archytas's reviews
1677 reviews

This set of interlinked short stories hovers somewhere between novel and collection. with a focus on three generations of women, and glimpses of a fourth, Darragh explores how our past, our genetics and our cultures shape us. 
Some of the individual outings are very strong - I identified, unsurprisingly, strongest with the Gen X ones. It was also compelling to see the different ways that these generations viewed and dealt with each other. The characters on the 'side', sisters especially, were engagingly drawn.
However, I thought it lacked enough momentum in overall arc or plot to entirely work as a novel, finding a drift in focus in the mid section, and the themes started to feel weighed down a bit.
I will be very interested to see what Darragh does next.

Dalrymple stated aim in this book is to revive an understanding of how significant India has been as a global power, especially east towards Arabia, North Africa and Europe, and west towards South-East Asia. This is largely achieved through his coverage of the development and spread of Buddhism and Hinduism, with a bit of Sanskrit, and the significance of numeral notation.
The book is interesting, but perhaps because I didn't come in unconvinced, I wasn't entirely sold on the structure. I found myself wanting to read more specific books on those specific things - especially the religions, where the rapid cultural conversion is fascinating, but I'm not sure coming out I entirely understand why.
I have come out with a new list of places I really, really want to visit though, so that was totally worth it.

This is an extremely moving book, the emotion heightened by the blunt cynicism of the narrator, which Tokkarczuk masterfully unpeels as the novel wears on, to show us a vulnerable heart. The book is funny when it needs to be funny, and always slightly knowing, and yet so full of love and empathy that the slow reveal is something you sadly know to be true, rather than are shocked by. And lest this seem to depressing, Tokarzuk serves us up a final full of mercy and a good dash of hope - as happy as a book this sharp could be.
And yet, despite this very specific story, it is a book with a huge amount to say about what it is to love, on a personal and a societal level, and what we can move past and what we can't. This isn't a story of who we should be, but it is a story of perhaps who we are.

This is a set of beautifully crafted short stories, with unforgettable characters, each of which stands entirely on its own as a little peek into humanity. It also works as a raw exploration of the reverberating impacts of violence, and specifically, of the actions of Ivan Milat, whose violence, arrest and conviction were a seismic event in Australian culture.
This is fiction, the chronologies have been changed*. The title inverts the highway numbers from the Hume (M31) in a winking nod that this is a mirror version, an imagining. Milat's doppelganger Joe Biga is not Milat. Nor does the killer ever assume center stage.  Some of Macfarlane's stories examine those on the periphery of his violence - the police officer who worked on his arrest; his wife's family, his mother, his neighbours, a brother still haunted by his disappeared sibling and a teenage girl who will grow up to escape him. The stories are set in different times. In three of these, where we meet characters with the violence still in their futures, the stories function as almost entirely stand alone adventures. It is only through our knowledge of the anthology, subtle connections between the stories - a name dropped here, a date there - that the darkness shades the story. In probably my favourite story Hostess, a twist ending provides the "this is what was going on all along" moment, but of course we know that this isn't the real reveal at all. It should be pointed out that while some of these characters share superficial similarities with the Milat case, they are not those people. These are fully imagined and realised characters, with engaging inner lives. In Demolition, for example, Biga's next door neighbour tries to fend off a journalist on the day 'his house' is being demolished, but is consumed with regret and longing for the lover who lived there when they were young. 
But other stories focus on those swept up in the cultural moment - true crime podcasters; rubberneckers, the actor who uses the telemovie to gain career gravitas and in the 1990s, a young women terrified her boyfriend is secretly the killer. Some of these - including a politician who shares Biga's name morosely cooking sausages on an election day he knows will not be his - are played partly for laughs, but never without realism (well, except for the pollie cooking sausages which is not how Democracy Sausage works at all, that annoyed me). There is snark at the edges of some, especially the very American podcast story, one about a big-city couple who dine out on their stories of meeting one of the victims (and the couple who in turn dine out on knowing them) and Tourists, about the rubbernecking impulse - but it always weighted, these characters don't like parts of themselves and juggle their empathy with their own sense of drama and importance. The only story I could not bear was Abroad, which includes a ghost story told at Halloween and I will confess to skimming past the story, knowing that the macabre-for-thrills was more than I could cope with in the face of the all-too-real horror I know of from the Milat case. McFarlane utilises our own knowledge to bring the dark, she does not put it on the page. (This has led, I found, to some interesting reviews from the US release of the book, where the case is not well known, and the book reads with less gravitas - it holds up).
There are other themes present through the stories. There is an enduring theme of restlessness, of characters perpetually on the move. Travel anecdotes abound, and at the other end of the scale, locals defend their turf - two older women grump at new arrivals at their open air Sydney baths (this is a real thing);  the locals cold-shoulder the new arrival at work. As someone who came of age during the era of the 'backpacker' murders, it felt as if McFarlane's themes paid tribute to the backpackers themselves. The book also explores the way we create and tell stories - how these shape our individual and collective realities.
As you can tell if you have read this far - I liked this rather a lot. I will be rather shattered if it doesn't appear on the awards circuit. McFarlane's books just keep getting better, and I really think this is a book which should be part of our national canon. Great literature helps us to understand who we are and who we have been, and there are few books which have captured the scope of Australia in the way that this one does.

*It did unreasonably distract me that Biga was born in the 1960s, a good 20 years younger than Milat, but described as being old at his death when he must have been in his 50s. I have struggled to let this go. I will get there.

I read this book when jet lagged, and now coming to review it, my memories of the details are a little hazy. I'd call this ironic but that isn't what ironic means. Grimace worthy, yes.
What I do remember is that a) there was a wealth of detail on how to better align your circadian rhythms, b) it was a little terrifying to realise the impact of indoor life and our unhelpful approach to lighting* is, c) Americans still start schools at ludicrous hours of the morning and should just stop and we shouldn't need evidence on anything for that, it is just dumb d) Peeples, like many experts deeply engaged with their subject, can see cicardian disruption at the heart of most social ills - at times perhaps in isolation from other things. e) At times, Peeples seems to want to return to some kind of idealised relationship with our natural clocks - and one based on static hours, rather than changes with the seasons. Humans, however, did not really evolve on the equator - I thought this was odd.
Would recommend, but maybe try reading it when appropriately rested.

*Nowhere near bright enough during the day; far too bright and far too blue at night. 

This is a handy book for anyone who wants to arm up with evidence around why the logging of old growth forests continues to be a very bad thing. Lindenmayer covers the economics, ecology, impact on climate change and impact on wellbeing of the industry. 
This is not a book which will convince the unconverted, however. Lindenmayer pulls no punches, and his combative style combined with a tendency to self-cite a lot, will probably mean this book is destined for the shelves of those already in agreement.  This also applies in some of his frustrations delivered at writers such as Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe.
His endorsement of Victor Steffenson's work has reminded me I should get around to reading that one.

What Carmody has been doing brilliantly since Obernetwyn is world building, creating a mystery around it that makes you want to keep reading to learn more. In the decades since, she's also honed how to write teenagers naturally and in ways that model relationship skills and social responsibility. Which is a way of saying that Comes the Night is a highly enjoyable read, hard book to put down, and peppered with characters you desperately want to be okay.
I often - okay maybe always - feel with her books that the third act plotting isn't at the level that the rest has me hoping for. It is not bad, it is just that it isn't the stupendous payoff that all that great teasing in the first half has me set up for.
But if for nothing else, it is so nice to have a novel set in Canberra - a futuristic Canberra no less - which manages to capture the vibe of the city in a very dystopian way. And it is nice to have a dystopian novel that acknowledges the likely trade offs ahead of humanity. 
As a lucid dreamer - one who developed the capability as a way to manage nightmares - I also both appreciated the acknowledgement of lucid dreaming and then eye rolled as it all turned into something else entirely.

Once again, an eclectic collection of science writing. This year's was a little less climate change focused, although James Purtill's bleakly short "Western Australia had its hottest summer ever, but climate change barely made the news" may be partly why science writers are no longer motivated to write pieces they feel will exhaust them with misery and disappear without a trace.
But some of the 'lighter'pieces here are really interesting - Belinda Smith on how chip flavours are made; Bianca Nogrady on how coffee flavours are made and perhaps the best "how it is done"piece, Matthew Ward Agius on solar challenges and what they are really achieving.
Others cover work that gives you hope, especially India Shackleford on Indigiemogis and language revival. And there are a few nicely thoughtprovoking big picture pieces, including Tabitah Carvan on how the wild creates our home.

Each of the seven chapters in this book was structured to uncover the kernels of truth underlying seven myths about the creative brain, as well as the chain of events that led to specific narratives being propagated. In adopting this approach, my direct aim was to inform readers about the bigger and—dare I say—more exciting stories surrounding these dominant ideas.
This book is much better than I think the blurb gives you to understand. Abraham explores the different ways in which the brain might support creative endeavour, and debunks even more.
Key lessons here include that a lot more is being claimed than is known; that creativity has a wide range of causal factors, which also have a wide range of brain functions, and my favourite because it is so rarely understood in this field, that you also can’t ignore the impact of socioeconomic factors. In talking about the association of mental illness with professional artists and writers, for example, Abraham tartly points out that the association of professional artists with poverty, insecure employment and denial of health care definately has a bigger impact than any question of associated brain wiring.
Recommended.

This book had been languishing on my to-read pile until my partner finally chose the Leftovers from our shows-we-should-have-never-watched list, which had the scene-stealing Emily Meade in a bit part, which reminded me of the engrossing Deuce (in which Meade put an unforgettable turn as a porn star), which in turn reminded me of this book as the second unforgettable performance in the series by Maggie Gyllenhaal was as Candy, a character loosely modelled on Royalle, so I packed the book for a beach long weekend read, and yes, that is exactly how my brain works.
The first thing to note is that loose was very much the modelling for Simon and Pelecanos in writing the Deuce. Their Candy was a streetwalker who finds art through porn. Kamensky's book reveals a very different story - a New York survivor who immerses herself in the queer and alternative theatre scene in San Franscisco, and turns to porn as her theatre career falters and her heroin habit grows, Royalle brought her past to porn, and was certainly not a creation of it.
Kamensky weaves Royalle's story alongside social, economic and political analysis of the sweeping years between the 1960s and the 2010s. As a historian who lived through the "feminist sex wars"of the 1980s and 1990s and now teaches this to bewildered, arch Gen Zs, she is both invested in how ferocious these debates became and capable of seeing, in hindsight, how stupid and ultimately useless it all was. This is a perspective I could empathise with, including the wincing at how much something that mattered so much might now seem so ... quaint. 
Kamesky had great material to work with. Royalle kept a daily diary her whole life, and this archive is now safely stored in a library, providing the primary material for the book.
Royalle I was also aware of as a 1990s figure, an icon frequently held up by the sex positive feminists (of which I was one) who wanted to prove that sexuality could have feminist expression, often simplified to feminist porn was possible. This version of Royalle appears in the book, but often as a fragile shell - a lot of bravado, backed underneath by a failing business model, swept up in the general whirlwind of the end of the era of profitable pornography in the face of the internet. Many aspects of Royalle's life that Kamensky has brought out challenge the simplistic narratives. A sexually abuse, pedophiliac father, clear lifelong anguish from her abandonment as a baby by her teenage mother, fall all to neatly into stereotypes of traumatised sex workers. Royalle refused to either erase her trauma or her efforts to be more than it, nor to bow to those who then argued that it negated her capacity to choose her own life. While Kamensky at times is clearly frustrated by the ego of her subject, she draws with great respect on the enormity of what she achieved - not only a life lived on her own terms, but one that demanded to try creation of a safer space.
In leaving the mainstream porn industry, Royalle did several significant things. Firstly, she built and celebrated a community of women who demanded a space for ethical sexually explicit entertainment, and refused to sit in the boxes porn had created for them. These women, which included Annie Sprinkle, continued to meet regularly throughout Royalle's life, and organised her funeral and celebrated her life. More than any specific initiative, this community feels like a huge achievement in an industry designed to disempower and marginalise women.
Secondly, Royalle created safe sex initiatives and programs on set for her performers, setting a total ban on sex without condoms, insisting on - and paying for - regular testing of her performers and providing safe sex education resources on set, and then throughout the industry. She was the first producer to do this, and was out of step with practice for some time until others caught up. It is clear in the book that this comes through her ongoing participation in queer circles, and the devastating loss of so many of her oldest friends in the pandemic. But at time when she is financially struggling, it more than any other component, stands for her ethical centre and willingness to model a different way of doing business. It saved lives. She also made films showing safe sex techniques. (It is notable that Deuce omits entirely the community orientation of Royalle, and how much everything she did was with others in some way or another)
The book is slow and was worth savouring. There is a pathos to it, which is mirrored in Royalle's own diary as porn slips into an ever-escalating violence and mock realism, while also becoming less and less lucrative for the performers involved. Her own videos, based in couples scenarios and arthouse shots, have proven to have long lives - contrasting sharply with the novelty drive of the rest of the industry - but too late to matter. But the book also celebrates her achievements as a beacon for a different way, a woman who provides still evidence, that this was neither inevitable nor what most women wanted.