Tag Archives: Reading

‘The Dream Hotel’ by Laila Lalami

Posted on May 4, 2026 | Leave a comment
2025, 322 p.

At the moment there’s a Senate inquiry into the new computer Integrated Assessment Tool that is being used to assess eligibility and assign funding levels for aged care service. It is completely automated, and there is no human over-ride function when the algorithm spits out an assessment that is inappropriate, insufficient or just plain wrong. At the inquiry, the first assistant secretary of the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, Robert Day, said

The no override comes from the fact that that is an objective outcome….If you have these scores from your assessment, you get this level of classification … there’s no discretionary element (Guardian, 3 April 2026)

SPOILERS

I was reminded of this when reading Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel. My library has designated it ‘Science Fiction’, but there’s not much science fiction about it: it’s just an extrapolation of what is already here. Set in an alternative present day and in response to moral panic about the rising crime rate, The Risk Assessment Administration has been charged with investigating suspicious individuals in order to prevent future crimes, and it can draw on myriad data sources in order to do so. American citizen Sara Hussein is pulled from the arrivals line at the airport because her risk score is too high. An archivist by training, she has been attending a conference, and she bristles and pushes back at being flagged as a risk. The risk assessment has picked up on a complaint from a fellow passenger on the plane who was off-loaded before take-off because she assisted him when he was having trouble breathing; her response that her employer paid for her flight was questioned because, technically, she had not yet submitted the receipts to recoup her expenses. But most damaging of all for her assessment was the information that the authorities could access from her Dreamsaver, a device that she -along with many other Americans- used to maximize the value from her sleep. As the mother of young twins, trying to keep her career afloat, she had turned to this device to overcome her insomnia and although she didn’t realize it, there among the terms and conditions was her permission for the data to be handed on to a third party if required by a legal enforcement authority. Her dreams revealed a propensity to violence, they claimed, and so she needed to be assessed further in Madison Retention Centre.

So started her months-long stint in an ‘retention centre’ which increasingly became prison-like with 24 hour surveillance, curtailed freedoms presented as ‘privileges’, and enforced work. The organization contracted to run the Madison retention centre, Safe-X Inc., has its own internal economy. It has contracts with outside clients like film studios to have AI generated video content assessed for its verisimilitude; it has its internal laundry and catering facilities which fall under Safe-X budgets. Communications are provided and monitored by the AI-driven PostPal; there is a commissariat where Residents could purchase goods from their own money or from funds provided by their families. She can receive visitors, but the scheduling program is capricious, cancelling her visits without any recourse. Her Dreamsaver is monitored daily, and periods of detention could be extended at whim by the Attendants. In the narrative, you (and she) are never quite sure what is dream, or increasingly nightmare, and what is real.

What seems to be a Kafka-esque and dystopian situation does come to an end- the book has an ending, after all- when she resists, using time-worn tactics of strike and solidarity. In fact, the book is almost optimistic in its ending:

…isolation is the opposite of salvation…she owes her release to the women who joined together to say not….Freedom isn’t a blank slate..[it] is teeming and complicated and, yes, risky, and it can only be written in the company of others…This is what Madison has given her, even as it has taken so much from her- the knowledge that she isn’t alone, that she doesn’t have to be. (p. 321,322)

This is a fantastic book. I only had ten pages to go to the end, and so I sat on the station as my train went past, wanting to finish it. It seems that so many articles and events are converging: I just read Anna Krein’s The screens that ate school, from The Monthly, 2020; at a recent appointment my doctor asked me if I would agree to HeidiAi Co Pilot for Modern Healthcare. Do I read the screen after screen of Terms and Conditions? Did I take the doctor’s word that the recording of my appointment wouldn’t go any further than her computer? Do parents have the courage to push back against Google and Apple programs in their schools? No, no and no. This book isn’t Science Fiction: it’s a warning.

My rating: 9/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: I had read excellent reviews of it.

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‘The Elegance of the Hedgehog’ by Muriel Barbery

Posted on April 28, 2026 | Leave a comment
2006/2008 320 p.

Translated from the French by Alison Anderson

I know that this book was on the best seller list for ages several years ago, but somehow or other I missed out on reading it. I think that I had it mixed up with Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes -both European animals, I guess- and I was surprised to find that it wasn’t a WW2 Jewish family story at all. Instead it is set at some undetermined time -1990s?- in a luxurious Parisian apartment block. Reneé Michel is the concierge there, a job that she she took over from her late husband Lucien after his death.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Outwardly Reneé appears to be a working class menial worker, largely invisible to the residents of the apartment block who see her as little more than one of the amenities of the building, like the elevator. But she is much more than this. A precocious child from a poor family, who was forced to leave school early and marry young, she has a thirst for knowledge of the most esoteric and philosophical kind but she hides her abilities from everyone. Her best and only friend is Manuela, who works as a cleaner in the building. Manuela does not share Reneé’s interests at all, but she is quick, observant, generous with her limited resources and a loyal friend. She also provides cover for Reneé, giving the appearance of two equally humble and uneducated women friends- which of course we know Reneé is not. An equally precocious child lives several floors up, twelve year old Paloma Josse who is a mixture of intellectual superciliousness, ennui and determination to subvert the bourgeois future that awaits her by planning to commit suicide on her thirteenth birthday.

The book is told alternately from the first person perspective of Reneé and Paloma. The author distinguishes the two voices through different fonts, but the narrative voice is strong enough in both of them that there is no need for the visual cues. Both of them are exploring big philosophical questions- Reneé at a more abstract level; Paloma by observing the behaviour of people around her and gradually distancing herself from her avowed intention to set fire to the apartment buildings and kill herself at the same time.

I’ll confess that I found some of the philosophical chapters rather tedious- a long chapter about phenomenology, for example- and until halfway through the book I was wondering whether it was going to go anywhere. But then one of the residents of the apartment block died, and his apartment was purchased and renovated by the wealthy Japanese Kakuro Ozu. A man of refined and simple tastes, and an observer of beauty, he recognizes through small clues that both Reneé and Paloma are intelligent, philosophical women, both hiding their intelligence behind a surface of gruffness and ignorance, in Reneés case or adolescent moodiness and self-centredness in the case of Paloma. Manuela, Reneé, Paloma and Kakuro form a bond to which the apartment residents are completely oblivious.

Kakuro asks Reneé on a date, and with endearing awkwardness she procures a dress through Manuela’s help and goes to the hairdresser for the first time in many years. But she is increasingly uncomfortable at his attention, telling herself that such a cultured and wealthy man could not be interested in a lowly concierge. This, however, is all a defence mechanism, and we learn from her family story that her sister Lisette had died after giving birth to the child of the wealthy employer she had left home for. Shaken by her sister’s death, “Don’t fraternize with rich people if you don’t want to die” had become her watchword, but it was countered by Kakuro’s response “You are not your sister, we can be friends”. Indeed, possibly even more than friends.

I won’t divulge the ending, but it came quickly and out of left field. All of my reservations about the lack of movement and philosophical pretension in the first half of the book were dispelled. It left me in tears, wishing that I could stop the ending and just hold on to the characters for a bit longer.

I am rather mystified by the title though. Paloma watches Reneé and observes:

Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she’s covered with quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary- and terribly elegant. (p.139)

I’m no expert on hedgehogs: indeed, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen one. I must say, though, that ‘elegant’ is not a word I would readily associate with them. Certainly Madame Michele is prickly, solitary, combative and self-contained but elegant?

My rating: 8/10

Read because: Rosanna Readers bookgroup (i.e. ex-CAE) selection through YPRL.

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‘Flashlight’ by Susan Choi

Posted on April 21, 2026 | Leave a comment
2025, 445 p.

It’s ironic that often the books that impress me the most are the ones that I delay writing about. I want the story to percolate for a while, and to really craft my response to it – and then by the time I get round to writing a blog post, it has all faded and I can’t remember enough details. However, in this case, the details (and even the plot) don’t really matter because I wouldn’t tell you about them anyway. For me, one of the real joys of this book was that I really didn’t know where it was going to take me next and by the time I got to the end, I felt as if I had been on a very long journey that crossed time and national boundaries. It’s a mystery, domestic fiction, historical fiction all rolled into one. I really enjoyed it but it really is impossible to talk about it in detail without spoiling it for you.

Suffice to say that it spans the years 1945 to 2008 across Korea, Japan and the United States, with a cast of inscrutable characters. It is based around a family: American born Louisa; her Korean-born father Serk who had been raised in Japan before emigrating to America; her mother Anne, estranged from her family and Anne’s illegitimate son Tobias who re-enters his mother’s life as an adult. There’s defiance and stubbornness, coldness and detachment, as well as a suffocating over-solicitousness and emotional games between the adults of the family. But if you’re someone who feels that you have to like a character, you’re going to be challenged because none of them are particularly likeable.

There are so many themes that come through here: secrecy and shame; language and communication; nationality; belonging; family; identity. They are never once mentioned as themes, but they emerge through the narrative and plot.

The title ‘Flashlight’ is well chosen, not just for the ‘ray of light’ motif that appears throughout the narrative, but also for the writing style. The omniscient third-person narrator moves from one character to another, but unlike many recent books that I have read that barely alight on one character before bouncing off onto the next one, this book stayed with each character for long enough that you felt you knew them, and at least can understand their perspective, even if you don’t share it. In fact, as readers, we know the characters better than the characters know each other, or than the characters even know themselves. Although there are connections between each character and the others, the emphasis is on one character at a time, in the same way that a flashlight can only illuminate one thing in isolation.

It is a long book- 445 pages- but I didn’t feel that it dragged. But perhaps that’s because I’m interested in Korean history: I know that other people in the Reading Circle did feel that it was far too long. It’s ambitious; it has a big story; the writer is control throughout and she takes responsibility for her story, instead of expecting the reader to put the bits together.

If there’s any disappointment here, it’s with myself. I know that I haven’t done justice to this book, because the surprises in the plot are the real strength of the narrative. All I can say is, read it for yourself.

My rating: 9/10

Read because: March selection for the Ivanhoe Reading Circle.

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‘I You We Them’ by Dan Gretton

Posted on April 18, 2026 | Leave a comment
2021, 1120 p.

Has anyone ever complained so much about reading a book? At 1.6kg, I found it too heavy to hold up while reading it in bed and having recently sprained my knee, I was not keen on ‘tenting’ my knees to lean the book against. At over 1000 pages long, it took two renewals at the library to complete, and even now as I write this review, it is overdue.

So why did I so willingly heft it off the floor each night, to keep reading? Quite simply, because I enjoyed the company of the author and once I gave up any idea of following an argument, I just floated along on his observations – a little bit like reading Proust, really.

The lengthy subtitle of the book is “Journeys Beyond Evil: The Desk Killers in History and Today” and this is the overall theme of the book, but it is intermingled with reminiscence, nostalgia, regret and curiosity as he travels around Europe researching his topic. It could just as easily be a travel book. Attracted to maps from childhood, he maps out the sites of concentration camps of Europe and their accompanying industrial infrastructure, he follows forced marches and places himself in massacre sites, forming his own mental and physical maps. And it could just as easily be an ecological/environmental diary of landscape. For him, the environment in which he holes up to immerse himself in his writing – the Suffolk Coast for Book One in winter; Pembrokeshire in spring in Book Two- becomes part of the narrative as well, particularly when he writes about a hurricane that buffets the cottage in which he is sheltering when the power goes out in the house he has rented.

Gretton himself is an activist as well as author and teacher. In 1983 he co-founded the political arts organization Platform, which describes itself on its website as bringing together workers and communities “to create new, liberatory systems that tackle injustice and climate breakdown”. In particular, it confronts the power of transnational corporations. You can see this emphasis coming through in this book in its focus on corporations; especially that of the German manufacturing, banking and insurance companies that still exist powerfully today, which had flourished in Nazi Germany through its contacts and contracts with the government. He also targets Shell and its influence in Nigeria that looked the other way during the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the activist who died trying to save his land and people from the destruction of Shell’s oil conglomerate. The “desk killers’ that he focuses on here are the managing directors of wealthy, multinational corporations, many of whom he interviewed after they have retired, and the often invisible bureaucrats and office workers who followed the procedures and timetables and the accountants in charge of the financial accounts that made genocide an anonymized, abstraction. There are no innocents here.

Although his focus is on corporations, he also hones in on individuals – most particularly Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, whose own biography and the work of Gitta Sereny has thrown up so many questions about culpability and redemption. He also spends quite a bit of time on the Wannsee Conference of 20th January 1942, which pulled together as many agencies as possible to discuss the implementation of ‘the Final Solution of the Jewish question’. Of the 15 attendees (there were actually 16, counting the unnamed stenographer), seven held PhDs in law. We only know this because just one copy survived of the thirty copies made at the time. He parallels this with a discussion of the two Washington lawyers, who prepared memos for the Bush administration discussing the legalities and grey areas of torture and ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’.

Then there are the individuals who survived: Primo Levi, Jan Karski, Elie Wiesel. Some of the testimony in these books kept me awake at night, after turning off the light.

He concentrates predominantly on Nazi Germany, and on Nigeria to a lesser degree. But he also turns back to history to take up Gunther Grass’ question about how young people grow up in Britain and know so little about the long history of crimes during the colonial period. He looks at the East India Company and the Opium Wars, the slave trade, the Irish Famine, and what he claims as “the genocide” and the “extermination” of the Tasmanian Aboriginals (a contested question here in Australia, where there is a continuing Tasmanian First Peoples community today)[As an aside, if you’re looking a desk killers, I would have focused more on later bureaucrats and Protectors in the late 19th-early 20th century Australia whose arbitrary and desk-bound decisions did just as much as outright massacres to distort indigenous families and expunge language and culture]. He spends quite a bit of time on Namibia (former German South West Africa) where the systematic killing, detention and forced labour of the Nama and Herero people was a forerunner to actions undertaken by the Nazi government. He looks at the French massacre of between 120 and 200 Algerian demonstrators by the French government on 17 October 1961.

All of which would be pretty grim, continuing for over 1000 pages, if this were all that this book contains. But it’s not. There’s beautiful writing about his father and a wistful recounting of his own torrid, passionate affair with a younger man. There’s information dumps at time, as if you’re reading someone’s research notes. Interwoven are his own childhood memories, his political stances, travel-journey type entries.

It’s big; it’s untidy; it’s completely indulgent but it’s also thought-provoking and very easy to read. My complaints about weight and heft not withstanding, I missed hearing Dan Gretton’s voice when I finished. But perhaps there’s more: apparently this 1000+ pager is just Volume 1 of a two-volume publication. Hopefully the next volume will have an index, which I really missed in a book of this size. Will I read Volume II when it comes out: most probably, if I still have the strength to hold a 1.6 kg book!

My rating: Hard to say. 9?

Read because: I read or heard someone raving about it- can’t remember who.

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‘The Man in the High Castle’ by Philip K. Dick

Posted on February 2, 2026 | 1 comment
1965 (1962) 236 p.

It’s interesting that my copy of The Man in the High Castle should be issued under the Penguin Science Fiction impress, because it doesn’t seem particularly science-fiction-y to me. It was first published in 1962 and envisaged a world in which Germany and Japan had triumphed during WW2, with the action occurring taking place in 1962- i.e. contemporaneously. To my mind it was more an alternative history or counterfactual than science fiction.

The narrative traces through several characters who live in an America partitioned into three. Nazi Germany controls the East Coast, as well as Russia and Western Europe. The east coast itself is divided in two: the remnant United States of America up to the Canadian border, and ‘The South’, both ruled by puppet regimes under Nazi control. The West Coast had been annexed by the Japanese as the Pacific States of America. Between the two regimes is the buffer Rocky Mountain states, where American citizens continue a depressed, oppressed existence.

The novel starts in the Pacific States of America, where businessmen Robert Childan runs a business selling pre-invasion Americana, most of which is counterfeit and manufactured by the Wyndam-Matson Corporation. Childan is contacted by Japanese trade official Nobusuke Tagomi, who seeks a gift to impress a Swedish industrialist named Baynes, who is coming to visit. Baynes, however, is really a Nazi defector who is coming to warn of the incipient activation of Operation Dandelion, a plan for Germany to attack Japan and attain world domination. Meanwhile, there is a banned publication, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy which is circulating surreptitiously, which posits that in fact, the Allies did win. Ostensibly the book is written by Hawthorne Abendsen, the eponymous ‘Man in the High Castle’. Juliana, the ex-wife of secret Jew Frank Frinke, is fascinated by the book, and travels unwittingly with an under-cover Nazi to meet the author, unaware that her companion Joe Cinnadella, has been sent by the Germans to execute Abendsen. It is a repressive and violent society, which has reverted to almost-magical times, with the I-Ching, a book of Chinese divination, guiding the actions of many of the characters, both Japanese and American.

The scenario is fascinating, but unfortunately the characters are not. I confess to losing track of who was who, and I am still bemused by the authorship of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, although I think that the author intended this ambiguity. The characters are rather mechanical, and it is difficult to feel any connection with any of them. The end of the book becomes bogged down with a fairly metaphysical exploration of the I-Ching.

However, the book does form the political and ‘historical’ background to the excellent Prime four-season series, which managed in its first episode to evoke more sympathy and coherence to the characters than the whole book did. Interestingly, they turned The Grasshopper Lies Heavy into a film, instead of a book, which in a way made the whole scenario more implausible- who has a film projector hanging around in their apartment? Surely a book would be more portable and thus more dangerous. To eke four seasons of the TV series out of a fairly slim volume, obviously it was taken far beyond the original book, but to my mind so far, with far more success in character development than the book. So, for me, The Man in the High Castle is a book with a really fascinating premise which didn’t quite manage to develop its characters, or integrate its metaphysical aspects.

My rating: 6/10

Sourced from: My husband’s bookshelves. I had heard about the book, but never read it or seen a copy.

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‘Becoming’ by Michelle Obama

Posted on January 24, 2026 | 2 comments
2021, 464 p.

I had not had much interest in reading this book, deterred perhaps by the glamour shot on the front cover. Even though I very much enjoyed Barak Obama’s Dreams From My Father, I wasn’t particularly drawn to reading a First Lady’s life story, thank you very much. But it was a Book Group selection, and conscientious Book Grouper as I am, I resolved to read the book and I am so glad that I did. There was much more in this book that I might ever have anticipated.

The preface started with really good writing. It’s post-Presidency, and Michelle is alone in the house for almost the first time (excepting the security guards down in the garage). Her daughters are out, Barak is not at home, and she decides to make a grilled cheese sandwich. There’s no one to make it for her, no-one to say “Mrs Obama, let me get that”, no one to look askance at her desire for such homely comfort food. She sits on the back doorstep, and eats the sandwich.

The book proper is divided into three parts: Becoming Me, Becoming Us, and Becoming More. Becoming Me traces her early upbringing on the South Side of Chicago, where her remarkably hands-off parents bring her up to be an intelligent, independent young woman, super-organized and conscientious, ambitious and methodical. Becoming Us chronicles her relationship with Barak Obama, and her switch from corporate law to the non-profit sector. The ‘us’ expands to include her two daughters, born through IVF, and the tension she feels between being a professional woman, and a mother. Barak is becoming increasingly involved in politics, first as a state congressman, and then as presidential candidate, although she is often angry and resentful of the demands that politics make on their relationship. Becoming More takes us into the Obama presidency, and the weird home-life this imposes on their family. She needs to carve out her own identity as First Lady, even though this is a role that is not of her choosing, and she struggles to keep some sense of normality for her daughters.

The book is very honest. Barak comes over as a highly intelligent if selfish man, infuriating in his messiness, chronic lateness and lack of attention to detail. She for her part comes over as rather controlling and chronically insecure about whether she is good enough. The awareness of being a black woman in a predominantly white political milieu accompanies her always. She talks about the strains in their marriage as her life is subsumed into his ambitions, and her eventual decision to keep some sort of family routine of dinner and bedtime which Barak has to accommodate to, instead of the other way around. Her mother is a saint: I don’t know that I would get up at 5.00 a.m. to mind my grandchildren while my daughter went to the gym- if fact, I know that I wouldn’t (just in case any of my children get ideas).

She does not even try to hide her contempt for Donald Trump, which hardened even more when he won the Presidency. Trump’s actions in demolishing the East Wing seem even more egregious now, after reading about an engaged First Lady who opened the White House up to many people, through that very East Wing that no longer exists.

At first, I was so impressed with the writing in this book that I was rather disappointed when I learned that it had been ghost-written, or at least written with other people. Does that matter, I wonder? For me, probably yes, because I feel that her writing has been mediated through the other author, and I feel disappointed that the words are not hers. But this doesn’t detract from the honesty that pervades this book. She doesn’t once mention the word ‘feminist’ but the tensions between motherhood, professionalism and politics reflect the viewpoints of a modern, engaged intelligent woman that the world was lucky enough to have as First Lady for eight years.

My rating: A rather surprising 8.5

Read because: Reading Group Book

Sourced from: Darebin Library as part of their reading groups program.

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‘The Dust Never Settles’ by Karina Lickorish Quinn

Posted on January 4, 2026 | 1 comment

2021, 352 p.

I don’t very often read a book just on the basis of a blurb alone, but in this case I did. Paul Lynch, the author of Prophet Song spoke highly of Quinn’s book in author interviews and his blurb describing it as ‘a mesmerising feat of imagination and a masterful debut’ graces the back cover. It’s a beautiful front cover, and the yellow butterflies evoke Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to whom this book owes quite a debt.

Anaïs Echeverría Gest has returned to her childhood home in Peru after an absence of several years in England. The family is expecting her to sign the papers authorizing the sale and inevitable demolition of her grandmother’s house, la Casa Echeverría in order to free up the inheritance. The house, which is a character in its own right, is a large yellow colonial mansion and garden overlooking the shacks and slums built by squatters on the dry plain behind the house called Los Polvos de Nadie y Nunca (the dusts of no-one and nothing) during the Agrarian Reforms of the 1960s. As soon as she steps over the threshold, she is assailed by the memories of the house- not just her life in that house, but the memories of the house itself- and the ghosts of family members and employees who had lived and worked there. Time seems to stretch and contract in the house; one minute the rooms are intact and the furniture dusted and lights illuminated, and the next minute the house is derelict and dark.

Anaïs has left her fiance Rupert Napier, a thoroughly English gentleman, in order to come home to Peru. She is curiously detached from Rupert, telling herself that she loves him but never really feeling it, and she is likewise ambivalent about her pregnancy. The future baby exists as a little pink fish in the corner of her vision, and as her pregnancy progresses the little fish changes shape until it is a huge, snapping lobster. When Rupert comes over to Peru, probably at the request of the extended family who are frustrated by Anaïs’ refusal to sign the papers, he brings with him all the Englishness of his family, an Englishness that Anaïs resented in her own English father’s refusal to acknowledge his second family in Peru, choosing instead to stay with his wife in England.

The house, built at the turn of the century, has seen multiple deaths, that are only just hinted at: a baby whose cries still echo through the house, the suicide of her Aunt Paloma and most importantly, the death of a 17 year old maid, Julia Álvarez Yupanqui who died when she fell (jumped?) from a window. As Julia falls from the window, the Earth falls away from her and is like a sheet of cloth; she sees Time “spread like an ocean, flowing this way and that, tossing up moments, driving them forwards on the crest of a wave then swallowing them again, pulling them back into the deep“. (p. 96) A disembodied presence, Julia wanders unseen through generations of the Echeverría family, right back to the Conquistadors and through centuries of dispossession, enslavement, poverty and violence. The people of Los Polvos, who saw her fall, believe that she has become a saint- and indeed, it seems that she has, as she walks unseen through history dispensing kindnesses as she passes.

It was not only the Polvorinos who saw her fall: Anaïs did too, crouched under a geranium bush. She becomes electively mute, and is seen by a succession of psychiatrists and doctors who try to make her talk. Anaïs could see the ghosts in the house and the adult Anaïs has a tenuous grasp on reality, and you are never really sure whether she is going mad.

So the story shifts back and forth between two realities: that English reality (denoted by chapters with English numerals) and the Peruvian reality in chapters with Spanish numbers. The Spanish chapters follow the disembodied Julia Álvarez Yupanqui and take us on a meandering journey through Peruvian history. There is an exhaustive list of characters in the appendix of the book, divided into the Echeverría family and a longer list of historical and imagined characters who feature in small, passing vignettes as Julia crosses the earth. These vignettes are beautifully written and draw you in just enough to feel disappointed as Julia passes by, leaving that narrative thread hanging loose. Reflecting the tragedy and complexity (and complicity) of various generations of the Echeverría family, there is a convoluted family tree that challenges the one found in One Hundred Years of Solitude with its seventeen Aureliano Buendías.

The complexity of this book is both its great strength, and its greatest weakness, particularly as the book goes on. The last quarter of the book is Julia’s journey through history, and Anaïs’ story drops away. I found myself having to consult the list of characters at the back of the book, having ‘met’ these characters earlier in the book but having forgotten them in the cavalcade of ghosts passing by. I enjoyed the frequent use of Spanish, which she paraphrases in the following sentences, but I don’t know if I would have felt that way had I not been able to read Spanish.

Because this book is just as much about time, land and colonialism as it is about individual people, it reminded me of Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, which was similarly shape-shifting and which caused you to think “am I even understanding this?” In fact, I often said that out loud while I picked it up each night, enjoying the experience of reading it, but unable to hold it all in my head.

I like magical realism, but many people do not. This is a really ambitious, fearless book, and I suspect it is more memorable for its overall shape than for its details. It is flawed, but it’s very good.

My rating: 9/10

Read because: I loved Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song and I thought- if he loves this book, perhaps I will too. I did.

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‘The Season’ by Helen Garner

Posted on December 30, 2025 | Leave a comment
2024, 208 p.

This book should have ticked all my boxes: set in Melbourne, written by a much-loved Australian author, written with a nanna’s-eye (and I do embrace my nanna-dom). But it sounded as if it would be a bit slight, and I probably wouldn’t have read it had it not been an Ivanhoe Reading Circle selection, read and discussed amongst all the other nannas.

Even Garner herself sounded a bit ambivalent about the whole project, admitting that she wrote the book because she needed something to do, but didn’t have the energy to embark on one of her investigative non-fiction books. It traces the footy season of her grandson Amby’s under-16s footy team, at the J. J. Holland reserve in Kensington. As she always does, Garner conveys a strong sense of suburban place, and in this case, the football ground she describes so closely fitted with the oval that I walk through to my volunteer job in Kensington that I actually researched the club and found that, indeed, it is the J. J. Holland reserve. She’s there for the team’s matches; she’s there for their training sessions on cold weekday nights, and she’s there for the conversations in the car driving there and back.

Although ostensibly about football, it’s even more about young men growing into masculinity, and at under-16 Amby is at that liminal stage, with signs of the little boy still visible under the swagger of adolescence. Garner’s daughter lives next door, and she has a strong and enviable relationship with her grandchildren, especially Amby. At the same time, she is aging and feeling irrelevant and frustrated by her increasing deafness. In places she veers into idealization of these young men, seeing them as warriors, and even admitting to a slightly ‘off’ recognition of their adolescent sexuality (Garner has always been, and remains, perhaps more honest than she should be).

It is the football season that gives this book its beginning and ending, and the book was more a reflection than a plot-driven story. I had feared that it would be slight, and unfortunately it was.

My rating: 6.5/10

Sourced from: purchased e-book

Read because: October 2025 selection for the Ivanhoe Reading Circle.

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Six Degrees of Separation: from ‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle’ to…

Posted on November 1, 2025 | 13 comments

It’s literally the first Saturday of the month, which makes it Six Degrees of Separation day. This meme, hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best involves Kate nominating a book I have rarely read (in this case, We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson) and then nominating six other titles of books that spring to mind.

  1. With ‘castle’ in the title of the starting book, what else could I go for but I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith? In Grade 7 and 8, I just loved this book and kept reborrowing it from the school library. I saw the film, but it didn’t have the magic for me now that it had as a young girl. I have a copy on my shelves, but I don’t know if I want to re-read it or not. Perhaps some books are best left as memories.
  2. Brideshead Revisited had a castle in it too. I loved the series with Jeremy Irons. I know that I read the book too, while I was at university.
  3. L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between was set in a big house as well, told from the perspective of a visitor from a lower class who doesn’t know the ‘rules’ of the gentry. We read it in Matric (yes, I’m that old), and I think that it has one of the best starting lines in literature: “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”
  4. Like everyone else in the world, we read To Kill a Mockingbird at school too. I have re-read this one, many times, and every time I hear the music to the absolutely perfect movie, my eyes fill with tears. To me, this book is emblematic of the Deep South
  5. Another book set in the South- New Orleans this time- is The Yellow House by Sarah M.Broom (my review here). The youngest of twelve children in a working class family, she tells the story of her family home in New Orleans, interweaving national and local history, family stories and her own story of place and identity.
  6. The Lives of Houses, edited by Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee is a collection of essays that emerged from a 2017 conference titled ‘The Lives of Houses’ held at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, Oxford. This conference brought together scholars from different disciplines and professions, with an emphasis on British, Irish, American and European houses. The ‘big’ names include Hermione Lee, Margaret Macmillan, David Cannadine, Jenny Uglow, Julian Barnes, and it focuses on 19th century British writers and a peculiarly British form of being ‘the writer’ in a mixture of eccentricity and domesticity. (My review here)

So somehow or other I started off with a castle and ended up in a house.

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‘Everything lost, everything found’ by Matthew Hooton

Posted on August 15, 2025 | 1 comment
2025, 304 p.

Are there more books being published about the slide into dementia and confusion, or it just that I perceive it that way because of my own fears? Writer and academic Matthew Hooton is rather too young to be facing this situation himself, but he captures well the slipperiness of memory in this beautifully written book. If you’re looking up ‘Matthew Hooton’ to find out more about him, you’ll find that unfortunately for him, he shares his name with a former National Party politician from New Zealand. But there’s a certain irony in that because Jack, the narrator of Everything lost, Everything found also shares a name with another Jack in Henry Ford’s rubber plantation in the Brazilian Amazon, where he travelled with his parents in 1929.

There are two threads to this book. One is Jack’s memories of Fordlandia in Brazil, a cookie-cutter American suburb transplanted into the Brazilian jungle, under the control of the morality agents charged with carrying out Henry Ford’s vision for a colonial outpost to establish rubber plantations in the jungle, while gradually easing out reliance on native rubber-gatherers. The second thread is that of Jack’s life in Michigan, in what is now a deserted Ford Factory town, as his wife Gracie is sliding into dementia and a slow death with cancer.

The descriptions of the jungle are just gorgeous, and the jungle itself seems to take on a personality. But it is a malevolent personality: taking Jack’s mother’s life in a caiman attack on the river, and driving Jack’s father into his own madness in searching for his wife’s body in the jungle. A man half-dead from exposure and the jungle’s flesh-eating insects staggers into Fordlandia, and Jack himself is not sure whether it is his father or not. Young Jack himself is forced into a battle with the jungle as he and Soo, a young Korean girl who had worked in the sanatorium laundry, try to escape the morality agents who have shopped her to the Japanese.

I read this book because I had recently read Hooton’s Typhoon Kingdom (review here) and at first I was struck by the difference in setting between his earlier book and this one. But Korea (where Hooton lived and worked for some time) works its way into this book as well, when Soo explains that she is Korean royalty has escaped the Japanese in their takeover of Korea early in the 20th century. I’m not sure whether this strains credulity or not.

But there is no difficulty at all in watching the older Jack, seventy years later, defiantly trying to stay in his family home as his life revolves around visiting his wife in the nursing home. Jack’s relationship with his divorced daughter Jess is strained, and his grandson Nick is a mixture of solicitous and off-hand adolescence as he is trying to negotiate his own relationship with his father.

In fact, one of the things that really impresses me about Hooton’s writing is the way that he is able to emotionally inhabit someone that he clearly is not: a Korean comfort woman in Typhoon Kingdom and an old man here. His characters have an authenticity and layers of complexity, and their dialogue and tone is distinctive and convincing.

The two story lines become increasingly intertwined, as Jack himself becomes more addled, and as the past colonizes the present, not unlike the colonization attempt of Fordlandia. Jack’s narrative voice is comfortable and engaging, and as a reader you want things to be better for him.

I really enjoyed this book. In one of those little twists of coincidence, I read a review from 1925 of Henry Ford’s rather burnished autobiography, which was written before the establishment of Fordlandia and some of the more unsavoury aspects of Ford’s politics. Moreover, I had only recently read Hooton’s earlier Typhoid Kingdom, and so the Korean aspect was familiar to me as well. But quite apart from that, I just enjoyed the beauty of the descriptions, the poignancy of loss and grief, and the sheer humanness of it all.

My rating: 9/10

Read because: I enjoyed Typhoon Kingdom and I saw that he had a new book out

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

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