Last week’s reading: My first Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs, is a refreshing revelation. Moore’s highly individualistic writing style, all quirky similes and metaphors, laced with lyricism, is nothing like what I tend to read. As with other stylistic writers like Cormac McCarthy, I found the going slow because I needed to roll [...]
Last week’s reading: Parrot and Olivier in America is Peter Carey at his most exuberant, wild almost. Recounting the fictional tale of the trip to the new, troubling democratic nation of the United States of America by French nobleman Olivier-Jean-Baptist de Clarel de Barfleur and an artistic servant thrust upon him, John ‘Parrot’ Larrit. Carey succeeds marvellously in [...]
Last week’s reading: ‘What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?’: Jimmy Carter, America’s ‘Malaise,’ and the Speech that Should Have Changed the Country is an intriguing single-topic book by Kevin Mattson, an Ohio historian. He tells the story of the critical speech given by Carter on July 15, 1979, covering the energy crisis [...]
Last week’s reading: Robert Harris’s Lustrum is the second of two novels recounting the life of Roman philosopher/orator/lawyer/politician Cicero. Harris can write smoothly and entertainingly about any subject, modern or ancient, Lustrum being a good example. It’s an enjoyable and intriguing read, although the five-year period covered by this book is telescoped at the end, [...]
On November 5, on her radio show, Ramona Koval interviewed Peter Temple, author of the scorching, wonderfully written Truth. I found it most revealing of the man, increasing my admiration even further. Here’s the podcast.
Melbourne crime/thriller author Marshall Browne introduced Franz Schmidt to us a few books back (talk about a fecund imagination, Browne’s other heroes are an Italian detective with one leg and a Japanese policeman) in The Eye of the Abyss. Schmidt is as unusual a thriller hero as they come – a one-eyed auditor in preWWII [...]
Because this was a book club selection, I read The Girl Who Played with Fire without first processing the initial volume in Stieg Larsson’s mega-selling series. Heresy, I was told by a number of Larsson fans – how can one possibly understand the labyrinth of characters without starting from the beginning? Well, the truth is that in [...]
Fresh from the sprawling literary triumph of Tree of Smoke, American novelist Denis Johnsonhas turned to the antithetical genre of noir crime fiction. Nobody Move is a slim (just over 200 pages) gem of concentrated violence, bleak humour and yearning, as different from Tree of Smoke can be, yet curiously alike in its phosphorescent use [...]
Research crunches side reading, so October was a poor month. A bit of travel in November invites a flood of fiction: Stewart O’Nan’s Songs for the Missing Ward Just is a much-praised novelist virtually unknown in Australia – I’ll try his latest, this year’s Exiles in the Garden I hope the latest Ian Rankin – [...]
Spring releases, particularly of novels, tend to be marvellous. I’m not sure why but check out these beauties: Peter Temple’s Truth – how long I have waited! The Year of the Flood, another dystopian venture by Margaret Atwood Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City promises to be a corker
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