Pen Hanley

  • John Tesarsch – sophisticated and uplifting

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    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 it. I simply could not put it down and I am in awe of the author’s mastery of the form. The novel deals with the theme of death as a catalyst for examining life – the past life, in this case with its extraordinary secrets,…

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  • The Knee Bores and the Cake Addict: A tale of comeuppance

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    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 about a month. It was weird. And boring. I’d be on my way to Chifley Library or The Gods café when suddenly I’d be waylaid by the long, tedious tale of the knee injury, the different methods of diminishing the pain, and the impending surgery.…

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  • ’62 people are as wealthy as half the world’

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    ‘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 writing jobs are (nearly) finished and I’m back here. Finally we got a new fridge at our house. The previous one was an old biological specimen fridge that we got for free from a university biology/zoology department (Bozo at ANU) nearly ten years ago. Like…

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  • On hearing inner music: the pleasure of the written word

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    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, miscellaneous bits of scribble, other people’s descriptions I admire, and quotations, all of which I think of as ‘compost’ because out of these scraps I can be inspired to create a new piece of writing. One of the quotations saved is by Truman Capote (McCall’s…

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  • Eating real food: a quick comparison of cookbooks

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    ‘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 practically nothing (other than eat pudding on a regular basis)’. David Gillespie presents the facts about serious and complex subjects (how sugar makes us fat and exhausted and gives us chronic diseases like diabetes Type 2 and certain cancers) simply and clearly. Equally clear are…

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  • Cheerfulness is an achievement: favourite books of 2015

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    The Guardian Weekly ‘Books of the Year’ (18-31 December this year) is where writers and critics present their favourite reads of the past year and it is a reliable guide to some great reading. You can also hear authors speak about their work on theguardian.com/books/series/books Popular choices of ‘Books of the Year’ were Ali Smith’s short story collection Public Library, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet and Colm Toibin’s Nora Webster. Kate Mosse recommends selected essays by women under thirty entitled I Call Myself A Feminist (Virago, 2015). The uplifting website www.brainpickings.org also lists favourite books of the past year. The first…

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  • Meeting the sunlight: taking time to think

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    The picturesque town of Mallaig is on the west coast of the Scottish Highlands. I was waiting for a coffee at the Mallaig Tea Rooms when I saw a framed scroll on the wall above the little coal fire. It read: ‘These are times of more convenience but less time, more knowledge but less judgement, fast foods but slow digestion, tall men but short character, steep profits but shallow relationships. ‘It is a time when there is much in the window but nothing in the room.’ The Dalai Lama. It was when I was travelling for six weeks between writing…

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  • The life-changing magic of Marie Kondo’s book on the Japanese art of decluttering

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    The National Association of Professional Organisers (U.S.) claims that we spend one year of our lives looking for lost items. Clearly, we would have more time to spend on what is important to us if we didn’t waste all that time on looking for stuff we’ve lost. What is important to me? Books, art (film, dancing, photography, food…), health and love; your list might be different, but simplifying your life will give you more time to spend on those things, whatever your priorities are. Courtney Carver’s ‘Be More with Less’ online course tells you how to do this. I subscribed…

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