My 2023 in Pop Culture: Favourite Books

If there's ever a subject I'm nervous about writing about, it's books. I was one of the those classic voracious child readers who grew up and discovered the internet and was never seen with a book in her hand again. I exaggerate, but given I have friends who routinely hit 100 or even 200 books a year, it's hard not to feel like a philistine in comparison.

This year, I set my reading goal at 23 books, and I nearly reached it. (Hilariously, I thought I could finish The Secret History in the two days before the year ended. It's 600 pages!) While 22 books isn't a huge number, in amongst them were some gems I'm excited to recommend.

I love memoirs and biographies. People are endlessly fascinating, and I find it comforting to remember that, to quote Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, "life is a gradual series of revelations / that occur over a period of time / it's not some carefully crafted story / it's a mess and we're all gonna die".

I've never read a biography like Tracey Thorn's My Rock'n'Roll Friend. In an act of love and generosity that takes my breath away, she has written an entire book dedicated to the life of, and her friendship with, Lindy Morrison, a fellow musician and drummer in the cult Australian band The Go-Betweens.

I know more about The Go-Betweens than most millennial women, because my childhood best friend's father was completely obsessed with them. (Despite not being very successful in their lifetime, they seem to inspire a fierce love in a particular brand of alt-rock-loving Australian and New Zealand middle-aged men). But I never realised that that there were two women in the band; I was only aware of frontmen Robert Forster and Grant McLennan. This, Thorn argues, was not by accident.

In 1980, Forster and McLennan brought on Morrison as the Go-Between's drummer, and considered themselves incredibly progressive for doing so. They certainly scored cool points in the media for their feminist aesthetic (aesthetic being the key word here). Morrison was in the band for the whole of the 1980s, joined later by Amanda Brown. It cannot be argued that they were anything other than an essential members. Yet in 1989, the two men decided unilaterally to break up The Go-Betweens without consulting either woman. Then, in 2000, they reformed the band. Morrison and Brown were not invited to join them.

Even worse, Thorn argues, Morrison's contributions have been been erased from the history of The Go-Betweens. She analyses the two existing books and documentary on the subject, all of which centre Forster and McLennan as the "geniuses" behind the music. Even during the band's heyday, the men would get all the interesting questions about their inspirations and musicianship from the media while Morrison was dismissed as "the girl in the band" or "the girlfriend" (she was with Forster for most of her time in the band, adding another layer of complexity to her role within the group). When she refused to play nice, she was called "too much", a "fucking nightmare".

Thorn provides an alternative narrative. Morrison, far from being the silent token she was designated by the media, is a furiously complex and fascinating person, whose unconventional drumming was a backbone of The Go-Between's signature sound. Before she even joined the band at age 26, she had gained a social work degree, worked as the first social worker at the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service, had a relationship with founder of the Australian Black Panthers Denis Walker, flatted with a gang of actors including Geoffrey Rush, backpacked around Europe for two years, performed as part of a satirical street theatre troupe, protested many times against the authoritarian Brisbane government, and was drummer for a feminist punk band. Thorn lays it all out in beautiful prose, these incredible stories no one else bothered to write about.

Thorn writes honestly about Morrison, who doesn't always sound like the easiest person to know - intensely emotional, bossy and all around full-on (Thorn notes how often Morrison is described as a "force of nature"). But, as Thorn argues, there are plenty of men like that in the history of music, and we still consider them worthy of examination. So she has done that, and by the end of the book, we feel we have really seen her beloved Lindy, as if she's cleaned a dusty window and the vague, hazy "girl in the band" is now revealed a sharp-edged, real-life woman in all her glory and pain.

This is a unassuming-looking book, small and millennial pink. But much like Morrison, who wore little floral sundresses while drumming her guts out on stage, the dainty exterior contains a furious power within. An alternative history, a treatise on the treatment of women in music, and a love letter to a true friend. What a book.

When I was sick with a cold in March, I was bored stiffless and decided to pick up Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games, which I hadn't read in a decade. Uh oh. I became completely, utterly obsessed with the Hunger Games trilogy and prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and barely thought about anything else all year.

Luckily, The Spinoff's Catherine Woulfe has already written an excellent full-throated appreciation of the books, so I don't need to try and convince you of how brilliant these books are. But they really are exceptionally well-written, and sadly more prescient than ever. Stuff's reviewer of TBOSAS astonished me when he said "That we will revert to death-matches fought between children for our future entertainment is too nihilistic to be credible". Really? The Hunger Games are an allegory for what we already allow to happen to children - a quick glance at a newspaper would confirm this. And delighting in people's suffering has been part of television from day one, beginning with Queen For A Day and continuing to the point where we've decided to turn Squid Game into a real life competition (with less death, but no less desperation). Collins, a former television writer, has an incredible understanding of both these aspects of the story, and the world she has built, while fantastic, is chillingly believable.

I'm trying to leave my Hunger Games obsession behind in 2023 - it's a new year, with new opportunities for hyper-fixations. But I'll never be able to forget these books.

I love short stories. For an attention-span deprived reader such as myself, they're absolutely perfect. I often find them more daring and thought-provoking than a lot of novels I read. A good one is like a perfectly formed little jewel. One of my favourite all-time writers, Ted Chiang, deal exclusively in them. (the beautiful, perception-altering The Great Silence is only three pages long).

My goal this year was to read as many short stories as possible. This goal got completely waylaid when I picked up The Hunger Games. Still, I managed quite a few thanks to a wonderful podcast called Levar Burton Reads, in which the legend himself selects a piece of short fiction - usually with a sci-fi or fantasy bent, but not always - and reads it aloud. Legends such as Shirley Jackson and Stephen King are represented, but just as often it will be a new writer with not even a published collection to their name. My favourite stories included Ken Liu's The Paper Menagerie, Toni Morrison's Recitatif, and Kurt Vonnegut's DP.

I enjoyed the latter so much I got Vonnegut's book of short stories Welcome to the Monkey House from the library, and while I have to say I intensely disliked several of them, I completely fell in love with one: Who Am I This Time? It's a romantic comedy about an incredibly shy man who completely transforms when he gets on stage in his town's local amateur productions, and a woman from out of town who is determined to woo him during the production of A Streetcar Named Desire. It's hard to say why it captured me so much, but the story was so simultaneously warm and ridiculous, and Vonnegut's trademark arch prose is so drily hilarious, that I reread it three times in a row. It was also made into a wonderful short film starring Christopher Walken and Susan Sarandon.

Other books I loved: Yoko Ogawa's The Housekeeper and the Professor, a touching novel about... maths? Mo Ryan's furious Burn It Down. RF Kuang's icky and compelling Yellowface. Catherine Chidgey's gothic The Axeman's Carnival.

Finally, since it's New Year's Day, I can't resist doing a shoutout to my favourite book of all time, Bridget Jones's Diary. I read it every year in January to remind myself that New Year's resolutions have limited value, and the real point of life is to be get sloshed with your girls, eat as many Mars Bars as possible, and be your own weird, messy self.

Next time: Everything else!