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
Also posted in Literary Fiction |
I wasn’t aware that James Ellroy’s American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand are formally two-thirds a trilogy titled Underworld USA. And it’s been so long since the last one that I suspected Ellroy had retired. Now the finale, Blood’s a Rover, is coming out in two weeks, and the question is: do I want [...]
China Miéville made his mark in 1998 with King Rat, his first fantasy novel set in New Crobuzon, an imagined world. Five more fantasy novels followed. For some reason, I’ve never read any of them, but when The City & the City was described as his brand of fantasy melded to the private eye genre, [...]
Also posted in Science Fiction |
Mega hits like Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol are always fascinating to read, if only to then participate in the public debate on their merits. I enjoyed reading The Da Vinci Code. But when the time came to put The Lost Symbol on my list, I recall how much I enjoyed the previous book’s choreographed [...]
You know what you’re in for when the opening line of a book goes: The frozen lake and the black vacuum sky and the dead man pleading for the return of his remaining days. “There must be some kind of mistake.” I’d never heard of Adrian McKinty, an Irish-born writer who happens to have settled [...]
A cauldron of genres and styles: American Journeys by Don Watson – I’m deliberately reading this past its period of currency The Women by T. Coraghessan Boyle Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson – Vietnam Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954 – am partway through American Rust by [...]
Thomas Perry writes kinetic thrillers that mostly get the pulse rate up and are satisfyingly character rich. Some of his recent books haven’t quite hit the spot for me, principally because I can almost feel the author trying to follow the characters, come what may for the plot. His one series that was remarkably powerful [...]