February 5, 2025 – SparklyPrettyBriiiight

This book was read at Kalimna, Yeranda cottages, near Dungog in early January 2025. In a perfect world, and we all know that’s not where any of us are fortunate to live, you would grow up untroubled, fall in love, make a family of whatever diversity and shape reflected who Continue Reading

Movie review: Queer

(courtesy IMP Awards Finding somewhere to belong, and just as importantly, someone to belong to, is one of the great drivers of what it means to be human. We need, crave and desperately desire connection, and when we find it, there is joy and contentment in abundance … but when Continue Reading

From long shot … to a big shot: Underdogs hilariously try to make a go of it in Running Point

(courtesy IMP Awards) SNAPSHOTWhen a scandal forces her brother to resign, Isla Gordon (Kate Hudson) is appointed president of the Los Angeles Waves, one of the most storied professional basketball franchises – and also her family business. Ambitious and often overlooked, Isla will have to prove to her skeptical brothers, Continue Reading

Book review: The First Murder on Mars by Sam Wilson

(courtesy Hachette Australia) There’s a lovely, and surprisingly enduring, romantic idea that if you could just take humanity away from its usual surroundings that somehow we’d suddenly morph into thoughtful, more caring and emotionally and intellectually advanced beings. It’s borne from that post-World War Two optimism, now being sadly and Continue Reading

Can the end of things also be its beginning? Thoughts on Earth Abides (season 1)

(courtesy IMP Awards) It’s become a well-worn pattern in apocalyptic storytelling to portray the end of the world as a one-way, cataclysmic slide into oblivion for good old Homo Sapiens. Whether it’s alien invasion or zombies or a pandemic, humanity is knocked down and comprehensively so, and if it does Continue Reading

Book review: Somewhere Beyond the Sea by TJ Klune

(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) When you have spent much of your life being placed in the “Others” camp, that is, not part of the heteronormative white mainstream, then it can be tough to explain to those firmly in that camp what it’s like not slot neatly and without censure into Continue Reading

Movie review: A Complete Unknown

(courtesy IMP Awards) Plunging into a biopic of someone you know about but who isn’t someone you know well, can be an interesting, and sometimes illuminating, exercise. By sheer dint of their celebrity and ubiquity, you will have some surface knowledge about them floating around your knowledge-burgeoning mind, but beyond Continue Reading

Book review: Special Delivery by Leesa Ronald

It’s often the case that when our lives change, they change in fairly big ways. Sure, we witness incremental shifts on an almost daily basis, but that’s usually to do with small things such as a picking different café to get our coffees or walking a different way to work. Continue Reading

Comic strip review: Breaking the Chain: The Guard Dog Story by Patrick McDonnell (Mutts)

(courtesy Abrams Books) From its launch on 5 September 1994, the comic strips Mutts by Patrick McDonnell, has always worn its heart very much on its sleeve. Far from being just four panels and a gag – though that is not a bad thing; whimsical escapism in and of itself Continue Reading

Book review: A Short Walk Through a Wide World by Douglas Westerbeke

This book was read at Kalimna, Yeranda cottages, near Dungog in early January 2025. Stuck, as many of us lamentably often are, in a variety of fairly unchanging workplaces, the idea that we might be condemned to wandering the earth without ceasing for our entire lives might seem an attractive Continue Reading

UPCOMING READS: All Wrapped Up by Heidi Swain

(not final cover; courtesy Simon & Schuster Australia) SNAPSHOTIn Wynbridge, the scent of autumn is on the breeze and love is in the air… Clemmie Bennett has been renovating beautiful Rowan Cottage on the outskirts of the small town of Wynbridge, for eighteen months following a very public heartbreak back Continue Reading