(courtesy Penguin Books Australia) Despite living in it all the time, humanity is, by and large, not all that good with dealing with the reality. So averse are we to its omnipresence and the way in which it very rarely squares with our fairytale glossy hopes and dreams that we Continue Reading
Books
Book review: Crushing by Genevieve Novak
(courtesy IMP Awards) Whether we’re conscious of it or not, we often tend to define ourselves in terms of our connection to others. In an ideal world, we would be who we are consistently and without change from one situation to another or one person to another, but a combination Continue Reading
Book review: Charles M. Schulz – The Art and Life of the Peanuts Creator in 100 Objects by Benjamin L. Clark, Nat Gertler and the Charles M. Schulz Museum
(courtesy Simon & Schuster) When you have loved Peanuts as long as this review has, it’s all too easy to assume you know everything about the comic strip and its creator, the legendarily talented Charles M. Schulz. But even though I started buying secondhand copies for twenty and thirty cents Continue Reading
Book review: Fault Tolerance by Valerie Valdes
(courtesy Harper Collins Booksellers Australia) There’s always been a lot to like about the gloriously flawed but found family-prioritising protagonists at the heart of the Chilling Effect series of playfully intense novels by Valerie Valdes but chief among them must surely be the fact the fact that here are saviours-of-the-day Continue Reading
Book review: The Collected Regrets of Clover by Mikki Brammer
(courtesy Penguin Books Australia) There are those books that you read that are beautifully written, lovely and sweet, full of great characters and a pleasingly wrought plot that leave nary a mark upon you emotionally; and then there are novels like The Collected Regrets of Clover by Mikki Brammer which Continue Reading
Book review: The Complicated Calculus (and Cows) of Carl Paulsen by Gary Eloon Peter
(courtesy Goodreads) If you’re not a natural fit for the societal mainstream, it can hard coming to grips with precisely who you are, especially in those pivotal teenage years when defining yourself is pretty much the first order of business. The reason why it’s so hard is that while those Continue Reading
Book review: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
(courtesy Hachette Australia) One of the great delights of reading, indeed of the consumption of any kind of pop cultured medium, is coming across a story that absolutely reinvents, emboldens and breathtakingly refreshes the genre of which it’s a part. When it happens it constitutes one of those wondrous moments Continue Reading
Book review: Better Than Fiction by Alexa Martin
(courtesy Hachette Australia) Falling in love is sweet in a million different wonderful ways. But how much sweeter, especially if you’re a book lover, is it when it all happens against a backdrop of a bookstore, and concerns said owner of that literary retail establishment and a hunky writer who, Continue Reading
#Eurovision cultural festival 2023 book review: Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov
War, it almost goes without saying but it likely still needs to be said given the plethora of present horrific conflicts around the world, is a horrifically terrible thing to live through. But what is it like to live war-adjacent? This disorientingly strange limbo of normal is affectingly explored in Continue Reading
UPCOMING READS: The apocalyptically toxic world of Battery Life by Brennan Gilpatrick and Gregory Lang
(courtesy Gizmodo / image (c) Blackstone Publishing) SNAPSHOTWelcome to the Junkyard, a toxic wasteland where humans, machines, and everything in between fight for survival among the ruins of a long-forgotten war. This is where Diane Three-One-Seven finds herself after the arkship Cradle—the only home she’s ever known—falls out of the Continue Reading