Breathing Just a Little

I've just finished two books that have both been on my bedside TBR pile for some time. Both of them are books I was keenly anticipating reading, based largely on the regard in which I hold earlier works by the authors. Now, having completed both, I find myself ... underwhelmed? Neither are awful books - both have points of interest, both have things to recommend them - but given what each of these writers has shown themselves capable of in the past, these books just ain't it. This book, billed as a novel (spoiler alert - it is not in fact a novel) is purported by Barnes to be his last book. However. Given this is the same writer who gave a long-form interview over a decade ago that was billed as The Last Interview, and has been nonetheless all over the press ever since, giving more interviews than a Bridgerton actor, I think we can take that with a grain of salt. For the sake of Barnes' legacy, I actually hope it is disingenuous, because this would not be a strong note on w...

The last two months have been incredibly hectic, with two stints of work travel (including one overseas trip), a very heavy workload, and some very significant family milestones. While I haven't stopped reading (of course, when do I ever?), I have read less than is my usual wont, and I haven't been writing up very extensive notes. In lieu of trying to play catch-up with longer reviews, I thought I'd do one post here that gives a shorter look at some of the books I've read and enjoyed over this eight weeks. While these are hardly deep dives, hopefully they give some taste of the books and what I liked about each of them! I have excluded the books I didn't like much, as well as the one book I am saving for a proper review (Caro Claire Burke's Yesteryear). I'll go category-based to divide them up. Mysteries This was a really enjoyable historical mystery, embedded in a location and historical moment that I, as an Australian, have heard of, but knew little about ...

The next five in my Agatha Christie re-read project are now down the hatch! I said when I started doing this that it would take a while, and so it is proving, but I am really enjoying the journey, and you can't say fairer than that, can you? I did a mixed bags this time - picked out three books I am very fond of, for quite varied reasons, and have already re-read a few times, so none of these plots came as a surprise, as well as two I didn't like much on first reading and haven't re-read before. I was interested to note the ways in which my reading of them is different now, with my middle-aged eyes, and the ways in which my response has remained consistent over time. Over halfway now! I'm planning to clean up all the remaining Marples and Beresfords next, then swing back to do a Poirot completion journey. Death on the Nile was among the earliest Christies I read - probably in the first five or six - and I fell madly in love with it then, and have re-read it several time...

It's Saturday morning in the suburbs, and late autumn has sidled in all dove grey skies and chilly exhales sugar frost on the grass the leaves still falling, but the gold dulling now the citrus trees have given their last fruit, and are quiescient, drawn inside themselves from the once-were-flowers, seeds drip down darkening into the damp silty earth wodsmoke drifts out from chimneys down the street, curling away to the horizon in fat scribbled interrobangs saying the year is turning from the light why why why and from the house next door, the smell of frying bacon while the people behind are making some kind of stew, rich with the tang of wine and meat the kids from the corner are riding their bikes up and down, and calling out something about dragons while the people next door trudge off with their twin cavoodles, one dragging them along, one needing to be dragged on the nature strip, at least four kinds of mushrooms growing in fairy rings and ley lines and I remember the autumn ...

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...

  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...