Sarcasm is an adjusted stress reaction.

I started playing Assassin's Creed: Unity and realised that I know almost nothing about the French Revolution. We did study it in grade 10, but I missed a lot of time due to a never-identified virus -- I was out for most of the American Revolution and all of the French, and mostly passed the class because I knew more about the Chinese Communist Revolution than my teacher. (It's not her fault, she was an art teacher who was roped in to teach history for ... reasons which I'm sure made sense at the time.) 

Anyway, I've decided to fill the gap in my knowledge. I started out by trying to listen to The Rest Is History, a podcast my mum recommended, but the hosts are two English men, and they spend a weird amount of time comparing Marie Antoinette to Meghan Markle, but in a derogatory "maybe we should decapitate the Duchess of Sussex" way that I did not care for. 

Then I read The French Revolution by Christopher Hibbert, which I think is from 1980. It was a solemn, dispassionate accounting of events and personalities, but didn't get into the question of, for example, why the Parisian mob went from zero to heads on pikes in the storming of the Bastille. 

I've requested an inter-library loan for Citizens by Simon Schama, which I've seen recommended a lot, but I would also be eager to read a history that's not ... British? Because the British, for understandable reasons (I guess) weren't really down with the beheading of the monarch and the end of the monarchy (even though they did it first), and I feel like a pro-aristocratic bias has pervaded a lot of what I've encountered. And obviously the Terror was bad, but, like, maybe Robespierre was an asexual smol bean who was a convenient scapegoat! I'm open to the possibility! 

I am open to suggestions, is what I'm saying. 

So I've been a SNW skeptic since it was first announced, and have never been impressed by the show. But I've gotta say, I've seen six episodes of the third season, thanks to screeners, and we are so far yet to hit a good episode. We have, however, hit several repetitive m/f relationships, multiple love triangles, weirdly a lot of antisemitic subtext, and the decidedly bad look of Pike trying to stop his girlfriend from consenting to life-saving medical treatment.

Mostly I think this is because Akiva Goldsman is a hack who doesn't understand Star Trek or subtext, but also I wonder how much is because the seasons are being filmed back-to-back, and so there's no opportunity to see and respond to criticism. Ironically I think part of Discovery's problem was that it was too responsive to fandom, but Goldsman can't be left alone to pursue his creative vision because he doesn't really have one. 

Anyway, at this point I'm only watching because I have a podcast, and also out of a sick eagerness to see if Pike will have to murder his girlfriend and have manpain about it, or if she'll sacrifice her life to save him. 

(I've seen people theorise that the problems this season are due to the show pivoting in a more conservative direction to appease Skydance, and I am sorry to say that these scripts predate the 2023 strikes. Like, there was time for the writers to go back and think, "Oh, there's some dodgy stuff here, we should fix that!")

The surgery went well; the surgeon says the inside of my ankle turned out to be worse than expected, but not difficult to fix. I'm in a cast with no weight-bearing for two weeks, which I knew in advance but did not anticipate how hard it would be.

I bought a knee scooter off Facebook Marketplace a couple of weeks ago, but it's not so helpful for getting around tight spaces, like the walk from my bed to the bathroom. The hospital physio set me up with a zimmer frame and taught me to use it, and the hospital has given me a free 30-day loaner frame. (I cannot rate the public health system highly enough. They do so much with so few resources. Support Medicare! Aggressively!)

Because I am clumsy, yesterday afternoon I hit a raised tile with the toes of my good foot and broke one of them. This is actually almost as annoying as the ankle, but will heal faster. I gave it ice and have buddy taped it, which helps.

I set up my bed to be a comfort/recovery station before I left for hospital; naturally that has not lasted. I think I had trouble regulating my temperature overnight, I really thrashed around and messed my blankets up.

I was concerned about pain management, but so far it's great -- I was sent home with five mild opioids, took one last night, but otherwise Panadol has been enough. I'm to take one aspirin a day for six weeks so I don't get blood clots, and cannot restart my arthritis meds for another week. I can resume the Wegovy whenever, but don't feel up to giving myself an injection today.

Next to my broken toe, my biggest annoyance is that last week I bought a remote-controlled bluetooth curtain opener/closer. My bedroom faces west, and it's awkward to get to the curtains. It was my biggest indulgence as I prepared for surgery. Got home yesterday and found that it has disconnected itself and needs to be re-added to the app, which involves climbing up to hold a button. Not gonna happen. My curtains stay closed. This is an extremely petty problem, but it's nevertheless irritating.

Round-ups from previous years: 2021, 2022, 2023

This year I kept a media-tracking spreadsheet in Google Docs, and also a paper reading journal. Which sounds extremely wanky, because it is, but I enjoyed the tactile aspect of creating layouts, pasting print-outs of covers, and keeping track of things in handwriting. Also I got to use stickers. Here are a couple of sample pages:


I've already started a fresh journal for 2025, this time in a small ring binder to avoid certain annoying problems, ie, the build-up of thickness from pasting the covers into the same spot over and over again.

Okay, the stats.

Total books logged: 138 (the secret to my success: sprained ankle, broken ankle, covid, ongoing ankle problems and plantar fasciitis have made it more likely that I will stay in the office and read at lunch instead of taking a walk)
DNFs: I didn't keep close track, but a standout is a YA quartet I abandoned 20% into the third book

By target audience (age)

• Adult - 86
• Children - 1
• Young Adult - 42
• Middle Grade - 9

And my favourite category, by genre and audience

• Contemporary (adult): 7
• Contemporary (YA): 10
• Contemporary (middle grade): 2

What's great about "contemporary" is that it's really a setting, not a genre -- so these 19 books encompassed everything from Māori literary fiction to two books which are arguably thrillers and now I'm wondering if I hit the wrong option in the dropdown menu.

• Fantasy: (adult): 8
• Fantasy (YA): 11
• Fantasy (middle grade): 4

Other than Christelle Dabos, I only read three YA fantasy novels from authors who were new to me -- and two were the quartet I wound up DNFing in book 3. (Respectfully, I think that if you are writing for young adults, you should not have more graphic on-page rape than George R. R. Martin.) It feels like the bubble has truly burst.

Contemporary mystery and thriller

• Adult: 17
• YA: 10

It feels like exciting things are happening in the contemp mystery genre right now, especially YA. Especially if, like me, you don't draw too much of a distinction between a "mystery" and a "thriller".

Science fiction

• Adult: 6
• YA: 6

Again, I feel like the YA SF bubble has burst, largely under the weight of too many Hunger Games imitations. Or maybe it just seems that way because I reread the Hunger Games novels.

Adult SF is where I found most of my DNFs this year, as I tried and failed to read more indie SF.

Non-fiction: 35

History was the winner here in terms of numbers, but for quality, I read a bunch of books about organisational and corporate shenanigans at Boeing, NASA, Twitter and Qantas, and those were the standouts.

Author stats

Australian authors: 18% - this is much lower than in previous years, but I made up for it by reading more widely throughout the world, with more books by New Zealanders and Nigerians, and what I think must be the first YA novel I've read by an Argentinian
Authors of colour: 26% - down from last year's 29%, and doing even worse in terms of "30% feels like equality if you're not marginalised"
Women: 67%, I do NOT need to make a deliberate effort to read books by women. Also three were books by trans women, and I need a better way of tracking that than putting an asterisk in the gender box in my reading journal
Trans and non-binary authors: 4%

The really nerdy stats

Library loans: 73% - I tracked spending for the first time this year, and spent a total of $479 on books, plus US$50 for my Queens Library membership.
Ebooks: 76% of my reading was ebooks, plus I read one (1) audiobook. Which is a format I do not care for, but it was the only way to get Black Against Empire from the library. (A stranger on Bsky tried to neg me by saying it's weird that I would have preferred to skim the chapters on Marxist theory, and I'm sorry, I think finding Marxist theory boring is a pretty common position.)

TV stats

For the first time, I tracked TV watching via spreadsheet. I can't tell you down to the minute how many hours of TV I watched, but I watched 69 different series (nice), most in English and most made in the United States.

In which three friends (two trans women and the cis man they lovingly bully) sit down to talk about every mayor ever.

I got into it via their episode on Darryn Lyons, former mayor of Geelong (accurately described in the episode as Australia's New Jersey), then listened to their episodes on Rudy Giuliani and Rob Ford, and then signed up to their Patreon for the second halves of their episodes on Giuliani and Ford. (I do not love this release model, but at the same time, the paywalled episodes are EXTREMELY worth it. I've linked straight to the Patreon, not least because they don't seem to have a website beyond it, and linking to an RSS feed is annoying.)

As a person who enjoys politics, petty corruption and shenanigans, this is very much the podcast for me; the running gag about Rob Ford being the Kwizatz Haderach of bad mayors makes me think it is also the podcast for sabotabby. I'm going through the backlog, and next after Boris Johnson is Eric Adams, and my. body. is. ready.

I actually just finished my 86th book of the year, which sounds impressive until you remember that a few months ago I sprained my ankle, and then I broke it, and then I got covid. I had a lot of time to lie around reading, is what I'm saying.

Anyway, I fell out of the habit of talking about my books here, because I already keep a spreadsheet and a paper reading journal, but here are some highlights, and also lights.

We Didn't Think It Through by Gary Lonesborough

Lonesborough is a gay Aboriginal man who writes YA about Aboriginal boys being complicated and messy and screwing up. He's a super important voice in local YA, and one who is actually read by teens. This is his second book, about a boy who steals the local white bully's car and goes for a joyride that ends up with the hero in juvie. How do you come of age and become a man when you're in prison? And what kind of man will you be?

I enjoyed this a lot, but -- as someone who is on the record as being against verse novels and against the causes of verse novels -- I think it needed more poetry. The protagonist is very much steeped in hip hop (he listens to Kendrick, as opposed to the white bully, who turns out to be a secret Bieber fan; if this book had been written just a year later, I think Bieber would have been swapped for Drake) and the classic Aboriginal folk and country music that his family listens to; a youth worker in prison turns him onto poetry. It's pretty clear that the publisher couldn't get the rights to quote the poems that become important to the hero, which is a real shame, but also I would have appreciated more of the hero's own poetic voice.

The F Team by Rawah Arja

You know how I'm always complaining that current YA doesn't give its characters space to be messy or hold bad opinions without stopping to reassure the reader that it's okay, they'll learn better? This book does not have that problem. I wanted to gently take the hero and his friends aside and go, "Boys, I'm gonna need you to be less antisemitic." Which kind of goes with the territory when you're reading a book about a group of Lebanese-Australian yoofs and their misadventures as they try -- initially half-heartedly -- to save their school (which is a real school, and its Wikipedia page is a trip) from closure.

When I was very small, my family lived in Sydney for a few years, and my class at my first school was almost 2/3 Lebanese-Australians. So I picked this up on a whim at the library, skimmed a few pages and was immediately transported back to my youth -- Arja has a great ear for dialogue and subtle class differences, as the boys come in contact with the more privileged boys of the Shire, and also earn the respect of the local teenage girls. It's a sports book in the most classic sense, but very enjoyable. And yes, the boys do learn to be less antisemitic as they help their new Jewish frenemy deal with the death of his father.

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

Climbing Mount Everest seems to be a bad idea and no one should do it. But this was incredibly compelling, and I understand why it's a classic.

Flying Blind: The 737-MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robison

I'm slightly ashamed of reading about air disasters the same way I'm slightly ashamed of listening to true crime podcasts, although at least no one has decided that all plane nerds are sending love letters to Boeing. (Probably because the stereotypical plane nerd is a bloke, although the world's leading air disaster blogger is a trans woman.)

Anyway, I also love a business disaster, and obviously Boeing provides both in spades. This was very interesting, very humane, not too heavy on the physics, and I kind of wish I hadn't read it a few weeks before I'm due to fly to New Zealand on a Boeing 737.

The entire Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins

I don't think I've reread the first trilogy since Mockingjay came out, and it holds up really well -- although it has a lot more telling-not-showing than current YA, which has massively ballooned in size since the 2010s. Overall my opinions of the books are unchanged since my first read (Mockingjay in particular needed extra time for revisions, and I salute Collins for extracting herself from the "put out a book a year" treadmill, which obviously doesn't suit her writing), but I was struck by how perception of Katniss as a character has drifted away from the actual content of the books. I see a lot of people talk about her as a straightforward Strong Female Character, where it would be more accurate to say that each book leaves her progressively more broken and traumatised. Like, she spends two-thirds of Mockingjay passively watching and/or having trauma naps because she cannot cope with reality. Which doesn't make for compelling reading, but also isn't the uncomplicated heroine behaviour some readers complain of.

Anyway, I learned in the course of my reread that Collins lives in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, and suddenly her urge to keep returning to this universe made sense.

The Firekeeper's Daughter and Warrior Girl Unearthed by Angeline Boulley

Two historical novels (one set in the 1990s, the other in 2014, I'm sorry, let's all take a moment to feel old) about teenage First Nations girls in Michigan. They're connected -- the heroine of the second is the niece of the first book's narrator -- and really amazing. Probably my favourite reads of 2024 so far. Both are essentially YA crime novels, but the first book deals with drugs, and in particular the impact of meth; the second deals with stolen First Nations artefacts and bodies.

The big trigger warning is that the first book includes a sexual assault on the heroine. It's rough! But also earned? I tore through these books in a couple of days, and at this point will read anything Boulley puts out.

I really hate the binge model for things I care about -- the last quarter of the season blurred together, and I'm very glad I'll be rewatching more slowly for Antimatter Pod.

My spoiler-free review is that Prodigy has gone from "the best Trek since DS9" to "the best Trek", but in a way which doesn't negate anything that has come before it. It's standing on the shoulders of giants, and also Star Trek: Picard.

( Spoilers for all 20 episodes behind the cut )

So first of all, I am a very simple woman. You give me a grumpy man in a Starfleet uniform roughly a generation older than everyone else, looking at his colleagues and going, "These people have taken their trauma and used it to become more emotionally honest, vulnerable and compassionate people? Sounds fake, can't relate, do not ask me about my feelings" and I will claim him for myself.