Year: 2016
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Boy, Lost – a compelling memoir
Boy, Lost (University of Queensland Press, 2013) is a fascinating and compelling memoir by Kristina Olsson and her luminous prose elevates it to an even higher level. This book feels transcendent with a mother’s love. The author gains profound insight on her journey to trace the steps of her mother and of her lost brother,…
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Coining words – from assassination to jobstopper
Shakespeare introduced 1,700 words and many phrases we still use today. He coined assassination, for instance, from the 8th century Arabic assassin. Even-handed, far-off, hot-blooded, schooldays, well-respected, are Shakespeare’s too, as are useful, moonbeams, subcontinent. [Without him we wouldn’t have the phrases] laughing yourself into stitches, setting your teeth on edge, not sleeping a wink,…
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Putting the world into words – Tim Parks and why we write
I’ve been fond of English writer Tim Parks since he cheerfully admitted to ABC Radio interviewer Margaret Throsby that he had had ‘enough rejection slips for his novels to paper Buckingham Palace with!’ Parks wrote seven novels over six years before one was accepted for publication. Rejected by twenty publishers, Parks tells us in Where…
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John Tesarsch – sophisticated and uplifting
John Tesarsch’s The Last Will and Testament of Henry Hoffmann (Affirm Press, 2014) is a masterpiece. I’ve reviewed a lot of books in the past twenty plus years, (in local magazines and 85 for The Canberra Times, and more recently in this blog) but I have never described a novel like that. This one deserves…
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The Knee Bores and the Cake Addict: A tale of comeuppance
In the 1990s I was a Research Assistant at the Australian National University. It was a time when some of my older male friends and ex-boyfriends began hitting their forties and whenever I ran into one of them he would start talking about his knee problems from old Rugby injuries. This happened several times within…
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’62 people are as wealthy as half the world’
‘62 people are as wealthy as half the world.’ I haven’t been blogging lately because I took on two small writing jobs, and, like most writing jobs – big or small – they took longer than anticipated. Plus I was visiting my beautiful nieces and their progeny and returned late last week. But now the…
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On hearing inner music: the pleasure of the written word
As one who has digested and recommended Marie Kondo’s The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up (2 Nov ‘The life-changing magic of Marie Kondo’s book on the Japanese art of de-cluttering), I am pretty good at throwing away old pieces of paper and notes in the rubbish bin. But I do keep some stuff, for example,…
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Eating real food: a quick comparison of cookbooks
‘Gosh it’s easy to write a cookbook. Well, it’s easy if your primary role is “quality control”, and all the actual work is done by seasoned professionals and my slave-driven wife,’ writes David Gillespie in the Acknowledgements of his The Sweet Poison Quit Plan Cookbook (Melbourne, Viking, 2013, p. 199). He states that he ‘did…