By:
On:
In: Book Reviews, Reading

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 →

By:
On:
In: Book Reviews, Reading

“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 →