Phosphorescence

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After the profound and intense way that On Not Climbing Mountains made me feel, I was keen to keep that feeling of self-awareness and emotional clarity going. So, I plucked Phosphorescence off the shelf: a book that I have been meaning to read for ages but have never seemed to be in the right mood or headspace for. Until now.

It’s hard to articulate just how good it feels to get into a good reading groove. While I haven’t stopped reading at any real point, I realised only recently that there was this underlying feeling of stagnation that was accompanying my bouts of reading. But now it feels like I have broken the surface of a body of water I didn’t know I was submerged in. When I read right now, I experience relief and liberation. I’ve been trying to identify the catalyst that stirred up these feelings and it finally came to me this morning. It’s a universal fact that is so obvious we constantly forget about it, take it for granted, and render it invisible. Variety. Up until maybe a month ago, I was on a total fantasy kick and by the time I finished Throne in the Dark I was so burnt out on fantasy that I didn’t even realise. Then I switched tracks with some slice-of-life novels and the Claire Thomas one for bookclub and suddenly my brain was reacting differently. We all know that the occasional break in routine or ‘spicing things up’ is good for revitalising you, but I don’t think we ever really realise just how much a small change can affect brain activity until we mentally catch ourselves in the action of changing it up. It’s remarkable and, aptly, the theme of Julia Baird’s Phosphorescence, which I absolutely adored!

Julia Baird is a renowned author, award-winning journalist, mother, and cancer survivor devoted to finding awe and helping her readers find it too. As humans, we are complex, erratic, and chaotic masses of organic matter and thoughts, living lives that are often made dark by depression, trauma, anxiety, illness, bad luck, poor choices, loss, grief, and a Pandora’s box of et cetera. But we live in a world that provides resources for coping with all of this. Whether it be the natural wonders of hearing birdsong while watching the sun rise, or seeing the ocean light up at night with its bioluminescent inhabitants, or the ones that we shape ourselves: art, relationships, community, religion, there is awe to be found everywhere and it’s important for us to stop for a moment or two every day, find these awe pockets, and take the time to admire and appreciate them. We might be surprised at just how much it changes the course of our day.

Phosphorescence is an exploration and celebration of a whole mass of stuff. Part autobiography and part explorative essay, it’s written with a voice that is intelligent, curious, and down to earth, instantly making it relatable and engaging: like having a long conversation with a creative critical thinker. Baird shares her own experiences of darkness and celebrates the memorable moments in nature, with friends, within communities that helped light her way through them. It’s a book that tells us stuff we technically know but then backs it up with statistics and personal scenarios that really hammer home the point, inspiring moments for us to look back at our own dark times and feel the dawning of realisation spread though us as we recall going through the same mental and emotional phases she describes.

Image credit: Penguin Random House

It’s tricky to articulate why it’s so stirring and profound because, similar to Thomas’ On Not Climbing Mountains, it tells a lot of different stories about a lot of different things in a voice that is reporting with feeling. What I can say with certainty is that this book made me feel wonderful: it’s its own little pocket of awe that I am so glad that I took the time to enjoy. Praise for Julia Baird!

Author: Julia Baird, 2020

Published: Fourth Estate, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, Australia, 2020

On Not Climbing Mountains

Image credit: Amazon.com.au

After my recent fantasy deep-dive and then the overly cosy outings with Michiko Aoyama, this month’s Bookclub read was a welcome change of pace that I didn’t know I needed. Isn’t that a lovely thing: when a decision is made for you at precisely the right time that you would be ready for it? This month, we are looking at Claire Thomas’ On Not Climbing Mountains, a book about seemingly everything and nothing that is written in a way that just inspires you to think about the world: its narratives, its landscapes, and its interconnectivity.

Schoolteacher Beatrice Angst arrives in Geneva, the first stop in a train journey across the country of her father’s birth. He has recently passed away and Beatrice wishes to grieve, to be outside of time, alone with her thoughts and her loss, but as she travels across Switzerland she cannot help but get swept up in the stories that all around her. Mary Shelley, Charlie Chaplin, Fleur Jaeggy, Patricia Highsmith, Vladamir Nabokov, Lenin, Sir Edmund Hailary, Casanova – they are all with her on this journey, tied together by a beautiful, mountainous landscape.

Madeline Gray best sums up this incredibly moving novel in her front-cover review: “Thomas has written a novel that is truly novel – braiding stories of artists, writers, and thinkings into a literary rope, a pulley system for the mind.”

Indeed, the book begins as a collection of individual life-stories and anecdotes of famous and recognisable historical figures, as well as a few unheard-of heroes, with nothing in common aside from their presence in this landscape at one time or another. Written simply while also being engaging enough to inspire one to hop onto Google and learn what they can about these people, On Not Climbing Mountains is one of those rare books that gently massages the part of your mind where ambitions are kept, stimulating inspiration to learn more about bees, read Frankenstein, go to an art gallery, and watch Modern Times.

It is only about a third of the way through that we are properly introduced to the main character and the circumstances that bring her to this place that inspires such stories and trains of thought. From there the book is… everything. It’s fiction, it’s a bunch of biographies, it’s a review of art, literature, and film, it’s an environmental, historical, and poetical study on mountains, it’s a series of tales interconnected across time. It’s beautiful.

And the prose throughout is written with this gorgeously genuine and admiring tone that provides insight into who this protagonist is. It’s unidentifiable to me but there is something about Thomas’ writing that is raw and genuine, which makes this book feel so intimate even though it’s nonchalantly telling a bunch of tiny stories that have nothing to do with the heroine, other than be about people or books or films that she’s enjoyed or been interested in.

Image credit: About- Claire Thomas

I absolutely loved this book and the way that it made me feel. It’s a novel that promises everything and nothing. That somehow manages to envelope you so totally that you’ve traversed half of it before registering what it’s about and what it’s exploring. It’s both melancholy and jubilant, a lament and a celebration of humanity’s achievements: art, science, philosophy, politics, invention, curiosity, brutality, conquering the physical world, and being left to slowly die in it. On Not Climbing Mountains is moving, profound, soothing, and fascinating. The literary equivalent of being carried by a small current in a quiet beach on a cloudless day.

Author: Clair Thomas, 2026

Published: Hachette Australia, Australia & New Zealand, 2026

Macha on Monday

Image credit: Penguin Books Australia

After enjoying Hot Chocolate on Thursday so much, there was no way that I could not close the cover on it and not dive right into its companion novel, Macha on Monday.

The Marble Café in Tokyo is an assuming place. One might even miss it if they were not looking properly. Yet so many people can trace defining moments in their lives back to the café and its mysterious founder, Maestro. A tea merchant finds love, a kamishibai performer expresses her feelings to her standoffish grandmother, a socially awkward young man looks at his classmate hierarchy a little differently, and a cat listens as an old second-hand book seller tells it about the Tanabata Star Festival. Dreams, desires, needs, and the means to fulfill them, sometimes all that’s needed to achieve them is a place to sit and gather one’s thoughts.

The ripples that were established in Hot Chocolate on Thursday have reached further and Macha On Monday tells a fresh batch of uplifting stories from characters in Kyoto who have ties to Marble Café and Maestro. The story progression follows the same flow as its predecessor, this time with the chapters telling a story from each month over the course of a year. Stronger themes of social anxiety, traditional vs modern attitudes, and self-discovery and acceptance colour the stories, still achieving the uplifting feels that flavoured the first book, though a little more forcefully.

The prose is simple with the perfect number of descriptive phrases that conjure the visual scene in the reader’s mind, making the book completely enveloping and creating a mind-space in which the reader can breathe and become aware of their own state of being; mental, emotional, physical etc. That is the power of these types of novels, what makes them so special, important, and enjoyable.

Image credit: Penguin Books Australia

While I enjoyed its predecessor a lot more, Macha on Monday is a book that still brightened my week and made it easier to breathe through. A delightful read.

Author: Michiko Aoyama, 2021. Translated by E. Madison Shimoda.

Published: Original Japanese edition published by Takarajimasha Inc., Tokyo. First published in Great Britain by Doubleday, an imprint of Transworld Publishers, Penguin Random House, 2026.

Hot Chocolate on Thursday

Image credit: Penguin Books Australia

While the saying goes, ‘you can never have too much of a good thing’, we all know this is false. Everything in moderation is a much healthier mantra to live by. After the slightly amusing but overly unimpressive Throne in the Dark, I felt it was definitely time to take a step away from fantasy for a bit, so this week I have moved on a little bout of cosy, Japanese, slice-of-life fiction.

Tucked away amid the cherry blossoms along a river in Tokyo sits the Marble Café. It’s a quaint and cosy place where one can have a hot drink, pass the time, and perhaps have a special encounter. Here, a woman sips hot chocolate while writing a letter to her pen pal. The manager admires her from afar. A working mother makes plans for her son’s lunch, while a friend quickly rushes out to buy another friend something blue for her wedding. Life is made up of meetings and moments, many of which seem so insignificant but end up making the biggest differences in our lives.

Japanese slice-of-life novels are fast becoming my new favourite genre for cosy, recreational reading. There is something about the uplifting collection of short stories centred around a specific location that has the power to really pull me out of any life-funk that I’m on the verge of slipping into. Hot Chocolate on Thursday definitely did this for me. It’s a sweet and wholesome collection of stories, each one a different chapter with a colour as a narrative focal point, that hold nothing in common with each other but the fact that the characters are each somehow linked to Marble Café or its mysterious founder, the Maestro.

Despite the absence of a central plot, there is a definite flow in the progression of each story, as every chapter is a tale told from the point of view of a person we met in the previous chapter. Messages of work-life balance, love, and the health benefits of shifting perspectives fill every page to make the book a warm and gentle reminder that even though the anxieties of life can become overwhelming, they can be broken down piece by piece and everything can be OK in the end. The lightest touch can disturb a still body of water and this book really plays with that image but instead of disturbing calm, it’s rippling common life problems and reshaping them so that the characters (and the reader) can see them differently and change the way they respond to them.

Image credit: Penguin Books Australia

Hot Chocolate on Thursday is a warm, soothing, and delightful book. It really is like a cup of chocolate: a smooth procession of stories that are tinted with a slight bitterness but are then overcome with a spreading sweetness that manages to reach every part of the body and mind. I absolutely adored it!

Author: Michiko Aoyama, 2017. Translated by E. Madison Shimoda.

Published: Original Japanese edition published by Takarajimasha Inc., Tokyo. First published in Great Britain by Doubleday, an imprint of Transworld Publishers, Penguin Random House, 2026.

Villains & Virtues: Throne in the Dark

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While I absolutely adored the scenic and mouth-watering excursions around Taiwan that was Taiwan Travelogue, with bookclub postponed for a month, it should come as no surprise that I dove right back into fantasy the first moment I got. I was gifted A.K Caggiano’s Throne in the Dark by a very dear friend back in June and now having finished it I am keen to get her on the phone for a little bookclub to hear her thoughts on it.

Watching films and reading books that are recommended by close friends is another unique and fascinating experience that humans get to enjoy and navigate. Of course it’s different for everyone, but I personally find that my reading experience is already shaped a little by the fact that I’m diving into a book that a friend with similar tastes has read and enjoyed enough to share with me. There’s a sense of obligation to put in the effort and read the whole thing, even if you struggle or find that the writing is not working for you. Then there are character and narrative choices that you can’t help but wonder, ‘did she like this bit or also find it predictable?’.

Damian Maleficus Bloodthorne is a powerful bloodmage who has just completed his life’s work, to create the most powerful talisman of enthrallment history has ever known. With it, he can finally fulfil his destiny to release his demonic father from imprisonment so that darkness and villainy can cover all the world. Well, that was the plan until he runs into a pretty little thief called Amma who accidentally becomes the harbouring vessel for the talisman. Stuck dragging Amma across the land and trying to find a way to remove the talisman, Damien’s concrete plans have started to crumble. Even more so when Amma’s caring nature and bubby demeanor starts to stir up feelings in Damien that contend with the usual ones of villainy and malevolence.

It’s worth nothing that reading the Author’s Note at the end of the book can sometimes help to alleviate the negative feelings you have about the work or help you to better understand what the author was trying to achieve. This was certainly the case for me with this book. I originally thought that this was going to be another YA fantasy romance to join the ranks of the Scholomance or Little Thieves trilogies in my library, when actually it’s a little bit closer to Once Upon a Broken Heart (though not as enthralling). According to Caggiano’s note at the end, Throne in the Dark was supposed to be a standalone parody, but became something bigger as, “the sincerity of the story insisted on seeping through the cracks in the absurdity”.

Knowing this made it a lot easier to understand some of the tonal choices that were made throughout the prose and helped to alleviate some of the annoyance that I had with it. Unlike Once Upon a Broken Heart where the writing is so overloaded with syrupy adjectives that it can’t be anything BUT a piss-take, the prose in Throne in the Dark is blunt and descriptive with smarmy and whimsical asides that break up the narrative flow to ensure the reader is in on the joke. There are many moments in which the author’s voice can be clearly heard making metafictive remarks on the genre, not to mention the vague, summarizing chapter names. While I can appreciate the intent behind these choices, I personally felt that it didn’t really add anything to the story, merely stopped its trajectory for a breather.

Then we have the caricatured characters of Damiel and Amma. Their central romance story is pretty predictable and even though Amma’s motives remain a mystery until the third act, I still picked what was coming pretty early on. The chapters flip between the perspectives of Amma and Damien while still being written in the third person omniscient. This works perfectly well, but I would have liked it if there was a little more insight into their characters. Annoyingly, we don’t really get a sense of who these characters are and what they feel, their story is sort of written in a hand-wavey way that rides on them being token genre pieces.

Because the humour does not really come across as obviously or early as one would like, these tonal choices and the caricature protagonists just prove to be a little bit annoying and make it easy to put the book down. Had I known from that start that it’s meant to be a parody, I might not have felt as strongly – though probably still a little annoyed because it now feels a little bit lazy to let everything ride on, ‘ah but that’s the joke’.

Image credit: Penguin Books Australia

Having said this, the story itself is actually kind of compelling and I am definitely interested in the fantasy world that Caggiano has created. There are supporting characters that are truly fascinating and a whole bunch of lore that only gets hinted at throughout the tale. While I realise that the exposition dump is not a preferable means of learning about the world, there are ways in which to make them more interesting and when used to educate readers about the world they find themselves in, they can make stories even more compelling. It's also a very visual world and story: honestly, it would probably do very well as an anime.

Throne in the Dark is not a bad book, it’s a solid fantasy story that has some very memorable scenes. But in a rapidly expanding subgenre like YA fanta-roms, a book that is mildly amusing with unsubstantial characters can fall into obscurity. It was interesting enough to get me through the entire thing (which is 500+ pages), but I didn’t experience any strong feelings while reading it and did find it easy to put down and walk away from. I have not decided if I will continue with series.

Author: A.K Caggiano, 2022-2025

Published: Sourcebooks, Casablanca, 2025

Throne in the Dark is the first book in A.K. Caggiano's Villains & Virtues series.

Taiwan Travelogue

Image credit: Scribe Publications

Well, after weeks of going heavy on the cosy, fantasy reads, we have finally travelled somewhere a lot closer to home and am now reveling in the heady jetlag that comes from closing the cover on an immersive book. Cutting it a bit fine, seeing as we are meeting to discuss this tomorrow, I have just closed the cover on this month’s bookclub read: Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-zi.

It is May 1938 and Japanese woman author Aoyama Chizuko has arrived in Taiwan, invited by the colonial government to write a series of travelogue essays, even though she is personally indifferent and sometimes against their agenda. She determines to experience and devour authentic island life in every sense of the word, but fears this will be impossible with her assigned assistant/interpreter. Expressing these concerns to her hostess, she is then introduced to the charming, meticulous, and incomprehensible Chizuru, who quickly becomes her interpreter and guide. Over meals of winter melon tea, braised minced pork, silver needle vermicelli, and leftover soup, Chizuko becomes infatuated with Chizuru, but is kept at arm’s length for reasons that only become apparent after a painful separation.

Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text, Taiwan Travelogue is a gorgeous story about a beautiful relationship between two women while also being an immersive cultural exploration of history, language, power dynamics, and of course, food.  It’s an homage to the episodes of self-discovery that can occur only when you travel and stay with you for the rest of your life. I found it inspiring, engaging, and beautiful.

An accessible, academic, and yet poetic prose flavours the pages and completely envelopes the reader in the landscape as well as intimacies that come with sharing a meal. Each chapter is defined by a specific dish that accompanies a significant event in the story and the footnotes serve to cleanse the palette by breaking the narrative flow with academic flavours as well as further establishing the landscape in which we find ourselves.

Image credit: The Booker Prizes

Taiwan Travelogue is immersive and insightful and it very much has made me want to be more adventurous in the kitchen! It’s one of those books that makes you consider yourself a little more closely and from different angles, a truly beautiful and inspiring piece of fiction.

Author: Yang Shuang-zi, 2020

Translation: English translation from Mandarin by Lin King, 2024

Published: Springhill Publishing, Taiwan 2020. This edition published by Scribe Publications, ANZ, 2026.

Bookshops & Bonedust

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Still very much entrenched in the world of high fantasy and low stakes, I have just closed the cover of Travis Baldree’s prequel to Legends & Lattes: Bookshops & Bonedust – a cosy story of high fantasy about first loves and second-hand books.

Viv’s brutally glamorous career as a mercenary is just taking off. But it’s a fact of life that disaster always strikes just when things are getting good. Running with a renowned mercenary group called Rackham’s Ravens Viv is badly injured during a hunt for a fearsome necromancer, and she finds herself stranded in the sleepy seaside town of Murk to recuperate. Laid up with a bad leg and a growing fear that she might not be able to return to the action, what’s a thwarted soldier of fortune to do? Spending time in a struggling bookshop is certainly not how she would have imagined spending her time, but nevertheless when Viv discovers Thistleburr Booksellers she also discovers that adventure and excitement comes in different shapes like a fowl-mouthed rattkin proprietor, a flour-dusted dwarven baker, and a rambunctious gnome with a penchant for knives. Who knows? Maybe the action Viv craves is not as far away as she thinks.

As is the case with any particular mood you get into with reading, it ebbs and flows. For the last couple of weeks I have been all about cosy fantasy reads that I can while away some sunlit afternoons with, but it seems this mood is now ebbing as I found Bookshops & Bonedust to just not be as cosy and enveloping as Legends & Lattes. It’s a sweet and relatable story of self-discovery and growth through finding new interests, with a slightly more dramatic, adventure-y twist in the third act.

The prose is simple, not particularly memorable, but it does transport us into the sleepy seaside town: though this could just be because we are so overexposed to this kind of setting in a plethora of genres that it’s very easy to be transported there with just a few words.

It’s interesting to read a prequel written after a book establishes the central character, mainly because we get to see a greener (no pun intended) and underdeveloped version of this character that we’ve previously come to know. In Viv’s case, she’s young, aggressive, and itching for a fight; devoid of the wisdom and appreciation for the less-stabby pleasures the world can offer. This brings a little humour to the book in the scenes where people raise their eyebrows when they see her reading a book but for the reader, it does deplete her character a little bit, which is fine for the story but meant that I found it a little harder to pick up the book again once I’d put it down.

Image credit: Fantasy-Hive

But with a supporting cast of colour characters, I’m not saying this book is devoid of appeal. Filled with action, romance, comedy, and cosy vibes, Bookshops & Bonedust is a fine little fantasy read if you have the time to while away.

Author: Travis Baldree, 2023

Published: Tor, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, London, 2023.

Bookshops & Bonedust is the prequel to Legends & Lattes.