Michaela Kolowski

I go back to things that I've loved and that are kind of tried and true.

And for me, I actually found myself going back to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, which is one of my favourite novels of all time.

It's a big, lovely chunk of a novel.

And I don't know, I think I suppose I find it familiar but also in that wonderful way when you reread works that are so brilliantly crafted.

Every time you read it with the eyes of where you're up to, you see new things and notice new things and it gives you new perspectives.

So I've really loved rereading that.

But I've also been reading one of the most recent collections of essays by Rebecca Solnit called Whose Story Is This?, which is the old complex, new chapters.

And it's really a collection of a lot of her writing about, I guess, about the narratives, you know, who gets to shape the narratives of our times, really.

And that's been, it's a call to arms, it's enraging, it's disheartening to read about some of the, I guess, abuses and exploitations of people, particularly of women, that have happened, you know, around the world.

But it's also very empowering and she's a fantastic writer and a very concise writer.

And also, like many people, I've also read Julia Baird's Phosphorescence, which I can't imagine a book that's better timed by accident in its release to have come out during a pandemic because it's about wonder and awe.

And the subtitle for the book is, you know, what things sustain us when times go dark.

I'm absolutely intrigued.

I'm absolutely intrigued.

I have read Leah Kaminsky's A Hollow Bone.

So this idea of having a really unusual narrator is a really, it's an awesome device, but it sounds like it's a lot more than that in Mammoth.

It sounds like it's, as Kate mentioned before, it brings these really like playful ways of thinking about the natural world and history, but also really intelligent ways.

I love this idea that, you know,

If my tooth is buried at the bottom of a river halfway across the world, I can access the memories because some part of me is there.

I also love the debate between Hatshepsut's hand and everybody else about how can you really be who you say you are?