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CREDIT: Brian Harris (Alamy) Freakily, reading Tim Winton’s Dirt Music is like reading about myself. Looking back, it’s not difficult to find a time when I was a little lost, a little trapped, a little aimless and a lot unsure. This is what Winton does so well. He’s the master of the awkward, the displaced and the stuck, so while Dirt Music is an Australian story, it’s a universal one too.  If you like your characters neat and clean and sure of themselves, he’s not your guy. The characters in this novel are imperfect beings held in place by their pasts and weighed down by guiltRead More →

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Even with the benefit of the past, we are wading knee deep through our present. We embrace the new normal, but as we do, it’s already ageing, nearly passe. Where does our gaze rest and why? What are we admiring? Is the future a distraction from our past or the present a distraction from our future? These are the questions which bubbled to the surface during and after reading Michelle de Krester’s, wonderful mind-stretching and form-warping novel, Scary Monsters. With Halloween approaching, I thought now was the time to bring it up. What we scare ourselves with might serve to distract us from what isRead More →

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“They will be great!” we think as parents of newborns. “They will go on to live exceptional lives!” But sitting on our shoulder whispering in our ear is our less certain self. It may not turn out the way we would like, it says. It may not turn out at all. I’ve been thinking about broken hearts and lost dreams, since reading Chigozie Obioma’s, The Fishermen. It is impossible not to think such things having spent time between the pages of this beautiful book. Obiama’s novel is set in the town of Akure in southwestern Nigeria during the 1990’s. It follows the fate of one family,Read More →

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We think they don’t move, but they do. We think they don’t communicate, but we are wrong. They live on a different time frame, that’s all; one that takes in the great vistas from an age before people. Their gaze is farseeing, beyond us (over our heads, so to speak), and hopefully will persist long after we are gone. That is, if the world is lucky. They are trees and this novel from Richard Powers allows us to get close to something marvellous and infinitely more valuable than the surfaces of our floors, the frames of our houses, and our own front doors. You see,Read More →

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I’ve been thinking about my reading habits.  I’ve always had this thing about reading a book twice.  I know people who will read a book over and over.  My daughter is one of them.  Every time a new Harry Potter book or movie was released, she would read the previous books again and in the right order.  She said it was so everything was fresh in her mind.  It makes perfect sense, except for the time it takes.  I just couldn’t do it.  My brain would seize as soon as the story became familiar.  I couldn’t say, I know this already and it’s okay.  IRead More →

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How reckless, how dangerous, we can be in the grip of an obsession. We can steal, lie, do murder even. And just before you say, not I, know that if this can happen with Terence Greene, oh yes, it can happen with you. Terence is the protagonist in Joyce Carol Oates’ novel, Double Delight. He is the director of a charity, (a deft move by Oates to give him gravitas) and lives in the wealthy suburb of Queenston, New Jersey. He wears expensive suits during the week and, when not socialising with the other well-to-do residents of Queenston, he fiddles with his small DYI projectsRead More →

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In: Book Reviews, Human Nature, Reading

We know we are destructive creatures, but to this I now add ridiculous and delusional. It’s how we go on, isn’t it, in the face of our inevitable end. It makes it possible for us as readers to enter a graveyard and cavort with the dead and pity them their unfinished business. This is the scene set by George Saunders in his novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. We are easily drawn into his tale of these malformed spirits, who despite all they witness, cling to the lives which have long-since left them. This is a netherworld where coffins become ’sick-boxes’ and the life they onceRead More →

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We yearn. The best of us do anyway and we struggle. Most often the struggle is carried on inside our minds as we attempt to bound and then rebound off walls we’ve built ourselves from beliefs we’ve had or adopted from…..goodness knows where. And this could be seen as futile and perhaps wisely so, if it were not for there being something noble, something best called human in the most fragile sense of the word, in the yearning and the struggling. It is the fact that we may not succeed which is the thing. We teeter on this knife’s edge, windmilling our arms this wayRead More →

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“Wherever human beings dream of a dignified and free society in which they can harvest the fruits of their own labor, The Grapes of Wrath’s radical voice of protest can still be heard.”  Robert DeMott says this in his introduction to the Penguin edition of Steinbeck’s depression era novel and its difficult to get past it.  Of course, I read the introduction after I’d finished the novel, so the bit about getting past it is a lie.  What I mean is I could not find other better words to describe what I was left with once the reading was done. There was churning in theRead More →

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There are special books, so strong in time and place, they transport us into the past. We walk with the characters through cities and landscapes. We smell the bakery on the corner or the mud of the riverbank. We hear the voices around us and we are immersed. We can begin to feel like Gump, a part of important moments in history.  It’s strange to think we really can live for a time in the past. It’s extraordinary to know that as long as there are people to tell these stories, those times cannot fade away. All readers need to do is pick up theirRead More →