Sarcasm is an adjusted stress reaction.

First, I finished reading the Succession scripts, and they remained excellent.

I've been a Greg Skeptic for a couple of seasons, and was unsurprised to realise that by the end of season 1, the character on paper was far more complex than Nicholas Braun was conveying. He's a bit of a one note actor (that note: gormless), and I think by season 4, the writers understood that he was the weak link in the cast.

Second, I read Burn It Down by Maureen Ryan, her long-awaited deep dive into professional abuse in Hollywood. Of particular interest are the sections focusing on genre television -- the respective chapters on Lost and Sleepy Hollow, one that examines franchises in general, and a brief discussion of fandoms directing criticism and abuse at the wrong people -- The 100 fandom was cited as an example there, targeting a lowly production assistant because she was available, rather than the producers who actually made decisions.

The Lost chapter was excerpted in Vanity Fair, but I found the Sleepy Hollow stuff far more shocking -- I knew that Nicole Beharie had been labelled "difficult" and effectively blacklisted after she left that series, but I did not know there was a baseless rumour claiming she bit someone -- a claim so audacious, it seems impossible that anyone would take it at face value.

I very much enjoyed Burn It Down, and only take issue with Ryan's claim that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is an example of good disability representation. (Tell me you're able-bodied without telling me, etc.)

After that, I had trouble settling down to a book. I started These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong, but after months of anticipation, I realised I wasn't in the mood. Like Six of Crows, it's a "YA" novel about characters who would make more sense if they were in their 20s or older, and also, I do not need to have the Kuomintang explained to me. (That might just be me, though, the Chinese Civil War and Revolution were a hyperfixation when I was 15.) So I returned it to the library, and will try again another time.

Now I'm reading The Storm Before The Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan. I finally started watching HBO's Rome, which is both very good (in its depiction of the politics and the male characters and the masculine side of Roman culture) and unbelievably bad (every single woman). Unfortunately for everyone I know, my inner Classicist has been awakened, and so I'm rebuilding my general knowledge before I start doing deep dives into specific (female) lives.

Also, if HBO wants a 40-episode series about the Gracchi from the perspective of a Carthaginian slave, they should make a deal with the WGA then call me. I am now practically an expert in how not to be a showrunner, so I reckon I'll do an okay job.

The Younger Wife by Sally Hepworth

Hepworth is a Melbourne writer who has achieved international bestseller status with low-key domestic thrillers. She's compared to Liane Moriarty a lot, but her work is less satirical, and mostly focuses on dysfunctional upper middle-class families in Melbourne's leafy south-eastern suburbs.

This specific dysfunctional upper middle-class family consists of two adult daughters in their thirties; their mother, who has advanced Alzheimers; and their father, a successful heart surgeon who has just announced he is divorcing their mother to marry an interior decorator who is the same age as his daughters.

SHENANIGANS ENSUE, if you count domestic abuse, gaslighting, kleptomania and recovery from sexual assault SHENANIGANS. There are also adorable children and a sweet romance based largely on food puns, but this a pretty serious book wearing a cute rom-com hat. The juxtaposition can be a bit jarring, but I like that Hepworth trusts her audience with this material, and I think it's important that domestic violence isn't only depicted in gritty, realistic srs bzns dramas. Hepworth is also acutely aware of class, which I appreciate; I'm a sucker for books about upper-middle class Melburnians having dramas, but sometimes you get the impression the author doesn't know any other type of people exist.

Does My Body Offend You by Mayra Cuevas and Marie Marquardt

This actually might be historical, given that it is very specifically set in 2017 -- one of the heroines has moved from Puerto Rico to Florida in the wake of Hurricane Maria. Badly sunburned, she turns up to school wearing a modest tunic but no bra, and is humiliated by the school's response. But she also meets a brash white girl, who promises they can change the world. Or at least their school's dress code.

YES, IT'S ANOTHER DRESS CODE NOVEL. I went to a high school with an unreasonably strict uniform policy (girls were restricted to wearing skirts, shorts or culottes; I wore dress pants for my final two years, and to this day, girls are explicitly banned from wearing dress pants because of it) so I love a dress code novel.

Does My Body Offend You follows in the footsteps of a lot of dress code novels and other "teenage girls become activist" stories, and as the authors note, it's a genre that more often than not centres whiteness. Honestly, so does Does My Body Offend You, given that one of the protagonists has an arc about unlearning her white saviour instinct, but it's executed well. I really cared about the characters and their situation, and I appreciated that it handled a lot of issues, like slut culture and victim blaming, with more nuance than I normally expect from YA.

Honestly, I need to start doing these posts by book.

ANYWAY, the other weekend I had another 22-hour work trip to Sydney. As usual, I wildly over-estimated the amount of time I'd have and books I'd need to take, and loaded my Libby app with a bunch. Which I am, of course, still working through to this day.

(This time I did get a chance to visit Kinokuniya, where I bought one book and took note of a bunch more, and also eavesdropped on some teens who were wondering if Famous Local YA Author A and Famous Local YA Author B were really friends or just doing it for the 'gram. I didn't want to be a creep and interrupt them, but Authors A and B were delighted when I told them about it later. If you are one of those teens and happen to stumble across this: they are really friends.)

Books read in Sydney: 

Class Act by Jerry Craft

A sequel to the earlier graphic novel The New Kid, this follows Jordan and his friends for another term, and this time delves into their relationship with their rich, white friend. I thought it successfully avoided a tedious "RICH WHITE KIDS HAVE PROBLEMS TOO, YOU KNOW" moral in favour of a more nuanced "everyone has stuff going on in their lives that we don't see on the outside" message. I loved it, I cannot wait for the library to provide me with the third book in the trilogy.

Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells

I'm always behind on Murderbot on account of having to wait for Macmillan to release their ebooks to libraries. This novella came out in 2021, and here I am reading it now.

It had exactly what I needed (bots, murder), following Murderbot as it adapts to life on Preservation Station and investigates a murder, mainly using skills it picked up watching media. If you've read Murderbot, you know the deal -- but I will note that I often have trouble following the action in this series, and I did not have that problem at all here.

I found the paperbacks at Kinokuniya and thought about buying at least one, but paying $27 for a novella just feels ... wrong.

Leviathan by John Birmingham

When I was a first-year uni student in 2000, it was the done thing among us older millennials to read Birmingham's sharehouse books. I guess we all wanted to pick up tips on How To Be Students? Mainly what we learned was that Gen Xers had it way better than us, with unlimited Austudy, cheap rent and no need to get a part-time job to pay for textbooks.

At the same time, Birmingham was bringing out Leviathan, his first 'serious' book. It's a history of Sydney in the style of New Journalism, which mostly means a lot of jumping between topics and nothing about women. I'm not joking -- he says in the afterword that he got to the end and realised he had forgotten to write about women and gay people, two demographics who loom fairly large in Sydney's history. But apparently there was no opportunity to fix that? 

A lot of the stuff in Leviathan was already familiar to me -- you're going to cover one woman and it's Caroline "little children study her in primary school" Chisolm? -- but I particularly enjoyed the chapters on the anti-landlord demonstrations in the Depression and the union-led green bans in the '70s. I kind of feel like Australians don't know enough about our history of anti-authoritarian protest. But also, a whole chapter on the green bans, and the murder of Juanita Nielsen only gets a passing mention? Birmo. Do better.

Blood Debts by Terry J. Benton-Walker (current read)

FIRST OF ALL, go look up Terry J. Benton-Walker and bask for a moment in the glory of his face. Writers are meant to be puffy indoor pets, squinting at the screen or into the sun, and yet here is Benton-Walker with his flawless bone structure and perfectly sculpted beard and eyebrows.

SECOND, this is a contemp YA fantasy set in New Orleans, in an America where Republicans seek to repress magic, white people want to appropriate the uniquely Black generational magic, and Democrats are having it both ways. The protagonists, twin brother and sister, investigate the attempted murder of their mother and the 1989 lynching of their grandparents after accusations they had used magic to murder the white mayor's daughter.

There is a LOT happening in this book (there is also Mean Girl Drama, a sweet gay romance, and all the adults have their own stories and agendas) so it's a bit more involved than the average YA novel. I'm enjoying it immensely and hope it sticks the landing.

Only finished one book this week: The Yoga Manifesto by Nadia Gilani. This was promoted as an examination of cultural appropriation, commercialisation and exploitation in yoga, which it is, but it is also Gilani's memoir, covering her relationships and struggles with eating disorders and addiction. This made it a bit disjointed, and though Gilani writes well about her life, it's not precisely what I thought I was signing up for. (The format -- a series of essays -- doesn't help with the disjointed feeling, of course.)

As an overview of Issues In Yoga, it was more satisfying. Although -- Gilani downplays and outright dismisses the links between yoga and Hinduism. Which makes sense: she is British-Pakistani and from a Muslim family. And she is far more educated in South Asian history and culture than me. Nevertheless, her claim that yoga dates from an ancient past before the subcontinent had been touched by outside cultures kiiiiind of raised my eyebrows. It might be true, but I've seen "actually, X is GOOD and PURE and UNTAINTED BY X" come up too many times in historical studies for it to be anything but a red flag.

Overall, I enjoyed it, and it very much made me want to get back into yoga, but it wasn't quite the book I expected.

I did start another one -- Foul Lady Fortune by Chloe Gong. Gong is a Chinese-New Zealander who writes YA Shakespearean retellings with magic, set in China in the '20s and '30s. This is extremely my jam. And I very much enjoyed the few pages that I read, but the copy I picked up from the library was a large format paperback and weighed over 500g. That is too much for my delicate hands or bad shoulder! I've gone back and reserved her first book in ebook form from the library instead.

A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

In which a group of libertarians attempt to take over a small town in New Hampshire and turn it into a low-government paradise. The result? Bears.

Only not really, because the bears were a problem before the libertarians turned up, and in fact, the resident who most encouraged the bears (by feeding them grain and doughnuts) doesn't seem to have had any political affiliation at all.

I've been keen to read this since it came out in 2020, and thank goodness for the Queens Public Library saving me from spending actual money on it. Hongotz-Hetling writes with a sarcastic, cynical tone, like he's been listening to a lot of Behind the Bastards. Unfortunately, a tone which works in a podcast is less effective in a book, and honestly he comes across as a bit of an arsehole who is determined to make the facts fit his hypothesis, but who also doesn't seem capable or willing to look at how the issues he's writing about can be applied to a wider situation, ie, the entire United States under Trump.

The main thing I took away is that, when the state government did finally acknowledge that there was a bit of a bear issue happening -- after a woman was mauled in her own home -- they framed it like a police shooting. "Bear-involved attack". Soooooooo ... it's not just the libertarian incomers who were the problem, eh? 

If You Could See the Sun by Ann Liang

I recently said that I was done with American YA, but then I immediately had to make exceptions for "Australian author published in the US" and "my friends".

Not that Liang is my friend, but she is Chinese-Australian and I am sending her GOOD VIBES and also ordering everything else she has written, because I loved this book -- a YA fantasy set in an elite Beijing boarding school. Alice learns that her parents cannot afford the fees for her final semester, and then turns invisible. Which is a problem, except maybe she can ... monetise it? With the help of her worst enemy, her unreasonably hot and attractive classmate Henry? 

Alice is a fairly delightful heroine, which is to say she's unapologetically ambitious and not entirely certain of her moral centre. She's Team Macbeth Did Nothing Wrong, and her new venture takes her from the small-scale -- deleting nudes off a boy's phone -- to the outright criminal. And she's okay with that. Right? 

A friend of mine complained that the invisibility goes unexplained (which I think is a trope of Chinese fantasy?) and that there's more romance than ethical quandary, but I felt like there was sufficient quandary, and also a very relatable arc as Alice slowly realises that many of her classmates are actually likeable people who could have been her friends if she hadn't spent all her school years studying and resenting them. (You don't need to be a scholarship student at an elite boarding school to go through this experience!)

And I liked the romance, which Alice thinks is enemies-to-lovers, whereas Henry is like, "Wait, are we not friends? You don't like me? You hate me? Oh. Well, now my feelings are hurt."

It's very Americanised (I do not think Alice needed to specify for the reader that a "southern accent" means "southern China" not "the Deep South"), but the privileges of private school students and the gap in opportunity between private and public schools felt very familiar to me as an Australian.

Liang's other book (so far) is a fake dating story, also set at an elite Beijing school. I am super into this milieu and cannot wait to read it.

The Quarter Storm ended with the heroine basically going, "Yes, the entire institution of the NOPD is corrupt, and my cop ex-boyfriend is a bigot and a bully, but he's also a poor little meow meow and I love him."

And, like, people are complicated and I certainly don't want to whitesplain to a Black author how she should write about the police, but I had trouble discerning any redeeming qualities in that character. So I'm not gonna keep going with the series, the cognitive dissonance was too much.

Am now reading the new Watergate book, and have so far concluded that (a) Nixon was extremely on the spectrum, not the representation we need but the representation we deserve, etc; (b) it is a crime that there is no film about the Chennault Affair starring Michelle Yeoh; (c) Henry Kissinger is not a good person. Groundbreaking, I know.

For reference, here is my 2021 reading round-up

What's notable is that I read 95 books in 2021 ... and I read 95 books in 2022. It's a sweet spot, I guess.

( This is long and kind of nerdy )

Spoilers: he was not a great guy.

I need something lighter and shorter as a palate cleanser, and then I have a First Nations mystery novel lined up, but if anyone can recommend a good biography of Ivan the Terrible, I'm open to suggestions!

(Apparently Stalin was a big admirer of Ivan, which I cannot help but see as a RED FLAG. Though in fairness to the Politburo, they were surrounded by literal red flags at every turn.)

I had to go to Sydney for work -- I was in the city for less than 20 hours, and it turns out that traveling for work is not quite as glam as I have always imagined, and I didn't even get enough free time for a walk to Circular Quay to gawk at the Opera House. (I am seriously thinking of being outrageously extravagant and flying up for a weekend over the summer. I lived in Sydney as a small child, but have only been back a couple of times since, and don't tell Melbourne, but I like it a lot.)

Anyway, I put Stalin down for the trip and instead embarked on my latest reread of the Benjamin January series. And realised, for the first time, the significance of the thanks to Octavia Butler in the endnotes: the reason the series is so good at capturing Black history -- despite being written by a white woman -- is that Hambly had one hell of a sensitivity reader.

In the hour I wasn't working or sleeping, I ate some outstanding tacos, and then decided I had just enough time for a flying visit to Kinokuniya. I knew from their website that they had a YA novel I've had my eye on for a while, which is otherwise very hard to get in Australia, and they had the sequel. So I jumped on a train, went one stop, did not get lost in the labyrinthine subterranean mall (one of the things I like about Sydney is that it goes down as well as up), and found my way to Kinokuniya, where my book was waiting for me.

It had. The smallest print. I have ever seen. I have okay eyesight for a myopic forty-year-old, but I could hardly read this. I mean, if you want to stop adults from reading YA, this is the way to do it.

And, of course, I had no time for a leisurely browse to find something else, so I left empty-handed. A sad story.

(The AU Kindle store has the first book in the duology, but not the sequel, so I'm holding off for now.)

Back to Stalin for the time being, but I got a Nigerian boarding school novel from the library on the weekend, that will be my reward.

I love that Zero has by default become the ship's doctor, and they are doing a very good job, but at the same time ... you know how some people prefer their gynaecologist to have a uterus? I think I'd prefer that my doctor has a body. And a medical degree.