Category Archives: Everything

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Behold the Deluge as the Levees Break

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The Water Knife
Paolo Bacigalupi
Science Fiction
Hachette
June 2015
Paperback

the_water_knifeFor someone who quite enjoys science fiction movies, I sure don’t like thinking about the future. It’s scary, it’s worrying, and in order to live my life without being cripplingly depressed I do have to become one of those head-in-sand people about some things. This is especially the case when it comes to near future climate change fiction, a genre I pointedly avoid. But it’s not just earth futures; it’s space as well, that unfathomably huge universe. Nothing against space personally, I just don’t need an existential crisis right now. Thanks.

Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, then, was a book I took up hesitantly for fear it would just upset me. Set in water-starved Arizona in a future where the United States has all but dissolved and swathes of people are fleeing death by dehydration, it is a grim view of the future indeed. The powers of Nevada, California and Arizona vie for drips of the Colorado river. Ruthless Angel, employed by Nevada, arrives in Arizona to chase up rumours that a new water source has been found. Lucy, a journalist, is chasing similar leads in her quest to uncover the truth behind Phoenix’s ever-increasing bodycount. Maria, a Texan refugee, tries to eke out a living selling water, fighting to survive Phoenix’s dangerous underworld. The plots of these three characters intertwine as they are all embroiled in the desparation and violence of a city in its death throes.

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Red as Blood, White as Clay

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The Singing Bones
Shaun Tan
Allen & Unwin Children
September 2015

SingingBones_247x189_CVR.inddThe release of a new book by Shaun Tan should be accompanied by a day of national celebration. If the state of Victoria can celebrate a horse race, then it’s not too much to ask that the country as a whole take a day to wave a coloured flag for artistry and wonder. Parades would be necessary, full of papier-mâché creatures. Confetti of reds and oranges and yellows would rain from the skies as if Autumn had come all at once. There would be songs with no words, and random kindnesses between strangers. And at the end of the day, we’d sit around a giant fire and watch as stories unfolded in the shadow of the flames.

Shaun Tan can craft a story in a way that you didn’t know you needed until the manifest form of it was resting in your hand, a tangible thing that seemed to emerge straight out of the ether of endless myth rather than shaped by mortal hands. His stories are small stories (The Red Tree, The Lost Thing), and yet they speak directly to the core of human loneliness and connection. We are individuals standing in a world that is both beautiful and menacing, a shared space and yet so full of distance and emptiness. If you’ve ever felt lost in the world, chances are that Shaun Tan could help you see that being lost is something we all share, and actually there’s radiance in not knowing where you’re going. Continue reading

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The Best Botanist on Mars

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THE MARTIAN
Andy Weir, narrated by RC Bray
First Published 2011 (Self Published), Audio Version: Podium Publishing March 2013

The MartianI had a google fail recently and thought that The Martian the movie was being released in Australian cinemas in November—and so with this review would be giving you all a good lead time to read the book The Martian before watching the movie. Turns out the Australian release date is actually October 1st, so there goes that plan.

Well, you still have two days to cram in listening (or reading) Andy Weir’s novel The Martian before the movie based on Weir’s book, and starring Matt Damon, comes out on Thursday. The audiobook is a little under 11 hours, so it will be a bit of a push, but doable—especially once you get sucked into the life or death struggle of our Astronaut hero, Mark Watney, stranded alone on Mars. Continue reading

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Memento Mori

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memento-mori

In Victorian times there was a fashion for keeping Memento Mori about the place, maybe on your desk, glaring gloomily at you… maybe on the mantle above the fireplace. The Memento Mori was intended to be, as the name suggests, a reminder of the finitude of human life. It was supposed to say to you, remember that one day you too shall die.

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Nature Hath Reared Beyond This Hawthorn Glade

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AT HAWTHORN TIME
Melissa Harrison
Bloomsbury Circus
June 2015, RRP $29.99

At Hawthorn TimeNo matter where you live, most people get a sense of the year passing and changing, even in the deprivation of the city—a bit. And more and more and more the more green you have around you. And for many, including me, the pull of the green becomes stronger the longer it has been since you surrounded yourself with it.

At Hawthorn Time is a braided tale of the lives of four people. Kitty and Howard have made their tree-change, from the smoke of London to idyllic village life. Though perhaps that’s the idyll that we all may still have in our minds about country living. Kitty and Howard soon discover that moving to the country is not a panacea for all of life’s ills.

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You are My Moon in My Night

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1Q84
Haruki Murakami. trans. Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel
Vintage
2011

1Q84At the great risk of sounding insufferably pretentious, I am a fan of Haruki Murakami. I first received Kafka on the Shore for Christmas in 2005, when I had just recently returned from my first trip to Japan as part of a high school study tour. My mind thoroughly blown, I searched for other Murakami books and have enjoyed most of them. It must be confessed, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle sits half finished on my shelf. But I loved A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance, Dance, Dance and Sputnik Sweetheart. And I read Norwegian Wood at precisely the right time of my life, in my early 20s and on holiday. Though it remains one of my favourite books, I’m afraid to reread it and lose the magic of that first emotional sweep. So with all that said, of course I wanted to melt similarly into 1Q84 in all its expected weirdness, letting the musical references sail over my head like I usually do.

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What if Tolstoy and Monty Python met at a party, got very drunk and decided to write a novel?

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UNDERMAJORDOMO MINOR
Patrick deWitt
Allen & Unwin, RRP $27.99
August 2015

undermajordomo_minorPatrick deWitt’s third novel takes us to an unnamed Russo-Romanian land in the steam age. Our comic hero, a village lad named Lucien (Lucy) Minor, travels to a remote castle to begin his career as the undermajordomo in Baron Van Aux’s eccentric household. On the train he avoids being robbed only to be politely mugged at the castle door. But it is when the door creaks open that his adventures really begin.

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Angel [pt.1]

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ANGEL PICTUREweierstrassangel

This selcouth angel dwells in the Weierstrass function. Each dot’s colour occupies a position between zero and nine along a continuum of shades. The distance between each dot and an origin point near the centre of the painting depends on two characteristics: one, the position of the dot’s colour in the continuum; two, the angle of the dot within the painting in a system of polar coordinates centred on that origin. For each dot, the distance equals the infinite sum of three fifths to the power of the index of summation times the cosine of: the dot’s angle times pi times: the position of the dot’s colour in the continuum to the power of the index of summation. Continue reading

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We’re All Mad Here

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ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND Book Cover ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND
Lewis Carroll
1865

tove janssonThere is something that happens to one’s very soul somewhere between childhood and adulthood and it is this: in some people it dies and in some people it lives. I don’t mean soul in any religious sense but that thing inside you that makes you human. Your mind, consciousness, heart, whatever you want to call it. And it doesn’t really die, it just withers into a small black stone that either sits quiet-like with the potential for reawakening or just slowly rots spreading the chancre throughout your entire body. The longer you let it sit there marinating in fixed ideas and cold resentments and failed FTTN policies, the harder it is to recover any joy in the simplest of things, like rain on a roof after a long drought or kitten batting about a bottle top. And yes, this sounds like a very middle-class view of things but do try your best not to create well-intentioned but patronising two dimensional caricatures of human beings. Instead, go out and look at some sky-kittens* or if you can’t find any recite a poem whilst balancing a shoe on your nose.

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They Smoke Cigarettes and Play with Bombs

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THE TRAGEDY OF FIDEL CASTRO
João Cerqueira, trans. Karen Bennett and Chris Mingay
River Grove Books
2015

the-tragedy-of-fidel-castro_joc3a3o-cerqueira1The Tragedy of Fidel Castro is an entertaining jaunt into political and religious irreverence.  Communism, capitalism and Catholicism all get a heart lashing as God intervenes, at the beck of Fàtima, in a war between Fidel Castro and JFK.  In the meanwhile, the nature of politics, humanity and religion are also given for the reader to consider.

I’m sad to confess that I did not really get a lot of the humour in the book.  I’m not sure if this is because the nature of humour I enjoy is just different to that present in this book; whether it’s a difference in Portuguese and Spanish humour as compared to humour in the Anglosphere.  Or perhaps it’s just a few of the references I miss, with my relative ignorance of matters concerning post-Bay of Bigs relations between Cuba and the United States.

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Grendel’s Mum

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BEOWULFbeo

J. R. R. and Christopher Tolkien

Mariner Books, August 2015

 

A thousand years on, the sharpness of Beowulf‘s images still strikes us. Longships cruise amid icy spray. A king stares with fear amid the riches of his hall. Then comes the fiend Grendel stalking across the moors. Tolkien’s translation weds to these visions the rhythm and grandeur of language that rumbles even as it exults, which rolls like the swells of the sea. Continue reading

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