Shopping List Season

The greatest holiday tradition of all: grumbling about end of year lists.

Greetings from the pit of darkness that is the 49th parallel a whisper before the blessed winter solstice. End-of-year lists are being published at a breakneck rate, and I am observing my annual tradition of at once hoovering them up and bemoaning their very existence. Best books, best telly, best movies. I’m sorry to say, I laughed like a drain at the effort of The Yale Review to hit a distinguished note with their contribution: Our Favorite Cultural Artifacts of 2024. The question ‘What is the most significant cultural encounter you have had this year?’ was funny to me last year, and it will be funny to me again next year. Alas, dear Yale Review, it is just not possible to highbrow this most middlebrow of formats. As for me, I will go to my grave grumbling about end-of-year lists.

This year there are almost as many gift guides doing the rounds as there are top-tens. It’s all clickbait, of course, an effort to seize and maintain the attention of audiences in high-stimulus digital environments. This is the epoch of algorithmic recommendation and traffic-based editorial decisions and even readers like me who loathe best-of lists still click on them. Why wouldn’t an editor try to fill her stocking with cheap, reassuring traffic? It’s just that the calendar for cultural journalism seems to be shrinking. December and January are now all but given over to point form retrospectives and prospectives, what with the best books features, the what’s ahead next year filler, and now, god help us, the gift guides.

I found in Anne-Helen Peterson’s theory of the modern gift guide a helpful explanation of why these are now so abundant:

First and foremost, for any site that uses affiliate links — and that’s almost all major publications and many newsletters, but not this one — it’s a way to significantly increase affiliate income. So long as an organization is following a set of ethics when it comes to its own recs and endorsements and avoiding the trap of only recommending products with affiliate kickback, the practice feels like a pretty standard replacement for the advertising dollars that once propped up most publications. It’s not a perfect scenario, but it’s not objectionable.

Not objectionable. Hmmm, it’s certainly another reminder that the media business is presently more crater than terra firma. Out with classifieds, advertising and subscriber income, in with affiliate links. Most top-ten lists also feature affiliate links, such that if you are finally persuaded to buy a copy of All Fours or James via one such list, the publisher will get a small payment. Indeed there’s very little that separates a gift guide from a top-ten or other best-of list. They’re both cheap content that require an editor ask a bunch of people to write very short and easy to edit texts. And a list and a gift guide generate revenue in an identical manner: customer clicks a link, buys something, publisher gets some cash. Publishers need to figure out ways to stay afloat, whether they’re one-woman newsletter shows or major corporations, but unless we yearn for a version of cultural journalism that is essentially writing glorified shopping lists, I do not believe the affiliate links will save us.

I pore over the best of the year lists, even as I find the form debased. I’m curious about how other readers conceptualise their reading and how they present themselves in relation to the books they read. There’s good verb sightings to be had. Of course in the Ozlit context I take scurrilous pleasure in seeing folks recommend the books of their friends and colleagues, steadfast behaviour that is also a form of debasement. I really couldn’t name my book of the year, although I certainly read many excellent books this year, including a boatload published in 2024. The best? Too soon to say. To make that kind of evaluation in a short time frame is what the judges of literary prizes do, and they use spreadsheets, take diligent notes, and sign agreements promising ethical conduct.

Of the books I reviewed and annotated heavily this year, I would love to see more people read Dominic Gordon’s Excitable Boy, a really excellent debut. I did suffer for my art and closely read Scott Morrison’s execrable memoir in order to write a review for Crikey; no compunction whatsoever about designating that the worst book I read in 2025.

I do wish I’d put my hand up to write about Michelle de Kretser’s Theory and Practice, which I plan to read over the break. Why is it, I have wondered these past few years, that a number of Australian women writers – Sophie Cunningham, Michelle Cahill and now de Kretser – have been drawn to write about the Woolfs? I swallowed Mrs Dalloway whole on a long flight in July, washed it down with ginger ale and thought for a moment that maybe I would write a book about Mrs Dalloway too. These days I am rarely able to read for long stretches, and it’s rarer still for me to read a novel in a single go. To spend hours sitting inside Woolf’s narration, lulled into a trance by the white noise of flight - what a glorious caper! A book of the year candidate? Hardly. I was reading a free e-book from Project Gutenberg, one of the precious remaining pockets of the open internet, a site that offers no prospect of affiliate income. Download your legal e-copy of Mrs Dalloway here, comrades.

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I wrote about Helen Garner’s new book The Season for Guardian Australia earlier this month. You can read the review here. It’s not a long review, and although the convention is to rail against the restrictions of the word count, I was relieved to be left with a lot more to say. I’ve been reading Garner since I was a teenager, and she is a writer about whom I suspect I will always have a great deal more to say.

It’s difficult for me to enthuse with any sincerity about the subject matter of the book, which is the experience of watching an U16 football team train and play for a season, mainly in the rain. Garner’s youngest grandson is on the team, and one way to describe the narrative point of view of The Season is as the fond view from the sidelines. Actually, there’s more than one of Garner’s books of non-fiction that I think this description fits, and close readers of those earlier books will find some interesting perspectives on Garner’s relationships to her subjects in The Season. Anyway, Garner calls her book is a ‘nanna’s book about footy’, a description so concise that it’s been cited in every review I’ve seen, including mine. Garner’s prose ennobles her material, turns a bunch of footy boys into eternal heroes, and there are several long stretches of sublime prose, writing that is just as deft and featherlight as that which keeps aloft the Garner book I love without reservation, The Children’s Bach.

I came to The Season with several decades of accumulated resentment at the national adoration of footy players of any age. I grew up in a country town and at my high school, the boys who played footy were seen as gods, and granted commensurate privileges. The rest of us clumsy mortals were ignored if we were lucky, bullied, harassed or worse if we weren’t. I know, I know, not all teenage footy players. Some of them were nice guys, for sure, but many of them acted like pigs. I stayed away from the training ovals because they scared the shit out of me.

There was a paragraph in an early draft of my Guardian review about the repeated motif of young women jogging past the oval while the boys train. They dont hold Garner’s attention: ‘I can hear their voices from a long way away, the music of them, some murmuring, others laughing and loud.’ Thank the goddess for the word count because it made me cut an embarrassingly maudlin par about the joggers. The gist was that I wished Garner would turn and pay attention to these women. (Concept: a book about women runners.)

Another leitmotif in The Season: Garner’s assimilation of other people’s ideas about the book she should have written. Pre-emption is a good way to deflect criticism, and on my first read I rolled my eyes at all the gestures to critics who might want Garner to write about women’s footy, or about sexual abuse in football clubs, or whatever aspect of Melbourne footy arcana they saw as important. And I suppose I do need to count myself in that cohort of readers who wished that Garner had looked for a different subject, or approached it differently, or turned her attention to the girls running by, or acknowledged how frightening the footy boys can be to young women.

And yet I gradually came to view Garner’s nods towards other people’s ideas of the book she should have written less as a cop-out, and more as a vital claim to aesthetic autonomy. Vital, because the current publishing environment works to inhibit the autonomy of artists and make it very hard for them to write the books they want to write. I don’t mean here that cancel culture is silencing artists, not a bit of it. I mean that many writers I encounter work under internalised expectations about what the market wants and what kind of books they should be writing - and here is Helen Garner acknowledging those expectations, and dismissing them. This goes against all the folk wisdom about how to thrive in the industry, about how to make work more appealing to agents, to publishers, to markets, about how to adapt projects to meet the expectations of grant assessment panels and of sales teams. Yes, it’s easier to exert your aesthetic autonomy when one is a lauded best-selling writer - but it’s hardly common. Even as I continue to butt my head against her books, I ultimately find Garner’s obstinacy – her commitment to writing exactly the book, or rather, all the books, she wants to write – extremely stirring. If she can’t do it, who can?

Thanks for your company this year, friends. I’m in two minds about whether to keep writing this newsletter regularly and I’m certainly considering whether to stay on SubStack or find a less cursed platform. These are ambivalences that will be easier to resolve when the days are a little longer. I plan to mark the solstice by walking the shoreline of the Burrard Sound with a string of singing hippies. I’ll light a candle, wait out the darkest night of a dark year, hold friends and family close. And then? I’ll see you in the bright lights of 2025.