From Tiny Rebellions, a newsletter of human-curated recommendations as a counterweight to algorithmic curation.
The Employees — Olga Ravn Hello readers. I am sorry, again, for the delay. I was intending on posting this review in the weeks after Bali, but work got busy, and then in June, around my (cursed) birthday, I ended up in hospital for two weeks, and then spent many more weeks on the couch in recovery....
Prophet Song In December 2023, Antoinette Lattouf, a casual broadcaster with Australia’s ABC radio network, was fired from her short contract for re-posting a post from the Human Rights Watch account about the Israeli military using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza on her personal Instagram...
Hello subscribers and sorry for the long wait. In a way that should surprise absolutely nobody, I have been busy and it has meant that I have a series of book reviews backed up waiting to be written and shared. This is largely because my life swings violently from extreme busy-ness to total...
Orbital by Samantha Harvey 2 January, 2025 – Buninyong I tried to read this in 2024 to mark a good few years of Reading Books by reading the Booker Prize winner in the year it won but bookshops were sold out! Foiled! I tend to like the Booker winners. I don’t know if it’s a British thing. I like...
Underground Lovers – Encounters with Fungi by Alison Pouliot January 5, 2025 – Northcote I'm trying to get off Instagram. Facebook too, ideally, although there still feels like too many people I am only connected to on these platforms that I might regret being more disconnected from. I want less...
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu November 9, 2024 – Romsey Who is allowed to be American? This is the driving question of Charles Yu's experimental novel Interior Chinatown, where Willis Wu yearns to be more than A generic Asian stereotype in the screenplay of his life. This is fun, short and...
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin October 26, 2024 – Northcote Almost dropped this so many times but hate-read it until the end. Perhaps got better on the last act or so. Found all the references to games and coding deeply cringe. Almost threw the Kindle off the balcony after...
In Ascension by Martin MacInnes September 20, 2024 – Bridlington Quite a beautiful read, a book that goes deeper than we have ever gone into an oceanic trench and further than we have ever travelled into space. We accompany Leigh, our protagonist; relatable, lonely, awkward, smart, introspective or...
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman September 3, 2024 – Brussels As we are paying Brussels a visit I thought I'd read a Belgian author. I seem to be developing a taste for dystopian sci fi, with an interest in non-male protagonists. This was honestly very grim. But surprisingly...
All Fours by Miranda July August 24, 2024 – London I knew I'd read this, although I was not sure I'd read it so fast. Digested between Melbourne and Heathrow, I found it charming, rich and sweet, like a decadent croissant. I have often felt like I'm old for my age, and that's not really a brag. I...
The Overstory by Richard Powers August 21, 2024 – Northcote This took a long long time to get through. It's been a rough year. It started out slow, introducing all the characters who would eventually weave together into an exciting story about trees and activism and hope and nature and humanity. It...
Parallel Lives by Olivier Schrauwen July 7, 2024 – Northcote Reading this made me feel like I was having a stroke. I loved it. I don't really know how to describe it — the art style is off-putting and purposefully ugly; the stories are oddly erotic, alien and surreal, all loosely based on the...
Seek You – A Journey Through American Loneliness by Kristen Radtke March 11, 2024 – Northcote A new(?) genre (at least for me) — long form graphic essay — exploring loneliness with a focus on North America. From cowboys to dating apps, Radtke wants to understand the specific flavour of American...
I Don't – The Case Against Marriage by Clementine Ford March 3, 2024 – Northcote It's taken a while to get through this one. We moved house, there's a genocide happening and I've been distracted. I think dealing with all that and digesting the content of this was too much for me. I saw Clem launch...
Stories of your Life and Others by Ted Chiang January 3, 2024 – Northcote After enjoying Exhalation so much I picked up Ted Chiang's other book, which includes the story the film Arrival is based off. Ostensibly this is a sci fi short story collection but Chiang has a really curious and fascinating...
Eventually Everything Connects – Eight Essays on Uncertainty by Sarah Firth December 16, 2023 – Thornbury Such a beautiful and deeply relatable book of personal essays. I feel like this book articulates a kind of maturity that I strive for this kind of flexible thinking and stoicism, self awareness...
See What You Made Me Do – Power, Control and Domestic Abuse by Jess Hill November 26, 2023 – Thornbury This book is my villain origin story. It broke me over and over again. I've been reading it for months, picking it up and then needing to take a break, over and over and over again. The scale of...
Exhalation by Ted Chiang October 7, 2023 – Sydney I kind of knew I'd love this but wow I really really loved it. It reminded me a lot of Italo Calvino, although with a Charlie Brooker speculative sci-fi kind of vibe. Each of these stories is impossibly good, so perfectly constructed that it makes...
We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby September 19, 2023 – Gold Coast Hilarious and oddly moving. Personal essays about surviving under late stage capitalism with your mean cat and dark sense of humour. Much needed levity in my weirdly dark reading diet. Thanks to Karolina for the...
Turtlenecks by Steven Christie August 6, 2023 – Thornbury An absolute delight. Funny and touching meta art theory heist story. I loved this. @worf_episode 's art style, writing and ability to weave in-jokes and narrative together seamlessly is masterful.
The Reckoning – How #Metoo is Changing Australia by Jess Hill June 27, 2023 – Thornbury The weird thing about the Australian news is that everything seems filtered, muffled, refracted through politics of politeness and prime time manners. Brittany Higgins, Grace Tame, Christian Porter and the other...
Intact – A Defence of the Unmodified Body by Clare Chambers June 26, 2023 – Thornbury So I have actually read books this year despite failing to post! I seem to be reading a lot of philosophy? Starting with this, which I heard about via Jessica DeFino . Clare Chambers is interested in why some body...
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson January 3, 2022 – Chum Creek I don't want to have kids, but I'm increasingly interested in motherhood and its role in feminism and its ability to transform women. There's something about it that appeals to me on a level of radical politics, bodily autonomy, care and...
Stone Fruit by Lee Lai December 26, 2022 – Chum Creek Leigh brought this to Christmas, I just devoured it in a couple sittings. Such a good reminder of the rich and charming experience of graphic novels. This is an exploration of family through the eyes of a creative, cheeky, adventurous child -...
Ways of Being by James Bridle December 26, 2922 – Chum Creek At family Christmas in the Yarra Valley I think every person would have loved this book. My mum, a science teacher, my dad, a history buff, my sister who works at CSIRO and her partner, an artist, as well as Christopher, an engineer. I...
Eggshell Skull by Bri Lee July 28, 2022 – London I feel like the content of this book has been carefully avoided in its publicity in some ways — I was not really expecting it to go where it went. In the paperback it's a delightful light pink. The title refers to a legal concept about the nature of...
Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel June 28, 2022 – Bridlington Not a bad book to read while being covid positive on the back gardens of friends and family in England in summer. Haven't read much fiction recently so this was a nice change. I really enjoyed the writing style, and the story itself...
The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan May 16, 2022 – Thornbury Finished this last week with an old man reading over my shoulder on the plane. Hope he enjoyed it. As I understand it the eponymous essay that this book started with was a response to the Brock Turner case, which has occupied many pages...
Come As You Are – The Surprising New Science That WIll Transform Your Sex Life by Emily Nagoski PhD April 18, 2022 – Thornbury I'm not joking when I say everyone needs to read this as soon as possible. I consider myself pretty sex positive and open minded, but after reading this book, the amount of...
Against Empathy – The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom April 6, 2022 – Thornbury I'm a typical leftie nerd so I listen to Sam Harris and Very Bad Wizards and have always found Bloom quite engaging. This is my first of his books and it's close to my heart as a designer in tech. Let's clear...
