I’m writing an essay at the moment about the notion of a Sixth Extinction, and about the numbers that are regularly rolled out to show what a dire situation nature is in. As part of that I’ve been thinking a bit about the urge to use data to prove things in situations where data is probably not reliable, and is probably not the best way to tell the story. Consequently: here is some bad data, poorly presented, about what I read last year.
Last year I had a real dip in my reading, starting 102 books and finishing 89. This year is back up to more typical levels: I started 119 and finished 107 of them. Perhaps the books were shorter this year (I should really be recording page extents).
Of those, 18 were audiobooks, 36 were by Australians and 20 were research for my current writing project.
Books continue to be one of the best things. If I rated all my meals, I wonder if such a high proportion would be pretty good to heaps good. What about conversations? Days at work? Perhaps only hot showers and cats attain the same level of consistent goodness (or dogs, if that’s what you’re into). Say what you will about 2023, it gave me a better rate of good-book-reading than 2022: last year, 14% of books were Not Great; this year, it was 5%.
I’m just going to do a quick, half-arsed analysis of Heaps Good books and where they came from. One moment please…So, 29% of books I bought were Heaps Good; 29% of books I borrowed from the library were also Heaps Good, but FIFTY THREE PERCENT of books that were given or lent to me were Heaps Good books. I guess this means that other people have a much better idea what I’ll like than I ever will. Thanks, friends (and particularly, Tane Rawson, Kate Kruimink, Matt Lamb and Rose Mulready).
Normally, the final graph would show whether I managed to read any books that weren’t published in the past three years, but for whatever reason I absolutely cannot get Excel to generate that graph. I know this is a great loss to data journalism, but I’ll give you the highlights in text and you’ll just have to make do. Summary: I cannot manage to read old books, still. 28% of the books I read were published in 2023, with 15% from 2022 and 10% from 2021. 10% were also from 2006, but that’s because I read every single volume of Death Note in a week, counting each of them as one book and significantly skewing my results. My oldest book was from 1910 (Howard’s Way).
Favourite books
I never know how many books to list in this section or how to arrange them. Let’s try this…
Books published in 2023
Chain-gang All-stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and Audition by Pip Adam – two phenomenal works of speculative fiction about prisons and why they’re outrageously dumb (thank you James Bradley and Matt Lamb respectively for the recommendations). My notes for Chain-gang All-stars say it is ‘political, deeply felt, funny, sweet, propulsive – good at everything’; this was one of the most fully realised works of fiction I read in the year. Audition is another thing altogether: almost painfully weird and in an audacious world of its own.
Conquest by Nina Allan – Nina is one of my favourite all-time authors and this book about conspiracies, aliens and Bach has her usual thrilling blend of stories within stories and a perfectly honed lack of resolution. Read this or The Rift as soon as you can.
Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad – I read this novel about a production of Hamlet staged in Palestine late in September and I’m so glad I did. I understood so much more about Palestine by the time I finished it. It is never heavy handed or didactic, but it is powerful and nuanced and pulled me along from page to page. I highly recommend it. Thank you Bird Michael for the recommendation.
Also: Anam by Andre Dao, Some desperate glory by Emily Tesh and Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas.
Books about nature
I’m writing a book ‘about nature’ at the moment, which means I’m reading a lot of books ‘about nature’.
A world in a shell by Thom van Dooren – just before covid I was lucky enough to hang out with Thom at a conference in Melbourne, and the conversation we had helped me rewrite the ending of A History of Dreams. He is one of the kindest, deepest thinkers in Australian environmental studies, I reckon. This book about Hawai’ian snails is actually about everything to do with how humans relate to the rest of nature, and it’s probably pointless me writing a book when this one exists.
Summertime by Danielle Celermajer – thoughts on humans and animals in the frame of Danielle’s experience of the Black Summer bushfires and the impact they had on her small animal rescue sanctuary. Like Thom’s book, thinks far more deeply and more vulnerably than most of us are capable of.
Also: Catastrophic thinking: extinction and the value of diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene by David Sepkoski.
My other two favourite books…
…were A place of greater safety by Hilary Mantel and Death Note by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeishi Obata. In March I went to England to research my book and find myself and I failed dramatically at both. It was bloody cold and a lot of the time the roads were too icy to even go outside, so I spent hours in bed reading A place of greater safety and taking a wild ride through the French Revolution. Then I went to Paris for two days and that was the best (thank you Meg Clement). Hilary Mantel was an absolute genius and it’s incredible to think she wrote this epic novel before she was 40. I wish she was still alive. In June/July I spent a month in Canberra and it was kind of sad and kind of stressful and there was no better distraction than the battle of wits between Light Yagami and L in the manga my nephew Tane forced on me, Death Note. I loved it (even if it went downhill after [spoilers]). The shinigami Ryuk is one of my favourite characters ever. If you’re having a reading slump, give it a go.