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 [...]
Transition is somewhere in between Iain Banks’s contemporary novels and his alter ego Iain M. Banks’s science fiction operas, and it is all the grander for the admixture. It opens with a baffling prologue involving scene snatches from the points of view of mysteriously named characters, some in our world, some not. The attentive reader [...]
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 – The Complaints, featuring [...]
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, [...]
Last weekend’s book sections contained two complimentary reviews that add more onto the bulging list:
George Williams in the Weekend Australian calls Iain Banks latest, Transition, seemingly a thriller-science fiction cross, ‘dark and stylish’.
Ever reliable Age reviewer Andrew Riemer says Clive James ‘reveals admirable poise, erudition and authority, whatever the subject matter’ in his new The [...]
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 Philipp Meyer – more heartland [...]
District 9 sounds like one of those films to avoid, alien contact for morons, but an acquaintance recommended it and n0w here’s Andrew O’Hehir at Beyond the Multiplex, a stern critic of nonsense, commending it. It comes out on the big screen in Melbourne in a couple of weeks.
These days I wouldn’t look twice at a fantasy novel that at first glance seems to be Harry Potter replanted in the world of adults (or near adults, this is billed as a ‘coming of age story’). But Laura Miller in Salon, a most trustworthy reviewer, praises The Magicians by Lev Grossman. Count me in [...]
What is a review? Why read one, why write one, what form is best? I’m aware there are entire academic disciplines of literary/film/music criticism but, as usual, I prefer a naive, layman’s perspective. It seems to me reviews are read for two reasons, sometimes complementary but mostly exclusive: to dissect and analyze a book, film [...]