Reviews

Starting Over By Looking Back: Observation Notes 112-114 and Reading Notes 47-51

shallowreader 11 Comments

Observation Note 112: Starting over. As I do every January, I start out with a post of my favourite books. But this year, that post is running late so instead, I’m going to mess with the natural order of things and do my first post on SuperWendy’s TBR reading challenge. Last year, I only managed to post in the first half of the year. However, let’s just say I was busier reading than writing. I did manage to read through a big chunk of my TBR which is my ass-backwards way of kicking off on the theme of Starting Over. Well….let me tell you how I took charge of my 220 TBR waiting-to-read books that had accumulated on my Goodreads over the 10 years I have been documenting my reading habits…

Observation Note 113: Looking back. So let’s start in November, I was heading to the Blue Mountains a few hours west of Sydney for an academic writer’s retreat where I was going to try to be scholarly and thinkerly (true word). I was being driven by a friend in what I would call a white-knuckle drive on a Friday afternoon crazy Sydney motorway weekend exit frenzy, when I saw a friend contacted me via Twitter (yes – I am still there and happy to accept the side-eyes) to tell me that Queens Public Library in New York City had an overseas non-US citizens membership availability. For US$50, I got to subscribe to the most incredible elibrary. So I paid and added that sweet library to my Libby app for I now had some procrastinating reading to do rather than writing.

Have I been reading a book a day for the past three months. I sure have! Have I been reading in bed? Yes I have. Have I been reading instead of watching TV. Damn yes! Have I been reading instead of swimming. Ummm….no. Even I have reading boundaries. I can’t read when the harbour view is astounding!

Brilliant blue sky sea ripples out through the harbour yachts boats masts floating beyond. Houses bound Little Manly Cheerful cabanas, Cheerful sun tents. A beautiful day on the sand.
View of Sydney Harbour from Little Manly

Here is the link for those who want to be part of this amazing opportunity! https://www.queenslibrary.org/get-a-card/eUser

So how did that TBR go?

Well…my list has gone from 221 books to 121. 100 books are off my TBR. Of those 100, I have read 44, I have another 12 on hold, and another 44 which were reassessed off the TBR list – some due to sampling the first few chapters and finding I was no longer interested, and others just deleting as I couldn’t work out why or when I had added them. Of course, in the last week, I accidentally added another 10 to my TBR want-to-read list but I am not counting them here. Also, no book cover pics – I hate this wordpress layout. It makes adding images a nightmare.

So now for some of the more notable books I read: 

Reading note 47: The Longest Wait 

The Trouble with Joe by Emilie Richards.

I added this book, published in 1994, on the 29th of September, 2012 and read it on the 17th of November, 2022. A 10 year, 2 month wait. I have read and kept several Emilie Richards category romances from the 1990s so I was familiar with the calibre of the authors writing. She usually grapples with issues of the self, overcoming problems not necessarily of love, but of pressures that society can bring to a couple. The love between the protagonists is undeniable, however they are grappling with Joe’s infertility problems. Joe’s wife Samantha is a teacher and she has a neglected child, Corey,  in her class. Over the summer holidays, the two of them find themselves as foster carers for Corey, unravelling a lot of emotions around what it means to be parents, have family, responsibility, love and neglect. This is the only romance I recall reading which also gives the child’s point of view and it adds such depth to the story. It was well worth the 10 year wait to read it. 

Reading Note 48: The Best Wait.

Cara Bastone. About two years ago, in a catch-up conversation with Jayashree Kamblé, she recommended to me to try and find some Cara Bastone books to read. There were none in any of Sydney’s library systems so I left the recommendation hanging in the TBR. So I was delighted to find 3 of Bastone’s books at Queens Library: When We First Met, Can’t Help Falling and Flirting with Forever. All three novels had these fully fleshed, deeply understandable characters – not only the main protagonists but all their neighbours and friends and colleagues. The setting felt known and lived in, well understood, I felt like I could smell the air of the city through her writing. And the relationships, well they too were these nuanced courtship tales, thoughtful of differences and the tensions that can bring people together. I particularly loved the hero from  Flirting with Forever. In the opening scene of the book, he comes across as awkward and thoughtless but as the book unfolds, you discover a deeply thoughtful, principled man with grace and reason. I highly recommend you seek out Cara Baston’s books.

Reading Note 49: Most Annoying Wait.

To Sir With Love by Lauren Lane – I cannot tell you how frustrated I’ve been with my public library where I had a long-standing purchase request with them for this book in 2021. It was finally satisfied 14 months after I placed the request, so my reserve on the request expired and it got borrowed by other people and I had another 3 month wait and I was just furious and annoyed and I just didn’t bother going and it was so much more pleasurable reading it online. 14 months wait and a shitty reservations system – just do better, Sydney.

Reading Note 50: Yeah books from the TBR.

Some of my reading highlights from the last three months.

Blended by Sharon Draper. This was on my TBR since 2018. A children’s novel about mixed race young girl dealing with her divorced parents and her difficult experience. This is a book about seeking your belonging, grappling with your parents custody issues, the concept of home, and how race and identity can differ depending upon which parent you are with. A good read.

Accidentally Engaged by Farah Heron. This is one my favourite books for this year so I won’t write too much about it on this post as I still plan to do a 2022 post in the next few days. Basically, this is fun, family dynamics, Tanzanian-Gujurati-British-Canadian migrant story, lots of food, lots of cultural expectations and cultural pushback all set in lovely Canada. A great read. 

Anne of Manhattan by Brina Staler.  Thoroughly Modern 21st century fanfiction of Anne of Green Gables as young adults living in Manhattan. It’s well-written and I really liked the book. The author definitely captured the (kindred) spirit of of Anne and Gilbert and their connection though it had quite a different plot trajectory. Well worth the two year wait to read it.

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez. I wrote about this book in my previous post (Reading Note 46).

Tweet Cute by Emma Lord. A YA/teenage romance conducted across several social media platforms as well as being set in a New York high school. The usual teen coming of age issues compounded by pressures from parents especially around insisting their older teens making corporate social media decisions. It was complex, it was good, I really liked it. Well worth waiting to read it since 2019.

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing. A memoir reflecting on the loneliness of the city, seeking connections and not finding them, the impact of the AIDS crisis, and how artists such as Andy Warhol and Edward Hopper grappled with their own loneliness. Impactful and wonderful. Another well worth waiting for since 2019.

Reading Note 51: Meh books from the TBR. 

I am so far from the zeitgeist on these ones. Many of them are lauded as “hits” and “must-read” stars of booktok and romancetok. If this is the future of romance fiction, I will cry.

The Roommate by Rosie Danan. Bleh. Call me a prude. Porn hero was boring. The plot was inane (seriously – the heroine leaves her city to keep a low profile and then hooks up with a high profile porn star just doesn’t make sense) and there was zero tension. Just. waffle.

Below Zero by Ali Hazelwood. Double Bleh. I totally cannot stand the “smart” heroine romance trend. Let’s face it. All these STEM heroines are just another iteration of targeted career-girl romance novels. And this one – well the heroine may have had a high IQ but she was definitely lacking in emotional intelligence. Imagine cracking onto your research project’s interviewee IN HIS WORKPLACE! That’s is serious misconduct. Not sexy. A breach of work health and safety too. Just no.

Corner Office Confessions by Cynthia St. Aubin. Great title. The story didn’t grab me.

Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Sutanto.  SPOILER ALERT FOR THIS ONE. Everyone raves about this book as being hilarious and great and I will admit that it started out that way – just super super funny and cheeky. But then the main character Meddelin accidently kills her date (who was catfished by her mother!) and rather than call emergency services, get him to a hospital, go to the police, etc., like a normal person would, she shoves him in the boot, takes him to her aunts where they hide him in a freezer and all of a sudden I am reading horror murder meets Weekend at Bernies. I know that I should be able to overlook all the problems in this book and haha have a laugh but IT WAS GHOULISH!  A (fictional) person died. Someone has to care. Someone has to pay. And they didn’t. And I just couldn’t. Just say no!

The Wedding Party by Jasmine Guillory. Look, the premise was great – I do love a hook-up becomes lurvvve story and Guillory writes some lovely witty repartee but she substitutes way too much food in her novels for her lack of sexy times. Unlike Farah Heron’s book, the food is a prop in this novel, it beefs up the novel (sorry, not sorry) but it doesn’t further the plot. Not that books need detailed sex, but good god – that constant eating annoyed me. Waiting since February 2019.

The Two Lives of Lydia Bird by Josie Silver. A sliding doors story. Great premise, ho-hum delivery. It didn’t do it for me. Waiting since January 2020.

Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuoung. Listening to the audio narration also by Vuong was the wrong thing for me. Whispered wistful poetry is totally not my thing. I couldn’t bear it but I persisted to the end. Perhaps I would have liked the poetry better if I had just read the text, but now the poet’s voice is in my head and it won’t work for me. Suited to a whole different type of person. Frustrated at the anticipation of waiting since 2019 for On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous but opting for the 2022 publication instead due to availability.

Moral to the story is: stick with the book you have already listed on the TBR

Observation Note 114: In conclusion.

I feel so pleased with my overhaul of my TBR. I am so happy that Queens library membership has slayed my seven year reading slump, and I will definitely be renewing it for as long as it is offered to non-US citizens. 

As for my procrastination during my writing retreat…it was a successful enough attempt at being “scholarly” that it kickstarted my re-engagement with a journal article which had been accepted pending revisions which I hadn’t completed for many different reasons. I managed to finish it and submit it a month later. I think the deep diving into the TBR reading probably energised me as much as the retreat, if not more so. Thanks, Super Wendy!

Reading Milestones: Observation Note 111 and Reading Note 46

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Observation note 111: I’m an avid reader. I reached a personal milestone this weekend. I have read 2500 books since I started keeping my own digital reading records. Starting on WeRead from 2008, then migrating my data over to Goodreads in 2012 where I joined many of my other bookish friends (this probably coincides with my ceasing to post my reading choices on FB). This is the only social media platform I use consistently, facilitating nearly a decade and a half of record keeping – the habits of avid readers!

Diligently adding information to my digital reading record grew out of my readers’ advisory practices as a librarian. My access to my library records prior to using these book sites provided only a partial snapshot of my reading as it didn’t include the books I was buying and reading outside of the library. The books I found myself buying also informed me as to the biases in library collections.

Keeping track of my reading has always helped me in my workplace in understanding user behaviours and anticipating reading requirements, especially during my time as a team leader at the City of Sydney where I was coordinating up to 7 storytimes a week for the various childcare centres in Ultimo (separately from the children’s programming) which explains the “library-storytime” tag (143 books) where I was assessing picture books for performance suitability. But even once I stopped working in libraries, I couldn’t stop the record keeping. You can take the librarian out of the library, and all that.

Now for some statistics: My year for the most books read was in 2012 – 365 books. My year for the least books read was 2013 – 26 books. The years I spent studying deeply impacted my book reading outputs, especially as many of those years I was working in two jobs, along with studying, along with general family and home responsibilities. Reading opportunities in those years became treats and luxuries, though the list would be off the scales if I was able to count journal articles on GoodReads!

I have approximately 580 subject tags “shelves”, though my early records don’t have many tags, my later ones are rich with description – this practice emerged as the digital world became more sophisticated. Folksonomic categorisation rather than taxonomic predetermined ordering systems FTW! My highest read genre is romance fiction (814), picture books (599), non-fiction (589). I love that along standard tags such as “graphic novel” (64 books), “historical fiction” (86 books), I get to created my own descriptors and some of the more esoteric ones are “bat shit crazy” (10 books), “fake name trickery” (23 books), “yeeha cowboy” (27 books) and “hatch-back hero” (a pathetic 2 books). I even have a “vassiliki” tag for books with characters who have my name (5 books).

Caroline Criado Perez's Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

Reading Note 46: Furious fury. For the record, my 2500th book was Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. Added to my TBR in March 2019. It’s on the obfuscation of women from data collection and its deep life and historic impacts. It made me incredibly angry at the extent that womens’ lives continue to be marginalised from health, education, road safety, employment and every day life opportunities. Men continue to be the default at the expense of women’s lives. I think this book should be a must read for everyone, especially policy and decision makers.

Grumpy March: Time Poor, Graduation, Too Many Dates and Wham!: Observation notes 100-101 and Reading Notes 41-42

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So I have already established that this is my year of pretending to not taking part in  Wendy the SuperLibrarian’s TBR Challenge however I am still using her monthly themes to for my end of month blog post. And March has been a mean, moist, mlerhe of a month.

Observation Note 100: Time poor grumpy. Somehow, I have gone from languishing in lockdown to high speed pre-Covid busy in the space of a month. I was able to secure some sessional teaching at my university for a subject that I haven’t taught before (I have previously studied a very early iteration of it), I am continuing to run workshop on road safety for a not-for-profit organisation and of course there is the day-to-day running around for family and for my research project (see Observation Note 98). Just this week, I have been in contact with over 360 students in my classrooms and often I am the only person with a mask on (so I go full on with my n95). As my body is out of practice with the high pace, most days when I get home, I collapse on my sofa, too exhausted to do much other than groan. That said, I have managed to read a few books

Reading Note 41: Reading regrets, I’ve had a few grumpy. I tried and somehow managed to plod through Rebekah Campbells’ 138 Dates: The true story of one woman’s search for everything. I was so intrigued by Rebekah’s true story of needing for to find love for herself having spent 10 years alone, hardly ever dating. She had found love when she was younger, however she chose to explore life rather than commit herself to her boyfriend from when they were teens – this becomes a constant thread in her book because he truly symbolised lost love and lost chances for her, making it difficult for her to move on. I was really sympathetic to her decision at that young age, and as her story of finding love in her thirties unfolded, this decision impacted so much of her life trajectory. I really wanted to like this book, which is why I continued reading it where with other books I would have given up but sadly, it just didn’t work for me. I would argue that it was long, it was way too wordy, it brings up again my usual whine about traditionally published books which ramble to reach a certain page length. Perhaps it would have held my interest more if it had been 150 pages rather than over 400. And even the blurb felt too long and tiring. It wasn’t too bad a book, it just didn’t rock my boat. While I was reading this book a mosquito landed on the pages and I was about to squash it but remembered the book was a library loan so I stopped myself and the mozzie flew off. I turned off the lights and I tried to go to sleep with a mozzie buzzing in my room. I pulled my sheet over my head so I wouldn’t get bitten (if the pandemic wasn’t enough, and cataclysmic floods weren’t enough, we have a mosquito causing Japanese encephalitis crisis in Australia) but I felt the weird flutter of mozzie wings in my eyelashes. I flayed my arms and in a Ralph Macchio Danielson move, I caught the mosquito between my thumb and pointer finger…in the dark…and squashed it . This was the most interesting part of reading this book.

Observation 101: A graduation ceremony…at last not so grumpy. Having graduated a year ago, my university had not had any ceremonies over the last two years. They finally had a large ceremony for all the 2019, 2020 and 2021 graduates. I am surprised at how much I absolutely needed this ceremony to take place. The rituals and symbolism of hearing my name being called out was so important to me. I had a tinge of sadness at some parts of the rituals having been changed. There is no longer the handshake and the public handing over of your award. I understand why that physical touch needed to be removed so as to protect the health of the person giving the award to hundreds of students. You know, due to this scourge of a virus. Though all that needed to be removed was the handshake, they could have still handed the testamur to students without having any contact. However, the same concern was not extended for the health of the staff member who handed me my PhD in the gowning area. I guess some staff are more expendable than others. This made me grumpy.

I was also deeply disappointed that the PhD graduates were not given a seat with all the other academics which use to be the protocol that was followed. We were just led back to our seats amongst all the Bachelors. This was disappointing. I’m not angry or devastated or anything like that. I am fine with traditions changing. But it further dimmed my expectation for ritual on the day. Though I mention them, they are small grumps. There was still ceremony. My supervisor carried the mace into the great hall. There were majestic gowns and graduate colours. It was lovely to have my bright red gown – reserved only for PhDs. It was lovely to be sitting amongst the bachelors in their Uluru capes over their black gowns, just as I had worn exactly thirty years ago at my first graduation. These were my over-riding feelings on the day. I was happy and enjoyed myself. I was happy that my sons and my husband were all well enough to attend. One of my sisters came to the graduation too, however the other two are ill with Covid and my mother is in isolation due to living with one of my sisters. I wanted my mum to be there. But at least she could watch the livestream. I also managed to find a beautiful pink and floral dress. Over the past month I have bought five dresses, and returned three, in my obsessive search for the “perfect dress” for the “big event”. I felt like I was in a Betty Neels novel. LOL. It wasn’t until after the ceremony that I realised that I had chosen a dress worthy of Penelope Featherington from Bridgerton. It is indeed, very pretty. This historical romance moment was suited to the day, for as Kat from Bookthingo commented, the graduation event was the “PhD equivalent of an HEA with an epilogue”.

A lovely epilogue, at that.

Reading Note 42: Last Christmas. I received a copy of Andrew Ridgeley’s memoir Wham! George and Me from my son, last Christmas (LOL). There is so much going through my head having only finished reading this book a few hours ago. As a teenager, I liked Wham! for all their fun and happy songs, and of course their heartbreak songs. Though I desperately yearned for a “Choose Life” t-shirt (I never got one), I wasn’t a fangirl in the sense of buying all their albums (I bought none), or queuing for concert tickets (I attended none) though I did get to see Andrew Ridgeley spin some discs at The Polish Club in Sydney’s Inner West (back in the not-cool-to-live-here days) and to this day, I always get up and dance when Wham! or George Michael songs are being played. So reading this book was a given. An excellent and insightful present from my son (brownie points!).

This is a gorgeous, heartfelt story of Andrew and Georgios/Yog, two boys who became best friends at school and started a band together. I loved Ridgeley’s stories of how they would make up dance routines in their bedrooms, that they would skive off school to go to London clubs and record shops, that their aim was to have fun. I loved Ridgeley’s description of their songwriting, and I was so saddened that he took a back seat to George. I loved his description of their clubbing antics, their incredible fast rise to fame. But most of all, I love that this book is a love dedication to a deep friendship. Andrew Ridgeley writes “Undoubtedly, George was my best friend. And I’ve not had as strong a bond with any other chum since then….I’ve discovered that type of intensity is harder to rediscover as you get older”. This floored me. The loss of friendship and the inability to find new ones is something that thwarts many older people, and reading about it happening to Wham!, and having seen it unravel through the tabloids over the years, seemed to make it even more heartbreaking as there wasn’t even the privacy of being able to hide the pain.

I need to let you know that I cried so hard at the end of this book, that the top of my n95 mask got sopping wet as I was reading it on the bus home from work. This book had me sobbing in public and I didn’t care to stop reading so as to preserve my dignity. There is something so poignant about their early boyhood friendship and Andrew Ridgeley captures their youthfulness in this book. I love that he wrote that they wanted their band to symbolise fun and joy and happiness. I didn’t even realise how much Wham! captured and were successful in their aim. Wham! with its cheeky wink to pop culture comic book art, just made me feel happy. As they say in Wham Rap

Take pleasure in leisure, I believe in joy!

…

Do! you!

Enjoy what you do?

If not, just stop!

Don’t stay there and rot!

I think I just need to put Wham! music on high rotation so I can stop being grumpy and embrace joy again. Time to give up the rot.

My 2021 Year of Reading

shallowreader 13 Comments

Happy New Year to you all. Just like 2020, my year of reading for 2021 continued to be fractured and interrupted by life, relationships and of course, the pandemic. For the blog record, I read:

72 Books

Fiction: 18

DNFd but counted: 2

Audiobooks: 0

Picture books: 25

Graphic novels: 7 – 3 fiction and 4 non-fiction

Non-fiction: 23 – Memoir and long narrative: 15 ; Design and Travel: 6 ; Scholarly: 2. 

Essays and articles: lots upon lots

Though my year kicked off with the successful completion of my thesis, I had a number of struggles to overcome, not in the least, needing to finally grapple with my inability to return to working in libraries due to the severity of my asthma. Unfortunately, this is not going to reverse itself but at least I am no longer crumpling into a heap, beating my chest, voicing my mourning when I speak about it. I know this sounds so very dramatic, but it honestly is how devastated I feel. Along with the asthma, I also had a stupid fall (I think I have mentioned this elsewhere), face planting into a gutter while I was crossing the road on my way to pick up my library reservations (I blame avid reading). I ended up with a black eye, scrapes and bruises, and a “mild” head injury which took me close to 6-8 weeks to recover from the headaches and some brain fog. And then came the lockdown. So much time for reading, so little concentration to actually read. Just like last year, I spent more time reading articles, essays, doom scrolling and staring at walls than engaging with books. I am not sure if this is an indication of my attention span or an indication that I am not finding anything interesting enough to read. It’s probably a mix of both. 

Fiction:

Unlike 2020, the year I read only 2 mediocre fiction novels, in 2021 I read 18. Of the 18, only five were not romance, of those five, I read my first science fiction novel in more than 15 years. Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries series: All Systems Red was a fun read. The book appeal for me was its brevity which, unfortunately, continues to be rare amongst published fiction novels. I was deeply saddened to see that Wells has caved to the market and is now writing lengthier novels for the series with Book 5 clocking in at 350 pages – nearly double the length of the first four fabulous novels. Another loss for tightly plotted and written books.

The cover of The Prenup includes a byline "Love wasn't part of the deal"

Romance:  Most of the romances I read this year ranged from mediocre to lovely, though none were awful. I did have two standouts Lauren Layne’s The Prenup and Kate Clayborn’s Love at First.

Layne’s The Prenup is one of friction and surprise and fun and depths unexpected in a green card romance spanning ten years. I was delighted by Layne’s writing which always seem to have these socialites who hold zero interest for me, and yet, the beauty of Layne’s writing makes me forget my disinterest and plummets me into some excellent fun storytelling. The best thing about this book is that I had a momentary forgetfulness. I read as though it was 2011 – the year before I returned to study. I have linked to my earlier blog post for The Prenup above so I won’t write more here but if you are searching for a fun read, I do recommend Lauren Layne’s books – I read three of her novels in the past year and all were good.

Purple cover, stars and hearts, silhouette of an older style apartment with the title in cursive letters

As for Kate Clayborn’s Love at First  – this was such a gentle story. Mercurial in its pacing. Vivid in its setting. Nuanced emotions in its telling. I was charmed and so deeply taken by this book which barely has grand tensions or big misunderstandings or tempestuous feelings. The feelings are on the surface, even keeled. Still waters however, run deep and the issues that mire the two main characters are resolved slowly but not completely.

I loved this book for its softness. It’s soft hero. It’s soft heroine. Yet even with such kind and giving hearts, they both show their inner resolve for overcoming their personal and interpersonal problems which is what makes this book such a gem of a story.

Blue head being held by a pink body hanging from above

Graphic Novels 

Fiction: I really enjoyed Rachel Smythe’s Lore Olympus. First published as episodes on Webtoons, it is now published as a book. I read it on the app where it was infinitely superior than to the codex. Scrolling through each episode allowed for a flow of story, and a flow of emotions through illustrations continuing down the screen. The screen design builds tension and pace into a new imagining of age old stories of Greek gods Hades and Persephone and their often overlooked relationship. The scrolling down the screen also allows for such a visceral experience of Hades as the god of the underworld. I really feel strongly that this story should be read in the app or the website as I am unsure whether the book could elicit the same emotional reading. I look forward to reading through the new season of this story.

Green apartment building with silhouettes in the windows. Title spans the top of the cover with a background of orange sky

Non-fiction: Seek You: A Journey through American Loneliness by Kristen Radtke was a sombre read during an already sombre time. Having spent much of the year in lockdown or isolating from others, Seek You speaks to our disconnection from each other and how being lonely has deep impacts in the way we socialise with others. Radtke explores loneliness in its various manifestations, from radio, suburban sprawl, the sitcom laugh track and its insidious guidance as to what is and isn’t funny, the importance of connection with others, the physical pain we feel when we are rejected by others, disturbing research on the social deprivation in monkeys and the deep affects of loneliness. Radtke speaks of our need for the human touch, for connection with others, and the way that touch brings us to love. This book just made me sadder than I really wanted to be. It barely gave me hope but it did give me a way of seeing how I live now. And I really don’t like the way my world is unravelling into deeper loneliness. 

Non-fiction essays and articles

I read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Notes on Grief as a long essay in the New Yorker, and it has since been expanded upon and published in book form. From the beginning, this essay captured me through its form, her use of Notes felt similar to my use of notes for writing many of my blog posts. Adichie writes of the shock of her father’s death and the ensuing events, from remembering her life and relationship with her father as a young child and into adulthood,  to her struggle to return to Nigeria for his funeral during the peak Covid lockdowns. Adichie explores her love of her father, their ancestral home, her life as an immigrant, and the difficulties of being a cosmopolitan citizen in a world that has shut its borders. This essay was filled with sadness – a core theme in my 2021 reading choices.

Non-fiction books

Cover has an out of focus family photograph that looks like it is from the 1970s.

The Lost Family: How DNA Testing Is Uncovering Secrets, Reuniting Relatives, and Upending Who We Are by Libby Copeland was a fascinating read. As I have gone out of my way to leave as small as possible biometric trail of my life (no thumbprint or facial recognition to unlock my phone, no fitbit linked to an app, no entering nightclubs/bars that scan your eyes etc), doing a DNA test has zero interest for me. However, many of my friends and family are spitting into jars (so much for not sharing my biometrics!) and doing these tests to discover who they are, who their (biological) parents are etc. This book takes a deep look into the world of DNA testing, the ethical conundrums of the secrets that are revealed, as well as delightful news too. This book was wonderful, with many personal stories to accompany the more technical and scientific explanations of how DNA does and does not reveal our lives and our ancestors lives. I probably think about this book more than any other that I have read in 2021.

Shared reading

One of the unexpected joys that this miserable year provided me is a different way of reading. I started doing buddy reading with Kay from Miss Bates Reads Romance, and with my goddaughter. 

Miss Bates Reads Romance. Miss Bates and I chose to buddy read Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City. I was introduced to Gornick by Miss Bates and I was enamoured by her writing style. Having already read The Odd Woman and the City, Kay and I chose to reread it together. 30 pages at a time. Meeting weekly. It was a joyous way to read. Sometimes our conversation took us on tangents, other times it took us a while to get to our book choice, and we always always swapped favourite quotes and delighted in shared highlighted passages. We didn’t necessarily deconstruct the text as much as complain/enjoy/laugh at the text. I deliberately have not reviewed, or written further about this book which is my only reread of 2021. I just want to remember how much it resonated with me. How much my body – shoulders, neck, hips – relaxed as I read this book, and relaxed as I chatted with a dear friend about this book. I feel so fortunate to have had this experience as it led me to doing some buddy reading with my goddaughter.

A yellow sky, light blue buildings silhouetted, with dark blue cyclists riding up a hill. Lots of silhouette covers!

Fancy fairy reading godmother fancy reading fun. So at the end of June, Sydney went into hard lockdown. With an abysmally low vaccination rate (not through hesitancy but through the continued application of dirty design by our despised Prime Minister who did not procure enough vaccines for the population), everyone other than essential workers stayed at home, schools shut their doors and silent chaos ensued. Sadly, this is not unique to most people across the world. One day, I called my goddaughter’s mum to see how she was coping, and drawing from my Miss Bates fun, offered to do reading after school with my goddaughter. At first I thought it would be a weekly meet up, but we had so much fun that it immediately became a daily Zoom call. In the 2 months of our reading fun, we read 26 books – 24 picture books and 2 novels. We used a variety of methods from physical books which had to be held to the computer’s camera so we can see images, buying duplicate books so we can read in turn, to ebooks where I could share my screen and we would read in sync with each other. My favourite of the buddy reads with my goddaughter was Steven Herrick’s Zoe, Max and the Bicycle Bus. Written in prose, we read a chapter each until we found ourselves singing the story (out of tune) while using the Zoom tools to draw the characters. I honestly don’t think I would have considered this style of shared reading in the before times. Lockdown sapped me of energy and but it did give me a stronger connection with my goddaughter and a completely different way of reading. However, no pandemic would have been better for both of us.

A shared page from Zoe, Max and the Bicycle Bus with red writing over it saying "we can do it!" and a screen capture of the two Zoom participants at the bottom of the page.

Reading in 2022

Last year, I kept my reading goals low by setting myself 21 books. This year, I have decided to not take part in any competition. I have set my Goodreads challenge to 1 book only because I enjoy the “My year of reading” wrap up that they post in early January. I also get to show off this wrap up to my sons in comparison to their annual Spotify stats and I force them to feign interest (LOL). I haven’t made plans for reading this year. 2020 left me exhausted. 2021 has left me with depression and heightened anxiety. I have secured some sessional teaching/facilitating with two organisations and I have a paper to present at a Valentine’s Day symposium. Tiny steps in the work prospects which, for now, is all I want as I still haven’t decided what I want to do for the next 20 years. Long term goals will have to wait. With the pandemic still going strong, I am settling for short goals and maximising rest time for now. 

Happy reading year to you all. 

A photograph of myself wearing a white top with blue flowers. Backdrop of green plants and a small demitasse of coffee by my arm.

Readers and Languishing: Reading notes: 17 and 18

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Earlier today, I saw long-time Twitter friend Flexnib post that she is going to try to do BlogJune just like in the olden blog days. I have decided to try to post every June day too and I thought I would start simply, resurrecting my Reading and Observation notes, a style of writing which I have previously used and I find particularly enjoyable.

Reading Note 17: Other readers. I’ve just finished reading Vivian Gornick’s Unfinished Business: Notes of a chronic rereader. I first heard about Gornick pre-pandemic, 18 months ago on Miss Bates Reads Romance where Kay reviewed Fierce Attachments, a book that continues to sit unopened on my bedside bookshelf. I managed to borrow three of Gornick’s books from the library and I wanted to start with her book on rereading so that I can get an insight into who she was and what her book choices mean to her. I enjoyed Unfinished Business, this collection of essays has her rereading and reconnecting to books that she has loved many years ago. Her revisiting of each text finds her either loving or rejecting the book as she delves deeply into the characters driving each novel. Gornick is not writing an analysis of these books, but instead, she is relating her own life through her reflections of her rereads. Each essay was detailed and interesting but I was increasingly annoyed that her choices were all tragedies – stories where everyone grapples with life’s difficulties and love is attained and lost. I kept wanting Gornick to choose something more edifying, something with happier outcomes, something that could mix up her reading choices rather the the predictable stalwart classics. Right at the end though, she has a short essay on about a “cheap 1970s paperback” that falls apart when she takes it into her hand. Gornick relishes in her material experience of the pages falling out one-by-one and how she salvages this unnamed book by slowly reading through it again, marking the pages as she ordered them, and bounding the book with a rubber-band. Gornick doesn’t name the books and I am so curious. I would love to know the name of the one book that she doesn’t name. My guess is that it is something along the line of Kathleen E. Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower.

Reading Note 18: Languishing. Vivian Gornick discusses being “unreceptive” to a book, just not in the right mood to read it; not “in a a state of readiness”. Well that is how I have been feeling lately about all fiction reading. I pick up a novel and I either give up just a few chapters in, turned off the book for something as trivial as the name of a character, the description of a sofa, or an internal thought that I am just not interested in reading. This sense of fiction ennui is not what I want to be feeling and I hope it doesn’t last for too much longer. Meanwhile, I will continue reading memoirs and I will post about my thoughts on them here.

Vivian Gornick’s Unfinished Business, Fierce Attachments and The Odd Woman and the City have all been borrowed from a NSW public library.

The fairytale, marriage and another fun read

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I’m over 10 days late for this month’s TBR challenge having completely missed posting for March and April’s TBR. The May topic being Fairytale/Folktale and my connection to the theme is a bit of a tenuous stretch and only mentioned briefly towards the end of this post. As for how long this book has been on my TBR, I’m just going to say that I have borrowed it three times, with a three month loan period (inclusive of renewals), and I only managed to read it at the tail end of this latest loan.

A lilac shadow shaped like skyscrapers in a city as a backdrop, with a cartoon bride holding open a yellow taxi door which just doesn't make sense because there was no taxi in the wedding scene.

Book: Marriage on Madison Avenue by Lauren Layne  (the third in the ˆ series) 

The Blurb: Can guys and girls ever be just friends? According to Audrey Tate and Clarke West, absolutely. After all, they’ve been best friends since childhood without a single romantic entanglement. Clarke is the charming playboy Audrey can always count on, and he knows that the ever-loyal Audrey will never not play along with his strategy for dodging his matchmaking mother—announcing he’s already engaged…to Audrey.

But what starts out as a playful game between two best friends turns into something infinitely more complicated, as just-for-show kisses begin to stir up forbidden feelings. As the faux wedding date looms closer, Audrey and Clarke realise that they can never go back to the way things were, but deep down, do they really want to?

This is the final instalment to the Central Park Pact series.

How did I find this book: Lauren Layne has become an auto-read author for me since Dr Jayashree Kamblé recommended her novel Walk of Shame to me several years ago.

Meet Cute: A bit of series backgrounding first: this is a trilogy with the protagonists of each book, Audrey, Claire and Naomi having dubiously met at the funeral of their (yes – plural THEIR) dead boyfriend a couple of years earlier, having discovered that they had all been duped (ahem sleeping with) the same man. On the day of his funeral (no – they didn’t kill him), the three discover that they weren’t his only girlfriend/wife. Though horrified by their own role in being “the other woman”, they forge an unlikely friendship where they look after each other – especially when it comes to finding their true love as they all now, understandably, have trust issues. Claire and Naomi in this book are already paired up which leaves Audrey to find her love match. 

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New to me author and getting a life

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I have surprised myself in that I have managed to read yet another novel! What is this new life of mine? I’m liking how being liberated from being a student feels. Unemployed for the while, I am listening to podcasts, reading, watching TV and attempting to clean the house. Reading is still super-slow as I had a whole lot of administrative things to do around the thesis as well as finally sinking my teeth into some research that I have had on hold for a while (now to get some funding!). Meanwhile, it’s SuperWendy’s TBR challenge once again and this month’s theme is a new-to-me author and as is my usual way – there are some vague spoilers.

Book: Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert

Blurb: Chloe Brown is a chronically ill computer geek with a goal, a plan, and a list. After almost—but not quite—dying, she’s come up with seven directives to help her “Get a Life”, and she’s already completed the first: finally moving out of her glamorous family’s mansion. The next items?

• Enjoy a drunken night out.
• Ride a motorcycle.
• Go camping.
• Have meaningless but thoroughly enjoyable sex.
• Travel the world with nothing but hand luggage.
• And… do something bad.

But it’s not easy being bad, even when you’ve written step-by-step guidelines on how to do it correctly. What Chloe needs is a teacher, and she knows just the man for the job.

Redford ‘Red’ Morgan is a handyman with tattoos, a motorcycle, and more sex appeal than ten-thousand Hollywood heartthrobs. He’s also an artist who paints at night and hides his work in the light of day, which Chloe knows because she spies on him occasionally. Just the teeniest, tiniest bit.

But when she enlists Red in her mission to rebel, she learns things about him that no spy session could teach her. Like why he clearly resents Chloe’s wealthy background. And why he never shows his art to anyone. And what really lies beneath his rough exterior…

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The Prenup: a happy read

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It has been several years since I have felt motivated to read novels back to back. Yet here I am, finally with two books in one week! Time for cake! I want to point out before I go any further that 1. I absolutely loved reading this book and 2. SPOILERS ABOUND. If you hate spoilers (’cause these ones are not subtle), maybe just bookmark this post and come back once you too have read the book.

The cover of The Prenup includes a byline "Love wasn't part of the deal"

Book: The Prenup by Lauren Layne

Blurb: My name is Charlotte Spencer and, ten years ago, I married my brother’s best friend. I haven’t seen him since. Charlotte Spencer grew up on the blue-blooded Upper East Side of Manhattan but she never wanted the sit-still-look-pretty future her parents dictated for her.

Enter Colin Walsh, her brother’s quiet, brooding, man-bun-sporting best friend, and with him a chance to escape. He’s far from Charlotte’s dream guy as but they need each other for one thing: marriage. One courthouse wedding later, Charlotte’s inheritance is hers to start a business in San Francisco and Irish-born Colin has a Green Card.

Ten years later, Colin drops a bombshell: the terms of their prenup state that before either can file for divorce, they have to live under the same roof for three months. Suddenly this match made in practicality is about to take on whole new meaning…

How did I find this book: I loved Lauren Layne’s The Walk of Shame so I went searching for her and borrowed her only two books my library held.

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Love Lettering and Comfort Reading

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Having barely read for pleasure in 2020, I wanted to start 2021 by reading in my favourite genre as well as take part in SuperWendy’s TBR challenge with this month’s theme being Comfort Reads. New Year reverting to old readerly me! I do want to point out that this review has a MAJOR SPOILER ALERT!

Book: Love Lettering by Kate Clayborn

Book cover for Love Lettering

Blurb: Meg Mackworth’s hand-lettering skill has made her famous as the Planner of Park Slope, designing beautiful custom journals for New York City’s elite. She has another skill too: reading signs that other people miss. Like the time she sat across from Reid Sutherland and his gorgeous fiancée, and knew their upcoming marriage was doomed to fail. Weaving a secret word into their wedding program was a little unprofessional, but she was sure no one else would spot it. She hadn’t counted on sharp-eyed, pattern-obsessed Reid . .. A year later, Reid has tracked Meg down to find out—before he leaves New York for good—how she knew that his meticulously planned future was about to implode. But with a looming deadline, a fractured friendship, and a bad case of creative block, Meg doesn’t have time for Reid’s questions—unless he can help her find her missing inspiration. As they gradually open up to each other about their lives, work, and regrets, both try to ignore the fact that their unlikely connection is growing deeper. But the signs are there—irresistible, indisputable, urging Meg to heed the messages Reid is sending her, before it’s too late …

How did I find this book: Twitter conversations

Meet Cute: Meg did the calligraphy for Reid and his former fiancee’s wedding invitations. They met when he turned up to approve the design. Their own story starts a year after this event, with Reid approaching Meg to ask why she encrypted the message “Mistake” into the invite. Meg doesn’t really have an answer to this but when Reid tells her that he is leaving New York City because he hates it, she feels that she needs to show him the New York she loves so he can understand the city better.

This inexplicable and kinda weird insistence for Reid to see the beauty of New York City left me feeling confused and I kept reading back over her proposal to find hand written signs across the city to try to understand 1) what’s in it for her and 2) what’s in it for him. I just couldn’t work it out or why he would agree to take part. But this doesn’t really matter because what happens next were these lovely walks through New York City, part game and part tour, where Meg and Reid searching for hand-drawn signs and colours and letters. These regular rendezvous allowed them to build a relationship where they talked and had fun searching for the textual rhythms of the city. These walks were incredibly endearing and were instrumental in revealing Meg and Reid’s selves to each other. These walks become the backdrop to Meg’s relationships with her friends,  employers and clients, and Meg hopes that they help her to resolve her artistic block that was keeping her from meeting her work commitments. I liked the way their walking builds up to Meg and Reid’s friendship, and then builds up to Meg and Reid’s intimacy where they both revealed their vulnerabilities. I especially like that when they realised that they were going to be having sex, their is a long break involving walking and catching transport with “no self-respecting New Yorker PDAs on the subway” intimating their restraint until they reached his apartment. The walking allowing them space for reflection and thought, a way for consent to be reached through the clarity that time and thinking while walking can give you, and the loveliness of walking through their city to their amatory destiny.

Meg’s problem however is that she is a not a confrontationist. She would rather friendships and relationships peter out than confront problems and grapple with possible arguments or fights that need to be resolved. Throughout the book, this becomes a major issue which she needs to overcome with her best-friend Sibby and then with Reid too. She slowly builds up to being able to argue with them and resolving these arguments. Which was fine. It was lovely. It showed care. But it made me a tad bored. Not bored enough to stop reading, but still, bored.

And then the very odd end of the book happened when all of a sudden, instead of reading a romance (THIS PART IS THE SPOILER)…. I’m reading a fraud case, and Reid is an informant (still waters run deep!) and is now in witness protection, and Meg has to decode coordinates??? Just. Really? Why did this just happen? I feel confused again. I feel cheated. I know that I was bored in parts but this wasn’t a change of pace as much as a change of book. So this was a romantic suspense novel and I didn’t even realise it. Switch and bait. I grumbled, I did. This ending really annoyed the shit out of me because of this. It felt fabricated and orchestrated due to not enough tensions being available in the relationship. I don’t mind a story that goes from no drama to high drama in a flash but it felt out of kilter with this particular story and its conciliatory strengths.

I do want to point out one that I stuck with the book because it was beautifully written. The turn of phrase, the loveliness of the narrative. The lettering and planner details gave a rich experience of the text, and though I personally don’t pay lots of attention to details (I just buy whatever is on offer), their description in this book kept me engaged. I also absolutely adored the city walking. I am an urban bunny, I cannot bear bushwalking as I find nature rather boring (oh look – there’s a tree. And just beyond it another tree just like it). I’m glad nature exists and all, but I’m happy to protect it by not going to it. In the city though, the thrill of noises and sirens, the smells, and the crowds (this books is written in a pre-Covid world). Ah! I just loved the city as character in this book and it worked its magic on me.

Will they last: I’m undecided on this one. Do I think that Meg and Reid have a relationship that they can sustain for all their lives – Yes. Do I think that Reid can live 25/40/60 years in a city he once hated? I’m unsure. Which is the whole crux of their relationship. Meg loves the city and somehow Reid claims that he now loves it too because he saw it through her eyes but I remain unconvinced. No doubt they love each other. But I doubt Reid loves NYC. They’re really going to have to think carefully about which neighbourhood they choose to live in if they want to ensure that city living doesn’t become their insurmountable problem.

Feelings: Overwhelmingly though, this book was heavy with sadness. Both Reid and Meg carry their worries on the page. From Meg’s inability to vocalise her problems to Reid’s skin flares making it impossible to hide the stress he wished he could internalise. Though there are some funny exchanges and witty repartee, sadness was stronger in this book as an emotion. And perhaps this is why I did not enjoy the book as much as I would have wanted. With the sadness of living in plague times, with the political zeitgeist being one of oppression and obfuscation across the world, and all the other usual personal problems I carry in my soul, I was really wanting a lighter book to read. I needed a light breeze and Love Lettering was certainly not that for me. Would I recommend it to others? Yes. But it definitely was not the right book for me. I sought a comfort read but I didn’t find comfort.

This book was borrowed from a NSW public library.

My 2020 Year of Reading

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Happy New Year to you all. Unlike 2019, yet like so many others, my year of reading in 2020 was fractured and fraught. The year started with several issues both personal and environmental. Bushfire smoke having enveloped Sydney for many months in 2019 continued to pollute our air with many people wearing masks in Sydney months before the pandemic. For a variety of reasons, with the main one being the immediate need to complete my thesis, I resigned from my librarian position. Unexpectedly, this left me out of paid employment for the first time since I was 22 which was unnerving. My year was spent hiding in my bedroom, writing up my thesis and panicking about the pandemic emerged. Instead of taking 5 months to finish, it took me 11 excruciating months where I found it difficult to do anything other than eat, breathe, sleep my thesis. Reading for pleasure was near impossible though I read 44 books but even those were primarily university text books. Between global dread and thesis dread, I barely managed to read. Here are my rather sad statistics:

Books: 44

Fiction: 2

Books DNFd but counted: I borrowed over 40 books and returned as many unread and unopened. It wasn’t them, it was me.

Audiobooks:  2

Picture Books: 0

Graphic Novel memoir: 8

Non-fiction including Memoir/Narrative: 6; Design and Travel: 16;  Thesis theory texts: 12

Essays and articles: lots and lots and lots

Romance

Both the novels I read this year were (kinda) romance. One was Young Adult fiction that agitated me, and the other a tepid category romance.

Graphic Novel Memoir

One of the most striking books I read this year was Vannak Anan Prum’s The Dead Eye and the Deep Blue Sea, a deeply upsetting story of the author’s years trafficked as a slave. He spent 3 years at sea on a Thai fishing trawler as indentured labour where he witnessed murders and torture on his “floating prison”. He managed to escape just to find himself sold as a plantation slave in Malaysia before finally getting home many months later. Vannak writes that “my physical injuries hurt less, but my memory is a wound that will never heal”. His graphic novel style is strikingly unlike other graphic novel memoirs I’ve read. Vannak has an image per page with rich narrative though sparse on dialogue. His artistry depicting the torture on the boats is startling and it now makes me deeply consider the source of my fish. With 40 million people in slavery today, this memoir was a sombre reminder of the difficult lives that people lead and our personal responsibility to not support this industry and to demand our retailers have ethical supply chains. 😕

Non-fiction essays and articles

My year has been full of reading essays and news articles. My oldest son gifted me a New Yorker subscription which has been quite interesting. However, my two favourite essays this year were published elsewhere. Briallen Hopper’s Sirenland moved me to my core as did Hannah Davis writing about her long haul Covid experience. Both essays have hovered in my mind, with an ambulance siren, the sound of coughing, or the notification from family of their suffering and loss, bringing back to my mind the strength of Hopper and Davis’s unique pieces of writing.

I continue to adore Humans of New York stories whose human element is so touching that it is a reminder that kindness amongst people continues to exist even in the most violent of days. My eldest bought me the Humans book for Christmas and I look forward to reading it. I also derived a lot of happiness from watching Schitt’s Creek which filled me with joy and tears and warm, fuzzy feels which sent me to reading fanfiction for the first time in years.

I took deep comfort from my friend, Dr. Tilly Hinton’s sublime storytelling platform where I was fortunate to read at two of her thirteen Storytime for the Apocalypse events. I was even more fortunate to listen to some incredible selections from all the other readers, and to meet so many people in the informal chat after the readings – I feel as though Tilly has an innate ability to draw from her participants fluid and casual conversations in the digital sphere which felt natural and comfortable.

I felt relieved seeing people around the world unify in the Black Lives Matter marches, in celebrating Biden’s electoral win. But overall, I feel the weight of worries from all the overwhelming clusterfuck of political arsehole bigots in this world who kept me from deep, immersive reading. And yes, I do blame them all, every fucking single one of them.

Non-fiction books

Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu: Black Seeds – Agriculture or Accident reframed everything I thoughtI knew and have been trying to learn about our continent’s First Nation people. A rethinking of precolonial Australia challenging their perception as hunter-gatherers. Pascoe shows this continent’s people’s sophisticated agricultural and sustainable land & water practices which included tilling of the land, fire farming, fisheries and aquaculture – which in 2019 received a UNESCO heritage listing as Budj Bim is older than the Egyptian pyramids – as well as their architecture, landscaping and engineering knowledge. He does this through the use of the diaries & journals of early white settlers for his evidence.

The point that had never occurred to me and fills me with awe, is when Pascoe highlights that the over 200 nations that made up pre-colonial Australia, were the longest peaceful pan-Continental society in the history of the world and that finding a way to understand how this peace was maintained for so many milleniums is imperative for finding a way forward in a world that seems to be constantly at war. I listened intently to Pascoe’s self-narration of his book, often doing loops and loops around my neighbourhood so that I didn’t need to stop half way through a chapter. This book was beyond anything I have read before. It is an outstanding book that should be compulsory reading in Australia.

Swimming

As a swimming obsessive, not in a competitive way at all but in a human lilo floating over the gleaming blue, I am always seeking calm water to immerse myself in. I read several books on swimming pools this year, and I found myself enchanted by Caroline Clements and Dillon Seitchik-Reardon’s Places We Swim in Sydney. My youngest son bought me this gorgeous coffee table book for Christmas because he knows me well enough to not even attempt to give me fiction. Many of my favourite swimming spots appear in this book and I have decided to try to visit most of the pools – some natural and some purpose designed – throughout 2021. However, I will taking a pass on the 11km return trip to Tahmoor Canyon especially Mermaid Pool with its “no safe entry or exit” requiring a rock jump to get in and a rope climb to get out. Just no! I like my swims to be effortless and free from exertion.

This book is beautifully presented though the matt paper stock and muted colours don’t do justice to the brilliant blues of Sydney’s sky and water. The access information is very useful but some of the suggested food pitstops suggest the authors lack true local knowledge especially in Western Sydney with the ridiculous suggestion that a visit to Cabarita Swimming Centre can be combined with a lunch at Pyrmont fish markets 13 kilometres/ 8 miles away. This rankled when most of the pools in Sydney’s East had swim/food suggestions in the same suburb. Apart from these minor irritations, this book is wonderful and gave me a lot of happiness reading in the last week of the year.

Reading in 2021

I make no plans for reading this year. This past year has left me feeling exhausted. Though I submitted my thesis 4 weeks ago, I have yet to be able to pick up a novel. I don’t have any reading plans at this point. The horror that is the US coup, and the accelerated speed that Covid is spreading in Europe and the Americas has left me doomscrolling. I have listed my goal as 21 books only in reflection of the year. Hopefully, there will be moments of global peace allowing me some quiet to lose myself in a book. And if that fails, I will just go for a swim instead.