The apocalypse is once again upon us. Not so good if you like running water, mobile phone service or law and order and human civility; but great if you, like me, are looking for a fresh take on the end of the world. With Peng Shepherd’s richly-intimate, vibrantly-magical The Book Continue Reading
Books
Book review: Salvation by Peter F. Hamilton
For all the existential car crashes it has left in its wake, humanity remains a curiously-upbeat species. It must be an evolutionary quirk that enables us to stare disaster and loss, much of it of our own creation, in the face and still believe, all evidence to the contrary, that Continue Reading
Happy pop culture new year everyone!
Lost in a sea of beautiful words: My 20 favourite books of 2018
I have been a bookworm my entire life. In fact, I can’t recall a single moment in my increasingly-long life where I haven’t found inestimable pleasure in losing myself in the worlds contained within the thousands of books that have kept me company through the good and bad parts Continue Reading
On 10th day of Christmas … I read Terry Pratchett’s Father Christmas’s Fake Beard
Among the may things I love about the work of much-missed late Discworld author Terry Pratchett is the sense of playful irreverence that fills each and every word. A master storyteller who has a deserved legion of fans including myself to his enduring credit, Pratchett’s sense of the quirkily absurd and his Continue Reading
On 8th day of Christmas … I read Seven Days of Us by Francesca Hornak
Christmas is, by any measure of popular culture, supposed to be a time when we cleave close to our families, joining us together in an unmitigatedly positive festival of joy, love and inclusivity. It’s a tantalising ideal, all right, but as many of us, even those of us in functionally Continue Reading
Book review: The Girl on the Page by John Purcell
There are certain idealistic views of the world that we hold dear. Grandmothers are always sentimental knitters. Kittens will purr and not bite you. And writers, noble, self-sacrificing writers, are so addicted to the power of literary creation that they are content to sit in their lofty garrets spinning words Continue Reading
On 4th day of Christmas … I read The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum
There are some figures that loom so large in the public consciousness that it’s easy to feel like you know, or you can imagine, pretty much everything about them. Santa Claus is one of those figures. We owe our collective modern idea of Santa Claus to the Greeks (Saint Nicholas, Continue Reading
Book review: The Single Ladies of Jacaranda Retirement Village by Joanna Nell
Getting older, as with most things in life, is a double-edged sword. For all the wisdom accrued and knowledge secreted away there are aches without number and ailments without number; every longstanding friendship is matched with the disappointment and loss of a relationship lost to enmity or mortality, every Continue Reading
Book review: The Witch Who Courted Death by Maria Lewis
Diving into a book by Australian author Maria Lewis is a guarantee that you will be plunged, with well-researched vigour, emotional resonance and palpable love and familiarity with the supernatural, into a world vary different from the everyday world we encounter. Each of her books to date, which incorporate Continue Reading