Breathing Just a Little

This will be the last longlist book I review - I ended up not being able to get into The Renovation, so I left it over - and what a way to finish. It's my equal favourite to win now (wish the Booker would give a three-way tie, but while they have done two winners in the past, three might be a bit much to hope for!) Here's the rolling list. I use a green cross if I attempted the book but didn't finish; red crosses are for ones that I (at this stage) don't intend to attempt. I abandoned All Them Dogs at about 1/3 of the way through and The Renovation at about 1/4 of the way. ✅1. The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis: 8.5/10 ✅2. Switzy by Emma Cline: 9.5/10 ❌3. Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman ✅4. The End of Everything by M. John Harrison: 5/10 ❌5. The Disappearers by Marlon James ✅6. Black Bag by Luke Kennard: 7/10 ❎7. The Renovation by Kenan Orhan ✅8. May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry: 8.5/10 ✅9. The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley: 6/10 ✅10. The Things We Neve...

Next three are done, and this time, I wasn't as impressed (although I am sure views will differ!) My next two, as I approach the halfway mark, is Douglas Stuart's John of John, one of the heavy hitters (and favourites to win), and the highly praised All Them Dogs, so I am preparing for bedazzlement :-) The rolling list is below. 1. The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis 2. Switzy by Emma Cline 3. Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman ✅4. The End of Everything by M. John Harrison: 5/10 5. The Disappearers by Marlon James ✅6. Black Bag by Luke Kennard: 7/10 7. The Renovation by Kenan Orhan ✅8. May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry: 8.5/10 ✅9. The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley: 6/10 ✅10. The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout: 9.5/10 11. John of John by Douglas Stuart 12. All Them Dogs by Djamel White ✅13. The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams: 5/10 The End of Everything by M. John Harrison: 5/10 Have we got up to one of the Booker Stinkers already? Well ... maybe. Sort of. ...

Well, the time has rolled around for the Booker Prize longlist again! The thirteen titles in contention are: 1. The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis 2. Switzy by Emma Cline 3. Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman 4. The End of Everything by M. John Harrison 5. The Disappearers by Marlon James 6. Black Bag by Luke Kennard 7. The Renovation by Kenan Orhan ✅8. May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry: 8.5/10 ✅9. The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley: 6/10 ✅10. The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout: 9.5/10 11. John of John by Douglas Stuart 12. All Them Dogs by Djamel White 13. The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams I had already read the Strout book prior to the list (review is here ), but have decided to take a tilt at banging through the rest of the longlist in advance of shortlist announcement in late September. We'll see how we go! I'll tick each title on the list as I cover it. Kicking off, here are two of the shorties (under 250pp) that I started with. I listened to the au...

This has been a much bigger reading month for me than the two preceding, largely because I spent a week in social isolation in the lead-up to surgery and then a week recovering from surgery, which left more available time for books. As is not unusual for me at times of physical and psychological stress, I dropped back to one of my favourite comfort-read genres, which is mystery fiction.  Rather than doing a detailed review of each of the six titles I read, here's a little para about each just to give a flavour! No covers because, frankly, I can't be bothered :-P I've just stepped off into the 2026 Booker Prize longlist reading challenge, so my reading for the next two months will be Booker-dominated (and so will any book posting to this blog). I may end up missing these lighter reads by the end of that! To every season, its book will come... 1. The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz This is the first book in Horowitz's very popular Horowitz and Hawthorne series, which f...

I'm going into hospital for a (hopefully relatively minor) surgery tomorrow, but before I do, I thought I'd give some thoughts on the wonderfully palate-cleansing three books I have just finished - such a great change after being disappointed by the Barnes and Yuzuki books (see last post!) I read these three books in tandem, alternating between them as the mood struck, and I thought each of them was near-perfect of its type. All were relatively short - more evidence, if more were needed, that you don't have to write doorstoppers to pull off something great - and they were incredibly different in tone, style and affect from each other. One was contemplative and moving, one hilarious and witty, one dark and sad and incredibly powerful. I would recommend each of them without hesitation, but for very different reasons. "It was one of those jolly, peaceful mornings that make a chappie wish he’d got a soul or something" I can't believe I've never read Wodehouse ...

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...

  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...

 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...

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...