Six Degrees of Separation (Oct): I Want Everything to Every Secret Thing by Marie Munkara

  The meme is hosted by Books are My Favourite Best and is described thus: On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book. Each person’s chain will look completely different. It doesn’t matter what the connection is or where it takes you – just take us on the journey with you.


This month we begin with I Want Everything by Dominic Amerena. Although I own this book, I haven't read it yet. I have started it but found it a bit hard to get into and moved onto something else. I did see Dominics Amerena at the Sydney Writers' Festival 2025, speaking on a panel for debut authors. For anyone curious, here is a link to my post about the panel event


Green Dot by Madeleine Grey
The compare of the event was Madeleine Gray, an Australian author who wrote Green Dot which I read earlier this year. I really enjoyed Green Dot: Hera’s affair with her older, married boss plays out as a slow unraveling. It's a story about some coping with the inconsistency between what she thinks her life should be, and what her life actually is. 

Bliss by Peter Carey
Bliss by Peter Carey is what then comes to mind. It's a novel about man who realises that his life isn't what it seems and isn't what he wants. A crisis of meaning I suppose you could say - but in a slightly different context to what we see in Green Dot. 

The Secret River by Kate Grenville 
A weird shift perhaps. At first I couldn't quite put my figure on why I thought of The Secret River next, but I think it's because in Bliss the protagonist questions the life that he has built and in The Secret River that moral discomfort is felt more so by the reader watching the immoral acts of the colonists as they invade and take what isn't theres. It could also just be the Australian connection. 

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards 
OK, hear me out. I've gone to the Memory Keeper's Daughter because they are both about control. The Secret River is about control of land and lives. The Memory Keeper's Daughter is also about control of the lives of others. Who gets to decide what is best for others and who faces the consequences of those decisions. 

100 Years of Betty by Debra Oswald
Both of these novel revolve around children separated from their mothers because of societal pressures and shame. In The Memory Keeper’s Daughter a father decides to hide his daughter’s disability by giving her away at birth.Iin The 100 Years of Betty, the protagonist's decision to givs up her baby for adoption is also shaped by the harsh moral expectations of her time. 

Every Secret Thing by Marie Mukara
I read this one a long time ago. In Every Secret Thing the theme of forced familial separation is even more central. Munkara writes from lived history: Aboriginal children removed from families, cultural dislocation, the mission system. It’s a more painful reflection on the cost of forced familial separation, especially when identity is not just personal, but deeply communal.



WWW Wednesday: 17 September 2025

  WWW Wednesday is a meme that is hosted by Taking on a World of Words. It's a very simple premise of sharing with others The Three Ws:


What are you currently reading? 
What did you recently finish reading? 
What do you think you’ll read next? 




Currently reading 



I have literally just finished Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, and so technically haven't started this yet - but I am about to start Everyone this Christmas Has A Secret by Benjamin Stevenson. This is his thurd book in his Ernest Cunningham series, which is just a fun quirky detective series set in Australia. I find these books quite fun and am looking forward to this. 


Just finished















I just finished reading Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. I was keen to read this because a friend had spoken very highly of it, and it is on the New York Times Best 100 Books of the 21st Century (so far) list. It didn't disappoint. It was a bit slow to start for me, but eventually I got right into it. I enjoy reading a family history that spans throughout the generations.


I also recently finished reading The Hallmarked Man by Robert Galbraith. I know JK Rowling is controversial these days, but I can't help but love this series and I just can't give it up. I really appreciated that this one was quite a bit shorter than the last few, but I do think it was possibly the least interesting mystery that they were working on. It was the romantic tension that kept me interested more than anything else.


What's next?


As per usual, who knows. Only time till tell. 

Review: The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde



I remember really enjoying this book when I first read it, but this time around my reaction was much less enthusiastic. Perhaps I wasn’t in the right mood, but I found myself bogged down in page after page of men lecturing on their personal views of life and morality. Although I remember once finding this interesting it now felt a lot like dreary mansplaining.


For anyone unfamiliar, the story follows Dorian Gray, a beautiful young man in Victorian London who becomes the subject of a portrait. After falling under the influence of Lord Henry Wotton’s hedonistic philosophy, Dorian makes a wish that he could remain young and untouched by life, while the portrait ages instead. Over the years Dorian plunges into a life of self indulgence and cruelty and his body remains yuong and beautiful while his portrait becomes a monster. 


It’s a novel often celebrated as Wilde’s great work of fiction. Looking through other reviews and commentary it’s been described as a warning about vanity, a study of aestheticism, and even an early exploration of queer desire. 


And yet, despite all that, I didn’t enjoy it this time. I could admire the cleverness and understand why it’s considered significant, but as a reading experience I found myself more frustrated than anything else. It’s a reminder, I suppose, that some books resonate at certain times in our lives, and not at others. This was one of those re-reads where the magic didn’t return.

August 2025: What I Read

I started a new job in August. Starting a new job always had its challenges and this new role is definitely not an exception to that rule. One of the side effects of the new job has been far less time for reading. 


Some of this is undoutedly due to stress. The usual stress of starting a new role, but in this case additional stress because of office politics that I have walked into that have surprised me and are challenging me. My ability to concentrate is definitely suffering while I manage the stress and try to keep my intrusive thoughts under control.


On a more practical note, I no longer catch the train to and from work which has reduced the amount of reading time that I have available to me. I plan to handle this by getting this into audiobooks. Already.I have listended to a few and these will start popping up in my monthly overviews and my reviews. I've never really reviewed audiobooks before. I feel like the review will be about the story and also about the listening experience. I will make a point of reading some audiobook reviews to get some tips. 


Like that month, I've done a fair bit of re-reading and a lot less exploring of new works. 


New reads




Whose Body by Dorothy L Sayers, narrated by Robert Bathurst

I can't believe that I am admitting this, but I had never read anything by Dorothy L Sayers. I am a huge Agatha Christie fan, and read many cosy detective novels inspired by that genre, some of which refernece Sayers books (as in Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series). So I dived into Whose Body, on audiobook. Whose Body is the first novel featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, in which he investigates the mysterious appearance of a corpse in a London bathtub, complete with pince-nez but no clothes. I really enjoyed it, but I found the mystery much harder to unravel than in an Agatha Christie novel.


Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

I finally read an Ann Patchett book after one of my colleagues speaking so highly of her novels. Bel Canto is set at a birthday party in South America that suddenly turns into a hostage situation, but instead of being all tension and drama, it becomes this strange unfolding of developing connection between people who shouldn’t have anything in common. 


Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins

Novel About My Wife is told by Tom, who looks back on his marriage to Ann and slowly reveals how their seemingly ordinary life in London starts to unravel. I read this for my book club, Litery Wives Club, and a few of us reviewed the nove. You can read the full review here but in short I reacted strongly to this book, but not in a good way. So much was left unresolved and unexplained that it took away from any enjoyment for me, and I finished it feeling more frustrated than intrigued.


Re-Reads


Books that I read in the month of August, but had read previously, were Murder on a Midsummer Night by Kerry Greenwood, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by JK Rowling. 


Review: The Quiet Grave by Dervla Tiernan, dependable but unremarkable


I picked up The Quiet Grave during a busy patch in July when work and life were pulling me in all directions. More specifically job applications, interviews, and all the noise that goes with them. I was struggling to choose a book and then struggling to stick with it. In those times, cosy detective novels or crime procedurals are my fallback because they keep me reading without demanding too much mental energy.


The Quiet Grave continues Dervla McTiernan’s series, following Detective Cormac Reilly and his colleagues as another case unfolds. The story digs into a decades-old disappearance, and as usual for these novels, it's the kind of cold case that threatens to unearth more than anyone wants revealed. As usual, there’s the mix of procedural detail, personal drama, and the push-and-pull between police politics and real justice.


I’ve found myself enjoying this series more with each instalment, (see my review of The Scholar (2) and The Good Turn (3)) so I came into The Quiet Grave with some optimism. But this one didn’t land for me in the same way. The pacing reminded me of the first novel in the series. The resolution to the crime arrives so abruptly that it left me unsatisfied. I’ve also grown to appreciate Peter Fisher as a character, thinking he might take on a stronger role moving forward, but the events surrounding him in The Quiet Grave felt out of character and unlikely. I want to be immersed in the story but the way in which his story came to end took me out of the story and reminded me that I was just reading something that someone had made up. 


That said, McTiernan still delivers a reliable, standard sort of crime novel of the type that is good to have on hand when I just want to keep the pages turning without taxing my mind too much. I’ll keep reading the series when I need that kind of book, but this one reminded me that they’re not particularly special, even if they are dependable.

Literary Wives Book Club (Sept 2025): Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins

Literary Wives is an on-line book group that examines the meaning and role of wife in different books. Every other month, we post and discuss a book with this question in mind: What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife? 

Don’t forget to check out the other members of Literary Wives to see what they have to say about the book!

Other participants:
Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins



Last book club we reviewed The Constant Wife by W Somerset Maugham (read my review here). When I finished The Constant Wife I appreciated its take on marriage and the power dynamics within. In contrast, Novel About My Wife fell a little flat for me. 

The central wife in Novel About My Wife is Ann. But in truth, the story is told entirely from Tom’s point of view (her husband) and feels like it speaks more about him than her. The title promises a novel about a wife, but what we really get is a husband narrating a sotry about his wife to the reader, ostensibly to keep her memory her alive but he may have other motives. Tom tells us that Ann is an Australia he met while she was living in London. He doesn't know much about her past or even why she is living in London. But he falls in love and marries her. They buy a house and when the story begins they are expecting their first child. 


At the beginning of the narrative, Ann is caught in an underground train derailment which undoutedly impacts her mental health. She descends into anxiety, believing that she is being followed by a stalker and sometimes obsessively cleaning their home. It eventually seems likely that her issues began before the train accident, but it is never certain. We see her only through Tom’s eyes and his interpretation of her behaviour. Can we even be certain that he is being honest with us?  ,  The novel never gives her a voice and we can only speculate and infer from what Tim recounts. There is a traumatic event hinted at in her past, that potentially is a defining even in her life that may or may not being related to the decline in her mental health. Is the stalker a delusion created by her mental health struggles or are the mental health struggles the delusion and the stalker real and somehow connected to her past? We know that Ann passes away (not a spoiler) and it's implied, butonly implied, that she died by suicide. The traumatic event that defines her is never explained. 


In short - I did not enjoy this book. 


To delve into this more deeply - I found the ambiguity frustrating. I wanted to understand what was going on with Ann. I wanted to know what had happened to her in the past that cast such a shadow. I wanted to know how she died and whether there might have been anything suspicious about it. 


Perhaps I could have exercised my little grey cells and drawn my own conclusions, but I never got that spark. The gaps felt empty and the book didn’t inspire me to search for answers, only frustrated that I didn't have any. Is the fact that the story is narrated by a husband about his wife's death and yet he has called it a "novel" some clue to my confusion? If anyone else who has read this has their own theories, please let me know. 


So what does this novel say about wives?


Honestly, for a novel called Novel About My Wife, I think tha tthis story says something more about Tom, the husband. If I had to say something, I was would say that the novel suggests that a wife can still be unknown to the person thought to love them more than most others. Ann is only defined by Tom's observations and projections. Tom himself admits to not knowing much about her past, but he also has little curiosity, even though the very fact of her being less than forth coming suggests something important and hidden. He takes her at face value, but is also dismissive of her. He might say that he loves her, but does he know her? Can you love someone that you don't know?


In the end, I'm not really sure what it says about the experience of being a wife and I have no love of the story. It felt more like an ambiguous retelling (potentially even a confession, but of what I'm not sure) of events from a husband who never really cared to understand his wife. Maybe there's something there - that people see you as a wife or partner, but rarely as yourself without that context. 


If your idea of a satisfying read involves clarity, emotion and a satisfying plot then this book is not for you. 

Review: 100 Years of Betty by Debra Oswald


100 Years of Betty isn’t high-brow literary fiction and it doesn’t need to be. It’s warm, engaging, and I really enjoyed it. From the first chapter I connected with Betty, not because I’ve lived her life or even experiences 1/3 of what she has, but because Debra Oswald writes her with such humanity that you feel you could bump into her at the shops and strike up a chat.


Betty’s life begins in wartime London, a childhood shaped by the chaos and fear of the Blitz and the slow disintegration of her family under the strain of war and poverty. As a young woman she migrates to Australia in search of something more and begins (bravely in my mind) begins to build a new life in an unfamiliar country. Across the decades we see her navigate love and loss through multiple marriages, raise her children, and weather the quiet triumphs and disappointments that come with time. Betty's life is one of resilience and reinvention. 


One of the things Oswald does beautifully is show the role of chance in our lives. I once heard (and I wish I could remember where) that life is essentially a set of experiences that we tell ourselves stories about, so we can understand and ourselves better. It's an idea that's always struck me and I keep in mind when I am experiencing something challenging or stressful. That idea threads through Betty’s life. She makes choices but she’s also shaped by accidents, encounters, and the circumstances she finds herself in. Looking back, she pieces these moments together into her own narrative, and we see her come to understand who she is.


Reading it felt a little like a time travel novel except we move through time in the right direction. We watch Betty live through decades of change, each new era bringing shifts in social expectations, opportunities, and challenges. I felt joy and heartbreak watching her grow into her true self across all those years, especially as the world around her changes. We particularly see this shift almost immediately after her children are grown and she travels for the first time, moving to another content, to form connections and create a new family for herself, for a time. This moment felt to me like the most jarring or abrupt development in her character. I understand the change is big and abrupt because of the point in her life where she is free, without the responsibility of caring for her children, to finally put herself and her interests first.


One of the storylines that particularly resonated with me was about forced adoption. In a previous role, I worked in a not-for-profit organisation that supported people separated through forced adoption, and the emotions in this part of the book rang true. Oswald captures the pain, the complexity, and the lifelong impact without turning it into melodrama.


At its heart, this is also a story about women’s liberation. It shows how women have seen ourselves over time, how society has seen us over time, and how we have come to expect more from our lives. Through Betty, we see those changes unfold in small, everyday ways. Her confidence shifts, she becomes self-reliant and she knows she deserves and then expects respect.


And who doesn't doesn't love an elderly lady willing to experiment with hallucinogens. 


100 Years of Betty comes highly recommended by me.