Today I’m bringing back an old column of mine. It’s where I take a paragraph and examine it in whatever detail I wish. Today I’m taking a paragraph from one of my favourite books of all time. My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George is a book I ...
"You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me." C.S. Lewis
Est. 2009
This book is really new, it was only released two months ago, you might have seen it come across your radar some time in this time frame. I love Jean Kittson as a comedian, I find her very funny. I had no idea what to expect from a non-fiction book ...
When I was young I totally fell in love with the books by Arthur Ransome. They were gentle fictional novels which really caught my fancy. They are the reason I enjoy rowing, I’m not particularly good at rowing…I’m more in the camp of go-hard-or-go-home and that’s not terribly good when ...
Don’t ask me where I got this volume from, I’ve not made a note of that information. Instead I’ve used my bookmark (AKA an out-of-date business card) to make copious notes of things to write about. Some of the notes are in pencil and are very faint. I need to ...
Another book from a deceased estate. The late owner had a reasonable size of English literature as well as novels in both Romanian and Italy. Many of the English literature novels ended up in my To Be Read Pile. Nabokov was a very talented man. Not only did he write ...
I have this love/hate relationship with Monkey Grip. It’s an iconic book and very important because of how it’s written, that it’s written by a female and that the author represents womanhood in a totally different manner to how womanhood had previously been represented in literature. And I love/hate it ...
You may have heard of the series of TV movies with Rowan Atkinson in the starring role of Maigret. This book is one of the series of books written by Georges Simenon with Chief-Inspector Maigret as our protagonist. They have been translated from the French, this title was translated by ...
This is the book I’ve been reading for the past few weeks. I’ve not quite finished but I think I’ve had enough. It’s an anthology of stories, some of them only a couple of pages while others are novellas. Along with these stories, though, are a number of pages full ...
Yes, another Verandah. This issue is from 2012. If I understand correctly, Verandah has a new team every year. It is supported by The Deakin School of Communication and Creative Arts. In 2018 some of the team were in my classes. It’s going to be interesting to see where their ...
The Lifted Brow is an impressive magazine. The organisation itself is a non-profit literary publishing organisation based in Melbourne, Australia. They don’t worry too much about the money instead focussing on publishing work from the artistic and/or demographic margins. They’ve been doing this since 2007. It’s full of excellently written ...
I’ve picked up a book that at over 900 pages might possibly keep me going for a few weeks. It is dense reading with many short stories and some critical articles about those short stories. The first few pages are about Writing About Fiction. As I was reading those pages ...
This is a novel of the popular English comedy series of the same name. The programme ran from 1979 to 1994 and was sort of rather funny. I won’t say I’ve watched all the episodes but I’ve watched enough, one day I’ll revisit a couple of episodes and see how ...
My Brother Jack is one of the most important books about the Australian depression in the 1930s that I’ve read. It shows it as it must really have been. And then there are the sequels. Clean Straw for Nothing and A Cartload of Clay. I’ve done my usual and read ...
when I really wish I lived in the northern hemisphere. Things happen over there in the book world that either don’t happen here or they’re just bigger. I’m only jealous. If you’re wondering what I’m annoyed about now then you can wander over to your Twitter account and put #TheBookCon ...
Judging by the date of publication this these books have been on my shelf for five years. Not too bad by my standards. I don’t remember where or when I met Petrie and bought some of his books but they’ve proved to be a good buy. What you’ve got here ...