Listen Up Fives, A Ten Is Speaking: My May 2025 in Media

The weather is finally turning (intermittently) overcast and drizzly in my particular spot on the Earth’s crust, which means that conditions are finally allowing me to enjoy media in my preferred manner: snuggly.

May’s digital collage looks deceptively springy, but that’s just Western Australian late-Autmn.

BOOKS READ:

The Siege of Burning Grass by Premee Mohamed (2024)
Format: Paperback (Solaris)

This time last year I’d never even heard of Premee Mohamed. Now, having since consumed three novellas, a short story and this, her debut fantasy novel, she’s become an autobuy, a priority read, and is well on her way to becoming one of my favourite authors. She has really interesting ideas and isn’t afraid to play with form, style and genre in her pursuit of them.

The Siege of Burning Grass is that rarest of delights: a 350-page standalone second-world (science) fantasy. In it, we follow Alefret, a deformed and disabled pacifist who is forced into a covert mission with a violent extremist to end a war. It’s a slow-paced meditation on the nature of war, colonisation and propaganda, on the ethics of non-violence in a time of horrors, and on the foolishness of judging a person’s intelligence by their appearance. It felt fresh while also reminding me a little of Octavia E. Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin in their ability to write incredibly rich, incredibly interesting genre fiction with something to say. It’s not a perfect book — it meanders and repeats itself a little — but if you’re a genre fan, Mohamed is someone you’re going to want to get familiar with.

Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (2023)
Format: Audiobook, narrated by Shayna Small, Aaron Goodson, Michael Crouch, Lee Osorio (Harville Secker)

Chain-Gang All-Stars was my favourite book of 2023, and I’ve been wanting to reread it ever since. I have finally let myself, this time in audiobook format, because I’d heard great things about the performances. And oh, boy, did I love this book even more than I did the first time.

Told in a patchwork of stories and styles from a wide cast of characters, Chain-Gang All-Stars follows Loretta Thurwar from her first to last appearance on the Chain-Gang All-Star Circuit: a new American extreme sport and reality TV phenomenon that pits convicted criminals against each other in gamified death matches. This is another book that reminds me of genre goddess Octavia E. Butler’s work. It has so much to say about the US for-profit prison system and its many, many victims, arguing eloquently in favour of prison abolition while acknowledging the complexity of emotions abolition evokes and the difficulty of putting forgiveness into practice. It’s gory, horrifying, complicated, and full of love. An absolutely masterful debut from a writer I’m so excited (but will wait patiently) to read more from.

The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar, illustrated by Kathleen Neeley (2025)
Format: Hardcover (Arcadia)

It’s been such a banger of a reading month, my goodness. At long last, Amal El-Mohtar, co-author of the absolutely fabulous This Is How You Lose The Time War has her own novella out and it is wonderful.

The River Has Roots is an original fairy tale come murder-ballad about two sisters living on the edge of Fairy. It’s too short to give you much more than that, but it’s impressively faithful to old fairy-lore while also feeling fresh and wholly new. El-Mohtar’s writing is rich and verbose in a way that might risk being too much (for me) from any other author, but the way she builds music, grammar and the many peculiarities of the English language into her magic is so clever. This feels like a story that should be told to you at the knee of a very charismatic old woman.

A seriously prolific short story author, Amal El-Mohtar also has a short story collection, Seasons of Glass & Iron coming out early next year. I’m extremely keen.

The Wood at Midwinter by Suzanna Clarke, illustrated by Victoria Sawdon (2024)
Format: Hardcover (Bloomsbury)

The River Has Roots reminded me more than a smidge of Susanna Clarke’s lovely way of writing magic, and reminded me that I had a similarly small fairytale from her sitting on my shelf, not yet read.

The Wood At Midwinter is a short story bound in a beautiful hardcover and tells the story of a saint who walks the woods in midwinter, desperately in want of a child. It’s short, it’s lovely, it’s set in the world of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and the author’s note at the end is a really delightful insight into Clarke’s brain and the magic that surrounds her in a casual way. A morsel of a book, but a scrummy one. I’d love to see more short stories given a sweet little binding.

One Day Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (2025)
Format: Paperback (Text Publishing)

On October 25th, 2023, in retweeting a video showing the aftermath of an Israeli bombing of Gaza, journalist and author Omar El Akkad posted: “One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” This post was retweeted 59,000 times and liked by 178,000 users.

This book, which is part memoir, part long-form journalism, part essay collection, expands on this idea from El Akkad’s experience as a journalist covering the Iraq war and various other beats, and as an Egyptian-born Muslim man named Omar living first in Canada, and then the United States. It’s a thoughtful, often scathing exploration that unravels the myth of America and its allies as peaceful or morally superior forces in the world, weaving past and present together to paint the USA as the empire it has been for at least the last century. It’s an easy read in that El Akkad is a wonderful writer and the chapters flow well, one personal or professional anecdote leading effectively into global horror and back again, but challenging in the emotions it stirs. Having been paying attention to Israel’s genocide since October 2023, much of his reporting brings back visceral images, reminding me of things I’m ashamed to have already forgotten, and showing me that I’m already falling prey to this normalising of mass violence, that as much as I want to consider myself aware, and on the “right side” of history, society, and the left-right divide, my brain is already trying to block out images of Palestinian suffering I thought would be engraved on the inside of my eyelids forever.

A short, powerful piece of non-fiction, and one well worth reading.

MEDIA WATCHED:

Andor, season 2 (2025)
Streamed on Disney+

What a finish! What a show! There’s so much to say about Andor as a second season and also as a complete piece—I’ve been trying to write a standalone blog about it for weeks now—but for the purposes of brevity I’m just going to applaud Tony Gilroy for creating an entry in the Star Wars universe that dares to feel unique, to trust its audience, to embrace adult storytelling and themes without violating the all-ages-welcome aesthetic and language of the show, and to engage with the age-old tradition of good science fiction reflecting the world we live in back at us. So much of Star Wars takes place under a fascist regime, and involves its heroes standing up to the evils of empire, and yet Andor is the project to finally sit down and look at what that means: politically, societally, and personally. It’s an incredibly interesting Star Wars entry, and is all the stronger for mostly eschewing the two things Star Wars properties have come to over-rely on: The Jedi, and interconnected lore. A bit of a shame it must, by necessity, lead on to Rogue One, but I’m looking forward to rewatching and maybe, finally, writing reams about all the very interesting character and storytelling choices it made within the confines of its franchise.

Cassian Andor and Bix Caleen: Bonafide Babes.

Conclave (again), (2024)
Owned on BluRay

There are some people who can resist the lure of watching the absolutely stunning Elect-A-New-Pope movie when the irl papal conclave is electing a new pope, but I am not one of them.

See April’s media wrap up for slightly more coherent thoughts on this one.

Isabella Rossellini: Always a ten in a sea of fives.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
Rented from AppleTV

It’s hard to believe there was a time when “Oscar Isaac” wasn’t synonymous with the concept of on-screen handsomeness, but that was the history of the world before the Cohen Brothers made the excellent choice of casting him to play the lead in their saddest movie. Inside Llewyn Davis follows its titular character through a disappointing week in what seems to be a pretty disappointing life. Llewyn is a former merchant-marine turned folk singer in New York in 1961. It is the dead of winter, and he has no home, no winter coat, his former collaborative partner is dead and his solo album isn’t selling. He survives by playing the odd gig and cycling through an ever-shortening list of people who are willing to let him crash on their couch for a few days. He is unpleasant, defensive, and he sleeps with his friend’s wives. He is a fuck-up on basically every axis you can think of, and the film presents no solution, no way out, not even the faint promise of a happy ever after. Llewyn is a depressed man with some talent, but not enough. Some friends, but not the one he needs. Some family, but not for much longer. Many people have theorised over the years, and I think broadly agree, that this film, about the despair and inertia that follows a broken creative partnership, could be Joel and Ethan Cohen’s way of speculating what life might look like for one of them when the other dies. A love letter, perhaps, to how important they are to each other, and an acknowledgement that everything ends eventually, even if you, paradoxically, have to go on for at least a while longer.

This was my second time watching it, the first being way back when it was released. I loved it then, and I loved it now, but in the different ways you can love a thing when you’re 26 and 38. Then, I thought it was incredibly romantic movie about suffering for your art. Now, I think it’s a reflection on the fact that not only does not everyone make it, but almost nobody does. Which is a bummer, I guess, but one you can read a whole lot into. And you should know by now that I love to be sad and overthink things.

Oscar Issac, handsome and cold.

The Last of Us, season 2 (2025)
Streamed on Max

Oof. I hate to say it, but this season was a massive flop for me. The reasons why are too numerous to list here (I tried and then had to delete a 900 word rant) but the short version is that, despite some bright spots, great visuals and lovely performances, The Last of Us season two doesn’t work for me as either an adaptation of the game (which, I’ll be upfront, also made a lot of choices I don’t love) or as a standalone piece of television, despite trying very hard to be both. It’s caught somewhere in the middle, and as a result serves up seven sluggish episodes that put their focus in all the wrong places. I don’t know what must have been going on behind the scenes re: HBO Max, game creator Neil Druckmann’s openness (or not) to changing the format of the story, or a case of nightmare actor scheduling to have led us to this, but I expected something with much more purpose from Craig Mazin, who is an incredibly skilled writer and showrunner, as well as an avid game guy who I am confident understands the difference between storytelling in TV and storytelling in games. I so badly want to shout about gameplay as being vital to character understanding and storytelling, but I’ll just push it all down like a healthy adult who recognises that there are significantly larger problems in the world than a TV adaptation of a game sucking a bunch.

Anyway. The main saving grace here is Isabela Merced, who is a stone cold delight as Dina (my admitted fave from the game… I’ll own a bias when I see one), and Bella Ramsay, who is doing the best they can with the tonal mess they’ve been given.

Nice gay time ruined by that whole revenge spree Ellie is half-heartedly on.

Murderbot, season 1 (2025)
Streamed on AppleTV

Only four episodes of Murderbot are out at time of writing, so I’ll save my thoughts until the season is over, but gosh am I optimistic about this one. If you’re not up to date on your sci-fi reading, Murderbot is an adaptation of the first book in The Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells, focusing on the first novella, All Systems Red. These books are beloved in the sci-fi community, particularly in neurodivergent and queer spaces, so lots of people are having lots of feelings about the adaptation. For my part, and in stark contrast to The Last of Us, I’m really enjoying a lot of the adaptive choices being made. I’m thrilled at the return of the ye olde half-hour adventure comedy format (i.e. closer to 20 minutes than 30, aka the network half-hour) and am enjoying the extremely earnest silliness of the tone. I think it’s already a nice fit for a lot of the humour on display in The Murderbot Diaries and will pair really well with the heart to come. This is currently the only weekly release thing my partner and I are watching, and it’s become something we really look forward to sitting down to.

What’s not to love about an awkward, soap-opera loving cyborg?

MISCELLANEOUS NEWS MEDIA, ESSAYS, PODS and BLOGS I ENJOYED:

“Again and again, the show highlights its characters’ investment in social equality—a formula, to be sure, but one that registers as more galvanizing than cloying. Which is to say, The Pitt’s literalism may be its superpower. In the face of mass institutional acquiescence to fascism, there’s a lot to be said for loudly asserting the value of radical empathy and social justice.”

The Radical Cringe of The Pitt by Charlotte E. Rosen
A piece on how the ever-present, occasionally clunky “wokeness” of The Pitt is just what the world needs right now.

“It's so emblematic of the moment we're in, the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore.”

The Who Cares Era by Dan Sinker
A piece on how AI is exacerbating an already worrying trend of declining care and quality in our news, entertainment media, and basically everything else.

“The loom was the only one of its kind in the southern hemisphere, and one of only a handful in the world, bought for the university’s Brunswick campus in the early 2000s, soon after Halton started teaching there. It “elevated what you could do as an artist”, she says. Students enrolled just to have access to it. International artists visited especially to weave on it.”

A New Room For A Doomed Loom - And The Battle To Save Australia’s Slowly Dying Crafts by Stephanie Convery (extremely Parks and Rec headline aside,)

Extremely Parks and Rec headline aside, this is a fascinating piece on how the near-junking of a Jacquard loom reflects the swiftly deteriorating quality of Australian higher education.

Lamestream: A brand new podcast on Australian politics, media, and the relationship between the two hosted by Osman Faruqi and Scott Mitchell. One month in, their episodes have focused on the recent Australian federal election results and coverage, and, more interestingly, the ways in which Australian news media has failed across the board in reporting on Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and rapidly accelerating violence and incursion in the West Bank. Osman and Scott have both had long careers as journalists, and it’s great to see them go independent and share their insights into the industry alongside deep dives into what is — and isn’t — making it into the mainstream news.

Deepcut News: More Australian journalists going independent, this time Antoun Issa and Alex McKinnon. It’s early days yet, and having also debuted in the last month their output has likewise largely focused on the Federal Election and Palestine, but I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read so far and am always going to boost the work of journalists who are actually interested in seeking truth and challenging power.

And that it’s it for May, 2025! Let me know if I’ve put anything on your radar, and if you’ve read or watched any of the above (or anything different!) and want to gab about them, my comments are always open!

Sorry, Was Engrossed In Sad Book: My April 2025 in Media

Normally, when looking back at my month in media consumption, I have a list of books 4 - 10 long, a show or two, and on the wild occasion, a movie. But this month (and, naturally, the first one I’m talking about in this newsletter/blog thing) things are wildly inverted thanks to two factors:

1. I’ve been reading through a fairly large stack of screenplays for a competition I’m helping judge, which has chewed up all my reading-for-fun-and-general-self-improvement time, and

2. I’ve been knitting a jumper, and something about knitting calls for screen time over audiobooking.

I’ve also consumed an unholy amount of hours in political and economic podcasts, but for the sake of everyone’s sanity, we’re not going to talk about that right now.

I’ve been making monthly montages out of the contents of my phone’s camera roll. Meet April!

BOOKS READ:

ANNE OF GREEN GABLES by L.M. Montgomery (1908)
Format: Audiobook (narrated by Rachel McAdams)

A short story of mine vaguely inspired by Anne Shirley and the Cuthberts was recently accepted for publication in a very cool magazine, so Anne of Green Gables has been on my mind a bit lately. And when the other book I started right before this turned out to be the actually scary kind of horror book, I thought, “Now’s the time for a reread, baby. You deserve something nice.”

And nice it was! The story of a highly imaginative, easily distracted orphan turning up to the farmhouse of two unmarried middle-aged siblings on Prince Edward Island by mistake is as effortlessly charming as its fatally red-haired protagonist. Anne’s romantic monologues are balanced effortlessly by the gruffly practical (but mostly kind-hearted) adults around her, and even more so by the wry commentary of its narrator. An absolute hoot was had, right up until it had me sobbing in the corner of the kitchen. Real life affirming shit. Treat yourself, or, if you have kids and don’t mind overt Christian values, it’s a solid candidate for bedtime reading.

BAT EATER by Kylie Lee Baker (2025)
Format: Paperback

Maybe it’s the absolutely silly cover Hachette chose for this book, but I did not expect this part-serial killer thriller, part-ghost story horror book to give me the willies as badly as it did. And I mean that as a compliment!

Bat Eater (published in the US as Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng) follows Cora, who, after seeing her sister brutally murdered in a hate crime at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, takes a job as a crime scene trauma cleaner in Chinatown where she begins to notice a disturbing pattern of unreported murders that may be connected to the death of her sister — and sees her on the list of potential victims. Which would be stressful enough, but Cora’s superstitious Auntie Zeng (and her superstitious co-workers) keep warning her about “ghost month:” the month in which the unappreciated and hungry dead come back to punish their loved ones. And Cora, with all her mixed feelings, trauma and denial, hasn’t been mourning her sister in any of the ways she should.

Bat Eater is gnarly. It’s goopy, gory, violent, sad, and oozing with dread. Baker has recreated the densely anxious air of COVID-19 lockdowns, painting an empty city in crisis. It’s a fascinating exploration of white supremacy, anti-Asian racism, the particular brand of misogyny that leads to the exploitation of Asian women, political corruption, youth malaise, passivity as a fatal character flaw, and the power of cultural connection. I had a horrible time, which again, I mean as a very high compliment. Top notch contemporary horror, and an absolutely banger use of ghosts.

WE COULD BE RATS by Emily Austin (2025)
Format: Paperback

An absolutely rare month in that I read not one, but TWO brand new releases, and loved the shit out of both. But that was expected in this case, at least. I’ve now read all three of Emily Austin’s published novels and she has made an eager fan out of me.

We Could Be Rats is something of an epistolary piece told in letters and journal entries, and follows two sisters, one of whom is trying to understand the suicide attempt of the other. It’s heavy and emotional, but really beautifully pieced together. I’m so thrilled to see Emily Austin continuing to explore her usual themes (mentally ill Canadian lesbians with big hearts and big trauma Doing Their Best) while really stretching her craft muscles and experimenting with different narrative structures and devices.

I was so engaged (i.e. crying) while reading a certain section of this book that I missed a text from my partner, and when I finally saw it half an hour later could only respond with, “Sorry, was engrossed in sad book.”

Again, highest compliment.

MEDIA WATCHED:

TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN (2017)
Owned on Blu-ray

Like many other David Lynch fans, my partner and I started rewatching Twin Peaks shortly after his death in January, and April brought the soapy and surreal journey to a close. We watched Season 3 as it aired back in 2017, which was a wild, entertaining, often beautiful but ultimately befuddling experience for me. I liked it, but I didn’t get it, and the fact that I didn’t get it frustrated me a little. But I’ve diligently spent these past eight years getting weirder, more creatively open and, I hope, interesting, and so I went into The Return not trying to understand it, but only to experience it. And mates, I loved it. Twin Peaks was always more soap opera than police procedural or small town mystery, and The Return keeps the spirit while beefing up the experimental elements that made seasons one and (parts of) two so special. I don’t love everything about it, and I think Lynch was pretty exploitative of the bodies of Black and Asian women, while giving them little actual screen and character time. But overall, it was a journey well worth taking again.

This is the arm, and it sounds like this: “psbpsbpsbpsbpsbpsbpsb.”

CONCLAVE (2024)
Rented on Apple TV, then immediately purchased on Blu-ray

Continuing on the theme of media I watched because someone died, I used the Pope’s death (RIP to an unprecedentedly pretty progressive one, relatively speaking) and the presence of Isabella Rossellini to sell my partner on finally watching Conclave: a movie centred around the process of electing a new pope. I went into this knowing very little other than the premise, and that people around the time of the Academy Awards had joked about Conclave being behind the self-elimination of a few of the leading nominees, so I assumed it was going to spin into some sort of Drop Dead Gorgeous situation with cardinals. What I got instead was a quiet, beautifully shot piece about grief, duty, and making good choices. I immediately bought it on blu ray so that I can appreciate the shots in non-streaming fuzz (our internet is… not great) and also so I can put it on whenever I feel sad. A feel good movie about papal politics. Who knew!

All those moments will be lost in time, like cardinals in the rain.

THE PITT (2025)
Streamed on MAX

I am a big baby with medical anxiety and an accident prone partner, so when everyone first started talking about (mostly) realtime medical show The Pitt I lasted exactly twenty minutes before I had to turn it off and have a prolonged cuddle with my dog. But then everyone in the discord started watching and raving about it, so I caved and tried again. This time with self-protection measures: I only watched it on my phone or laptop screen (thus reducing chance of seeing anything terrible, because this show has decided to go for a realism I have never craved in medical dramas) and only while knitting, to reduce my chances of paying too much attention to any of the medical talk. So I basically turned this into a radio play that I paid a bit of attention to. Is this the ideal way of watching TV? No. Does it cause me pain as someone who writes TV? Yes. But it eased me in, and then somehow I watched (listened to?) all 15 episodes of it over three days. I’m tempted to give it its own blog because I also happened to watch it the week that Katy Perry and friends went to the exosphere, which is a combo that provoked a lot of Thoughts. But the tl;dr is that I ultimately enjoyed it a lot once I made it baby-proof. The characters are great, the shift format allows for some really interesting cast relays, and I’m genuinely impressed by how a real-time show managed to find an engaging hook/cliffhanger at the end of nearly every episode. And, honestly, I’m just so happy to see another weekly release show with what seems to be a yearly commitment and a decent episode count. TV IS COMING BACK, FOLKS. NATURE IS HEALING.

Middle-age is really working for Noah Wyle, professional TV doctor.

BAND OF BROTHERS (2001)
Streamed on MAX

This show about American paratroopers in WW2 was a prestige television super event in 2001, which I completely missed, having been only fourteen at the time. It is absolutely brimming with baby British actors playing Americans, many of whom went on to be megastars (Andrew Scott, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Tom Hardy) and more than any other show it has made me wonder if I am face-blind because I cannot for the life of me tell the difference between 90% of these muddy brunette men. The production values are very high. The photography is quite beautiful. The performances are very good. I cannot imagine writing a script with this much group chat, so I’m impressed on those fronts, but I don’t know that I love the narrative framing of it all. It’s a good show told messily, but I think that’s probably a purposeful choice in reflecting the chaos of war. It might just be too much of an ensemble show for me. I cannot remember a single person’s name other than Major Winters. Good for knitting in front of, though, if you don’t mind all the screaming.

Noted American Hero, Damien Lewis.

ANDOR and THE LAST OF US (2025)
Streamed on Disney+ and MAX respectively

I am, of course, watching the two big, highly anticipated, mega budget franchise second seasons, and will probably give each a separate blog or two as they’re both prompting a WHOLE LOT of thoughts. But at time of writing, only three episodes of each show are out (with the next batch of Andor dropping today) so all I’ll say right now is that I’m mostly impressed and intrigued, with a few reservations on both sides. But I don’t think anything is going to happen this year that’ll top Mon Mothma getting absolutely crunk and dancing the pain away at her daughter’s childbride wedding in terms of sheer emotional and aesthetic extravaganza.

We call this a Chandrilan Doof.

This piece was originally posted on Substack on April 30, 2025

My Five Favourite Reads of 2025, Q1

JAMES by Percival Everett (2024)
Format: Audiobook (narrated by Dominic Hoffman)

I have to confess upfront that I’ve never read Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, of which James is a loose retelling (or perhaps closer to a re-imagining). In fact, prior to hearing a bunch of friends with excellent taste raving about James, my only understanding of the American children’s classic came from a Simpson’s homage and the memory of having seen a VHS cover of baby Elijah Wood in old-timey suspenders standing near a raft at some point in my life.

I did briefly consider reading Huckleberry Finn before I moved forward with James, but a) I’m a firm-ish believer that retellings and reimaginings should be able to stand alone as complete stories in their own right, as well as in conversation with their source texts, and going in sans source text is the best way to test that, and b) I didn’t wanna. So here we are.

James tells the story of “Jim,” an enslaved man in 1860’s Missouri who has secretly educated himself via the extensive library of a judge who lives on (or next to, or owns — I wasn’t too clear on the domestic layout) his owner’s property. Jim doesn’t lead a happy life, but he has found community with the other enslaved folk on the property, joy in his wife and daughter, and a certain amount of safety in knowing he’s considered one of the “good” slaves. The story kicks off, therefore, when Jim hears a rumour that he’s about to be sold.

Rather than be separated from his family, Jim runs away, intending to stay close until he can figure out a solution. It’s a doomed plan to start with, and only gets worse when he comes across his owner’s scrappy ward, thirteen-year-old “Huck,” who has convincingly faked his own death with pig’s blood and run away at the news that his violent, alcoholic father is coming back to town. Aware he must now be wanted for the murder of a white boy — the mere accusation of which is more than enough to see any Black man hanged in the south — Jim resolves to escape to a free northern state and work to earn the money to purchase his wife and daughter’s freedom.

What ensues is a kind of road trip story in which Jim and Huck, travelling mostly at night and largely along the Mississippi river, stumble from mishap to catastrophe as they make their way north. It’s an interesting pairing: Huck has all the privilege and confidence of whiteness, but with a dead mother and an abusive, deadbeat father is desperate to be loved, while Jim, who does feel some responsibility and affection towards this boy, has already spent all the love he has to give his wife and daughter, and is just trying not to die. Where Huck sees adventure and a growing camaraderie, Jim feels danger, obligation, and a growing resentment.

I’ve always been a big fan of road trip stories (even when the road in question is in fact a river), but they’re incredibly tricky to get right. The physical journey can lull the writer (and the reader) into a false sense of forward motion while the character journey itself stagnates. It can so easily go from a story to a sequence of events, distracting from its emptiness with interesting places and zany new characters. But Percival Everett manages to deliver the parade of location, characters and hijinks while keeping everything firmly grounded in the death of Jim, and the birth of James.

The name “Jim”, of course, wasn’t the name given to our protagonist by his parents. If they gave him one, he never heard it. “Jim” was assigned by one of his owners, as are most of the names of the Black characters we meet in the book. At multiple points of the book he tries on new ones, wondering what name he might choose for himself if ever given the luxury. The title of the book, of course, reveals his decision long before he makes it. But “James” is more than just a name.

Our protagonist, much like all the slaves we meet in the book who care about their survival, has a mask he wears in white company. The mask is cheerful, subservient, and speaks in a very specific dialect (called “slave talk” in the book). Everything about it is engineered to appeal to the idea of white superiority, and Jim is so good at it he gives anti-diction lessons to the Black children on his owner’s property, drilling them to make sure they never talk back to a white American, to never say anything that might imply they’re capable of intelligent — or critical — thought.

The children said together, “And the better they feel, the safer we are.”
“February, translate that.”
“Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be.”
“Nice.”

Despite having spent no small amount of time in each other’s company, Huck doesn’t hear Jim speak in his real vernacular until they run away together. The first slip comes during a fever, in which a delirious Jim argues philosophy and race politics with a vision of Voltaire: easily explained away to a thirteen-year-old as a bout of mysterious madness. But the longer they spend on the run, and the more Jim sees of America — the more he sees his people mocked and reviled while their culture is appropriated for entertainment, the more atrocities against Black bodies he witnesses and experiences at the hands of cruel, ignorant people who believe their supremacy is natural and god-given — the harder it is for him to keep the mask in place.

“I did not look away. I wanted to feel the anger. I was befriending my anger, learning not only how to feel it, but perhaps how to use it.”

The racist stereotype of Black men the world over is one centred around violence and anger. It’s an anger that is seen as innate, rather than ever having been earned: an unsubtle and intended reminder that Black people were, until only a few generations ago, legally and socially considered to be something lesser than human. Everett purposely subverts this stereotype in a way I found extremely effective. When we meet Jim, he’s not an angry man. Frustrated, sure, but his negative feelings are largely managed and vented through humour. He is resigned to the impossible situation he exists in, and is trying, somehow, to make the best of it. But, as he learns in the arduous journey that follows, there is no best of it. The system is built on violence, theft, suffering and cruelty. When James finally emerges from chrysalis of Jim, he is fucking furious, and he has earned every piece of it.

By the time I’d finished James, I was glad I’d ignored the brief temptation to read Huckleberry Finn first. There was something so satisfying, so subversive, so thematically appropriate in having James tell his side of this story first. It’s a book I plan to read again, though I’m of two minds as to whether I want to hear Huck’s side of things before I do. On one hand, I’d like to be able to appreciate the conversation being had between the two works, and to consider Everett’s adaptive choices. On the other, this work is a masterpiece all on its own, and the thought seeing James completely disappear behind the mask of Jim breaks my heart.

And on a third, less poignant hand… I still don’t really wanna.

If you are planning on checking James out, I highly recommend the audio version. Dominic Hoffman gives a fantastic performance, and the verbal code switching is really something to hear.

Content Warnings: Slavery, Racism, Racial slurs, Rape, Violence, Murder, War, Child abuse, Fire/Fire injury

A SUNNY PLACE FOR SHADY PEOPLE by Mariana Enriquez, translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell (2024)
Format: Paperback

Two things causes me to pick this book off the shelf. The first is that I’ve been eyeing off Mariana Enriquez’s absolute tome of a book, Our Share of Night for quite a while now, but as I’m so terrible at committing to books higher than 400 pages, I figured that dipping my toe into her writing via her short works might be more sensible. The second is that gloriously trippy, gross cover, featuring art by Pablo Gerardo Camacho.

A Sunny Place for Shady People is Enriquez’s third collection of short horror stories, and while none of the stories in this book directly relate to each other, they all (bar one set in Los Angeles) take place in Argentina post 2020. These are, almost across the board, ghost stories, with Argentina their haunted house. Each story is a character piece in which Enriquez paints a rich portrait of her (mostly female) protagonists, and in doing so, weaves a tapestry of everyday people doing their best to survive in a country beset with governmental corruption, institutionalised neglect, and in the aftermath of a pandemic that made everything worse. Her prose (translated beautifully by Megan McDowell, who also translates for the fascinating Samanta Schweblin) is rich and emotional, and incredibly effective at conveying information without bogging the reader down. By the time each story ends it feels like you’ve spent time with someone real, in someplace real, and the regret at moving on from them is only relieved by a lifting of dense foreboding. I read this collection straight through, and the breaks between stories are like coming up for air before plunging back down into a too-warm, too-reedy lagoon.

But for all their sense of dread, these horror stories aren’t, for the most part, particularly frightening. Enriquez doesn’t hasten to or linger over the grotesque. Her focus seems to be on the human element, on connection, on emotion, on grief. All are largely left open-ended, leaving you with questions, but also the tools to answer some of them. She’s a wonderfully pensive writer, a masterful character artist, and now I have to go and buy her giant bloody novel to see what she does with a long form narrative. Because, my god, is she brilliant with just a few pages.

Content Warnings: Body horror, Death, Blood, Rape, Death of parent, Suicide, Forced institutionalisation, Animal death, Cancer

ONLY THE ASTRONAUTS by Ceridwen Dovey (2024)
Format: Paperback

I’ve been aware of Ceridwen Dovey for years. Being an Australian with an aggressively Welsh hard-C name means, among other things, that you tend you take note of other Australians with aggressively Welsh hard-C names. But I’d never read any of her work until February, when a whim to read nothing but sci-fi led me to pick up this book, which I’d seen in my local bookshop the year before and bought more out of a sense of solidarity than anything else. I had no idea what to expect. I had a vague recollection that her previous, well-received collection, Only the Animals, was written from the perspectives of various animals, but I wasn’t sure what the tone was. And, if I can be honest, I don’t always trust Australian accolades when it comes to genre fiction. I’ve always found my country, as an audience and a publishing industry, to be quite snobbish and embarrassed by anything home-grown that lies in realm of whimsy, the fantastical, or strange.

Well, more fool me! Only the Astronauts is delightfully absurd, poignantly bittersweet, and, in bits, really fucking odd. Tens across the board.

Only the Astronauts contains five short stories (or, more specifically, three short stories, a novelette, and a screenplay written by a tampon) which make up five clear parts of an overarching narrative.

“My love, we need to talk. I’ve tried and tried to call you from the Tesla’s dashboard phone, but I haven’t had a clear connection in over six years.”

Beginning with Starman, a story written from the perspective of Elon Musk’s jilted lover (the mannequin he strapped to a Tesla and shot into space) and ending with Hackgold | Hacksilver, Voyager-1’s final, attempted missive to her long-lost sister after leaving the solar system and discovering a colony of aliens, Dovey creates her own golden record: a loving tribute to, and searing indictment of, humanity. This glorious species that is capable of sending a hope and a prayer into the unknown, knowing they won’t be alive to hear any answer; who can send astronauts into space so that they can consider how very small our presence in the universe is; who can project feelings of real love, real empathy, real grief onto a probe, or a station, or a rover, but so often fail when it comes to our fellow humans. Who find a way into space and onto the pristine miracle of the moon only to leave behind masses of garbage, and send a woman into space for a week with a hundred tampons, and then associate her forever with someone else’s sexist blunder. I live for books that are able to balance joy with sorrow, and humour with gravity, and through her rich cast of inanimate spacefarers, Dovey strikes it perfectly.

Last year’s Booker Prize was won by Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, a book that won over Percival Everett’s James and has quite a bit in common with Requiem, Dovey’s second, and longest story in this collection. Orbital is a slice of life novella that covers one average day on the International Space Station (or, sixteen orbits of Earth). It slips between the perspectives of its astronauts and cosmonauts as they look back at Earth, pondering their planet, life, politics, family, climate catastrophe, and each other.

“I like the modular way I came into being, and how I proved that mutual usefulness can sometimes be more appealing than mutual destruction.”

Requiem is written from the perspective of the International Space Station in the year 2031, on its final day with its final crew. The ISS is due to be retired, and will soon be allowed to fall through the atmosphere and into the sea at the point furthest from inhabited land. What follows is a memorial that goes both ways: the ISS reflects on and pays tribute to its many inhabitants over the decades, while its final crew pays loving tribute to it by writing sonnets: all of which are read aloud for its benefit even though the astronauts and cosmonauts have no idea the ISS is listening, and has just written its own in return.

“I don’t want to cause a global panic as I spiral out of control above towns and cities. I don’t want to destroy any living thing in the course of my own destruction. It would undo all the good I have done, welcoming humans into me, nurturing and sustaining them. A good death bookends a good life.”

Both Orbital and Requiem are ponderous and hopeful, both reflecting on the isolation and distilled humanity of the inhabitants of the ISS alongside the odd conundrum that comes with being a human who yearns for space, only to get there and yearn for Earth. But for me, perhaps because of its unique narrator, and perhaps because the narrative freedom allows for a more satisfying and purposeful structure than a day-in-the-life situation, Requiem is the stronger (and stranger) of the two. Like all of the other stories in the collection, it would stand wonderfully on its own. But taken in the context of the others, I think it’s one of the biggest reasons the ending of the collection packed such an emotional punch for me. This book had me sniffling in the kind of way that makes my partner panic from the other side of the house.

Only the Astronauts has, I believe, only been published in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, so if you’re outside of these areas, it may be tricky to get a copy of. But if you like books that are sad and strange and lovely, I encourage you to try. It is, after all, a runaway hit amongst Australians with aggressively Welsh hard-C names.

Content Warnings: Death

KINDRED by Octavia E. Butler (1979)
Format: Audiobook (narrated by Kim Staunton) and eBook

Octavia E. Butler is a giant of speculative and science fiction, a writer who was so good at paying attention to the world around her and connecting dots between past, present and future that she has been hailed in this, the year of our Lord 2025 (or, more relevantly, the year of the first entry in Butler’s seminal Parable of the Sower), as a prophet.

Kindred, however, looks backwards rather than forwards. Written and set in the late 1970’s, it follows Dana, a young, educated Black woman in California who is yanked through time and space to a Maryland plantation in 1815. Her first visit lasts only minutes, allowing her just enough time to save a young white boy from drowning. But in an unexplainable phenomenon that takes place over only weeks in Dana’s modern day timeline, she is pulled back in time for first hours, and then months at a time. Her anchor is the white boy, Rufus: an ancestor who is able to call her to him when he feels his life is in danger, and Dana is only able to leave him when she fears her life is in danger — a dangerous stipulation that she’s only able to game a few times. And so begins a complex relationship between the two that spans Rufus’s natural life. Dana’s survival depends on his, at least until she can guarantee he’s had the children who make up the next branch of her family tree. But as Rufus grows from an affectionate boy to a slave-owning, manipulative man, things become much messier.

“Strangely, they seemed to like him, hold him in contempt, and fear him all at the same time. This confused me because I felt just about the same mixture of emotions for him myself. I had thought my feelings were complicated because he and I had such a strange relationship. But then, slavery of any kind fostered strange relationships. Only the overseer drew simple, unconflicting emotions of hatred and fear when he appeared briefly. But then, it was part of the overseer’s job to be hated and feared while the master kept his hands clean.”

I don’t think I picked this book up so soon after reading James on purpose, but doing so made for an excellent companion read. Whereas James is a road story heavily focused on the Black male experience, touching on and portraying, but not really exploring the horrors facing enslaved Black women, Kindred has two static domestic settings and is almost wholly concerned with Black women and the communities they forge to survive. Dana, forced to live as a slave while she’s on Rufus’s plantation, is thrust into the orbit of several Black women: chief amongst them Alice, her once-free ancestor, now owned and lusted after by Rufus. With her is Sarah, the cook, who has seen all of her children sold except her daughter Carrie, who was born mute. The relationships between Dana and these women can’t always, or, in Alice’s case, ever, be called friendship. But there is sisterhood, a sharing of knowledge, a sense of support, and unflinching honesty. Dana enters into this community not-so-privately believing that her education, knowledge of history, and modernity sets her above these women who have, in her eyes, allowed themselves, if not to become enslaved, then to remain so. Exposure and experience, of course, challenge these perceptions. When all of society is built on the back of your labour, when every law exists to categorise you as an animal and unquestioningly forgive your abuse, your rape, your murder, then what can you do but try to cling to the few moments of joy and connection your life might allow?

I won’t spoil what is a really excellent progression in the story, but one of the most fascinating, sickening themes Kindred explores is how deep the ideas of white supremacy run, and how quickly people will accept the idea of a natural hierarchy so long as they feel they’re at the top of it (or, at least, not the bottom). Much like in James, the Black characters in the story are just trying to survive while the white characters are constantly trying to explain and justify their position: they are inherently smarter than Black folk(despite all evidence to the contrary), stronger (despite needing Black bodies to perform all their labour), closer to God (despite all the rape, torture, murder, abuse). Even the white “allies” in both stories fold at the first test of principle. White supremacist ideologies run through the veins of our societies, and it’s as true in 2025 as it was in 1979 and 1815. Kindred doesn’t hold solutions to that: only a mirror. And that, I think, is what gets me most about Octavia E. Butler’s work. For all her incredible imagination and powerful writing, she’s never really been a prophet. She’s only ever shown us the existing rot.

Content Warnings: Slavery, Racism, Racial slurs, Rape, Sexual assault, Suicide, Child death, Vomit, Fire/Fire injury

INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT SPACE by Emily Austin (2024)
Format: Paperback

Call me a sad white lady (it’s true), but I’m a sucker for a book that sounds like it could be a Phoebe Bridgers song. I’m also, increasingly, an absolute sucker for Emily Austin, whose debut novel Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead was one of my favourite reads of 2024.

Interesting Facts About Space is a contemporary litfic following Enid: a twenty-six year-old half-deaf neurodivergent lesbian with extreme commitment issues, an estranged and quite recently dead dad, a depressed mum she’s possibly keeping alive entirely via space facts, a bigoted and resentful step-mother, extremely kind half-sisters who keep trying to be be in her life, a backlog of embarrassing teenage youtube videos she can’t delete, an over-reliance on true crime media, a phobia of bald men, a possible stalker and repeat home invader, undisclosed trauma, and the wife of someone she’s been hooking up with calling her on the phone.

There’s a lot going on in this book (which, paradoxically, has been accused of having “no plot” by several of its reviewers on Goodreads), but it’s a carefully controlled chaos, with every thread connected in a way that, when tugged, pulls the whole web of Enid’s stressors tighter and tighter. This is a story about an overwhelmed young woman desperately in need of help, but who can’t conceive that she has the right to ask for it.

“I worry that I am a shell for something bad. That deep down, in the spot where most people keep their souls, I keep a weird little bug. I picture him there, leaning on the apple core of my soul, crunching on what remains of what’s good of me.”

Emily Austin is, for me, one of those authors who writes in a way that causes me deep emotional turmoil and humiliation, because she captures how I think and feel so perfectly that it is occasionally difficult to look at (and yet, impossible to look away). She so perfectly captures the neurodivergent brain on the page in a way I can see would be frustrating for readers who don’t know what it means to live with one. Interesting Facts About Space is largely internal, its protagonist self-centred and self-reflective in a way she is painfully aware of. The scenes are short and snappy, zipping through Enid’s work, social and private life, lingering in moments when she’s alone and thinking too much. It has all the hallmarks of what people seem to hate so much about litfic, and yet it builds quietly and beautifully to an emotional catharsis that says, “I see that you are overwhelmed, and afraid, and a bit broken in places. I see that you don’t feel like you should be allowed to be an adult with all the shitty choices you make and all the things you don’t know how to do yet. I see that you don’t feel like you fit into the shape of what it means to be a woman, let alone a queer woman. I see that you’re struggling just to exist in a world that doesn’t accomodate all your differences. Now see me, see that I feel like this too, and so does she, and her, and them, and him. None of us know what we’re doing, but it’s important we keep fighting and trying and caring about each other anyway, even if we fail. Your life, no matter how quiet, how seemingly unimportant, means everything. You mean everything.”

Anyway, I made the mistake of finishing this book on a plane, and therefore weeping so much the woman next to me leaned very firmly in the other direction.

A solid choice on her part, to be fair.

Content Warnings: Mental illness, Panic attacks/disorders, Abandonment, Suicidal thoughts, Homophobia, Death of parent, Self harm, Fire/Fire injury, Vomit

This piece was originally published in two parts on Patreon and Substack on the 18th and 21st of April, 2025