The purest mirror

Now I would like to write about my favourite things, books.
With a kind of bizarre secrecy from the Prime Minister's Office regarding the whereabouts of our national leader (apparently mainstream media also agreed not to broadcast his holiday intentions), I'm going back to books. Good books are dependable, like bushfires in this country. Books are revelatory, like the acts of politicians under criticism. Books hold a mirror to our society, *crickets* from our leaders. You may think that to conflate a post about a best reads list of 2019 with our ongoing bushfire emergency is a lazy grab for attention. It's not. It's related, because good books conjoin humanity with literature. It's like coitus, right? Literature gets together with humanity and before they know it, oh my god, humanity is pregnant.

Ok, so the humanity/literature babbies for 2019 are: 

Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson. 
This lady has never minded ruffling feathers. She builds a world in Frankisstein where others are building worlds, whether it be sex-bots which (which or who? crucial question here) malfunction during a sex-con gone wrong. A scientist is trying to create AI body parts, wants to upload his brain while still alive and a transsexual doctor is mistakenly inducted into said scientist's trans human project "because people often get this trans thing wrong". It's brilliant and scopes all the things we are terrified of when it comes to AI and the building of humans. Mary Shelley would be proud.

The Overstory by Richard Powers. 
This great big, baggy American novel is the read of the year for me. Three years ago, I discovered the wild wonder of mycelium in the world's forests. Now we have The Overstory. I keep pressing it on people, even though I know the worst thing you can do for a book is to say 'you HAVE to read this!' Yes, it's book death. But everyone has to read this book. It's about the fight to save America's great redwoods, the protests involved, the people who lived in the tallest tree in the world for ten months, trying to save it. It's about communication between trees, about arboreal interdependence and inter generational immigrants. Shortlisted for the Booker. Just fucking read it.

Vida by Marge Piercy.
Years ago, I used to read a lot of Marge Piercy. Woman on the Edge of Time, and other titles. I read Vida while I was on standby for fire duty recently. Piercy published Vida in 1980 and the eponymous protagonist was an (often violent) activist against the Vietnam War and later the anti-nuclear dissent. Vida is on the move as a fugitive the whole way through the novel, marked after trying to bomb the Mobil base. The novel is infused with the sexual politics of the late sixties, early seventies as people grapple with open relationships, covert affairs, bisexual tendencies and the latent desire to bomb places whose politics they detest. The book ties in with a lot of things in Richard Power's book; the exhaustion of fighting for years against an apparatus as large as the state, and common people feeling betrayed by their nation's leaders. See my first paragraph here ...