A visit to the local secondhand bookstore over the holidays wasn’t enough (bagging Malouf, Lessing, Armanno, Lewycka, Modjeska, Murakami, Astley); we fell into the Lifeline Bookfest on the weekend. I think we came home with about 100 books. The joy was in stumbling into titles that have always been on the “to-read” list: Silent Spring. […]
Tag: books
Old Filth, and all that.
This post is seven years too late. A perverse and quite irrational sense of anti-nepotism, for want of a better term, has prevented me from becoming acquainted with Jane Gardam‘s beautiful writing before this year. We are not related (sadly!); even if we were, since Gardam is Jane’s husband’s surname, I couldn’t even claim shared […]
Three new reviews
After an absence whose days were full but not fertile, here are Kate Forsyth’s Bitter Greens, Playing House by Amy Choi, and the wonderful Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son. Astute (one may say time-fortunate) readers may note the newish and natty little quote hanging around recently added reviews. This quaint folly is my editor’s […]
Quandry
I’m all in a dither over this latest review. Already, it’s taken much longer to write than usual. It has been written, deleted, rewritten a few times. The book was poor. I disliked it on a number of levels: starting with the macro, I think the genre of “memoir” can do without half-life scratches from […]
Work in hand
The latest review copy arrived yesterday. A novel for young adults. A teenage girl’s dying mother reveals that her father is not really a deceased war hero; rather, he’s a Hollywood action hero. And she has a bitchy half-sister. Kill me now.
Work in progress. Slow progress.
Writing a novel is surely making me a better reviewer. And a kinder one. This process is hard. Without the time luxury to write in large chunks, I fit in hours or two when I can. Which has produced not quite 20,000 words in just under a year. Already I am sick of the thing: […]