Breathing Just a Little

I picked up my monthly immune therapy injectable medication from the pharmacy today.  Take a look at the pricing label. Full cost: $1604.77. Cost to me on the PBS (Australia's Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, for non-Aussie readers, which heavily subsidises medications for all Australian citizens and residents): $31.60. This is a medication that has had a strongly positive effect on my health overall, and will probably act to extend my "healthspan" (years I remain fully functional). At $1604 a month, I could not afford it, and I just wouldn't get it. I wouldn't die without it, this is not an insulin situation, but it would impede my quality of life, especially as I age and my autoimmune issues become more prominent. Protect Medicare and the PBS, folks. Think about how affordable that top number would be for the vast majority of people (certainly for those without private insurance). Think about how it is in fully privatised healthcare systems, where whether you get...

I haven't read as much this month as I usually do, thanks to flu and other family health issues, but I did manage to knock over three ok but not outstanding books from three very different genres - a mystery, a history / travel book (which I listened to as an audiobook), and a fantasy /witchcraft novel. All three had their good points and plenty of potential, but ultimately, none of them nailed it for me. I wouldn't say *don't* read them (except maybe Weyward, which definitely don't read without considering the content warnings). If these kinds of books are what you're in the mood for, they are fine of their type - but don't go into them expecting to have your mind blown. This is a classic two-timelines cosy thriller-mystery with a mild twist.  Half of the book is told through the diary entries of the then-teenaged Frances, who is the murder victim whose death in her seventies (by now, "Great-Aunt Frances") kicks off the story and provides its engine. ...

I went into my online banking yesterday to pay a BPay bill, and took a look (as I usually do) at my credit card level. It's three weeks tomorrow since I returned home from my early February business trip to Sydney, and two days later became symptomatic with the disgusting strain of influenza A that has been laying me pretty low ever since. I am about 80% recovered now but the residual night cough is still a bit of a shit, and I was pretty sick for a while there. So I thought oh I can't possibly have spent that much in that almost 3 weeks, right?  And yes, it has been lower than a regular 3 weeks, but... somehow, there is a new $2500 on the card in that time. To be fair, $500 of that is birthday expenses for my 16 year old's birthday this past weekend (slumber party pizzas, snacks, her presents etc) and $700 is groceries (cos we still gotta eat, and we're a family of five - $700 for three weeks is about typical), so none of that is unexpected. However, that still leaves ...

I went down to the water to see the moon rise with my love down by the harbour, across the river's mouth the crane lights blinking on the tall cargo ships the city nestling into the cool summer night quietly, she rose from nowhere a fat gold coin inching up through the low clouds caught between towers, hanging, for just a moment a perfect shining fruit, sweet with all the nights she remembers soft with all the loving she has seen when women and men died, in times before, they covered their eyes with coins little golden tokens to carry into the next life into the mystery waiting behind that last door and they say it was for payment: fare for the ferryman or for wealth and power in the life beyond life but nights like these, I wonder, if sometimes the little shining discs were only mirrors only small talismans, to say: once you walked under the golden moon once we walked together, and her light fell on our faces and in our hearts and you were loved; you were loved.

This may be the best book I have read this year, and I have read some great ones, so that is intended as high praise. It is literary fiction AND science fiction AND a family saga - and by that, I do not mean it is "literary science fiction" or "a family saga in space", I mean it is three distinctly different genres within the single book, and all three are executed masterfully. One strand of this book is the story of Zelu, a Nigerian-American woman who was made paraplegic by an accident at the age of 12, and who begins the novel as an unsuccessful writer. The plot engine really starts as Zelu has an epiphany at her sister's wedding in Tobago, when she is unceremoniously fired over the phone from her adjunct teaching job, and proceeds to write a new novel in a white heat, which she calls Rusted Robots. Her book, which represents a post-human world inherited by and squabbled over by Humes (humanoid / embodied robots) and Ghosts (AI), is a runaway success, beyond a...

On Fridays, I plan to refresh a post from one of my older blogs that still seems material or relevant. I'm calling it "Everything Old is New Again Fridays", because why not? These reviews were published on my old blog, Too Fond of Books, on 19 September 2017, and address two books that I still think are excellent and well worth a read. Lincoln in the Bardo is a strange, strange book. Its central conceit is a relatively simple one - it's a journey into the fact, and consequences, of the death of Abraham Lincoln's third son (and favourite child), Willie, at the age of 11 in the early years of the Civil War. However, straight historical fiction this ain't - in fact it isn't straight anything. It's one of the twistiest books I've read for a long while. This is a book that takes place, largely, in the bardo - that Buddhism-based limbo-like place between life and death where souls are trapped who are too attached to the things of earth to move on to the ...

I don't know what happens after the last breath when the heart's fierce muscle falls silent when the door to life closes  I don't know: no one does or can pearly hope and gouging fear both only surmises sentience clapping back at the dark and this is what it means to be alive, isn't it: staring into the wide night sky as the milky way blurs into my vision so many stars and all so distant and feeling that ache that has no name watching the autumn sun slip up to irradiate the ribbons of cloud hot tea in my hand, and my body, older now, in the way of things, feeling the cool slap of the morning air deep in the follicles of my hair watching the orb spider diligently build and rebuild her fine-woven web rolling insects inside silky packages to keep for later and the ants, such models of industry, toiling in a jagged line to take away the nubbin of bread that fell at last night's campfire and, later, finding the bones of an animal in the bushland jaw set forward in the de...

(This poem is a Trimeric). There are a lot of things I am afraid of. Airplanes, snakes, caves, and cancer; fame, and fortune, and losing love, the dying of the light inside. Airplanes, snakes, caves, and cancer, or, to summarise: being trapped, by space or fangs or cells, being squeezed until the breath is out of me, and I'm gone. Fame, and fortune, and losing love, and the way they seem to go together; what profit to gain the world, but lose what you wanted the world for in the first place? The dying of the light inside, perhaps that, the most of all. the slide away from self, and into the boundless, starless night.

I mentioned in January that one of my reading projects for 2025 is to work my way through Percival Everett's back catalogue. I started off with Erasure, which I reviewed here last month; this one was next up. I'm surprised to find myself saying it, but this book is even better than Erasure (and I say this as a reader who highly rated Erasure). I'm starting to think Everett's not capable of writing anything less than a brilliant book. Last year's James blew me away, and got me started on my current Everett kick, and I'm delighted that there are several more waiting to catch up on. I Am Not Sidney Poitier is a very funny novel, with an unusual mixture of highbrow referential humour, absurdism, and frank slapstick. It follows the story of a young Black man, Not Sidney Poitier, whose secret wealth puts him in a strange limbo between negative assumptions based on his skin and the shallow but positive responses people have when learning about his wealth. Each of the c...

Well, I have flu :-( I think I picked it up on my flight home from Sydney last Thursday lunchtime, there was a passenger seated opposite who was coughing and sneezing with concerning frequency. I can't prove it, but given my onset of symptoms was Saturday morning, it seems pretty plausible. It's Influenza A, according to the RAT test I did, and it is kicking me so hard; so much worse than Covid has been for me the two times I have had it. Feeling pretty miserable, especially because I have given it to my poor husband who is also suffering with it. I'm past the febrile stage, but most of the other symptoms are still trucking on, with the worst being the painful dry cough and the joint ache. Or maybe the fatigue and brain fog. Or it could be the headache. Anyway, you get the idea. 2025 has been a nonstop parade of medical / health drama for my household so far, kicking off with my 21 year old's surgery in early January (which thankfully went well, but was still stressful)...

I've not long returned from a work trip interstate to sunny and sticky Sydney, where, among other things, I saw the Machu Picchu treasures exhibition at the Australian Museum, which is well worth a look if you happen to be in the neighbourhood before April. I may do a separate post about it if I can find the energy, but it has been a very challenging fortnight and I am knackered, so no promises. On my trip, I used flight and downtime to get through two novels, which I ended up giving the same rating - 7/10 - but for basically opposite reasons. Let me explain! The first of the two books I finished while away is celebrated Australian novelist Evie Wyld's fifth book, The Echoes. This is a book framed by the death (and afterlife) of Max, a young Englishman killed in a road accident in London, and the consequences for his partner, and Australian woman called Hannah. However, the book is predominantly set in Australia, mostly in a small country town. There were some elements of this ...

  This narrative true story of the prolific art thief, Stéphane Breitwieser, and his girlfriend and alleged accomplice, Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, is absolutely fascinating.  Active between 1995 and 2001, he travelled around Europe and stole at least 239 artworks and other exhibits (from 172 museum), an average of one theft every 15 days. In reality, his haul may have been even higher. None of his thefts involved violence or the threat of violence; most were done without the museum even being aware they had been robbed until considerably later. He really was the master of the small but perfect heist. Finkel's style in the book strikes the perfect balance between reportage and creative non-fiction, providing insights and descriptions that had me fully engaged throughout. The idea of an art thief who steals not to profit, but because he is obsessively in love with the art itself - not to sell, but to hoard and delight in - is an intriguing one, and I was very intrigued!  Fi...