Tag: books

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JENNETTE MCCURDY I’m Glad My Mom Died.

My latest review, I'm Glad My Mom Died, by Hollywood child star, Jennette McCurdy, is up now at Newtown Review of Books. This one took hold of me in strange ways. Memoir is not my favourite genre and I'd never heard of McCurdy but she writes powerfully and in the voice of the small child, betrayed by the one she loves and trusts the most. It is compelling from the start, where the title lets us know she frees herself, to the end, where we find out how and when and what came next. And laugh-out-loud funny too. Hats off.

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SALLY ROONEY Intermezzo

In her first novel, Conversations with Friends, a young woman, Frances, enters into an obsessive affair with an older man, a jaded, not overly successful actor. Published in 2017 when Rooney was in her mid-twenties, the protagonist’s naivety is understandable, though this older reader found her difficult to empathise with. In Intermezzo, her commentary on permissible forms of love has matured

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The In-Between, Christos Tsiolkas

Reading Christos Tsiolkas is a bodily experience. Smells, tastes, touch inhabit the pages. When a character makes the sign of the Cross, there is a pull to mimic the quick touches of thumb, index and middle fingers to the forehead and abdomen, right and left shoulders. Tsiolkas’s characters celebrate their bodies – they are a source of delight, to their owners and to lovers. And he writes good sex.

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Some bookshops may be thriving but that’s missing the point

Dom Knight’s piece on the ABC website (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-07/how-independent-bookshops-still-thrive-in-face-of-big-business/102937826) noted that many indie bookstores had been lost. Others survive. Some thrive. If your bookshop doesn’t have a loving community to support it, what is its future? It strikes me that publishing is, again, putting its head in the sand about change.  As an advocate of digital, …

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Things she would have said herself, Catherine Therese

Catherine Therese follows up her memoir The Weight of Silence with a novel featuring an abrasive yet sympathetic protagonist. My mother thought Catch-22 was one of the funniest books ever written. My dad thought it one of the saddest. Things She Would Have Said Herself reminded me of their observations, careening between tragedy and hilarity.

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Overland 6 April 2022

When I moved into a second career in editing and publishing, friends told me that working as an editor might temper my love of books—that a professional eye might spy previously unnoticed flaws. I dismissed this, but they were right. Before, if a book left me restless, dissatisfied, annoyed, I would simply close it and move on. Now, I knowwhat is wrong, why I, the reader, feel short-changed.

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How do you read?

Reading a book seems a straightforward thing. Be it on a page, an e-reader, on your phone, even listening to an audio recording, we’re all in the author’s hands, following the same path on this journey. Interactive multi-media books might be coming, but they’ve not taken hold of us yet. But I’ve recently been struck …

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Anything is possible, Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout, winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Olive Kitteridge,  is an author of piercing insight. Many a religious and philosophical tome has been written on moral righteousness but in her slim books, Strout’s characters show us how to live a good life.