January 22, 2025 – SparklyPrettyBriiiight

This book was read at Kalimna, Yeranda cottages, near Dungog in early January 2025. Once upon a time, a certain reader devoured all of Agatha Christie’s novels in one roughly year-long go at the suggestion of his book-loving dad who saw the works of the masterful English crime writer as Continue Reading

Book review: Mrs Quinn’s Rise to Fame by Olivia Ford

This book was read at Kalimna, Yeranda cottages, near Dungog in early January 2025. We live in an age where endless self-empowerment and improvement have become dogma, the endless mantras of a world where you don’t stand still, you don’t stop and you don’t simply make do. It’s an endless Continue Reading

Sometimes adventure isn’t all it’s cracked up to be … thoughts on Star Wars: Skeleton Crew S2 (E3-8)

(courtesy IMP Awards) One of the things that has always about Star Wars, from the moment this reviewer saw A New Hope (or just Star Wars as it was then) in a cinema in 1977 right up until now is its capacity for no holds barred adventuring. As Luke Skywalker Continue Reading

Movie review: Paddington in Peru (#3)

(courtesy IMP Awards) Any time you’re around Paddington Bear is a good, warmhearted and wonderful time. In the case of this reviewer, it began some decades ago with the books of Michael Bond, the man who gifted us this remarkably lovely and thoughtful character, beginning in 1958 with A Bear Continue Reading

Book review: Echo of Worlds (The Pandominion Book 2) by M. R. Carey

This book was read at Kalimna, Yeranda cottages, near Dungog in early January 2025. Every novel you read should, in some way or another, take you to a place far away from your own. Good or bad, this world should provide an escape from the everyday sameness of the life Continue Reading

Can you move on eventually? Shrinking S2 wrap-up review

By the time many of us reach the confusingly contradictory, dark and difficult, joyful and not messy wilds of unpredictable adulthood, we have been well and truly disabused of the notion that life is always going to be a smooth and easy ride. With that warm and cosy slice of Continue Reading

Movie review: Wallace & Gromit Vengeance Most Fowl

(courtesy IMP Awards) It’s a rare thing in this hyperconnected, digitally frenzied age where something is demanded of you almost every second of every day to just sit back, switch off and spend some time with old friends. And when that happens, when the gods smile upon you with an Continue Reading

Book review: The Bogan Book Club by John Larkin

This book was read at Kalimna, Yeranda cottages, near Dungog in early January 2025. A sense of belonging, identity and purpose is what defines us but what happens when it’s rent asunder and all we have are the vestigial rags of who we once were? That’s the great dilemma facing Continue Reading

Movie review: Grey Matter

(courtesy IMDb) What is it like to lose someone before you actually lose them? Ask anyone who has walked with a loved one through the long dimming road of dementia, and you will hear harrowing tales of what it is like to see that person disappear task by task, memory Continue Reading

What does it feel like to be alive? Love Me asks some big and deeply moving questions

SNAPSHOTLong after humanity’s extinction, a buoy and a satellite meet online and fall in love. As filmmakers Sam & Andy demonstrate in their wildly imaginative debut feature, telling the love story of a smart buoy and an orbiting satellite that spans a billion years and probes the mysteries of being Continue Reading

Goodbye Star Trek – Lower Decks: Review of S5, E4-10) + thoughts on the series

(courtesy IMP Awards) Saying goodbye to any series you love is always a desperately sad affair. Sure, you could argue, if you’re head was made of Romulan stone, that the end of any series is hardly the end of the world, and yes, in the grand scheme of things, that’s Continue Reading