Christmas Eve 2024

It’s Christmas Eve 2024 here in Perth. It was 44.3C yesterday, but there’s a cool change and Christmas should be sunny and mild.

Boxing Day is a day of preparation rather than celebration at our house. Family are coming tomorrow, so there’s shopping to be done and so on, gifts to be wrapped, food to be prepped. It’s all bubbling away.

I was up at 5am and cleared my morning email, reviewed the schedule and then headed out around 7.30am with Jessica. After a visit to mum’s to drop off the ham and turkey, we headed out shopping. We had a very unfortunate bingle at our first stop, which left the car scraped and damaged. A refrigeration truck backed up, smashed the wing mirror and scraped the door. It was unfortunate and put a bit of a pall on the beginnings of the day.

Still, we managed to drop past the post office, the brother’s place, do some grocery shopping, stop home, put in the insurance claim, go out to Yahava for a morning coffee (with Sophie and Jess), more grocery shopping, lunch, and then a nap.

The house is now almost ready. Bit by bit.

Episode 668: The Year in Books with James Bradley and Ian Mond

For our year-end review of 2024 books, we’re joined once again by fellow Locus reviewer Ian Mond and distinguished critic and novelist James Bradley. As usual, we mention a lot of authors and titles, and probably forget to mention many deserving others. But you’ll no doubt find some suggestions you hadn’t thought of, and some of our usual digressions about familiar questions of genre, literary ambition, and books that at least some of us think have been overlooked.

Ian’s list

We probably all should have kept lists, but we did not. Ian did, though, and so that’s provided to you with our thanks to him.

  • Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino
  • Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C.D. Rose
  • The Repeat Room by Jesse Ball
  • State of Paradise by Laura van den Berg
  • Changes in the Land by Matthew Cheney
  • Absolution by Jeff Vandermeer
  • Track Changes by Abigail Nussbaum
  • The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister
  • City of Dancing Gargoyles by Tara Campbell

Episode 667: Jo Walton and the most iconic books of the 21st century

At the end of October Reactor published their list of The Most Iconic Speculative Fiction Books of the 21st Century, which attempted to list the best/top/favourite science fiction and fantasy books of the past 25 years.

Two weeks later Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy award-winning writer Jo Walton published a follow-on piece on Reactor, On Selecting the Top Ten Genre Books of the First Quarter of the Century, where she discussed how she went about picking her contribution, while finding a classic reader’s workaround that allowed her to name a lot more than ten books.

That caught Locus reviewer Niall Harrison’s attention and lead directly to us inviting Jo to join us for a delightful and really interesting conversation on the subject.

While we hope you enjoy the podcast, we have to mention their were some audio difficulties. We’ve done the very best we can to make everything work, but we do apologise for any audio issues you experience while listening to the episode.