October | 2025 | Me fail? I fly!
3 posts published by Jonathan during October 2025| Me fail? I fly!
Rod Goodbun and Edwina Shaw (editors), Queersland (AndAlso Press 2025) Disclosure: Edwina Shaw, co-editor of Queersland, is my niece. The anthology includes a personal essay by her in which I am mentioned, as well as my mother, my brother and … Continue reading →| Me fail? I fly!
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925, Penguin Classics 2020) I was listening to Christopher Lydon’s Open Source podcast when he interviewed Merve Emre, editor of The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway (Ms Emre is from the US, so her book adds a period … Continue reading →| Me fail? I fly!
Albert Camus, L’étranger (1942, Methuen Educational 1970) A month ago I announced that I was resuming my practice of reading a couple of pages from a classic text first thing each morning, st…| Me fail? I fly!
Susan Choi, Flashlight (Jonathan Cape 2025) Be warned: the back cover blurb of this novel reveals something that the novel itself only begins to hint at at about the midpoint. Luckily I didn’t read the blurb until after I’d reached … Continue reading →| Me fail? I fly!
Michelle Johnston, The Revisionists (Fourth Estate 2025) Before the meeting: Michelle Johnston’s day job is in emergency medicine. According to a 2023 interview on ABC Perth, she had written a draft of this novel when she decided that she had … Continue reading →| Me fail? I fly!
As regular readers know, in November I set out to write fourteen 14-line poems. With November just over the horizon, I’ve been feeling the need to get in shape. So when, as I was heading for …| Me fail? I fly!
Hugh White, Hard New World: Our Post-American Future (Quarterly Essay 98, 2025)– plus correspondence in Quarterly Essay 99 This is Hugh White’s fourth Quarterly Essay. As the titles, and especially subtitles, of his essays demonstrate, he has been on the same track for fifteen … Continue reading →| Me fail? I fly!
Richard Osman, We Solve Murders (Viking 2024) Before the meeting: As a boy I read a lot of British crime fiction. When I was 13, I put a brown paper cover on the conveniently-sized novel I had to r…| Me fail? I fly!
Jock Serong, The Rules of Backyard Cricket (Text 2017) I was given The Rules of Backyard Cricket as a gift some years ago. Friends had told me it was excellent, but I knew nothing about it. The cov…| Me fail? I fly!
Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square (Swift Press 2024) Before the meeting: On page 411 of this novel, the narrator-protagonist, a student at Beijing University, posts an application for an exchange program a…| Me fail? I fly!
Yao Feng, Great Wall Capriccio and Other Poems, translated by Kit Kelen, Karen Kun and Penny Fang Xia (Flying Island Books 2014) Beijing born Yao Feng is a much awarded poet, translator, artist and…| Me fail? I fly!
Patricia Sykes, Among the Gone of It, with Chinese translation by Xu Daozhi and Wu Xi (Flying Island Books 2017) This is my fifth post for National Poetry Month, and my third bilingual book this mo…| Me fail? I fly!
John Phillips, Concrete (Bodily Press 2025) A couple of mornings ago, I opened my letterbox to find an envelope stamped with a profile of King Charles and evidence that someone had paid £4.30 posta…| Me fail? I fly!
Family life, formerly a .mac blog, continued and rejigged. Mostly written on Gadigal Wangal land. I welcome any First Nations readers and commenters| Me fail? I fly!
Annie Ernaux, A Man’s Place (La Place ©1983, translation © Tanya Leslie 1992) Alphonse Duchesne, who ran a small cafe/grocery in Normandy with his wife, died in 1967, two months after his dau…| Me fail? I fly!
Yael van der Wouden, The Safekeep (Viking 2024) Before the meeting: As I mentioned in my post about Lai Wen’s Tiananmen Square, this book has a general strategy in common with a number of other boo…| Me fail? I fly!
Josh Tuininga, We Are Not Strangers (Abrams Comicarts 2023) In December 1941, about 127,000 Japanese Americans lived in the continental USA. After the attack on Pearl Harbor and the declaratio…| Me fail? I fly!
Judith Beveridge, Tintinnabulum (Giramondo Poetry 2024) As a rule on this blog I focus on the page of a book that corresponds to my age. There’s a lot I could write about Tintinnabulum (it…| Me fail? I fly!
