peteg's blog - noise - books

Kindle. I thought I'd find out what the kids are reading these days. Billed by Amal El-Mohtar as "cyberpunk samurai in space" but actually tedious corporate sci-fi (says one of the more accurate reviews at Goodreads). The book is between 50% and 100% too long: so flabby, so much tendentious, concussive repetition in the small and the large, many chapters and excess colour that add nothing but show the author, so in love with her own voice, aims to stifle any independent thought about her constructions. Coercive reader control! The world building is dodgy and incoherent and everything is recycled and dumber than it needed to be. I couldn't tell if I was supposed to trust the omniscient narrator; the retconning in the third part showed the author didn't have a firm grasp of her project. I read the whole damn thing hoping there'd be something to it but no, it's a Sphinx without a secret. Hats off to the marketing team.

Kindle. I've been somewhat enjoying Sam Roggeveen's fortnightly sparring with Hugh White even though the latter always seems to come out on top. As with the recent Quarterly Essay by Michael Wesley (Roggeveen's sometime boss at the Lowy Institute) I'm sympathetic to the argument he wants to make: defend Australia, cut back on the expeditionary forces, get something workable going with Indonesia, develop resilience, all in the context of declining USA leadership/domination of Asia. But it's not clear how much of this is novel (see the Defence of Australia policy) or achievable, and the book would have been much stronger if it had presented and contested the cases for doing other things.

I did enjoy his take on nuclear weapons strategy in Chapter 6: one reasonable response for a "middle power" like Australia to a threat of that kind is to ignore it. This is because cracking the macadamia with that sledgehammer would invite epic blowback from others, and Australia developing its own deterrent would only attract aggression from major powers. I've never been sold on the nuclear umbrella concept, being born too late.

In any case Roggeveen is up against the dogma that it's better to fight elsewhere; in democracies the politicians would prefer the damage to be a long way away as we saw on 9/11 and the response to it. Those in power will spend an irrational amount of the nation's wealth to avoid being blamed. There's also a general absence of great-man glory in the book that is incongruent with the current era.

Goodreads. Much is absent, like climate change and the implications of dialing back Australia's integration with the US military; what happens to Pine Gap and North West Cape? Policing the Pacific requires some force projection. Joe Walker's notes contains some good points. Would future great-power Indonesia be interested in partnering with an echidna? Walker mostly comes down on Hugh White's side (How To Defend Australia (2019)).

Kindle. Again two-years-and-a-bit on from his previous novel. So many words have already been spilt on this London-during-the-Blitz fantasy. I ploughed through it, mostly enjoyably, hoping it'd get somewhere only to find it incomplete and to be continued. What a threat that is.

Spufford returns to peak Anglo (1939/1940) with a financier heroine from Watford who may grow into one of the grotesques in Light Perpetual (2021). She gets involved with an underdrawn boffin from the Backroom Boys (2003) and finds herself madly, unhappily, in love. (He's a bit of a human computer and eventually promises to be her Denis Thatcher.) There's some class warfare, generously if shallowly observed, and some supernatural machinery that drives the plot, as if the war itself was not enough. Spufford considers the period as a sort of interregnum when the vocabulary of black magic is obsolete but science isn't far enough along for the real stories. He goes lightly with the Christianity but endorses the great-man-of-history paradigm (via Churchill) as he presumably must. Sitzfleisch is what I've been lacking all my life.

Along with the main but mostly unseen antagonist, a foxy fascist toff whose perfection is clearly due to black magic, the cast put me in mind most of Amor Towles's Rules of Civility (2011) with its similarly triangular study of manners, class and aspiration in contemporaneous NYC. Spufford does not consider the colonial view; he's endorses Keynes's take on the plenty available to (some of) the residents of the metropole and the self-serving tosh that the City was self-policing and not rapacious, or at least not as rapacious as it became. The essentially-American leading lady's wish to profit from the war and get rich is presented without judgment, as is some thievery during the Blitz. It's a strange position to take in present-day England.

Spufford hits the limits of his imagination here. For instance a woman not into men is necessarily into women; he cannot envisage self-partnering or hermitude, or really think through the implications of selecting alternative possible worlds; I mean, at least some of them have to be Pareto improvements on the one we're in, right? It seems causality transcends time and monkeying with the past has limited, non-chaotic, effect; his take on what is and is not invariant was arbitrary. I did not understand how they put an upper bound on the nodes in the Bifröst; surely the door knocker was a tell if not the quotidian blessing bestowed on statuary itself. And so on.

As always Spufford writes cinematically but much is annoyingly derivative as he owns to in an afterword that is followed by a post-credits scene. There are trivial gestures to Schindler's Arc/List (1993), Watchmen (2009), and (gulp) the MCU with its consequence-free do-overs of franchise-destroying events. On a more British front it struck me that Spufford was leaning comfortably into Tom Baker-era Doctor Who: the episode that didn't get made (Shada) and Pyramids of Mars. And doubtlessly a lot more.

The problem with any cinematic adaptation is that Steve McQueen got there already; the images in my mind of the Underground refuges were McQueen's. But of course there is no race in this book. And von Trier's wartime Christmas-in-a-church was far more effective.

Louisa Hall contextualises for the New York Times: in conversation with The Chronicles of Narnia and other works. Tiresome. The "heroine ... has figured out how to travel in time, but somehow here we all are, face to face again with history." James Bradley was deeply affected. Goodreads. And so on until this branch of existence gets pruned.

The costs of Australia's serial distraction from its own geopolitical imperatives have been masked by the fact that maritime Southeast Asia has been peaceful, focused on economic development and benignly disposed towards Australia since 1966.

I had to wonder what I was reading when this came at the 10% mark given that the ADF was active in Việt Nam at the time, and to my mind Việt Nam is very maritime. Eventually I was told that the "strategic core" of Southeast Asia is Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. This hierarchical take is a category error even on the terms laid out in this essay. I surmise the date is probably when it became apparent that Suharto had bedded down his coup and the largest domino was not going to fall. But the war continued anyway. Upon its conclusion the American-sponsored SEATO folded and ASEAN's indigenous consensus-driven, unaligned, non-interference model rose and has proven durable. The latter has often been a venue for expressing negative sentiment about Australia by various post-colonial states. But you won't find that kind of framing here.

Wesley's essay is annoying like this all the way along, doubly so as I am very sympathetic to the point he is trying to make, that being Keating's from the early 1990s about Australia finding its security not from Asia but in Asia. He wants a return to the policies of the period from 1975 to 2005 (he does not appear to argue for those dates) that saw a deepening of expertise in this country about our neighbours and increasingly broad engagement with them. What's mostly absent is any account of why things are as they are; the diversity, tensions and even contradictions within ASEAN are not explored. On some fronts his proposals are already archaic (the rules-based international order is a dead letter) or just not going to happen (a revision of AUKUS). There's a lot of assertion, e.g. Australia is "difficult to invade, but relatively easy to coerce if hostile forces gain access to the islands to our north" but no grappling with how we may realistically, even unilaterally ameliorate those risks.

It's unclear to me just how vulnerable the Straits of Malacca are; unlike Hormuz there is the possibility of at least some cargo taking longer routes. Wesley does not dig into the connectivity between the Indian and Pacific Oceans and who might wish to sever it.

Google suggests the author toured widely and discussed his essay on a variety of podcasts but it appears to be thinly reviewed and discussed in prose. Mark Beeson found more novelty than I did. Huiyun Feng spilt many fewer words arguing along the same lines for the incorporation of ASEAN into the G2. This sounds great but contradicts the rising spheres-of-influence/great-man-of-history model that is surely the essence of the G2. More realism about ASEAN and Australia from Lindsay R. Dodd (2025).

Kindle. After the obscurity of the contemporary Red Birds (2018), Hanif revisited the more fertile ground (decades-ago Pakistani politics) of his first novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008) by way of a strong but more acted-against-than-acting female character ala Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (2011). This one is set at the time of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's execution in 1979 and covers the fallout on a failed revolutionary/successful English teacher, an Imam, a Field Intelligence Unit captain, the fallen angel and a few secondary characters at the pointier end of operations.

Unfortunately it's not great. We start with a bang, with a series of semi-random happenings that promise effective black humour in caper mode. But the themes are too weighty (sexual abuse, women as property/burdens, political/religious burdens/schisms, torture, so on) that soon enough we're in some kind of holding pattern, wading in treacle, as Hanif staves off anything too consequential. The ending therefore comes in an abrupt rush. It seems that women cannot be funny; the voice in her "homeworks" got flattened into the abiding third-person omniscient as the story proceeded.

The herb dealer who invents "Iron Syrup" links the book to Karan Mahajan's Complex (2026), and the haram stuff at a mosque to DJ Ahmet (2025).

Michael Gorra at the New York Times. "Often, too often, seem[s] to echo [Salman Rushdie's Shame (1983)], albeit without the fantasy." Yagnishsing Dawoor applies the Booker kiss-of-death at the Guardian. Goodreads.

Kindle. I remember (perhaps faultily) enjoying his previous novels: Family Planning (2008) and The Association of Small Bombs (2016). This one is perhaps a lengthy and not great expansion on the first.

After a first-person intro that sketches how things are going to go we get a series of character studies intermingled with some minor-note action. It's set mostly in the airless Delhi complex that appears to be the sole legacy of nation-builder SP Chopra to his children with a completely vanilla take on Desi in London and nowhereland Michigan, from (ballpark) the 1970s to mid-1990s. I didn't feel any of the characters popped and none did anything particularly interesting or novel; stuff just happens. The politics is mostly described and not explained, excepting one incident where the BJP needed to manufacture a distraction. At times he seems to be drawing a line from the Nehru regime to Modi via the naysayers, Hindutva, Indira and Sonia Gandhi. Humourless.

Jonathan Dee at the New York Times. Goodreads.

I figured I should try more history since reading Dean Ashenden's view from the north, and having enjoyed David G. Marr's excellent work. I was hoping Reynolds would provide an overview of evolving conceptions of sovereignty and property across the Australian continent and lay out just what native title is and allows, but this is not that book. (This text suggests I consult Reynolds's Aboriginal Sovereignty: Reflections on Race, State and Nation (1996) but surely that lacks reflection on the impact of the Wik decision of the same year and anything that has happened since.) Indeed Reynolds's (revisionary) focus is on the British/European settlement of the country and race relations; he does not discuss, for instance, the bombing of Darwin by the Japanese in World War II, the Kokda Track, Cyclone Tracey or other natural disasters, anthropology, science, culture/arts (no Gulpilil!), why treaties weren't signed, etc. Perplexingly he takes the Northern Territory to be just the Top End (the Yolŋu of Arnhem Land), despite Alice Springs being just short of his Tropic of Capricorn demarcation and Ashenden's Tennant Creek well in scope.

Overall I didn't find it as good as his essays; a few chapters needed another round of editing and I often wished he'd expanded on the assertions and self-citations in this text. In brief his thesis is that the indigenous peoples of Australia's north generally remained on their lands while working for cockies/squatters on a mutually-beneficial or at least placatory basis, in contrast to the south where the connections were mostly severed. This was due to labour shortages, of the unwillingness of the young colonials to settle in the harsh northern climate, which of course led to misunderstandings in the faraway centres of power about how things actually worked in the north. There is also an account of nineteenth-century multiculturalism in the new tropical towns: Chinese merchants, tailors, miners, railway constructors, etc., Japanese pearlers, South-East Asians, Pacific Islanders working the cane fields; Australia is forever short of agricultural labour.

The final chapter is the best as it is succinct and clear like his essays. We're told the pastoral leases of the mid-nineteenth century already required that access be provided for cultural purposes but this provision was not enforced. (Reynolds asserts that plain-vanilla common-law leases would have extinguished native title which makes it all the more perplexing that the imperial regime (out of London) did not sort out their intent towards the indigenous peoples well before Federation brought White Australia in 1901.) He does not explain why the British colonial powers took three goes at claiming sovereignty over the continent. I also wanted to understand what the native title regime provides for; from the little I understand it is a very degraded notion of property, at least by the standard of freehold. This may be a reasonable or at least workable compromise in the context of pastoral leases, etc. (I don't know) but the legal regime in places where the people have never been dispossessed (cf the peoples of the Kimberley, the Yolŋu, the Torres Strait Islanders and elsewhere) needed more explication.

The north is now being occupied; where the romantic propaganda failed the military (specifically the U.S. military) is pulling people in and aiming to stay. At least until the next big one.

Broadly reviewed when it was released in November 2025. Glyn Davis. Mark McKenna sounds like he's read all Reynolds's books and can't separate this one from its predecessors. Judith Brett summarised it. Indeed it does add to the why-Queensland-is-different canon. And so on.

Kindle. Flabby Brunner: he had some mystery in this book that he did not want to reveal too soon, leading to extreme repetition of scenes that don't progress anything. The delay in uniting his main character with the interlocutor that enables the exposition dump is unmotivated. The intro was sufficiently disjointed that I was intrigued by how he was going to stitch it all together but soon enough (20% or so) it became a slog. I didn't come away with a clear sense of what he was trying to say.

I think it's set in a present-day London that never recovered from World War II: there are aspects of 1984 privation and lifts from Doctor Who (a room that functions much like the TARDIS) and Douglas Adams's contemporary Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980). We'll make great pets, some of us anyway. There's a rocket attack with effects perhaps somewhat like those in Francis Spufford's Light Perpetual (2021).

Goodreads. Faust, Mephistopheles.

Kindle. Apparently Brunner's first under his own name, the first-first being under a pseudonym. Space opera. There's already some of his signature moves including multitrack narration and discursive smart-arse grabs at the start of each chapter. He put in a few too many underdrawn characters including a couple of token twentieth-century everypeople. Time travel, temporal inertia and surges... parallel universes with a causality repair mechanism ... oh my. God as a disembodied woman who gifts another woman to her surviving (embodied) husband. The (xenophobic) Enemy invades! The Being ... who does stuff ... ouroboric. Conceptually cracked but you can see the promise.

Goodreads. Apparently reworked by Damien Broderick in 2017.

Kindle. Inevitable after Mueenuddin's debut collection of shorts. Unfortunately this novel isn't any better.

The first three chapters/parts are relatively short. Initially we're filled in on an orphan boy's origins in a Rawalpindi bazaar in the 1950s, giving me the expectation that he'd be a major player later. The second recounts the problems a youthful American-educated scion/feudal lord has with controlling his ancestral lands and serfs in the 1980s, notionally juxtaposing raw power with Western humanism. It ends without resolution, leading me to think we'll get the rest of the tale in passing later. The third is about how the landed gentry hook up, the heir and the spare. Finally the latter half of the text agonises over how a servant botched his failproof get-rich scheme in the 2010s that put me in mind of Coffs Harbour.

The central flaw with this work is that it's all been done before, not the least by Salman Rushdie in Shame (1983) and Mohsin Hamid in How to get Filthy Richy in Rising Asia (2013). There's no humour, political commentary or class struggle so we can quietly ignore Mohammed Hanif and Aravind Adiga. The anachronistic view from the upper class/feudal seat was mined by Aatish Taseer, Rohinton Mistry and many others. Pankaj Mishra recently wrote about the Himalayas as a place for romantic escapes. The servant's view palely foreshadows the one in The Remains of the Day (1989). To echo Rushdie from a long time ago: this novel does not expand the space of things that can be thought.

The writing is often OK and even more often flabby and repetitive. The voices of the characters are flattened and often indistinguishable. Neither of the female characters is interesting or well-drawn. Category errors are rampant. There are no twists. The caste system (I didn't know there was such in Muslim Pakistan) is not clearly articulated though the feudal system is. Mueenuddin's use of the third-person appears to preclude an unreliable narrator but every so often he adopts a phrasing that in other hands would signal a departure from truth. It's a bit boring and there are no payoffs or even moments of quiet grandeur.

Dwight Garner saw a lot more in it than I did but also threw in enough references to signal he knows it's a bit stale. Goodreads.

Kindle. The remaining four of Raymond Chandler's novels over several months. The collection I have includes the incomplete The Poodle Springs Story (1962) which I'll skip.

The first two are good. The Long Good-bye (1953) is clearly his masterwork: twisty and funny, a rich source for Altman's adaptation (1973). The last just has Marlowe running around in circles in Esmeralda, somewhere north of San Diego, and is quite unsatisfying; so much so that Chandler concludes with a character from a prior story propositioning Marlowe for marriage!

Kindle. Thin Brunner. Not much chop. Piles on the cliches and moralism to no discernible end. Somehow Alice Springs survives a nuclear exchange, suggesting that Pine Gap wasn't common knowledge at the time (?). The Māori are once again warriors! Teleportation! The Infinitive of Go (1980). All women are mentally unwell.

Goodreads.

Kindle. Not great. A sapient ship (Ship!) has seeded the promising planets of the arm of a galaxy with humans and is now revisiting them for the nth time. There are rules of the game, of course, and Ship gets lonely so human companions are the order of the day. It's a bit fat Brunner but has more biology than sociology. The time travel mechanic does not work well; that and the exotic landscapes and biospheres evoke 1960s Doctor Who. The closing exegesis needed expansion and more weaving into the main text. There are some cute ideas (and some lazy historical lifts) that have effects too neat and tidy. Too much moralising again. You can see his interest flagged in this project as he was writing it.

Goodreads.

Kindle. The one that didn't win him the Booker. The edition I had (2025) included a worthless introduction by Amy Liptrot (The Outrun (2024)).

To be honest I was a bit disappointed that he didn't take things much further than he had in Greenvoe (1972) and Six Lives of Fankle the Cat (1980) which I did enjoy. Perhaps I rushed it a bit or was too insapient to grasp all his subtleties; he didn't adopt the fancy tenses of Charles Yu to travel through time, or even the slick trickiness of Murray Bail's prose for that matter, but the simple mechanism of dreamlife, later recounted for profit. The stories are sufficiently straightforward that the rewards are in how they are told. And just who is this entity that is sitting beside (and not inside) the ocean of time with the rest of us?

Goodreads. Cornelius Browne points to Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957).

Kindle. A lengthy, engrossing everything novel in the spirit of his earlier Parasites Like Us (2003). After a stuttered start I finished it in a few lengthy sessions.

In broad terms Johnson takes us to the Tongan empire of a while back, when they were having a forever war with Fiji, but only after a peppy first-person beginning from a young woman that evoked Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005). Soon enough we're told that she's from that other great tribe of Polynesians, the Māori, and her small, diminishing and amnesiac clan has much to teach the peoples of other islands. This is despite their lack of lineage (they are descended from slaves) and the basic skills of navigation and shipbuilding.

The genocidal war is necessitated by the resource exhaustion, ecological collapse and steady flow of extinctions caused by the overpopulation and cupidity of the imperial centre. Much of this is directly observed by an imported red-shining parrot (apparently tasty) that is sufficiently sapient to comprehend the apocalypse being visited on the ecosphere by humans, a role similar to Ned Beauman's venomous lumpsuckers (2022). This setting draws in all the issues of the present moment as collateral damage: the ill-treatment of women by powerful men, whiplash #metoo, a queen bee, abortifacients ("This allows you to put love first"), excessive lawyering (the matāpule), zombies, ineffectual transactionalism, migration, globalisation, a rejection of isolation, that the future is nomadism ("That there’d been a time before islands, when all was water. That a day would come when the islands slipped back beneath the waves, taking all the drowsy dirt-dwellers with them."). In short, everything is too much excepting technology (just boats, the necessary botanicals and special gifts to individuals descended from the gods) and romantic opportunities.

Many elements of the story evoke Greek mythology; there's a tale told about a journey to Pulotu reminiscent of Orpheus's visit to Hades, and the concept of do-overs was given the same even-handed treatment it received in the MCU, albeit the other way around. I felt the exotic ontology and belief structure was insufficiently explored; life is somehow something extra to Cartesian body and soul, and I wonder if the people of the time considered brains to cause minds, and hearts the same way we do now. What about love? Intriguingly there was no worship, just rank and tapu. The eventual redemption felt unearned.

Johnson obviously did a mountain of research for this book and integrated it very well. However the two-track structure was somewhat flawed: by the time the big events roll around we almost always know their outcomes, and by then the details are not as important or interesting as they would have been earlier in the story. At times it felt we were waiting for the other track to sync up. Moreover Johnson struggled to construct distinct voices for enough of the characters, making it sometimes challenging to remember which track we're on as events converge. The romantic pairings were telegraphed with no subtlety; there's no playing of the field or left swipes, perhaps suggesting sexual egalitarianism or cosmic predestination.

Ian McGuire at the New York Times made enough errors to suggest he skimmed some parts, like the ending which explicitly calls out Kōrero as the titular character. Goodreads e.g. Steven: one for fantasy fans, a "Western story in Polynesian dressing".

Kindle. The first half compiles Savva's columns about the previous Parliament (2022-2025) for the Channel9Fairfax entertainment complex; I skipped it as I read enough of them at the time. The second is pitched as an analysis (a second take on history?) of the election campaign and aftermath.

This is one for the insiders, being mostly a review of the theatricals and settling scores for those she spoke with. There is very little coverage of policy, or discussion of the coherency of or tensions in the way we are governed; compare, for instance, with Laura Tingle's concerns about the public service and Hugh White's ways of thinking about geopolitical forces. At some point she says:

It was [Chris] Bowen who told me after the last election that the emergence of the teal independents was for the Liberals what the great split of the 1950s — which led to the creation of the Democratic Labour Party — was for Labor.

which struck me as unusually insightful; Peter Lewis recycled this observation at the Guardian (2025-04-15) without attribution.

I felt she was too generous toward Mark Dreyfus's (anti-)achievements as Attorney General and while I might concur and even enjoy her take on the many heels in parliament there are some that deserve more sober consideration, if only because they might be ruling over us some day soon. Her own values are there but are mostly pushed aside. More context would often have helped; I wish she had mechanically listed party, seat, geography and perhaps provided a capsule bio for each politician she mentioned. Another round of editing may have fixed the typos and missing punctuation. Overall all I got was an expression of the common view (nothing new?), the odd amusing anecdote and that she's better in the short (warm take) form.

Savva stuck with her advice to Albo that he should go this term (from December 2024). She thinks he should be satisfied with about five years on the throne but that assumes he has other things to do than politic and set records of increasing vacuity. The ALP becoming "the natural party of government" has meant that it has adopted a policy suite that would not have embarrassed John Howard. (Scott Morrison's greatest achievement and/or legacy may well have been Albo.) But Howard achieved far more (some good things even!) by this point in his reign. Perhaps someone can press Albo on what he means by "fighting Tories"; one has to wonder what's in it for the rusted-on Laborites.

With Tingle now covering foreign/global affairs it would seem that Savva is the last journo of any standing left in the Canberra press gallery (in my bubble at least). She's a fan of Tom Connell on Sky During Daylight (who is now President of the National Press Club).

The platformed commentariat of Australia appears to be engaging in a great silence about this book. Goodreads: excess #leadershit. Nothing said about how and why Australia is the most secretive democracy in the world. Lacked the connections to do what she's done in previous books (?) so there's a lot more on Libnat failure than ALP success/internecine warfare. Does not get to the heart of the matter, e.g. why Albo was so much hungrier this time around. Her earlier work is superior.

Kindle. Inevitable after Yilkari (2025). The story goes as the summaries have it. It's written in a very discursive style with an irritating iterative-deepening structure. I didn't get any grip on the horror angle as it is all innuendo; I was more frightened that Lovecraft was going to take as many pages to get out as he took to get in. The epistemics are highly dodgy (it was all a dream) and the time travel aspect not very baked. I wonder why he picked that location in the Pilbara (spelt "Pilbarra" in the text I had) as the site of the happenings.

Kindle. More true crime, this time more tabloid. Overlong; not all of it is salient to the story at hand, of couple Willie Roger Holder and Catherine Marie Kerkow and their plane hijacking antics. It is kooky. The Black Panthers in Libya! Narrative non-fiction. I thought I was going to get it good and hard, or at least fast.

Dwight Garner. Goodreads.

Kindle. The tin (and cultural identity of the second author) suggested this would be about the Western Desert, i.e., the beautiful land west of Alice Springs, out past the West MacDonnell Ranges to Docker River and Warakurna, Papunya and so forth. The first story is set there, starting off at "Frontier Well" somewhere off the Gunbarrel Highway in Western Australia, and the second from Kintore, Northern Territory. But the third is in the Gulf Country, Queensland and the final one more firmly in the Pilbara, even Kimberley, Western Australia. That beginning recounts a night in Berlin when the Wall fell in 1989 which lead me to expect more of a meeting of (explicable, comprehendible) European high culture and Desert mysticism than I got.

Like The Moon of Hoa Binh (1994) there are several annoying aspects. Perhaps the worst are the flattened voices engaging in extended dialogue (really authorial-voice monologue) that each claim some distinct, esoteric knowledge that cannot be shared or at best imperfectly transmitted for reasons unspecified. I guess I was relieved that there was no pretence to scientism. Shallow/touristic takes on Aboriginal mythology/ontology are rubbished and then indulged in. The discursive Arabian Nights structure often cuts away just as things get interesting. There's an evasiveness, a contention that there is something out there for some people but probably not you, a spooky danger that I'm yet to find except when other people are nearby. Don't even think of loosening those fast suburban chains!

Another flaw is that the authors drop the names of lots of places but abidingly fail to evoke the places themselves; the ones I've been to (or near to) are unfamiliar or cursorily sketched here. There's a somewhat touching scene involving some World War II veterans returning to Corunna Downs Airfield (near Marble Bar) with the parties reminiscing about the Jupiter Well and Gary Junction Road. I'd say it's more fun to read about the actual places and history or just head out there. Stories about Len Beadell, namechecked here as he so often is, are generally great so perhaps his books are too. Aboriginal Stonehenge! Aboriginal astronomy!

One minor novelty here was the idea that the Desert ancestral spirits are ephemerally (on) the wind, in contrast to tales from Arnhem land (cf Gulpilil) which talk of eternal recurrence via waterholes.

Goodreads. Stephen Romei. (The slab quoting is smelly. It's a book made up of words.) Declan Fry: Percival Lakes, H.P. Lovecraft! I blotted that piece of cultural cringe out. Fry confuses secrecy and obfuscation (acts of commission) with Wittgensteinian ineffability, and defends the authors' inability or unwillingness to describe things that are hard to describe. Paul Daley at length. Of the land in direct opposition to Bruce Chatwin's drive-by novel. Tim Rowse: deserts are death. Understand with your ears!

All reviews are summaries, perhaps proving that engagement is not possible.

Kindle. Inevitable after watching Tina Satter's Reality (2023) which put the FBI's transcript of Ms Winner's arrest to movement. More true crime.

Ms Winner is famous for having been handed the longest sentence under the U.S. Espionage Act (which she has now served) despite the relative triviality of her crime, which was to leak an NSA document to The Intercept that illustrated some connections between Russia and Trump's campaign in 2016. The Intercept massively compounded her lack of opsec by more-or-less telling the FBI whodunit.

The first half of this book is interesting: she does a good job at describing her upbringing in south Texas and is especially strong on her complex and valuable relationship with her father. (The vibe is that her mother is relentlessly supportive and therefore the relationship is simpler but undervalued. Which is depressingly common.) She's obviously gifted with languages (I would've liked some more depth here). It is unfortunate that she did not learn more during her military training; perhaps they could've taught her more useful opsec/self-care at intelligence school. The latter half is mostly a gaol/prison log and things go (at repetitive length) about how you might expect. We don't find out what college classes she took in prison.

Ms Winner owns to having OCD, anger management issues, an eating disorder and so on that she manages with a disciplined and epic exercise regime and diet. (Some of that put me in mind of David Pocock.) She gets very frustrated when she can't control the things that help her manage her mental health, which is of course most of the time while she's incarcerated. Apparently it also helps if she can broadcast her achievements via Instagram, etc.

Beyond that there's not much to the story. She became a political football (of course) which means that most of the commentary about her is valueless. She makes it clear that she lacks judgement and often behaves impetuously. I wish she'd gotten better career advice and been more grounded in her longer term goals; she often seems to be insufficiently skeptical, even inexplicably naive. I did not understand what she meant when she said she loves her country and she does not present any reasons for converting to Judaism. The Rosenbergs got a mention. She gives a beautiful acknowledgement of Daniel Ellsberg's support (Secrets (2002)).

Nicolas Niarchos at the New York Times. Goodreads: so much vulnerability, so much trauma and pain, brave to put herself out there, raw and perhaps unlikeable. A recent (2025-09-11) interview on NPR.