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There’s an occasional Clanger where Terry is incredibly racist even though this is an anti racist book, but overall it still stands up and crackles along as a tale of peace and the stupidity of war.

Despite being curious and picking up tiny little slivers of knowledge through work; I know I know essentially nothing about Aboriginal Australian nations and culture. This book is great; and introduction and invitation written/edited by a proud Koori man named Bruce Pascoe; to know more, to celebrate culture, to reckon with historical and contemporary injustices. I am grateful for this accessible intro and recommend it to anyone who ever lives in or travels to Australia.

I dunno if I just wasn’t in the mood for it, or if it was just a hard act to follow after the gentleman in Moscow, but I didn’t love this book, and joined through it for book club rather than for any other reason. Maybe it’s my ignorance of malay history. Maybe it’s that I don’t really care about the marriages of white people in history. It hit some sweet notes and I appreciated the theme of what loyalty may mean in the context of friendship and marriage and with lovers. But despite some evocative scenes and clever plot weaving it just felt two dimensional.

Another book club book and I swear in trying to speed read this I must have missed huge chunks and don’t fully understand what happened at the end! But I loved the descriptions and the main character and would probably happily re-read it on an island. One critique from another in book club which I agree somewhat with is that the main character didn’t feel very Russian; his optimism in particular felt very American. But maybe that’s the point- the internationalists perspective? Or maybe we have too grim a view of Russia? Nonetheless a great read and would recommend.

Man this dude was lucky; this could be a tale of warning (at one point he heads off into the hills with a cyclone coming)… but he wasn’t the only one doing this. He makes this walk seem accessible, which is inspiring, but also worries me a bit. But on the flip side, it’s an easy and beautiful and inspiring read. I think he benefitted from the hospitality of the girls more than he let on, but it was also cool to see how things worked for them. Will give this to my mum, I know she will enjoy it a lot. Very pretty book.

I don’t know if I would have been able to get through the density of it reading normally- that’s more of a reflection on me than the book; which deftly explains details of countries and people I’d never known much about. It’s crazy seeing the impact of that time and those decisions to today; the audacity of the men that made decisions at the time about places they at times barely knew also.