This book was read at Kalimna, Yeranda cottages, near Dungog in early January 2025. Fantasies are often seen as a warm and fun, sometimes a little (or a lot) naughty way to take a step back from everyday life. All the things that normally worry or concern us are put Continue Reading
Books
Mini-mass of movie trailers: Jurassic World Rebirth and The Fantastic Four: First Steps
(via Shutterstock) A new year and a metric ton of new films! While we are currently awash in some very fine arthouse/indie films thanks to the overspill from awards season, which is in full swing, it’ll soon be time for blockbusters and plenty of them. Two that debuted this week Continue Reading
Book review: Ishq and Mushq by Priya Basil
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
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
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
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
A revolution begins … Thoughts on Silo season 2
(courtesy IMP Awards) Humanity has always been defined by an exuberant need to LIVE. Not just get by nor survive but to LIVE, to revel in possibility and promise and to explore all the amazing ways we can express our innate curiosity, passion and vivacious fascination with life. But what Continue Reading