Category Archives: Reviews

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Love and Leather… and Vampires

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The ShadowsThe Shadows (Black Dagger Brotherhood Book 13)
J.R. Ward
Piatkus, March 2015, RRP $29.99

I can’t remember if I’ve already outed myself to the MRB readers as a romance genre reader. In real life everyone knows, and are mostly accepting, though I get a few comments about ‘those shirtless dudes’ on the covers.* As a genre, romance is huge, and made up of a multitude of subgenres. Thus finding your way into the genre, let alone into the subgenres can be a really tricky process. One of the large sub-genres that has been extremely popular over the last few years is paranormal romance. Vampires, werewolves, zombies and a whole host of other supernatural creatures have all made their appearance in different iterations.

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Honoured To Be Sure

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The Honours Book Cover The Honours
Tim Clare
Allen & Unwin, RRP $27.99
June 2015

Astonishing.

Haunting.

Gripping.

Irresistible.

These are the only four words I read prior to cracking open Tim Clare’s debut novel, The Honours, plastered as they were on the four corners of the truncated dustjacket.
There are those who prefer to screen potential reading material, scouring blurbs and reviews until there is barely a reason left to read the book itself. My advice of the day is to save yourself the time investigating and just read, dammit. Read a book you’ve never heard of and know nothing about. This is a matter of wellbeing and should be done at least as often as taking a stroll through a sun-dappled forest—minimum dose: once every twelve months.

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‘There was a Ship,’ Quoth He

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sea_of_poppiesSEA OF POPPIES
Amitav Ghosh
First published 2008

Let me tell you about buying this book.  After being provided with a review copy of the third in this Ibis trilogy, I sought the first two books.  I initially purchased them from the Book Depository, since despite its purchase by Amazon, it has served me well in the past, and given the size of the books, time was somewhat of the essence. Unfortunately, my order for the second book was cancelled after a few days and I was refunded.  The first book, though, was ostensibly sent in early March.  By the beginning of April, I had not received it.  So I contacted the Book Depository and received a swift refund for that too.  And I turned to Booktopia, which delivered both books promptly, albeit in rather strange jaffle-style packaging.  Surprise, surprise, John Murray is a trading name of Hachette, with whom Amazon and by extention the Book Depository have been having a well-publicised tiff*.

Book finally in my hands, I expected something of a dour book.  Nominated for the Man Booker Prize, Sea of Poppies is firmly targeted at a literary market.  I feared it would be a worthy†, possibly depressing novel about serious issues. But while this book is certainly about the slightly serious issue of the first Opium War, it is neither dour nor worthy. In fact it is frequently hilarious.

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Muse

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Muse Book Cover Muse
Jonathan Galassi
Text Publishing
May 2015

 

In its opening chapters Muse is cleverly disguised as a work of non-fiction. So cleverly disguised that I had to turn the book over to check that the word “fiction” was indeed written beside the author’s photograph. I also did a Google search for the renowned American poet, Ida Perkins, to confirm that she really did not exist. (Look closely at the dates on the bibliography at the back, there is a clue there too.)

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Over Troubled Water

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To Hold the Bridge Book Cover To Hold the Bridge
Garth Nix
Allen & Unwin, RRP $19.99
May 2015

Have you read a Garth Nix before? Have you? Have you?

If you answered yes, you are correct. Well done. There is truly nothing I need to tell you other than – hey, check it out, a book full of short stories by Garth Nix. Huzzah!

If you answered no, then this is me taking you by the shoulders, looking deep into your slightly terrified peepers and trying to convince you to make that positive change in your life.  Continue reading

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Action is the Most Dangerous Thing

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THE QUIET AMERICAN
Graham Greene (William Heinemann, 1955; Vintage, 2004) ISBN: 9780099478393the-quiet-american-vintage

So, ah, have you ever started reading a book you thought was about something completely different than it turned out to be?  Because I was under some kind of misapprehension about The Quiet American before I started it.  All I really knew about it was that it was made into a movie some time in the early to mid 2000s starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser.  I only know this because I had a cousin involved in the picture, who at the time called his mother to say, “I’ve just met Michael Caine and you’re the only person I can think of who’ll care.”  Because this was back before we all had decided Michael Caine was cool again when he started being Batman’s butler and that sort of thing.

I think I had the book confused with The English Patient and possibly some other book that doesn’t exist.  Essentially, I knew the plot involved two men in love* with the same woman, but for some reason I believed it involved either a hospital or POWs.  This is what a hazy memory for pop culture does to a person.  I recommend you all study hard on what the Kardashians and real housewives are up to right now, for it may be tested later.

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School Finds: Rear Window

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School Finds: Rear Window – Alfred Hitchcock (Director) 1954rear-window-first-outfit-sitting-down-2

Having admitted in a recent review to being ‘not much of a reader’ it would seem somewhat duplicitous to go straight back to a novel or play or collection of poetry and sing its praises. Rather than appear two-faced I shall stick to my first love – the silver screen.

Currently, my time is consumed by re-writing my Year 11 Literature course for 2016 as the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority has seen it fit to shift the goal posts just when I thought I was getting the hang of it. The upshot of this is that I am to lose my ability to round out the first semester from here on by teaching Rear Window. Having taught it seven times I feel I have refined my delivery and breakdown of the film to a fine art. Hitchcock’s masterpiece has become so much a part of me that the other day my class observed that my hairstyle very slightly resembles that of Grace Kelly’s at the conclusion of the film. I’m not sure whether I should be distressed by that or see it as a great compliment to my beauty. Continue reading

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The Grand Sophy

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THE GRAND SOPHYGrandSophy

Heyer, Georgette (The Book Club, edition 1951 (orig 1950), ISBN – n/a)

I was at a social event back in the 1990s and someone was reading a copy of The Grand Sophy.  Soon there was a collection of us standing around laughing and giggling in reminiscence of it’s amusing scenes. The boyfriend of one of the girls wandered over to see what we were talking about.

“Oh,” he said. “A romance book.” And he attempted to walk off. The poor man, he never understood till then exactly how offending a bunch of nerds can go down so very badly.  He was sat down and lectured for about two hours on the merit of Georgette Heyer and how, while romance was part of it, it was a genius comedy he was dissing out of hand. I believe I recall his feeble excuse was that his mother had some Georgette Heyers. We all then agreed his mother must have excellent taste in books. Continue reading

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Quiet Please, We’re Sleeping

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The Sleeper and the Spindle Book Cover The Sleeper and the Spindle
Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Chris Riddell
Bloomsbury Publishing, RRP $19.99
October 2014

Once upon a time there was a princess who was cursed by a witch, or was it a bad fairy? Whatever she was, she was pretty pissed not to be invited to the princess’s birthing ceremony. And so when the princess turned eighteen she pricked her finger on a spindle and fell asleep forever and the curse was fulfilled.

About one hundred years later, a queen is preparing for her wedding or, as she sees it, the end of her life. The queen dares to think that becoming a royal breeding machine and most likely dying in childbirth isn’t really something she wants in her life right now. Quelle surprise. Luckily the queen finds out about a sleeping plague that seems to be spreading through the queendom. How to stop it? Find the sleeping princess at the centre of it and wake her up of course. So this sweet arse queen tells her fiancé – some prince she deigned to marry – to chill out until she returns and goes off to wake the princess and save her people.

But is everything as it seems in the mysterious castle full of sleeping beings? Well, it’s Neil Gaiman, so probably not. Continue reading

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School Finds: Pleasantville by Gary Ross

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pleasantvillePLEASANTVILLE

Gary Ross (Writer and Director) 1998

My students often find it hard to believe that I am not much of a reader. Well, I tend not to read a huge amount beyond work. The fact is most reading just feels like… work. Eventually Literature students discover that once you master ‘literaturing’ things (they have turned the noun into a verb without any approval or guidance from me) it can be very hard to turn this super power off. I deconstruct the instructions on a teabag and explore the dialogic relationship to the instructions on the artificial sweetener. It is an affliction of sorts. It is a common film trope that when someone develops telepathy they become overwhelmed with the voices of everyone around them, it is deafening. The same is true with the power of interpretation. This is my origin story.

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Be the Best That You Can Be, Best to Your Ability

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CREATING CAPABILITIES: THE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT APPROACH
Martha C. Nussbaum (Belknap Harvard, 2011) ISBN: 9780674050549

I think I may have fallen in love with Martha C. Nussbaum.  Law professor, ethicist, feminist, philosopher, confident teacher and elegant writer, she is a source of inspiration, even if I don’t subscribe wholeheartedly to her political biases.  Creating Capabilities is but one of her numerous contributions to discourse on human rights and starts with a simple proposition: living beings are more important than money.  GDP, which measures the economic wellbeing of a country in purely monetary form, is an at best unhelpful measure of any given nation’s actual prosperity.  In its place, Nussbaum and other proponents, such as the originator of the school, Amartya Sen, nominate the “capabilities approach” to measuring human (and animal) development, suggesting several different benchmarks that should first be aimed for and then improved upon by the world’s nations.  Creating Capabilities forms something of a manifesto for this approach.

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Rebecca

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REBECCADaphneDuMaurier_Rebecca

Du Maurier, Daphne (Pan, reprint 1975 (orig 1938), ISBN 0 330 24709 3)

About three years ago I lent some of my favorite books to a friend who wanted to read more. I included Rebecca (I have the version as shown, I bought it some time in the 80s) amongst other incredibly excellent books. After some time she gave them back and said she’d not really enjoyed them.

“You read literature, I don’t”, she said. Continue reading

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