Breathing Just a Little

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...

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...

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

 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...