#evelyn araluen's dropbear is amazing too

[pynkhues]

Have you read any books lately that you've loved?

I have a problem where I keep buying books much faster than I can finish them. I just tell myself I'm performing a valuable service and supporting the authors lol

Hahaha, I mean!! By buying a lot of books, you certainly are ;-)

In terms of books I've loved recently, I just finished Alice Pung's One Hundred Days last night, which was wonderful. The blurb calls it a fractured-fairytale, and it is, but it's also in a lot of ways a bit of a gothic lit story of a teenage girl who finds herself pregnant and locked in an apartment with her mother. Pung's probably one of my favourite Australian authors at the moment. Her memoir Her Father's Daughter and YA novel Laurinda are both great reads too, and she's just got a really wonderful voice as a novelist. Her work tends to explore a lot about immigrant families in Australia, the cultural divide between East Asia and South East Asia and Australia, and the nature of being a third-culture kid (she herself is Australian, but of Chinese-Cambodian descent).

I'm currently also about halfway through Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing, which is heavy, but excellent in ways that I can't articulate yet, and I've also (unusually for me actually!) been reading a lot of poetry lately? I'm a few poems off finishing Desiree Dallagiacomo's Sink, which I think is pretty good, and recently re-read two Australian collections - Krissy Kneen's Eating My Grandmother and Omar Sakr's The Lost Arabs, which are both collections I really love and think about a lot.

(I've also read a lot of Not Great Stuff recently, hahaha, but I'll spare you those!)