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James’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at James’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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James Whitmore
Goodreads Author
Member Since
October 2012
Reading the 2019 Stella Prize shortlist
As in 2018, I spent some time this year reading the full shortlist for the Stella Prize, Australia's literature prize for female authors.
The 2018 bunch was full of boundary pushing literature, both in form and subject matter. This year I thought was on the whole more conservative. Nearly all of these books revolve around a family, and most fit neatly within what you'd expect of a book. But where Read more of this blog post »
The 2018 bunch was full of boundary pushing literature, both in form and subject matter. This year I thought was on the whole more conservative. Nearly all of these books revolve around a family, and most fit neatly within what you'd expect of a book. But where Read more of this blog post »
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The Handbook: Surviving and Living with Climate Change
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published
2015
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2 editions
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* Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To add more, click here.
James’s Recent Updates
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James Whitmore
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| A brilliant eye for the absurdity of ‘these times’, endearingly tender and horny, and a protagonist neurotic enough to believe his crazy plan for revenge. | |
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James Whitmore
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| This peripatetic, searching novel begins with a birth, the narrator coming screaming into the world aboard a storm-heaving ship. Using all the tenses and persons — first, second and third — the narrator describes how he "had come the wrong way round ...more | |
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James Whitmore
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| This startling novel opens with a flower. It is an orchid growing in a moist valley in the verdant subtropical forests of northern New South Wales in the 1990s. Every summer for the last 12 it has bloomed, sending out pheremonal messages to attract p ...more | |
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James Whitmore
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| Australia’s media gets the story about Aboriginal people catastrophically wrong, Amy McGuire argues in this investigation. The first section, White Witness, begins with war and ends with disappearance. McGuire revisits communities where Aboriginal pe ...more | |
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James Whitmore
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| “Who was there to answer to?” This is the question posed by one of two narrators in Bobuq Sayed’s novel No God But Us (Ultimo, 2026). It is a question also suggested by the novel’s humanist title and Sayed’s dedication “to the transgressors of border ...more | |
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James Whitmore
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| Late-30-something twins Iris and Floyd ride into the highlands on the hunt for a man-eating puma in this musing novel. Which highlands? They are Tasmanian-but-not, a similar alternative geography to Robbie Arnott’s second novel, The Rain Heron. There ...more | |
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James Whitmore
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| This is a collection of moments. Like memories, they are often stark and bright, rendered with certainty and specificity. But also like memories they are unstable. Whether they are discrete or part of a grand story, whether the "you" who is addressed ...more | |
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James Whitmore
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Here is another addition to the recent flurry of reinterpretations of classical myth. It is easy to understand the pull of such stories in their old tellings: they are bizarre, often thrillingly violent and gruesome, moral in familiar and enticingly ...more |
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James Whitmore
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| Fiona Kelly McGregor's previous novel Iris gave us a real-life historical rogue to add to Australia's queer pantheon, the story of Iris Webber, charged with murder in 1937 Sydney and even more notorious for her womanising. The Trap picks up half a de ...more | |
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James Whitmore
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| Dysphoria Mundi, Preciado proclaims, is a “non-binary book”: “the book is, like the planet, in transition”. Being in transition themselves, as stated in Preciado’s medical history that sits at the opening of this book, they diagnose the rest of us. P ...more | |
“Boast of Quietness
Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors.
The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.
Sure of my life and death, I observe the ambitious and would like to
understand them.
Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air.
Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack.
They speak of humanity.
My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of that same poverty.
They speak of homeland.
My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword,
the willow grove's visible prayer as evening falls.
Time is living me.
More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude.
They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow.
My name is someone and anyone.
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive.”
―
Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors.
The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.
Sure of my life and death, I observe the ambitious and would like to
understand them.
Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air.
Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack.
They speak of humanity.
My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of that same poverty.
They speak of homeland.
My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword,
the willow grove's visible prayer as evening falls.
Time is living me.
More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude.
They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow.
My name is someone and anyone.
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive.”
―
“The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence. And it moved not. A deadened burst of mighty splashes and snorts reached us from afar, as though an ichthyosaurus had been taking a bath of glitter in the great river.”
― Heart of Darkness
― Heart of Darkness