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 retelling [...]
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 causing [...]
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, at [...]
I’m a geek who is fascinated by geeks, their ascending (I believe, though many would dispute this) role in the modern world, and whether geeks are ‘better’ moral beings than non geeks (call them jocks, if you like). The topic of geeks is not one easy to pursue tangentially, so not much thinking has occurred [...]
2009 was a humdinger of a reading year. Publishers often seem to load up the end of the year with the best stuff, or at least the books that suit my tastes, and this year illustrated that trend strongly. I had to scramble to read enough of those end-of-year books to make sense of the [...]
What the heck is The Bat Segundo Show? I must have registered, for I receive a semi-regular email telling me about it. Until now, I’ve binned the emails as products of another of my misguided online expressions of interest, but I read the latest one, and it’s got some potentially fascinating interviews: filmmaker Michael Haneke, [...]
Melbourne author Jeff Sparrow’s latest book takes him a long way from his previous ‘radical’ histories. After becoming fascinated by the mummified head of a Turkish solder in World War I, discovered in a country town recently, Sparrow embarks on a quest to find out how hard it is for humans to kill. Being fascinated, [...]
Do you have authors who so transport you that you read unappealing books by them? I’ve no interest at all in the subject matter of Po Bronson’s latest, written with Ashley Merriman, called NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children. But the man is such a vigorous writer, I’ll grab this as soon as possible.
One of the genetic topics I undertook to pursue and follow, on an erratic path to find ‘truth’ and story ideas, was that of stem cells. How controversial and mysterious they seemed! Well, I’ve just concluded a 2006 primer with the bloated title of The Stem Cell Divide: The Facts, the Fiction, and the Fear [...]
Mostly from the latest Readings catalogue:
Barbara Kingsolver’s latest, on Trotsky and art, The Lacuna
Parrot and Olivier in America, Peter Carey’s historical, novelistic gaze at USA
From a great novelist, a personal exploration of vegetariansim, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals
I’m not sure where I found this, but I was drawn to David Kessler’s The End of Overeating: Taking Control [...]