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
Books
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
Book review: The Lost Book of the Holy Grail by Charlie Lovett
We all love a good treasure hunt. Even more so when it involves lost and fabled treasures from the distant past which thanks to ever more expansively-hyperbolic storytelling have taken on an aura so captivating that the very idea of them gets our collective pulse racing with only the Continue Reading
Book review: Squirrel Days by Ellie Kemper
I just had the loveliest time sitting down and talking with Kimmy Schmidt. Having devoured every available episode of her, naturally, autobiographical, post-being trapped inside a bunker by a pedophilic cult leader sitcom – yep, that’s the premise and it works like a charm, an hilarious mix of quirky Continue Reading
Book review: The Memory of Running by Ron McLarty
One of the curiously unexpected aspects of deep and prolonged grief is an unnerving sense of becoming unmoored from your life. One minute all the touchstones are in place, the things that give your life a sense of time, place and meaning, and the next? One crucial piece is Continue Reading
Book review: Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton
If life had a damn good PR team, and it does in a way if you pay any attention to the glass-half-full, carpe diem, bluebird of happiness souls of the world, they would be constantly rabbiting on, with Hallmark-esque gleeful abandon about the limitless possibilities it offers. It’s a Continue Reading
Book review: No Good Asking by Fran Kimmel
People, by and large, place a great deal of faith in first impressions. They are an unofficial yardstick by which the worth of a person is judged and we cling them as social markers like a drowning man holding tenaciously to a buoy. But it becomes quickly apparent in Continue Reading