Author Archives: Jamie Ashbird

THE COAT ROUTE: Craft, Luxury & Obsession on the Trail of a $50,000 Coat

Meg Lukens Noonan
First published July 2013

A few Christmases ago, my cousin-in-law regaled me, as she always does, about a book she’d recently read. What she described to me with such enthusiasm made me want to forgo the table piled high with desserts and head straight home for a bit of binge reading. Quite maturely I reigned in that urge and carried on socialising like a normal human being. That very night however, I summoned the e-book from the cloud and it wriggled its kilobytes into my e-reader. Not long after, I was compelled to purchase a solid copy as it was crystal clear that this one was a keeper.

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THE DAY THEY MET
by Wendy C. Fries
MX Publishing, January 2015

I am a Holmes fan. There, I’ve said it.

Actually, perhaps I should confess that as a child I was far more immersed in the natural wonder of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and deeply scarred, to this day, by The Poison Belt. But the Sherlock Holmes stories made me happy too. Sure, there were no dinosaurs but we can’t have everything.

I still have my cheap plastic magnifying glass that accompanied me on many an adventure.* Unlike Holmes however, I investigated ant colonies far more frequently than crime scenes.

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THE WAKE

Paul Kingsnorth (Unbound) ISBN: 9781908717863

The first time I heard about The Wake, I promptly forgot about it. It sparked an interest that was quickly supplanted by the next thing on my to-do list that day. The next time I heard about it, it was on the Man Booker Prize long list – an unlikely crowd-source funded contender that exceeded all expectations. Continue reading

BEAUTIFUL DARKNESS

Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoët      ISBN: 9781770461291

A cast of cute little characters show us the horrors of humanity via the childish conceits of pettiness, jealousy, greed and two-facedness. Sound familiar? If yes, you’ve obviously watched shows like The Apprentice or, y’know, just met… people. And all this is set throughout the turning of four seasons in a forest next to, around and on the corpse of a little girl. Continue reading

THE THIRD HORSEMAN: CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE GREAT FAMINE OF THE 14th CENTURY

William Rosen ISBN: 0670025895

Before I begin, let’s get one thing straight. I love me a bit of Black Death. Plague? Bring it on*. I also love meteorology and all that Earth Science business. Needless to say, when the author of Justinian’s Flea comes up with another evocatively titled tome hinting at that crazy little climate anomaly a few decades prior to the Black Death, my heart does a little hop, skip and jump… then promptly falls into a vat of lukewarm melted chocolate. Continue reading

TINDER

Sally Gardner ISBN-10: 1780621493

Many years ago, a strange thing occurred. I was browsing the fiction shelves of a well known, and now defunct, multinational bookstore whilst discussing the reasons books for adults were no longer illustrated (with another person, I’m not entirely mad). One argument was that it was too much trouble for publishers to illustrate books. Another, that adults in order to feel like adults must not read books with pictures in. No luscious illustrations or flowery words for grown-ups. Goodness, no.

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THE FAULT IN OUR STARS

John Green (2010) ISBN-10 0143567594, ISBN-13 9780143567592

John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars is now a film set for release in Australia on June 5^th 2014.  And there, dear reader, is your deadline to read the book.

TFIOS (as we Nerdfighters call it) had been sitting on my list of to-be-reads for a while. Not as long as some others, but, eh,  a while. While I quickly devoured all his other novels, I left this one sit a little longer. I mean, why hurry the emotional seasick-making ferry ride of a book dealing with teenagers and cancer? Continue reading