(courtesy Simon & Schuster) Working out who you are is a full-time, lifelong job. But it gets going in earnest when we’re teenagers when life goes from idle, childlike curiosity to something chaotically emotional and emotional with a thousand competing questions buzzing for contemplative airtime in our head. It’s a Continue Reading
Books
Book review: After the Forest by Kell Woods
(read at Pindari cabin, Yeranda Cottages, Dungog, 2-9 January 2024) When stories are well and truly seared into the popular consciousness, as is the case for many fairytales, it can devilishly hard, and yes, that descriptive word has been used quite deliberately, to take another run at them and give Continue Reading
Book review: The Door-to-Door Bookstore by Carsten Henn
(read at Pindari cabin, Yeranda Cottages, Dungog, 2-9 January 2024) There is something redemptive about the act of reading. That may seem like an artful overstatement to some, but the truth is, when you open a book and lose yourself in the story within, a lot of the pain and Continue Reading
Book review: Translation State by Ann Leckie
(read at Pindari cabin, Yeranda Cottages, Dungog, 2-9 January 2024) We often associate identity with what are on the surface reasonably superficial things – name, dress style, choice phrases, interests and hobbies; they all matter, of course, because they express who we are but they pale in comparison with the Continue Reading
Book review: The Map of William by Michael Thomas
(read at Pindari cabin, Yeranda Cottages, Dungog, 2-9 January 2024) Every one of us reaches at a point at the start of our adult lives where many of the childlike things that defined us fall away or are transformed and we have to reckon with what it means to be Continue Reading
Book review: All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries #1) by Martha Wells
(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) One of the things that daunts many readers, including this reviewer, in an age of content plenty and time paucity, is embarking on a series of books, especially a lengthy of one of say, nine books. It’s not that the narrative arc doesn’t enthrall with its Continue Reading
Do readers dream of running a bookshop? Books about booksellers are having a moment – the reality can be less romantic
(Photo by Fahrul Azmi on Unsplash) This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. My mother and I wanted to open a bookshop. We signed up for a CAE course, which was cancelled when the bookseller who ran it went out of Continue Reading
Book review: New Year’s Kiss by Lee Matthews
(courtesy Penguin Random House) We love the idea of reinvention. There’s something immensely appealing about the idea that we’ve made mistakes or decisions that have changed us in some way , or life has strangely twisted us in some way, and that all that damage can be undone. The idea Continue Reading
Conquering the TBR like a mountaineer: My top 25 books of 2023
(via Shutterstock) Ever since I was a kid and bullying made the real world a scary and dangerous place to be, I have found books to be the ultimate comfort, the one escape I can count on to make everything seem a whole lot more magical and good again. Even Continue Reading
Merry pop culture Christmas to all … and to all a good streaming-reading-listening night!
(courtesy Pinterest (c) Charles M. Schulz) Merry pop culture Christmas everyone! I have had a ball as always this year writing about all kinds of books, movies, TV/streaming shows, graphic novels/comics and songs, and while it’s been tough to keep writing in my spare time when my day job as Continue Reading