For the first time in a long time, I am giving up on a book. I have battled my way through a few tomes I did not enjoy, but this was the one to break my spirits. At the moment of surrender I am over 200 pages in, not even halfway through. A plot is yet to appear in front of me, but I say- screw t...
Someone told me this is a "Marmite book" - and I don't like Marmite. It started promisingly with Catherine's story running parallel to Henry's but then, as they got interesting, they were both hijacked, by Amanda on one side and Sumper on the other, and what had promised so well disappeared into ...
Ever since my high school boyfriend outed me to my youthful music idol as a slavering fangirl, I resolved to be moderate in my attitudes towards artists whose work I admire. Not that I want to downplay my enjoyment of their art, or affect a "too cool for enthusiasm" attitude. But I realized tha...
So - a friend of mine is going to Greece soon and a friend of his collects honey and I tried some and told her it was the nicest honey I had ever tried (which was true - no exaggeration at all). My friend leaves next week and I thought it would be nice to send over a book with him to the honey c...
In 1943 two conservative classicists set out to expose the absurdity of modernist poetry. Both James McAuley and Harold Stewart were classical trained poets, who didn’t think much about modernism; it didn’t rhyme, didn’t make sense and it just didn’t look right, it was fake poetry. If an everyman...
Boy, it's been kind of gloomy around here recently, hasn't it? What with unanticipated abridgments, disorganized Englishmen, and lukewarm responses to historical fiction, things have looked rosier. But here, my friends, is the antidote: Peter Carey's rollicking Australian epic Illywhacker is ro...
As IfMany of the reviews of this fantastic collection of short stories mention the following comment by Peter Carey:"The trouble with academics is that they try too hard to understand these stories .... "They should relax. The stories are only about what they seem to be about. "They are, if you l...
If the varied works of Peter Carey have a unifying thread, it’s his fascination with what it means to be Australian, and Australia’s relationship with the rest of the world. Illywhacker, his second novel, was the first to thoroughly explore this theme, covering three generations of an Australian ...
The Rushlight List - A novel for each and every country This was a slow read. Five-hundred pages shouldn't have been too daunting to a regular reader of epic fantasy, but I have to say that after the first few it was clear to me that Oscar and Lucinda was no page-turner. However, I was determined...
I read Peter Carey's My Life as a Fake and Wrong About Japan, and didn’t like either of them. I just couldn’t get hooked into the effusively praised My Life as a Fake, and Wrong About Japan, though it had a few clever insights, seemed too slight to be a book.So I wasn’t planning to read any more ...