Borges Marathon, Part 14: The Lottery in Babylon
How do you explain the effects of random chance? Borges invented an all-powerful Lottery governing all possible events in life to help us think through it.
The Echoes by Evie Wyld: Review
My review of a beautifully dark and thought-provoking new piece of literary fiction by Evie Wyld, set between a remote Australian outback village haunted by terrible memories and a London flat inhabited by a disgruntled ghost.
May 2024 Reading Roundup
Here are the books I read last month, from historical fiction to a futuristic novel and a non-fiction book about a radical solution to climate change. Pretty much everything except the present, then, which is just what I needed right…
The Future by Naomi Alderman
What kind of future do we want? How would it look if it was based on trust instead of fear? For a novel that starts with the end of the world, The Future has a lot of interesting things to…
Borges Marathon, Part 13: The Circular Ruins
What happens when one man tries to dream another into existence? Jorge Luis Borges imagines this scenario in this thought-provoking story.
October Reading Roundup
My reading for October 2023 was dominated by the climate crisis and the horrific situation in Gaza.
Reading Australia
A roundup of my reading of Australian literature during a long road trip around the country.
Best Books I’ve Read So Far This Year
At the halfway point of 2023, here are the highlights of my reading year so far, including a Saudi Arabian novel, a history of Algeria and an Australian masterpiece.
Shadows on the Tundra: A Lithuanian Tale of Gulag Survival
I've read gulag memoirs before, but Shadows on the Tundra affected me even more deeply than the others—perhaps because of the age of the narrator, or perhaps the Lithuanian history that I didn't know before, or perhaps just the stark…