Posted in Book Reviews, Other Book Reviews, tagged ernest hemingway, fiesta, the sun also rises on July 22, 2008 | No Comments »
Hemingway is one of the most famous writers of the twentieth century and yet it seems to me that his books are no longer as widely available as they once were. He has fallen out of fashion in a way that Joyce apparently never will. And yet his presence in the history of literature is [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Other Book Reviews on July 11, 2008 | 3 Comments »
Well, my reading has ground to a halt. It was bound to happen after reading so many books in the first half of the year, but now I’m spending my free time playing old computer games instead. Despite this, I got out a few books from UWA yesterday. They are:
The Albanian - Donna Mazza - [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Other Book Reviews, tagged andrew mcgahan, Last Drinks on June 28, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Well, this tends to happen quite a bit. I start reading a novel, finding it fairly interesting at first, but then my interest tapers off dramatically. It’s interesting that I should struggle with McGahan’s Last Drinks, because I found the subject matter (corruption in 1980s Queensland and its aftermath) quite compelling. How is it that [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, J. J. Deceglie, Other Book Reviews, tagged j.j. deceglie, the sea is not yet full on June 24, 2008 | No Comments »
the sea is not yet full is the first novel by Perth writer J. J. Deceglie. Published in 2005, it is a story about a young man named Sep. Sep is in his early twenties, has a girlfriend named Sarah and a job as a teacher. He lives in Fremantle, Western Australia. Sep and myself [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Other Book Reviews, tagged simone lazaroo, andrew mcgahan on June 15, 2008 | No Comments »
My new reading list contains five novels, four of which are by Andrew McGahan. I didn’t exactly plan it that way, but those were the books I picked up. So you can expect to see reviews of all five of McGahan’s novels in the near future, unless I can’t get through one or more of [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Other Book Reviews, tagged samuel beckett, molloy on June 14, 2008 | No Comments »
You have to be in the right mood for reading Beckett. What that right mood is, I’m not exactly sure, but Beckett’s ‘novels’ are about as far away from the conventions of characterisation and narrative as you can get. Molloy (first in a trilogy including Malone Dies and The Unnameable) seems to be one of [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Other Book Reviews on June 7, 2008 | No Comments »
I’ve read about 40 books this year so far, which is a fair old rate (approx 8 per month or 2 per week). I’ve read a lot of SF, a lot of literary novels, and a few miscellaneous things. I’ve read TAG Hungerford Award winners, Vogel Award winners, and all four books in Simon Haynes [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Other Book Reviews, tagged J. G. Ballard, Kingdom Come on June 6, 2008 | No Comments »
Ballard has been on a long decline for decades now. Since the heady days of his seminal The Atrocity Exhibition, as well as arguably his best novels in High Rise and The Unlimited Dream Company, Ballard’s novels have been deteriorating almost imperceptibly. Perhaps this is somewhat unfair, but it’s how I feel. J. G. Ballard [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Other Book Reviews, tagged TAG Hungerford Award Winner, Vogel Award Winner on May 16, 2008 | No Comments »
Ah, poverty. It’s times like these that I must resort to the dreaded ‘l’ word - library. It’s not that I dislike libraries per se, but that I love to collect (read: hoard) books, and thus don’t like giving them back. But as desperate times call for desperate measures, I have borrowed the following [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Other Book Reviews, tagged m. john harrison, climbers on May 15, 2008 | No Comments »
Let me try to explain why I think M. John Harrison’s “Climbers” is one of the greatest novels of the last twenty years. Harrison has had a strange career: from science fiction to mainstream and back again; and he transformed himself from a bad writer into an outstanding one. After writing some run of the [...]
