tales of life, love, sorrow, and joy

Apparently, I have not made one of these posts since June least year. I don’t know how 10 months have passed, I feel like I only recently finished The Woman In White.

I spent a lot of yesterday reading about 1970s far-left Japanese insurgent groups. ( I had no idea they even existed )

Currently Reading:
Fiction

Gregory McGuire, Wicked. Someone told me that this book was “not as good” as the musical, and I’ve definitely heard people say it’s Worse In The Queer Way. I am baffled. The ableism as applies to Nessa Rose is still there, but honestly, far less simplistic.

Edmund White, The Beautiful Room Is Empty. The front cover of this second-hand copy fell off shortly after I got it, and then the book (I’d guess 90s paperback?) fell behind the bed and the back cover has taken some weird damp damage as well. I have a new copy on the way, because… well, because.

Non-Fiction

Will Tosh, Straight Acting: The Many Queer Lives of William Shakespeare, in fits and starts

Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth. I’ve had the USyd copy out for nearly a year now, revisiting (in fits and starts) legal details I did not particularly care about or didn’t internalise at any point 2008-2022, but the vague memories of which impede and frustrate my encounters with modern legal history. I have tried, on and off, since at least 2011, to buy a second-hand copy, and it has never been worth the $50 AUD + shipping given I had access to university copies. But I found a NEW copy for $40-ish dollars and domestic shipping, from an Aus/NZ online-only bookstore. I think it might be print-on-demand? Everything looks exactly the same (cover, pagination, publication details page) except for the tiny note on the final verso which, instead of “printed in the united states”, has the details of “Ingram Content Group Australia”.

And part-read on the backburner: (selected)

Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu

Bessel Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score

Hannah Fry, The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus. Fun Christmas-themed maths/logic exercises.

and, for some reason, Enid Blyton More Adventures on Willow Tree Farm. I ploughed through both Cherry Tree and Willow Tree farms in audiobook then stalled out on this one. Unsure if its not for me or if I just lost whatever “inner seven year old is running the show” mood I was in; unsure whether to abandon it or file it for a future mood.

Recently Read:

The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken by The Secret Barrister

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This was fascinating, and written with remarkable humour and wit for what is actually angry and depressing material.

Also I learned how the Magistrates Court works in the UK and who presides over them, and I am ... wow. What IS really striking is that the Secret Barrister doesn't seem to be aware that it's not just the Americans who don't do the "lay magistrate" thing - down here in Aus we started with those, thanks to colonialism, and decided to get rid of them!

Conversely, the Secret Barrister also doesn't seem to be aware of the aspects of the UK (/Eng-Wales) system which closely related jurisdictions in fact envy! "The UK has much greater availability of legal aid" is something I've heard plenty of commentators upon how NSW works remark upon.


Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I wonder what it says about me that read The Secret River, and came away with a fascination with the history of the Hawkesbuy but no real desire to keep reading Kate Grenville until this came across my path. And I loved it, and admired it much, much more than the literary-lush narrative style she wins awards for.

This is sparse - clearly fiction, in the way it invents incidents and individual conversations and scenes for a woman whom Grenville did not know well while she was alive - but sparse, hewing close to the documented outline of her grandmother's life. At times I could actually identify the context-providing sources that she would have needed to cite, if this was a biography.

And Dolly Maunder is such a well-drawn character, while growing progressively less and less likeable as she gets older. I liked the *book* more and more the less likeable she became. The points where the narrative dwelt sympathetically on her - when, for instance, she thinks over how she and her husband have been compatible and successful business partners despite their loveless marriage, she's still not a person that *I* would like (or who would like me, at all).

It's also striking - given I then went on to read "One Life", which was written earlier than this one - how *unlikeable* Grenville's mother appears in this book, too. One sympathises with her, bounced from school to school and town to town and too aware that her mother does not love her: but it's hard to like her. In "One Life", she is likeable and Dolly is not; in "Restless Dolly Maunder" it's hard to like either of them, but one is invited to sympathise with Dolly's awareness of her own inability to bond with her daughter as much as with the daughter.



One Life: My Mother's Story by Kate Grenville

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Should this be shelved with fiction or biography? Restless Dolly Maunder is clearly fiction, but there has been fictionalising here, too - the scripting of scenes and conversations, at minimum.

The life of Isabella/Nance, who trained as a pharmacist in the years of the Great Depression - one of the few jobs, her mother was told, where a woman could keep working after marriage or even children (although, in Nance's several attempts to set up her own business, to support her family while her husband first pursued radical politics then the law, it became clear that being legally able to own and run a business did not overcome the practical barriers) - is in many ways more interesting to me than that of Dolly, but I believe I preferred Dolly's novel to this, perhaps because Restless Dolly Maunder stood just a little further over the fiction line.




I Can't Remember The Title But The Cover Is Blue by Elias Greig

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This was extremely funny - little dialogue style "Me: ... Customer [Characteristic]: ..." scenes, brought to life by excellent caricatures.




Checkers by John Marsden

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Found this in a box at home. I never ended up with a copy of So Much To Tell You but I had this.

Honestly not his greatest work - although good work on realistially and empathetically characterising an assortment of kids in inpatient psych. I'd completely forgotten there was a gay character here.

What brings it up from 3 starts to 4 is the sheer audacity of writing a Teenagers In Psych Ward novel which is also a mystery/thriller about, of all the fucking things, _insider trading_. It works though!



Backdated: The next bunch of books in my record after Detransition Baby and Stephanie Alexander’s Home are a bunch of Chaucer and/or 18th c texts, and then an eight-book re-read of Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness series and then Protector of the Small. This was, as you might guess, deep in the “this egg is now scrambled” phase. I… have a few actually load-bearing thoughts on Alana, which I ought to write up one day (in conversation with PTerry, and probably also Silence and also Butler and also fucking Pierre Bourdieu).

But I will also say that something which I struggle with - I remember turning this over and over in my head in my late teens and early twenties - is that… not only am I not like Alana, it’s a total toss-up whether Alana would like me. Kel, on the other hand? It’s pretty clear I have little in common with Kel, and I doubt she’d think I was ideal company - but I remember thinking somewhere in my late teens or early twenties “but I am, or I think I should be, someone Kel would respect”, which is a wholly different question.

Some short fiction, read at some point

Cislyn Smith, Tides that Bind, which is about Scylla and Charibdys.

Abra Staffin-Wiebe, Becks Pest Control and the Case of the Drag Show Downer. This was published in 2022, back when drag + kids was Topical, scary, but still more of a harbinger than the “just one part of all the Doom” situation we have now.

Michelle Lyn King, One-Hundred Percent Humidity, which Electric Lit pubished with the compelling tagline “The only thing more humiliating than virginity is sex”.

Guan Un, Re: Your Stone , in which Sisyphus encountered corporate email.

Recently Added To My To-Read List:
Fiction:

Leanna Renee Hieber, Strangely Beautiful, which looks like a fun lil steampunk adventure

Victor Heringer, trans James Young, The Love of Singular Men. If I’m on a gay lit dive, I definitely don’t read enough in translation, and this looks like my kind of thing.

Steve MinOn, First name, second name. Aus lit, Chinese myth/cosmology and immigrant intergenerational heritage, queer author, porous boundary between fiction and autobiography. Seems like fun to me.

Non-fiction

Moudhy Al-Rashid, Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History

Billy-Ray Belcourt, A history of my brief body

Esther Cuenca Liberman, The making of urban customary law in medieval Europe