Non-Fiction:
Ocean Vuong: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous.
Leslie Jamison: The Recovering. Intoxication and Its Aftermath.
Carmen Maria Machado: In the Dream House.
Leslie Jamison: The Recovering. Intoxication and Its Aftermath.
Carmen Maria Machado: In the Dream House.
Alice Bolin: Dead Girls. Essays on Surviving an American Obsession.
Jia Tolentino: Trick Mirror.
Jia Tolentino: Trick Mirror.
Natasha Lennard: Being Numerous. Essays on Non-Fascist Life.
Jenny Odell: How to Do Nothing.
George Packer: The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.
George Packer: Our Man. Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century.
Stuart Schrader: Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing.
David France: How to Survive a Plague. The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed AIDS.
George Packer: The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.
George Packer: Our Man. Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century.
Stuart Schrader: Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing.
David France: How to Survive a Plague. The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed AIDS.
Fiction:
Seth Dickinson: The Monster Baru Cormorant.
Rory Power: Wilder Girls.
Becky Chambers: To Be Taught If Fortunate.
Lisa Ko: The Leavers.
Crystal Hana Kim: If You Leave Me.
Esmé Weijun Wang: The Border of Paradise.
Chloe Benjamin: The Immortalists.
Tanwi Nandini Islam: Bright Lines.
Andrea Lawlor: Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl.
Tanwi Nandini Islam: Bright Lines.
Andrea Lawlor: Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl.
Ausma Zehanat Khan: The Unquiet Dead.
Elizabeth Hand: Generation Loss.
Laura McHugh: The Wolf Wants In.
Kristen Lepionka: The Last Place You Look.
Paul Tremblay: A Head Full of Ghosts.
Stephen King: Duma Key.
Stephen & Owen King: Sleeping Beauties.
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Closely followed by Rory Power's Wilder Girls, which sometimes feels like it is set in Jeff VanderMeer's Area X, except it adds the genius twist of considering what the biological transformation that happens on its island would do to girls who are going through puberty. At Wilder Girls' centre is a boarding school on an isolated island in which a mysterious and unexplained infection (the Tox) has affected every single inhabitant - and is slowly transforming them into something else, a process that seems to inevitably kill the girls. The novel follows three girls - Hetty, Byatt and Reese, as they try to escape somehow.
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An aside here: I was re-reading Stephen King, but the horror novel that will stay with me longer than most of these books is Paul Tremblay's A Head Full of Ghosts, which finds an incredibly interesting form for its story about a suburban teenager who is either possessed by a demon or suffering from a severe mental illness - the interpretation of her suffering becomes determined by powerful economic and ideological interests, which is maybe true of teenage girls' bodies in general anyway. The story is told from the perspective of Merrie, the younger sister of the girl who may be possessed (Marjorie), but then also features television episode reviews from Merrie as an adult of the reality show that was eventually made of Marjorie's suffering. It all inevitably ends in a catastrophe.
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Also, Elizabeth Hand's Generation Loss, an accidental crime novel set on a remote island, a novel of photography as much as about the serial killer that haunts the protagonist who stumbles right in the middle of his artwork. And Ausma Zehanat Khan's Rachel Getty and Esa Khattak novel's, which are always about history and culture, about international conflicts translated into local crimes (The Unquiet Dead for example would make a great companion piece to Juli Zeh's Adler und Engel, which has a similar approach).
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And Tanwi Nandini Islam's Bright Lines about a Bangladeshi family living in Brooklyn in 2003, a portrait of characters struggling to figure out who they are. And Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor, whose shape-shifting main character Paul (who thinks Orlando comes closest, but he himself never had the luxury of quiet servants) navigates what it means to be able to inhibit a body that can present as male or female.
Becky Chamber's To Be Taught, If Fortunate, her first novel set outside the universe she created in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet follows four astronauts who are sent on a long-haul space-flight to study the flora and fauna of exoplanets. It's a short novel, but it beautifully tracks their scientific excitement, the details of their work studying worlds that have never been visited by humans, the bonds of their lives together so far removed from the world they came from that news from Earth travels fourteen years before reaching them. There's more to it, and inevitable drama, but I highly recommend this for imagining what it would be like if the future held exploration and science in store for humanity, rather than exploitation of resources. And maybe this is as close to Ursula K. Le Guin's implicit comprehension of the connection between the environment and everything that inhabits it as we can get in 2019.
This year, I also applied for citizenship in the country that I have been living in for the past five years. It is difficult to explain the complex thoughts and feeling that I have about exchanging a citizenship in a country that I have always struggled with for one of a country whose history of colonisation and violence is unresolved in a different manner. The way I have decided to do it is to try and find an intellectual connection, an understanding of the debates and approaches to Australia - and I have been reading the diverse writings in Meanjin and The Lifted Brow to get started on something that will take a lifetime.
Also, The Habitat podcast.
This year, I also applied for citizenship in the country that I have been living in for the past five years. It is difficult to explain the complex thoughts and feeling that I have about exchanging a citizenship in a country that I have always struggled with for one of a country whose history of colonisation and violence is unresolved in a different manner. The way I have decided to do it is to try and find an intellectual connection, an understanding of the debates and approaches to Australia - and I have been reading the diverse writings in Meanjin and The Lifted Brow to get started on something that will take a lifetime.
Also, The Habitat podcast.
Meanjin: The Trouble With Journalism, December 2019
The Atlantic: How Labour Lost the Culture War, December 13, 2019
The New Yorker: How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real, December 16, 2019
The Washington Post: At War with the Truth, December 9, 2019
Foreign Affairs: The New China Scare, December 6, 2019
Autostraddle: Toward an Applicable Theory of Just Not, December 3, 2019
Eater: What Does 'Authenticity' in Food Mean in 2019?, December 3, 2019
Film Comment: Present Tense: Kristen Stewart, December 5, 2019
The New York Review of Books: Lessons in Survival, November 21, 2019
Vice: The Creator of the Shitty Media Men List Isn't Done, November 19, 2019
Vulture: Watchmen Recap: … and Justice for All, November 24, 2019
Longreads: Every One of Us is Other: Looking Back on Representation in "Heavenly Creatuers" 25 Years Later, November 15, 2019
Wired: The Race to Bring Meat Alternatives to Scale, November 8, 2019
Popula: Fuck “civility”, November 1, 2019
Bookforum: Cutting Up, October 2019
Slate: “Hot Topic”: The Complete Annotated Lyrics, October 31, 2019
NPR: Trump Impeachment Inquiry: A Guide To Key People, Facts And Documents, October 28, 2019
Bright Wall/Dark Room: Sparking Joy. Tidying Up with Marie Kondo (2019), October 28, 2019
Texas Monthly: When ‘Angels in America’ Came to East Texas, October 13, 2019
The New York Review of Books: The Culmination of Republican Decay, October 10, 2019
Insider: The story of Jamal Khashoggi's murder and how the world looked the other way, October 2, 2019
The Cut: The Toll of Me Too Assessing the costs for those who came forward, September 30, 2019
The Cut: The Toll of Me Too Assessing the costs for those who came forward, September 30, 2019
The New York Times: How a Shadow Foreign Policy in Ukraine Prompted an Impeachment Inquiry, September 29, 2019
Longreads: Regarding the Interpretation of Others, September 19, 2019
Meanjin: Unearthed. The Last Days of the Anthropocene, September 17, 2019
The New Republic: The Remaking of Susan Sontag, September 12, 2019
Quartz: The Zimbabwean writer who was Robert Mugabe’s nemesis, September 7, 2019
The New Republic: The Danger of a Domestic Terrorism Law, August 16, 2019
LARB: Sally Rooney: The Dark Side, August 15, 2019
The New York Times Magazine: The 1619 Project, August 14, 2019
The New York Times Magazine: The 1619 Project, August 14, 2019
New York Times Magazine: The Radical Vision of Toni Morrison, August 8, 2015
Slate: Toni Morrison Reshaped the Landscape of Literature, August 6, 2019
The Paris Review: Not Gonna Get Us, July 29, 2019
Rolling Stone: Kamala Harris’ Moment, July 23, 2019
The New York Magazine: I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked, July 17, 2019
The New Yorker: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the 2020 Presidential Race and Trump's Crisis at the Border, July 10, 2019
LitHub: In Patriarchy No One Can Hear You Scream: Rebecca Solnit on Jeffrey Epstein and the Silencing Machine, July 10, 2019
ICWA: Austria’s far right faces life after scandal, June 21, 2019
The New Yorker: Inside a Texas building where the government is holding migrant children, June 21, 2019
New York Magazine Intelligencer: E. Jean Carroll: “Trump attacked me in the dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman.”, 21 June 2019
Buzzfeed: Going Overboard, June 18, 2019
Vulture: The Decadent, Visceral Pleasures of Killing Eve, May 29, 2019
Vulture: What We Left Behind Boldly Argues for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s Place in the Black TV Canon, May 17, 2019
Bandcamp: The Power of Community: Team Dresch Return, May 16, 2019
Bright Wall/Dark Room: It’s a Secret. Christine, May 15, 2019
KCRW Lost Notes Podcast: To Chan Marshall: A Letter to Cat Power, May 2, 2019
KCRW Lost Notes Podcast: To Chan Marshall: A Letter to Cat Power, May 2, 2019
GRANTA: Where Is Kigali?, May 2, 2019
TASTE: When the Next Big Thing in Food Isn’t Actually Next, April 29, 2019
Buzzfeed: “Fixer Upper” Is Over, But Waco’s Transformation Is Just Beginning, April 20, 2019
Lawfare: Notes on the Mueller Report: A Reading Diary, April 19, 2019
Lawfare: Notes on the Mueller Report: A Reading Diary, April 19, 2019
The Intelligencer: What Was the Washington Post Afraid Of?, April 1, 2019
Patricia Lockwood: You kick Miette, March 20, 2019
The New Statesman: How Australia incubated far-right terror, March 20, 2019
Pacific Standard: Indigenous Knowledge Has Been Warning Us About Climate Change for Centuries, March 4, 2019
Pacific Standard: Indigenous Knowledge Has Been Warning Us About Climate Change for Centuries, March 4, 2019
The New Yorker: The New Yorker: An Adopted Obsession with Soondubu Jjigae, Korean Silken-Tofu Stew, February 20, 2019
The New York Review of Books: Undefeated, ISIS Is Back in Iraq, February 13, 2019
Undark: Psychologists Seek a Broader, Healthier Definition of ‘Masculinity’, February 13, 2019
The New York Review of Books: America’s Original Identity Politics, February 7, 2019
Longreads: The Lost Boys of #MeToo, February 1, 2019
The New York Review of Books: Climate Signs, February 1, 2019
Popula: Grocery-store nationalism, January 30, 2019
Bright Wall/Dark Room: Disobedience as a Path to God, January 28, 2019
BuzzFeed: Does LGBT Media Have A Future?, January 25, 2019
The Atlantic: ‘Nobody Is Going to Believe You’, January 18, 2019
Los Angeles Review of Books: Feasting on Precarity, January 14, 2019
The Paris Review: On Being a Woman in America While Trying to Avoid Being Assaulted, January 7, 2019
Buzzfeed News: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, January 5, 2019
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