(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
Books
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
Book review: Beyond the Hallowed Sky by Ken MacLeod
(courtesy Hachette Australia) Humanity has, in many ways, got where it’s got because it’s refused to simply take the universe on the terms obviously presented to it. No matter what the issue is or the challenge to be resolved, we have looked all kinds of supposedly set-in-stone realities of the Continue Reading
Long live the fighters: Dune 2 debuts new trailer and poster and some damn fine giant worm riding
(courtesy IMP Awards) SNAPSHOTThe film will explore the continuing journey of Paul Atreides, now united with the Fremen on Arrakis. A boy becomes the Messiah of nomads on a desert planet that has giant worms that protect a commodity called Spice. Spice changes people into travelers, mystics and madmen. What Continue Reading