Salka

I wasn't sure what to expect but was pleasantly surprised to find a quality adventure story blending historical fiction and fantasy. And written by an Australian author! And with very cool character exploration around gender identity, bodies, and sexuality.
I'm not usually one for war stories but I was engrossed, and I think that's testament to the complex character development and intrigues.
I've heard good things about the sequel so will check it out.
Apparently Shelley Parker-Chan's inspo was period K-dramas and C-dramas but I think their characters are much sexier, morally complex, and grittier than you'd see on TV whilst retaining all the fun melodrama and plot twists.

Keiko Furukura has worked in a convenience store for 18 years. It is the only part of her life that gives her meaning and purpose, predictability and certainty. Keiko's eternal struggle is to appear normal to the people around her to gain acceptance. Keiko does this by paying close attention to social norms and cues, and her attention to detail makes her mask and camouflage adequately.
This short novella explores a lot in its brief pages: the reliance on and comfort to be found in the predictability of consumer capitalist culture, alexithymia, neurodivergence (perhaps Keiko is autistic or lives with antisocial personality disorder?), agency, meaning and purpose, social and gender norms, asexuality and aromanticism, heteronormativity, incel culture and toxic masculinity.

Murata's talent seems to be in revealing how experiences or thoughts a reader may think are unique or individual, even unusual, are actually symptomatic of something more universal and human.

I really liked the ending of the story. Keiko's ultimate empowerment challenges us to rejoice in her rejection of and escape from toxic masculinity and expected gender roles, and yet we feel eerily haunted by her finding salvation and delight in being a cog in the consumer capitalist machine - a role in which she accepts and delights in having no gender and being closer to animal than human.
But are these latter feelings inherent to Keiko or are they really a product of her social exclusion and alienation?
Ugh there's so much to unpack here, and that it Murata's brilliance: starting a conversation.

DNF. Couldn't get in to it. Might come back at another time.

Some useful therapeutic resources - the acceptance and mindfulness chapter, body image measures, self talk examples, and writing activities are good templates to adapt for practice, but some aspects are very outdated eg language has echoes of upper class, western, femme white feminist perspectives of the body that exclude other bodily experiences.
Still on the fence with the mirror activities included.

In the interests of total transparency, I did skim some parts but I found it a great read. The description of being emboldened in relationship with others, and visiting the queer mosque were particularly beautiful.

Gorgeous, lyrical, expansive. How can a novella of 200 pages contain so much complexity and depth??!!
An astonishing achievement, it's definitely bucked the bounds of sc-fi with its poeticism and the ostensible paradox of its simultaneous intimacy and cosmic scope. Ursula Le Guin would be proud.
There are so many layers here. A joy of a creation.
I imagine Shu Qi and Lupita Nyong'o in the title roles of an epic adaptation.

An important book. An extremely necessary book.
I cried three times - at both of Sunil's speeches and at Rooney's speech to Georgia at the end.
It's not perfect but it contains so much love.
It starts out lonely and finishes with the fullest of hearts.

A fantastic series of interweaving stories of British women spanning generations, sexualities, gender identities, & cultural heritage. Evaristo's skill is in how she's able to capture these contrasting voices- particularly the intergenerational ones. I enjoyed this book & hope to see more like it

I felt this book addressed some of the problems I had with Conversations With Friends; some of what mas missing from the latter, was present here, namely addressing gender power dynamics and adding a contrasting narrative voice.
Rooney somehow manages to communicate a very specific type of internal female voice that I haven't seen brought to life so vividly before.
I do feel like the only aspect of her writing that sits uncomfortably with me is that she writes as someone who hasn't moved through or transcended these experiences yet; she's still in them. The perspective is valuable and utterly absorbing, but I wanted the characters to grow beyond their experiences in a more profound way.
One niggle that persisted on from Conversations with Friends, is just an overwhelming vibe of middle class whiteness and fake-wokeness (the handling of class issues is kind of heavy-handed). There doesn't seem to be an authorial awareness of this either, nor the characters' inability to strive for anything other than a vaguely conservative BoBo mediocrity.

This is a story about a very sad and ugly subject, but written with an honesty and rawness that adds some kind of deeper pathos.

This was my first time reading James Baldwin's fiction, having previously only read his essays, nonfiction, and seen interviews/speeches. He is eloquent as ever but his eloquence and insight is held up as a mirror to a protagonist who is drawn into harmful and cruel behaviours due to his dishonesty with himself and fear of his attraction to men. This is a novel about masculinity and internalised homophobia and how it can eat you from the inside. The story illustrates how the process of internalised hate prevents a person from loving and destroys the lives of the ones around them. Like I said, ugly and sad subject, but as you'd expect from Baldwin, his perspicuity and insight mean it is a nuanced portrayal.

You won't like the first person narration from our protagonist, David: he's misogynistic, transphobic, fatphobic and classist. I guess a realistic portrayal given David is a white American man of the 1950s. Prepare yourself to be exposed to these 1950s attitudes. But it's probably the best portrayal of internalised homophobia you'll ever read. And these externalised behaviours are a great illustration of how hatred of difference and desire for normalcy is at its roots, disconnection, fear, and denial of self.

There are moments of beauty in the descriptions of intimacy, and I did jot down a few very quotable phrases. It's four stars for the quality of writing, but three stars for how rotten the protagonist made me feel.

Grief, appropriate to the cultural symbolism of the colour white, pervades the pages of The White Book. If you've read Maggie Nelson's Bluets, Han Kang's The White Book is similar in its series of riffs on a colour and its evocations for the author. I would say Hang Kang's work is more sparsely poetic & melancholy in its tone. There is beauty to be had here if you're in the right headspace & life stage.

A beautifully written piece of literary nonfiction that blends memoir and essay in the style of writers like Rebecca Solnit. The collected schizophrenias explores writer Esme Weijun Wang's experience living with schizoaffective disorder. As a health worker in training I found it essential reading.

Although I don't agree with everything Yalom advocates in his approach to practice (his approach to therapist disclosure, and touch, his habit of commenting on the “attractiveness” of female clients), I think this book is an invaluable guide for therapists starting out. It's emphasis on procedural insight & “the here and now”, transparency, and authenticity are hard to come by elsewhere so accessibly.

This was an engaging enough read. Appropriate for ages 8 & 9 up I'd say. I was interested to discover that it was published 4 years after the release of Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli adaptation of Howl's Moving Castle. I feel like Wynne Jones has definitely taken inspiration from the film in this follow-up to the original 2 books that pre-date (& differ from ) the film. There is a character that is somewhat like Heen, as well as Markl, and visits to the royal palace. Howl also features in disguise at the palace as a cute blonde, curly haired boy, just like in the film. I felt somewhat uncomfortable with the characters of the “kobolds” who seemed to be inspired by the houseelves from Harry Potter but without any riposte to the paternalistic/supremacist undertones of servitude. There was some surprising Alien-esque body-horror in the Lubbock's laying of eggs in bodies. With the lubbock / lubbockins too, I do get a bit antsy with the problematic plot device of characterizing a whole species as evil. And the implications of interspecies offspring as evil. That's a bit sucks teeth for me.

I wrote the following review as a student piece in 2010, not long after first reading Tall Man: The Death of Doomadgee, or as it was titled then, ‘The Tall Man':

Written by Walkley award-winning journalist Chloe Hooper, The Tall Man is a highly nuanced and penetrative account of the author's observations while on Palm Island during the inquiry into the death in police custody of Cameron Mulrunji Doomadgee.

‘On 19th November 2004, a drunk Aboriginal man had been arrested for swearing at police. Less than an hour later, he died with injuries like those of a road trauma victim. The State Coronor reported there was no sign of police brutality, backing up the police claim the man had tripped on a step. The community did not agree, and a week later burnt down the police station. Police immediately invoked emergency powers, flying in special squads trained in counter-terrorist tactics, who arrested countless locals including teenagers and grandmothers. I went there two months later' (from The Tall Man, 2008, 8).

With the recent re-opening of the inquiry into the death of Cameron Mulrunji Doomadgee, The Tall Man provides a powerful exploration of not only the particular details and background of the Doomadgee case, but also a compelling account of the contemporary imbroglio of indigenous-police relations in North Queensland. I found myself drawing parallels to George Orwell's Burmese Days and Conrad's Heart of Darkness in the pressing maelstrom of inercultural misunderstanding and folly Hooper evokes.

From a legal perspective, The Tall Man is fascinating in that it reveals the inefficiency and inappropriateness of the justice system in its current form to the Palm Island community. However the distinguishing feature of The Tall Man I found to be its broader commentary on how little Australia has developed in reconciling indigenous Australia with white colonial Australia, remote rural Australia with centralised, urban Australia, and the corresponding ramifications for present and future justice and peace in our society.

If anything Chloe Hooper's book succeeds in demonstrating the integral role the justice system will play in determining whether our communities are brought together or driven further apart.

Australian speciulative fiction that imagines a life in which the metaverse, AI, and other tech become entangled with what it means to be human and to exist embodied in the world. I'd probably bump this up to 3.5 stars for the ending- maybe the last 100 pages make this book much more worthwhile than I found it initially. Starting out, I found it hard to be engaged in the story- it seemed, vapid, cliched and a bit contrived at times, but really developed some steam, intrigue and conflict, moving from utopian to dystopian really quick. This is a very millenial-on-the-cusp-of-genz, australia-as-part-of-asia feel that I enjoyed, and I think it's an important addition to Australian new writing. Glad I read it! Worth your time! Looks like there'll be a sequel which I'll be interested to read.

Engaging and highly readable this should appeal to anyone, but was especially wonderful to read as a therapist.
The best book to give to someone if they're wondering what therapy is like. Made me chuckle and tear up, and found me genuinely engrossed.

This book is not for the faint-hearted.
Dickens once described Great Expectations as “a very fine, new and grotesque idea”, and this story, apparently inspired by Great Expectations, is definitely grotesque.
Be prepared for quite graphic rape, murder, sexual assault, and torture, at least every 30 pages of this ~350 page multi-generational epic. And epic it is, though a far cry from Pachinko. Another comparison I've seen is Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude.
The grotesque and the sensationalist storytelling is, either by author or translator, somehow, perhaps through its writhing vivid imagery, singing in blood and the fierce will to live of its protagonists, written with literary strokes which keep the reader engaged, though disturbed.
I was reminded of the novel When I Dance, Mountains Sing, by Irene Sola, in its tone, more than Great Expectations.
This story's sensationalism was uncomfortable for me. The horrific eventualities that befall its female and differently abled protagonists, though both historically accurate and somewhat fitting the hyperbole of folkloric satirical tone, imply an awareness in the male author of the voyeuristic pleasure some audiences will find in their perverse sensationalism, which the book's tone cannot excuse. I think what reinforced this opinion in me was Cheon Myeong-Kwan's unsophisticated handling of transgender experiences and wlw relationships.
I don't regret reading this book. I suspect many of the cultural and historical references were lost on me as someone not as intimately acquainted with the history of the Korean peninsula and politics as many, and others may find a greater richness with knowledge of these references, but be forewarned it's not for everyone.

I didn't enjoy it as much as White Teeth-but still a cut above most of the other ‘modern literary fiction' out there!

Four and a half stars.
This is a series of literary reflections very much in the tradition of Khalil Gibran's The Prophet, with the author and poet's musings on a series of words, packed tight with experiential wisdom.
While I didn't resonate will all the entries, I did find many excerpts profoundly resonant and meaningful. I felt particularly disconnected from the entries on places important to Christian history and the Western imagination - Rome and Istanbul, those places have their own meaning to me that was very different from the author's and I felt they didn't really fit in the compilation. They seemed a self-indulgent inclusion in which a tone of personal individual perspective contradicted the aspiring universalist tone of the other entries.
There are definitely some limitations to the author's traditional Western, Christian bias in these entries which prevents them reaching more transcendent knowledge or universal appeal and reveals the confines of the author's own perspectives a little plainly (he's no Gibran). But there is still some goodness and wisdom to be found as worthy food for personal reflection. The foreward by Maria Popova of Brainpickings fame, is gorgeously written.

Very readable and engaging, surprisingly dark. I enjoyed the portrayal of the counselling/therapy and found it realistic. Autism is never mentioned in this book, yet the main charactor Eleanor certainly has recognisable autistic traits, particularly literal thinking, alexithymia, and preference for routine. Yet I found this portrayal to verge on stereotypical tropes at times, and what behaviours were trauma and what was neurodivergence were very blurred sometimes. This might not be an issue in itself except for the fact that when Eleanor was shown to recover from trauma, some of her autistic behaviours were written away and she began to camouflage more and try to “fit in”. This was depicted as a good thing, a sign she was healing getting better, like the autistic traits were a sign of ill-health. So yeah, didn't feel comfortable on that one. But I did like the depiction of the slow and gradual building of connection, gradual trust, interest and opening up after trauma. That was very real and beautiful.

Loved it

Gobbled it up. Thriller meets historical fiction meets gothic colonial escape meets Cheryl Strayed's Wild meets Mary Oliver??? idk. 4 stars.

A cross between Rebecca Solnit, Nan Shepherd and Robert Macfarlane, this memoir intersperses stories of the weather, wildlife, and history of the Orkneys with the author's personal story of healing and recovery from alcoholism in that landscape.

Very readable and will appeal to nature lovers and those interested in mental health equally.

I haven't given a rating because I didn't read the whole thing, just skimmed.
The author is clear that this is a book about Americans for Americans, and I would agree - it is very specific in its scope and context and is not as generalisable as I anticipated. It is not about about racialised trauma generally or intergenerational trauma generally. From a therapist's perspective I think it seems to integrate well the current therapeutic modes of trauma recovery and trauma therapy with sociological and justice narratives around oppression, racialised violence, inequality and intergeneration trauma for Black American bodies.