This will hurt me...

Jen looks out to sea. Binalong Bay, Bay of Fires, Tasmania. July 2021. Catch-22   by Joseph Heller Catch-22  is one of the rare books that I have returned to and re-read several times throughout my life. The first time was as a young and impressionable 17-year-old, and I delighted in the confidence Heller displayed in flourishing his love of language and deployment of marvellous words. After reading the novel, I am sure that I was willing to open up and use the full vocabulary available to me under the English language (and a few others to boot). It was darkly funny, and I took delight in the absurd wordplay and ingenious structure. The second time I read it, I was in my mid-20s and neck-deep working in a large, bureaucratic institution (a university). The complexities and absurdities that didn't strike me during my first read suddenly had more resonance. I came to appreciate the author's skill and cunning in replaying the same incidents repeatedly and the art beneath the nons...

Ezra up a tree. Binalong Bay, Bay of Fires, Tasmania. July 2021. See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence by Jess Hill  A bleak insight into the history, culture and laws around familial violence in Australia. The book offers a broad sweep of the movement Hill identifies as a "historic shift in power and accountability" in which "the Western world [has] finally started taking men’s violence against women seriously". The full truth of the latter half of this statement remains still to be seen. Unlike the dry government reports and inquiries cited throughout the work, Hill gets behind the simple facts and figures (although there are plenty of these too) to give the reader a real visceral sense of the terror, abuse and personal and institutional failures behind the dreadful data. It's not perfect, and I scratched my head at times in which she defers to various authorities and takes assertions at face value (telling rather than showing), but it...