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
Books
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
Book review: The Road to Roswell by Connie Willis
(courtesy Hachette Australia) Back cover blurbs are written with a singular purpose in mind – to entice a reader, with thousands of reading possibilities at their bookstore-packed disposal, to pick a particular book and take it home to be read (or in the case of this reviewer, to be added Continue Reading
NYE book review: This Year’s For Me and You by Emily Bell
(courtesy Penguin Books Australia) In a great many seasonally redemptive romcoms, tragedy is usually just the curtain raiser to something good and wonderful down the track. Sure, the person’s heart is torn in two and terrible changes are wrought in the fabric of their life, but by and large, the Continue Reading
Conquering the TBR like a mountaineer: My top 25 books of 2024
(via Shutterstock) I’m not going to sugarcoat – this has been a tough year. Not because someone died or my world imploded dramatically in some way; it just felt like all the pressures of work, which was ridiculously and unrelentingly frenetic, ganged up on me, to the point where I Continue Reading
Merry pop culture Christmas to all … and to all a good streaming-reading-listening night! (Bonus The Penguins of Madagascar Christmas Special)
(courtesy Pinterest (c) Peanuts) Merry pop culture Christmas everyone! Another year has somehow zoomed right through, around and past us, offering up far too many books and movies and TV/streaming show and songs and graphic novels to consume in one lifetime, but reminding us as we gobbled what we could Continue Reading
Festive children’s book review: The Christmas Carrolls: The Christmas Competition by Mel Taylor Bessent
(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia) Is it possible to celebrate Christmas too much? That’s not something the titular characters from Mel Taylor-Bessent’s The Christmas Carrolls might ever have said; after all, they mark the most wonderful time of the year every single day with endless roast dinners, legions of Christmas Continue Reading
On 12th day of Christmas … I read Christmas at the Little Bookshop by the Sea by Eliza J. Scott
(courtesy Storm Publishing) Whenever you plunge into a festive romcom, you rightly expect that you will feel like you’ve given the warmest and cosiest of hugs. One made of love and redemption and healing and all the trappings of the season from decorations and mulled wine, snowmen and wreaths string Continue Reading
Festive book review: Finding My Elf by David Valdes
(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers) Life crises, especially those of a more existential variety, are never a loot of fun. All of the things you once took as gospel, the certainties you could count on in a world not exactly sporting them in profusion, are suddenly well and truly up in Continue Reading
On 9th day of Christmas … I read The Merry Matchmaker by Sheila Roberts
(courtesy Harper Collins Canada) If you’re going t do a festively fun take on a novel as loved and revered as Jane Austen’s Emma, then you need to be up to the task of doing it justice. Thankfully, Sheila Roberts is more than up to the task with her new Continue Reading