudes to south Asian people - less obviously malignant, but still uncomfortable and damaging. In particular, like many a British writer in the 20th century writing about India and B...
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A Tripled Nonet on Waking (Poem)

is there anything more boring than a poem about a strange dream where the house is sold but you forgot, and you haven't  started packing, but you must get out next Tuesday also the house is not actually your real house it's a trick mirror version, all weird angles and hidden rooms decaying walls, brick dust and everyone still here, even those who moved out no one gone and you can't find or can't remember  where all the paperwork is at and no one wants to help pack and when you try Googling "packing services" Google just gives endless hits of sad poems
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The perils of comparison when reading more than one book: Two book reviews

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 I have recently finished two books that I was reading simultaneously (actually I'm reading three, as my Agatha Christie re-read project continues, but two new-to-me books!) One of them was a book I'd not read by one of my favourite authors of all time, the incomparable Ursula K. Le Guin. The other was a recently popular book that is my book club's selection for this month, so I was reading it to be able to discuss it properly at the meeting. I finished the two within a day of each other (Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven first), and I think that my judgement of Chosen Family, the other book, was undeniably harsher because of how incredibly good the Le Guin work is. This really magnified my disappointed feeling that Chosen Family was incredibly unsuccessful - as a story, as a character study, as a piece of writing. Had I not been spoiled for the mundane by Le Guin's elevated prose and complex ideas, I might have judged Chosen Family a little less stringently, although I...
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Cat / Bird (A Poem)

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One of our Month of Poetry challenges in January was to write a contrapuntal poem, something I had never done before. Contrapuntal poetry involves interweaving or combining two or more poems to create a new poem. It uses two or more poems that are distinct in tone and subject matter but are, in some way, in conversation with each other. The term “contrapuntal poem” gets its name from contrapuntal music, which features more than one melody playing simultaneously. This is my effort. It can either be read as two separate poems down each side (Cat's Poem and Bird's Poem), or as one poem about both animals. I don't think I mixed the tone up enough for this to be a really good exemplar, but it's my first one, maybe I'll get better with more practice. It was literally inspired by watching my little cat staring out the window at the crested pigeons, who staring back at her, both giving out little peeps every now and then.
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Two recent books: Both good, very different!

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It's been another low-reading (by my standards) month so far in March, and not likely to pick up a lot of pace, although I do have some hopes for the next two weekends, which are uncharacteristically free of too many commitments. However, I have got through three new-to-me books, one of which (although I enjoyed it) doesn't really warrant a review, but the other two, I think, do. One is a literary fic with a central theme of disability, and the other is a Lovecraftian-coded horror dystopia SFF, so extremely not the same kind of book (and I would recommend them for very divergent audiences!), but I enjoyed both of them. This is the story of two Hong Kong sisters - Marlowe, 27, who is a graduate student of entomology in England where she lives with her boyfriend Olly, and Harper, 20, who has Down Syndrome and lives in Hong Kong with the sisters' English father and Chinese grandmother, working part time in a library and enjoying her relationship with her boyfriend Louis (who a...
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