"Well, there’s so much to read, and I’m so far behind." Wallace Stegner
For some years of my twenties I was very much in love with a man who would not leave his wife. For not one moment of this relationship was I unaware of what every single popular culture representation of such an arrangement portended my fate to be. I confess that I had no intention of … Continue reading Green Dot | Madeleine Gray
Below the surface through the rippled roiling waters of us, down, deep down, silver scales flash against a piece of buckled tin tossed in, an old engine grows slick with river muck and weed and here, snouting forward in the murky dark - what's this? - a bundle of rags attracting the bottom dwellers. Glide … Continue reading The Hummingbird Effect | Kate Mildenhall
George Orwell believed that up until 1914 Wells was 'a true prophet'. 'Thinking people who were born at the beginning of the century are in some sense Wells' own creation,' he wrote in a 1941 essay on Wells' legacy that could just as well have been written about Leo Szilard's destiny. 'The minds of all … Continue reading Question 7 | Richard Flanagan (4)
Some years ago I was sent a remarkable essay by a then eighteen-year-old Yolnju woman, Siena Stubbs, about the use of a fourth tense in the Yolnju language. It was, in its own way, the equivalent of Szilard's traffic lights for my thinking, and it informs this book deeply. An Indigenous concept of time where … Continue reading Question 7 | Richard Flanagan (3)
This series of Question 7 related posts will assume that you have read the book. If you have not and plan to, you may like to save them for later. This post talks to the title of the book. We pretend we know. We pretend there is a moral calculus in war. Whilst musing on the nature … Continue reading Question 7 | Richard Flanagan (2)
After chatting with both Kim and Lisa about their reading progress through Richard Flanagan's latest book, Question 7, I was prepared for two difficulties. Firstly, it would be almost impossible to take in everything Flanagan was posing in one reading and two, it would be extremely difficult to review the book. It only took me … Continue reading Question 7 | Richard Flanagan (1)
My parents were married in 1951 and, with a war service loan, bought a block of land in South Oakleigh, eight miles from Melbourne’s CBD. I don’t know what my dad was making then, but he was a carpenter and apparently the average wage of a carpenter in 1951 was about 80 shillings a week, … Continue reading Quarterly Essay 92: The Great Divide | Alan Kohler
Eddie Blanket was falling, falling, falling towards the good Yagara earth. A calamity. At her great age, a fall meant the end, simple as that. Broken hip, pneumonia, kaput. I have been agonising over my book response for Edenglassie for too long now. With the Christmas season fast approaching though, I need to get it … Continue reading Edenglassie | Melissa Lucashenko
Kuldesh Sharma hopes he's in the right place. He parks up at the end of the dirt track, hemmed in on all sides by trees, ghoulish in the darkness. We are now up to the fourth installment of The Thursday Murder Club Mystery with The Last Devil To Die and less and less is the … Continue reading The Last Devil To Die | Richard Osman
Most of us don't know the perimenopause...will probably start in our early to mid-40's - possibly with invisible symptoms we mistake for going bonkers. Told with Kaz Cooke's trademark sense of humour, It's the Menopause: what you need to know in your 40's, 50's and beyond is exactly what you think it is. For thirty-odd … Continue reading It’s the Menopause | Kaz Cooke
That Veronica and I were given keys and told to come early on a frozen Saturday in April to open the school for the Our Town auditions was proof of our reliability. I was in desperate need of some comfort and joy in my reading life. The past few months my reading has been full … Continue reading Tom Lake | Ann Patchett
From the window of a hotel room in Paris: a view of rooftops, the brown river, a cobblestoned street, one corner of a scaffolded, burnt-out church. It is a morning in March 2020 and the air holds a breath of warmth. The sky is a pale, hopeful blue. I love it when a book takes … Continue reading The Sitter | Angela O’Keeffe
Everything You Need to Know about the Voice, written by co-author of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, Cobble Cobble woman Megan Davis, and fellow constitutional expert George Williams, is essential reading on the Voice to parliament and government, how our Constitution was drafted, what the 1967 referendum achieved, what it left unfinished and the … Continue reading Everything You Need to Know About the Voice | Megan Davis & George Williams
The moon hid itself behind the clouds. The wind spat an icy snow at angles. In the tall black wall of the palisade, through a slit too seeming thin for human passage, the girl climbed into the great and terrible wilderness. I began The Vaster Wilds as an advance listening copy on libro.fm a couple … Continue reading The Vaster Wilds | Lauren Groff #historicalfiction
Come on a journey with us. Step lightly, carefully. Let's walk through the oldest, biggest library of knowledge on Earth. Many of my regular readers will already be aware of the First Knowledges series being published by Thames & Hudson in Australia. Originally designed to be a six book series (I believe it will now … Continue reading Songlines: First Knowledges for Young Readers | Margo Neale & Lynne Kelly
This Reading Life 