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 [...]
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 [...]
Eric Garcia is, as his own acknowledgements makes clear, a strange dude, a writer whose imagination runs riot. I loved his Matchstick Men (made into a wonderful film starring Nicholas Cage in one of his better performances) and his dinosaur detective series. The Repossession Mambo is not quite as outlandish as a PI who stuffs [...]
If you don’t follow an author from the outset, it can prove difficult to ever try her. The thought runs through your head: I must have had a good reason to avoid her books up until now! That’s the case with M. J. Hyland and China Mieville, both avoided until now. Hyland’s This Is How [...]
Also posted in Literary Fiction |
June was a reading month, with barely any carryovers into July. The month has everything from crime, sci-fi and literary fiction, mixed with biography and science: One of the few crime writers to maintain form over the very long run, John Harvey has a new one, Far Cry The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of [...]
An oddly titled novel, The Repossession Mambo, has kept appearing in book and review lists, and I’m ashamed to say my eyes flitted over it simply because of the title. It sounded like a Latin American book or some obscure memoir. In this weekend’s Australian newspaper, review George Williams puts me right, calling what turns [...]
The very conjunction of science fiction and a Siberian setting would be enough to put Marcel Theroux’s forthcoming book on my list, but Kevin Rabalais’s first-rate interview in this weekend’s The Australian makes the decision even easier. I first heard of Marcel (son of famous novelist Paul) in connection with his climate change doco, The [...]
I often berate myself for not reading enough science fiction these days. I do, however, follow the two big awards, the Hugo and Nebula awards. In my teens those awards generated winners that swept me off my feet. Nearly a month ago, the Hugo nominees came out, just after the Nebula nominees, but no new [...]