I judged this book by its cover.

I was browsing a bookshop with no real plan when Emma Grede’s Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Work and Life stopped me in my tracks, cover first.

I knew Grede’s face from her few appearances on the US Shark Tank, where she made history as the first Black woman to sit in the investor’s chair, but I couldn’t have told you much beyond that.

By the time I finished it, my copy was creased, coffee-stained and slightly warped - it became my sauna book, read in short, sweaty bursts over a few weeks - and I’d dog-eared more pages than I’ve dog-eared in a book in years.

Start With Yourself, released in April, is a New York Times bestseller and Grede’s first book. Beyond Shark Tank, she is co-founder and CEO of the denim label Good American, a founding partner of Skims, and co-founder of Safely and Off Season - which makes her one of the most senior operators in the Kardashian-adjacent business world, not just a famous face attached to it.

The book is aimed squarely at women, and Grede, doesn’t pretend otherwise. But there’s enough in here about ambition, boundaries and plain hard work that I found it useful regardless of who it’s “for”.

The section I kept returning to is a list Grede calls her basic rules for success. Some of them:

1. She shifted her mindset from blaming her circumstances to taking complete responsibility for herself.

2. She worked hard in her twenties, “a defining decade for everyone”.

3. She built detail into her plans for the future - how, when, where, what - but focused most on how she wanted it all to feel.

4. She found a genuinely supportive partner.

5. She established her career before having children.

6. She made selfish professional decisions, leaving opportunities when the time was right for her. “It’s okay to be most loyal to yourself,” she writes.

7. She leveraged every job, role or contact to help her do the next thing.

8. She moved away from people who didn’t serve her.

9. She learned to call BS - including on herself.

10. She “failed up”, stepping into jobs bigger than her experience.

11. She got up after failing, and kept getting up, learning each time.

12. She embraced crisis, using her own suffering as a chance to transform.

13. She put causes she cares about, like women’s rights and economic justice, at the centre of her businesses - “without making them about marketing”.

14. She refused to be afraid of anyone.

“And to this day, I always start with myself,” she writes.

Grede also introduces a term I hadn’t heard before: founderitis. “If you fear you have ‘founderitis’ and want to read a brutal Wikipedia entry, the one on ‘founder’s syndrome’ is for you,” she writes - a dry, self-aware line that sums up the book’s tone better than any blurb could.

My favourite passage, though, is the one where Grede traces her work ethic back to East London.

“I learned about action growing up in East London, where everyone is always on the go, hustling,” she writes. “Anyone reading this from my old neighbourhood will recognise these principles as our basic operating manual, and they continue to guide how I show up in the world today. None of them will surprise you; they’re woven into this book, and they’re dead simple: do what you say you’re going to do, show up; your word is king, always tell the truth; stay in motion. That’s it. These are the basic principles that guide the actions I take in my life.”

No inspirational-poster gloss, no seven-step formula promising an easier life. Just a clear account of what it actually took.

Start With Yourself is out now through Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster. If you’ve ever picked up a book for the cover and been pleasantly surprised, add this one to the pile.

With the TV adaptation of The Shards landing on Disney+ in Australia on August 6, I did something I don’t often do: I went back and reread the book before watching the show.

I am, by my own admission, a big Bret Easton Ellis fan.

Sheepishly, American Psycho remains one of my favourite novels.

The Rules of Attraction is right up there too.

So when The Shards was announced as a six-episode series, double episode premiere included, I wanted to revisit the source material properly rather than relying on a three-year-old memory of it.

Here’s my confession: it wasn’t until the very last page that I clocked this was fiction.

The Shards is narrated by a character called Bret, an aspiring writer at LA’s elite Buckley prep school in 1981, who shares Ellis’ name, his first novel (Less Than Zero), his old yearbook photo and, seemingly, a great deal of his adolescence.

Ellis blurs memoir and thriller so carefully that the book reads like a diary for long stretches, before a serial killer known as The Trawler starts stalking the school’s tight, privileged social circle.

I found myself googling “was Bret Easton Ellis stalked by a killer in high school” partway through, which should tell you how convincingly the trick works.

It’s only in the author’s note at the close that the rug gets pulled, and you realise the whole thing has been an elaborate act of fiction wearing memoir’s clothes.

I’m not alone in finding that disorientation the book’s biggest strength.

When The Shards was released in 2022, reviewers (including a widely shared Guardian review) largely agreed the metafictional trick was the smartest thing about it, calling it something close to a return to form for Ellis after more than a decade away from fiction.

But the same reviews raised a fair criticism: at more than 600 pages, the novel can feel indulgent.

Whole passages read like Ellis lingering in his own nostalgia for 1980s Los Angeles, and some of the shock tactics that felt fresh in American Psycho and Less Than Zero land as more familiar the second time round.

Rereading it now, I’d say both things are true at once.

The slow-burn dread of not knowing where memoir ends and thriller begins is genuinely unsettling, and worth the time it asks of you.

But it is a big ask, and I understand why some readers bounced off the pacing before they got to the payoff.

For the TV adaptation, that length works in the show’s favour rather than against it.

Six episodes gives the story room to breathe in a way a single sitting of the book can’t quite replicate, and the cast, led by Igby Rigney as Bret and Homer Gere as the mysterious new student Robert Mallory, alongside Kaia Gerber, Wes Bentley and Evan Rachel Wood, has a lot of ground to cover.

I’ll admit I’m nervous about how a TV format handles that late reveal that undoes everything you thought you knew about what you’d just watched.

It’s the kind of trick that works best on the page, where you’re alone with your own doubt.

But I’m going in with an open mind, the same way I did with adaptations of American Psycho and The Rules of Attraction before it.

If the series can hold onto even half of that unease, it’ll be worth clearing your evening for.

The Shards premieres in Australia on August 6, exclusively on Disney+.

I caught Spider-Man: Brand New Day at an advance screening at Hoyts Entertainment Quarter, the day before it swings into Australian cinemas on Friday, July 31.

I loved it.

So warning: this post contains full spoilers for Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

I’m not exaggerating when I say the reveal of Sadie Sink’s character had the whole cinema buzzing before the credits even rolled.

Sink, who has kept her role under wraps for months, plays Jean Grey — yes, that Jean Grey, the X-Men telepath and one of the most powerful mutants in Marvel canon.

Her arrival isn’t a throwaway cameo, either.

In the film’s tank scene, Jean confirms to Peter Parker that his spider bite triggered a dormant mutant gene, tying his powers directly into the X-Men mythology for the first time in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

It’s the clearest signal yet that Marvel is building towards a full X-Men crossover, and as someone who has come to this franchise fairly late, even I could feel the room shift when the penny dropped.

Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, Brand New Day picks up four years after Spider-Man: No Way Home, with Tom Holland’s Peter Parker living entirely alone after erasing himself from everyone’s memories.

Zendaya and Jacob Batalon return, alongside Jon Bernthal as The Punisher, Mark Ruffalo and Tramell Tillman.

Here’s my confession: I’m a fairly recent convert to the Marvel universe.

Outside of the Spider-Man films, I’ve seen very little of it, so going into Brand New Day I needed a crash course on some fairly major franchise history.

I needed someone to explain how Iron Man actually died (he sacrificed himself using the Infinity Stones to defeat Thanos in Avengers: Endgame, uttering the now-iconic line “I am Iron Man”) and why it mattered so much that half the population had vanished, only to return five years later.

For anyone else who needs the refresher: Thanos wiped out half of all life in the universe with a single snap in Avengers: Infinity War.

Five years passed before the surviving Avengers reversed it, an event fans now call “the Blip”, restoring everyone who had disappeared.

None of that backstory is strictly required to enjoy Brand New Day, but understanding the weight of what Peter has lost, and who he has lost it to, made his isolation in this film hit so much harder.

I’m giving Spider-Man: Brand New Day four stars out of five.

It’s emotional, it’s funny in the right places, and it left me genuinely excited for wherever Marvel takes Peter Parker next.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is in Australian cinemas from Friday, July 31.