Sarcasm is an adjusted stress reaction.

Round-ups from previous years: 2021, 2022, 2023

This year I kept a media-tracking spreadsheet in Google Docs, and also a paper reading journal. Which sounds extremely wanky, because it is, but I enjoyed the tactile aspect of creating layouts, pasting print-outs of covers, and keeping track of things in handwriting. Also I got to use stickers. Here are a couple of sample pages:


I've already started a fresh journal for 2025, this time in a small ring binder to avoid certain annoying problems, ie, the build-up of thickness from pasting the covers into the same spot over and over again.

Okay, the stats.

Total books logged: 138 (the secret to my success: sprained ankle, broken ankle, covid, ongoing ankle problems and plantar fasciitis have made it more likely that I will stay in the office and read at lunch instead of taking a walk)
DNFs: I didn't keep close track, but a standout is a YA quartet I abandoned 20% into the third book

By target audience (age)

• Adult - 86
• Children - 1
• Young Adult - 42
• Middle Grade - 9

And my favourite category, by genre and audience

• Contemporary (adult): 7
• Contemporary (YA): 10
• Contemporary (middle grade): 2

What's great about "contemporary" is that it's really a setting, not a genre -- so these 19 books encompassed everything from Māori literary fiction to two books which are arguably thrillers and now I'm wondering if I hit the wrong option in the dropdown menu.

• Fantasy: (adult): 8
• Fantasy (YA): 11
• Fantasy (middle grade): 4

Other than Christelle Dabos, I only read three YA fantasy novels from authors who were new to me -- and two were the quartet I wound up DNFing in book 3. (Respectfully, I think that if you are writing for young adults, you should not have more graphic on-page rape than George R. R. Martin.) It feels like the bubble has truly burst.

Contemporary mystery and thriller

• Adult: 17
• YA: 10

It feels like exciting things are happening in the contemp mystery genre right now, especially YA. Especially if, like me, you don't draw too much of a distinction between a "mystery" and a "thriller".

Science fiction

• Adult: 6
• YA: 6

Again, I feel like the YA SF bubble has burst, largely under the weight of too many Hunger Games imitations. Or maybe it just seems that way because I reread the Hunger Games novels.

Adult SF is where I found most of my DNFs this year, as I tried and failed to read more indie SF.

Non-fiction: 35

History was the winner here in terms of numbers, but for quality, I read a bunch of books about organisational and corporate shenanigans at Boeing, NASA, Twitter and Qantas, and those were the standouts.

Author stats

Australian authors: 18% - this is much lower than in previous years, but I made up for it by reading more widely throughout the world, with more books by New Zealanders and Nigerians, and what I think must be the first YA novel I've read by an Argentinian
Authors of colour: 26% - down from last year's 29%, and doing even worse in terms of "30% feels like equality if you're not marginalised"
Women: 67%, I do NOT need to make a deliberate effort to read books by women. Also three were books by trans women, and I need a better way of tracking that than putting an asterisk in the gender box in my reading journal
Trans and non-binary authors: 4%

The really nerdy stats

Library loans: 73% - I tracked spending for the first time this year, and spent a total of $479 on books, plus US$50 for my Queens Library membership.
Ebooks: 76% of my reading was ebooks, plus I read one (1) audiobook. Which is a format I do not care for, but it was the only way to get Black Against Empire from the library. (A stranger on Bsky tried to neg me by saying it's weird that I would have preferred to skim the chapters on Marxist theory, and I'm sorry, I think finding Marxist theory boring is a pretty common position.)

TV stats

For the first time, I tracked TV watching via spreadsheet. I can't tell you down to the minute how many hours of TV I watched, but I watched 69 different series (nice), most in English and most made in the United States.

Five days ago, I posted this to Facebook: 

OKAY SO. Last year skygiants posted about the Mirror Visitor quartet, a set of four (obvs) French YA fantasy novels about an arranged marriage between a young woman whose superpowers are reading the history of objects with her fingers and travelling through mirrors, and a man whose superpower is his complete lack of charisma. (Also he has perfect recall and can psychically extend his nervous system to cause other people pain, but mostly he is known for his awful personality. I love him.)

Naturally I was intrigued, even though I hate the French, so I put a hold on the first book at the library. It came in last month, followed quickly by the rest of the quartet, and I finished book 4 yesterday.

I loved it, I'm low-key obsessed with it, I do not think the ending worked, and it failed in a way I completely understand. For, you see, when Noted Australian YA Author Lili Wilkinson read my manuscript late in 2022, she was like, "This is great, but the end falls apart because you have one conspiracy too many and you're introducing all these new elements and characters which could be a whole separate novel in their own right. You need to simplify."

Everyone needs a Lili Wilkinson in their life, but maybe especially Christelle Dabos. Book 1 and 2 are perfect. Book 3 takes us into a whole new setting, introduces new characters and new mysteries, and it's ... quite good.

(I figured it would go something like this; ALSO Dreamwidth's image hosting is bad and should feel bad.)

Book 4 needed to bring all those elements together into a cohesive whole, and I don't think it worked. The characters we fell in love with in the first two books are sidelined, an extremely important new character from book 3 is all but gone in book 4, and one minor supporting character from book 3 is revealed to be extremely important after all, but in a way that made me go, "Wait, what?"

ALSO and most unforgivably, in my opinion, having taken three whole books for Ophelia and Thorn to reach a rapprochement, they're once again separated for most of book 4, and ( (spoilers for the end) )

I don't hate the ending, and I don't regret investing this much time and energy into the books -- Dabos does some especially cool stuff with disability, which almost makes up for the relentless and tedious heterosexuality -- but I'm not inclined to go out and buy the whole quartet in paperback, the way I was a few weeks ago. Though I will say, I think it may reward rereading at some future time.

(I also have a lot of beef with the translator, who keeps using words like "oriental" and "retard" in ways which are technically correct but also completely oblivious to the fact that these words are no longer acceptable in English. If not for the extremely canny metaphor for what is currently called AI, I'd wonder if these books hadn't fallen through a portal from the 1960s.)

Why did I read a 900-page potboiler from 1948? THERE'S BACKSTORY, OKAY So first of all, my flatmate and I were interested in watching Masters of the Air on AppleTV at the end of the month, but we were like, "Well, first we need watch Band of Brothers and The Pacific." I know some of you are in War Fandom and these are your canons, and I totally get the appeal of BoB, that was great. Like, it took a while, but eventually I could tell most of the men apart, and in any case, each episode had a clear narrative arc.

The Pacific. Was bad. The only men I could identify at any moment were Rami Malek and Australia's DILF Gary Sweet, so it was a whole lot of interchangeable men in khaki dodging explosions and shouting racial slurs. I mean, seriously, the Nazis in BoB were humanised more than the Japanese.

But I was looking forward to episode 3, "Melbourne", because it was filmed in the city almost the week I moved down here, and I remember marveling at the reproduction of wartime streets. And I was pretty sure there would be women in it. It would be a fun time! 

I was wrong. There were women, and there were quite a lot of sex scenes, but it was ahistorical to an annoying degree, and the women were not people.

But this reminded me that I've never read Come In Spinner, held up as the book about the Australian homefront in WW2 from women's perspective. There was a bright, pastel-coloured, hairspray scented miniseries in 1988, which always put me off reading it because it looked so fluffy, but the latest edition was pastel-free and I figured, why not? 

My friends. This book is talked about like it's a "women's novel" (nothing wrong with that, but there are implications of romantic tragedy, like a Joan Crawford or Bette Davis movie of the era). It's definitely a novel by and about women, but it's better described as "socialist melodrama", which is definitely not a genre I just made up. You've got your various romances and relationships, but ALSO every chapter sees someone give a speech about workplace rights, capitalist exploitation, housing shortages, women's rights, abortion rights and more. (If it's one of the villainous characters, they're calling for strikers to be shot, or blaming the housing shortage on foreigners -- because Australia has not learned a thing since the 1940s -- or proposing that African Americans be rounded up and put in KKK concentration camps after the war. Only they don't say "African Americans".)

I mean. It's absolutely a potboiler, I read all 900 pages in two days. Couldn't put it down, and have a lot of feelings about all the characters and the ways they're affected by the war and the patriarchy, and the lingering trauma of the Depression. One character's teenage sister runs away from home, falls into the hands of human traffickers and winds up in a brothel; another sister becomes pregnant to a married soldier, has an illegal abortion and dies. The only woman with any real autonomy is Dr Dallas McIntyre, a school teacher turned doctor, and even she remarks that she cannot legally have children without giving up her career and independence to marry. (Phryne Fisher fans will recognise Dr McIntyre -- Kerry Greenwood lifted her wholesale for the first book in that series, and then she became a regular in the TV adaptation, although Dr Dallas is enthusiastically heterosexual.)

It was a thoroughly good read; I completely understand why it was heavily edited when first published (and still created controversy) -- I'm very glad that James was able to reconstruct the original draft in the '80s, because I think it would have been a lot less substantial without the uglier plotlines. (I saw one GoodReads review complaining that an abortion is more scandalous and has more consequences than a sixteen-year-old girl being found in a brothel, and yes, I do believe that was the whole point.)

I knew it -- the second I declared I was done with books by men for 2023, I had two library holds come in.

Magpie Wing by Max Easton is an Australian literary novel about sports, class, arts and suburban snobbery. Like most Australian literary novels, it reads more like a detailed outline than a completed work, I assume because that's all the author had time for before the grant money ran out. And like most Australian literary novels, it left me with a strong sense that life is devoid of purpose or beauty, and artistic pursuits are pointless.

I actually didn't hate Magpie Wing, but I hate what it represents about the Australian literary scene. But I will give it this: as an historical novel about a young man from a working class background with literary aspirations, it is doomed to be compared with Boy Swallows Universe, and it is far, far superior to Dalton's racist poverty porn (TV adaptation coming soon to a streaming service near you).

Lone Women by Victor LaValle is a horror novel, but I didn't know that when I put a hold on it. I must have skimmed the review I saw, because I had this idea that the "horror" came from the heroine being a Black woman homesteading alone in Montana, not an actual monster. And I was well and truly sucked in before I realised, and then I couldn't stop, sooooooo I guess I read a horror novel.

Truth be told, it wasn't all that scary, or even especially tense. I suspect this is what people deride as "cosy horror", but it was exactly what I didn't know I needed.

My currently reading is Power Without Glory (1950) by Frank Hardy, the Great Australian Communist Novel, which is mainly remembered these days for its (self) publication triggering Australia's last ever criminal libel trial. Hardy wasn't sued by any of the people he actually libelled*, the book being an almost embarrassingly obvious filing-off-of-the-serial-numbers-of-reality and openly suggesting that every second Labor politician in Australia was corrupt. No, the plaintiff was the wife of John Wren, the dude who is 100% the main character -- the book depicts her as having an affair with a brickie from which an illegitimate child ensues.

Hardy won the case because he was able to demonstrate that he did no research whatsoever into any of the women in John Wren's life. I would go further and suggest that it's possible he never met a woman, ever, in his entire life.**

Anyway, the book covers the life of "John West", an Irish Catholic who rises from poverty to control the gambling industry, organised crime and eventually Labor politics in the first half of the 20th century. If you're going, "Wait, is that not the plot of Peaky Blinders?" you're not alone, although West does not enter politics himself, nor does he fuck Diana Mosley in a House of Parliament.***

As an indictment of Australian politics, particularly the Australian Labor Party, the Catholic Church, the labour movement and the mining industry, it's excoriating, and a lot of facets are depressingly famiilar in the present day. Hardy's politics is such that The Only Good Politician Is The Socialist Who Quits The Fight In Favour of Ideological Purity, which maybe explains why he was not especially beloved by his fellow Communists.

As a novel it's less successful; obviously "show don't tell" is CIA propaganda, but I think Hardy would have benefited from less exposition. Or maybe an editor. This may in fact be one of the most successful self-published books in Australian literary history, although I suspect C. S. Pacat sold more before she got picked up by a publisher, and has also never been sued. Anyway, highlights include phonetically rendered regional accents, but not applied consistently; honestly most of the character voices are interchangeable; 80% of the female "characters" are sad nags who stay at home and wish their husbands were less corrupt. (One of John West's daughters becomes a Communist and elopes with a Jewish fellow traveller; she's the most sympathetic woman in the book, and therefore dies of breast cancer at the end.****)

Anyway, I'm at page 450 of about 600, and I have the new Murderbot waiting for me as a reward at the end. I've enjoyed stretching my literary boundaries and spending time with an out and out antihero, but honestly, "political novels written by men in the 1940s" is a hard sell for me, and I don't see that changing.

* Truth is not a complete defence in Australia, I think this is what the "upside down smiley" emoji is for
** He had a wife and children and his granddaughter is a prominent literary nepo baby, so there is some evidence I might be mistaken
*** No, that is actually a thing in Peaky Blinders
**** I'm shocking about reading the last page first

Suffice to say, American Prometheus left me with a book hangover, much like Oppenheimer is still on my mind a month after I saw it. I started a lot of books, and eventually finished some.

Catilina's Riddle by Steven Saylor

The third in this series, and probably where I'm going to leave it for now, as each successive time skip makes me like the protagonist less. I note that his interactions with Catilina were extremely homoerotic, but, being spoiled for the end of the Catilinian Conspiracy, I couldn't really get excited about that.

Not finished: Paper Emperors: The rise of Australia’s newspaper empires by Sally Young

I got about 60% through this, which I think is enough to make it worth writing up. A fascinating topic, but I simply could not with Young's structure, which divided events up by newspaper company instead of chronologically. This is especially frustrating because various Murdochs and Packers were moving from company to company, so the narrative kept doubling back. It's a shame, because this book and its sequel are the definitive examinations of the Australian media landscape through history.

A Fatal Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum by Emma Southon

A genuinely fascinating blend of serious scholarship and pop history, conveyed in a chatty style that makes me very much want to sit down and split a bottle of wine with Southon. Example: 
Whether this style works for you is entirely a matter of taste, but I was sufficiently indoctrinated into the Cult of Classical History that making fun of Cicero feels a bit subversive. So it very much worked for me, and I learned a lot from Southon's examination of the Roman understanding of "murder" as a concept.

Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of Cold War Submarine Espionage by Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew and Annette Lawrence Drew

Weird fact about me: I fucking love shipwrecks and submarines and reading about maritime disasters. There was a time, in my teens, when I was going to become a marine archaeologist. There are a bunch of reasons that didn't happen, starting with the fact that I'm a very poor swimmer and also terrified of drowning, and if you spend a lot of time reading about maritime disasters ... well. Suffice to say, the whole Ocean Gate fiasco was extremely relevant to my interests on a bunch of levels.

I'm still catching up on the backlog of Behind the Bastards, but I skipped ahead to the episode on OceanGate. Host Robert Evans mentioned this book in passing, and I hunted down a copy (I had to buy the paperback from Amazon Japan) and read it with great interest.

If you're into submarines, espionage and really terrible events happening at sea is your jam, this might be the book for you! It's a bit episodic, but interestingly skeptical about the military industrial complex -- more than I expected, anyway. I personally think it should be required reading for any writer working on a Star Trek, but that's just me (and my love of submarine nonsense).

Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy by James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams

Reads like the tawdry Succession knock-off that Showtime desperately needs right now, except that because of the events of this book, and the total ineptitude demonstrated at Paramount/Viacom/CBS, Showtime has been folded into Paramount+.

A very quick, easy read, which I think goes a little too far in depicting Shari Redstone as a totally relatable busy working mom/adult child caring for elderly parent/billionairess girlboss/friend of Donald Trump. But at the same time, the way she is treated by Les Moonves and the various boards kind of makes it hard not to be on her side, just a little. Fortunately, I have four seasons of having feelings about Shiv Roy under my belt, so I have practice at this sort of thing.

The Wolf Den by Elodie Harper

"Where is all the Roman historical fiction from the perspective of the enslaved?" I wondered, and the answer was right here. The Wolf Den follows an enslaved prostitute* in Pompeii as she engages in a battle of wits with her enslaver and schemes to regain her freedom at any cost.

There's a notable lack of obvious historical figures, save for a brief appearance by Pliny the Elder -- but I read through the list of excavated buildings in Pompeii and recognised every single one. Harper is mainly concerned with the Roman lower classes, which makes this a refreshing read. Although not an easy one: I think Harper handles the matter of sex with caution and respect, but obviously this is a book with rape at its core.

* Harper uses the modern language of "enslaved" and "enslaver", and I know I'm usually out here complaining about anachronisms, but it works perfectly here because Amara never regards slavery as anything but something done to her. At the same time, Harper refers to "prostitutes" not "sex workers", which I think is reasonable: it might be an anachronism too far, and it almost imbues this situation with a dignity that absolutely did not exist.

A River with a City Problem: A History of Brisbane Floods by Margaret Cook

First of all, that is an amazing title.

Second, this was a very enjoyable and informative book which covers a lot of what I shall loosely call ground, although you wouldn't want to build your house on it. I inhaled this on a plane on the weekend, and very much wished I had a pen so I could annotate it with notes like, "I lived here!" and "My brother went to school there!" and "I don't hold a hose, comrade." (Turns out that Gough Whitlam had a real problem with turning up to the sites of natural disasters. Great man, but an absolute tosser.)

My edition was updated to include the 2022 floods, and also goes into some detail about the current culture war taking place around dam management and whether or not Brisbane needs more dams (absolutely not, but try telling people that).

Currently reading: 

Agrippina: Empress, Exile, Hustler, Whore by Emma Southon

Do I know any necromancers? I need to fight Robert Graves in a Red Rooster carpark.

Yaqui Delgado Wants To Kick Your Ass by Meg Medina

A very serious YA novel about bullying: a nerdy light-skinned Cuban-American girl is forced to change schools, and the titular Yaqui takes against her. Piddy goes through several months of psychological torture, culminating in a physical attack that winds up on YouTube.

Honestly, this felt more like older MG/young YA than the older YA it was marketed as -- despite having some fairly graphic sexual content. I absolutely inhaled it, but found it unsatisfying, especially the "if you tell the school administration you are being bullied, they will do everything in their power to protect you" conclusion.

The Arms of Nemesis by Steven Saylor

The second in Saylor's Roma Sub Rosa series. Gordianus the Finder is dispatched to investigate the murder of a wealthy Roman's client; meanwhile, a guy called Spartacus is leading a wee bit of a slave rebellion. This was a much breezier read than the first book, and kind of suffered for it -- the emotional climax, to me, is Gordianus realising he is no longer comfortable with the institution of slavery, freeing his slave/lover and marrying her. (Their relationship is as consensual as is possible under the circumstances and in a culture where "consent" isn't really a concept for anyone except men, but also we never get Bethesda's POV, so who knows?) All that happens between chapters, effectively off-screen, which was annoying.

Having said all that, this was still a good read, and I'm inclined to keep going with the series.

I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai

Literary mystery in which a successful podcaster -- think Karina Longworth of You Must Remember This, but with kids and a husband who is more problematic than Rian Johnson -- returns to her old boarding school to teach a two-week course. In 1995, her roommate was murdered; now one of her students wants to make a true crime podcast, arguing that the Black man convicted of the crime was innocent. This leads the podcaster to revisit her memories and realise that her roommate was having an "affair" with their music teacher -- who probably killed her. Meanwhile, her husband is being cancelled on Twitter for having had an affair with a 21-year-old when he was 36.

There is a LOT happening in this book. Maybe too much? Maybe just enough? Makkai covers a lot of ground, from race and class to power differences in relationships to the ethics of the true crime media industry, and it's all surrounded by the white noise of violence against women. It's hard to tell with an ebook, but I think this must be quite a thick volume -- I kept thinking, "Oh, this is the fifty percent mark," and finding I had barely made a dent. I very much enjoyed it, but then, boarding schools + true crime podcasts is kind of my jam. The heroine is incredibly messy in a way I liked, despite the fact that -- with her married lover, Twitter rants and complete disrespect for the sequestration of witnesses, I think she's not meant to be likeable.

Succession - Season 1: The Complete Scripts by Jesse Armstrong et al

I miss Succession. But what better way to remember it than by reading the scripts? 

I am attempting to read one episode between other books, but I keep getting caught up in the narrative. Through the exercise of considerable self-control, I'm only at episode 7 so far, and I'm deeply impressed by how good these are. There's famously a lot of ad libbing in the series, but maybe less than you'd think -- a lot of the Succession trade marks like filler words and repetitions are on the page.

Also on the page from the start: Connor's presidential ambitions, Shiv's willingness to abandon her career if she thinks she could be CEO. They were always there if I knew to look. Gerri/Roman is right there from their very first scene.

Finally, I think it's useful to remember that Succession isn't this good by accident -- apropos the WGA strike, Jesse Armstrong has talked about how he negotiated with HBO for a full writers room, a longer writing period than most streaming dramas, and writers were always present on set.

Class Trip by Jerry Craft

The final book in Craft's middle grade graphic novel trilogy. Unlike the first two, this one covers a couple of weeks instead of a year or a semester, so we get to spend more time with some characters who have been peripheral until now -- and also Andy, the class bully. I really enjoyed the way Craft gave us a glimpse into Andy's psyche and gave him a pathway to becoming a better person, without insisting that his victims forgive him and become friends.

This was the first of Craft's books where I found some of the art a little off-kilter -- some of the faces in the early sections were uncharacteristically lifeless. But it's more than made up for by Craft's careful rendering of Parisian streetscapes and landmarks.

I really enjoyed this trilogy, and I can't wait to see what Craft does next.

The Black Queen by Jumata Emill

GOOD NEWS, it's another contemp YA novel by a gay Black man set in Louisiana. This is an extremely edifying publishing trend.

This one is a crime novel: the first Black homecoming queen in a practically-segregated school is found dead. Two girls need to find out who did it: the victim's best friend -- and daughter of the only Black police captain in town -- and the spoiled white girl who is suspect number one.

Emill deals with a lot of sticky, nuanced issues in this book: Duchess thinks her father is overlooking the obvious suspect because he's protecting a white girl, while also wanting to defend him from her classmates, who are like, "ACAB, obviously." And Tinsley is, to put it bluntly, a racist bitch.

Duchess's complicated attitude to the police can't really be resolved, but Emill has to thread a very fine needle in making Tinsley compelling enough that the reader will tolerate her chapters before she begins to develop an ounce of self-awareness and begins to change.

I enjoyed this a lot, and as a person who reads a lot of crime fiction, I have to give it the highest possible praise: I did not guess the real killer until about one page before they were revealed.

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.