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 […]

I posted these on my Substack on 29 & 30 December 2022, but now I have plans to shut that down so here it is, reposted on my blog. My 2023 stats and favourite books are incoming… The graphs Once upon a time, I used to produce nonsensical graphs about the books I read on […]

Here’s a video I made for Brio about why I write what I write https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfZAu98uGTw

Writers are singularly obsessed with portraying their art and work as a waste of time and a moral failing, even though its negatives, environment-wise, are almost non-existent. The footprint of writing a book is approximately equivalent to sitting around doing absolutely nothing, which is largely what writing a book involves.

But first, some graphs! If I’d bothered to publish my graphs last year I think this would be year eight of ‘books unnecessarily graphed’. I’ve cut back over the past couple of years on the things I record in my reading spreadsheet, which means you get only the best graphs. Enjoy the colours… And now […]

How should we leave the consumers of fictions we write about climate change and ecocide? What should they think and feel as they close the book or the laptop?

I’ve just been reading about how daft end-of-year lists are and yep, that’s fair, but here it is anyway: the books I enjoyed reading (and listening to) the most in 2020.

Image: ‘Lost’ by Catherine Nelson https://michaelreid.com.au/art/lost/, which is the cover illustration for Elizabeth Knox’s novel, ‘The Absolute Book’. For the past year or so, the question I’ve been hoping to answer in my own mind (both for my current writing project and for my life) is something along the lines of ‘what are humans for?’. […]

Now into its sixth year, welcome to the 2019 edition of ‘books I read, unnecessarily graphed’. This year I started 93 books and 7 manuscripts. I abandoned 7 books (no manuscripts), mostly because they weren’t grabbing me (I noted them as ‘try again later’), occasionally because I didn’t like them at all and probably never […]

Let’s take a look at the spreadsheet as we hit the halfway mark in another exciting year. Has moving to the country made me read more? Better? Quicker? Do I just spend all my time looking out the window at birds? (Not today – today it’s so windy all the birds are in their homes, […]

I had a really good reading year, according to my reading spreadsheet. The vast majority of books I read fell into the ‘really liked it’ category. This list of the ‘best’ ones could have easily been four times as long. But ten is a standard number, so ten it is. As always, and where possible, […]

Nothing says festive season like graphs. Welcome to ‘my year in reading, unnecessarily graphed’. This year I started 104 books. I gave up on seven of them; two of them I’ve been reading for months, but I still intend to finish them. Ten of them were required reading: five were manuscripts from other writers, and […]

How exciting is the end of financial year? So exciting I forgot it had even happened. Sixteen days later I remembered I usually (OK, once) do a quick countdown of how my reading has gone in the first six months of the year. Last time I might have done the whole financial year. Who knows. […]

I’m doing a bunch of events in early August. In Adelaide: Tuesday 7 August at 6.30pm – A lecture I called ‘Inside wild minds’, looking at the predicament of wild animals, and how fiction might help us care about it. It’s on at Flinders University at Victoria Square, Room 1, Level 1, 182 Victoria Square. […]

I finally got around to updating my ‘Stories and essays‘ page, which it seems I haven’t touched since mid-2016. All my latest publications, online and off, free and paid, are now on there. In other news, I went to a brilliant workshop with Charlotte Wood at Writers Victoria yesterday, and I now feel slightly more […]

… and lacking even my usual minor attempts at layout and panache, this is my list of the best feminist books I’ve read since last International Women’s Day. Links are to reviews that go some way to talking about why I’ve chosen the books I’ve chosen. Sorry about the rushed post! Kingfishers catch fire by […]

I’m doing a few festival appearances over the next few months. First up: Adelaide Writers Week (which is next week): Catherine McKinnon and I will be talking about Invented Histories on Saturday I’m doing a ‘meet the writer‘ at Dymocks in Rundle Mall on Monday I’m chairing a session with Maja Lunde and Harriet McKnight […]

  ‘Get a hobby.’ The ‘will finish’ books are I contain multitudes by Ed Yong, about bacteria (it’s FASCINATING) and Secondhand time by Svetlana Alexievich, an oral history of the breakdown of the Soviet Union which is, huh, I don’t have a word for it. It’s extraordinary. They’re both very long and they’re both non-fiction […]

I’ve read about 100 books this year and these were the ones I liked best. Links are, where possible, to libraries where you can borrow the book (because library books are free to you but the authors still get paid). Books in bold were published this year. This list is way too long and for […]

A couple of weeks ago I went to Sydney, partly to do a talk about From the Wreck at the Thomas Keneally Centre. The Centre, at the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts, is a wonderful little retreat from the lunacy of the Sydney CBD, and they’re perfectly happy for you to pop in and browse […]