Early in his career the 2014 Booker Prize winner Richard Flanagan ghost-wrote a book about Australia’s greatest con man John Friedrich and this book is a fictional retelling of that experience. The narrator Kif is a long-time drinking buddy/friend of Ziggy Heidl’s body guard Ray and through this connection he gets the job. He is in dire need of money to support his family, and accepts...
An appealing audiobook on several counts, News of the World interestingly inhabits a different time. It is set in Texas shortly after the Civil War when a reader with a good suit could make his way by traveling to small towns and bringing the news from far off places for ten cents a person. International news was best in order to avoid the strong partisan views on local issues in some localities...
This unconventional ramble through the life of the author of two popular history books that I dearly loved (The White Nile and The Blue Nile) was a pleasant walk indeed. It was a few months before our trip to Australia that I read another of his books, Cooper’s Creek, about the ill-fated exploration of the interior of Australia. He was an ambitious journalist who left Australia as soon as...
This 1961 novel tells the story of Rufus Scott, a talented drummer in Harlem, overcome by the societal forces he faces, and the stories of his friends in the aftermath of his death. He is introduced to us on the last night of a gig when he meets the sweet Leona, a Southern white woman with a complicated past. Their intense love for each other does not overcome those societal forces, and Rufus...
I bought this book on the occasion of hearing Paul Auster speak about it at the 92 Street Y, an event we attended because our wonderful kids gave us tickets to it for Christmas. It was over a year before I found the dedication required to read an 866-page book. The weight alone is daunting. At his talk he said that his father had died unexpectedly at the age of 66 and when he began thinking about...
Published in 1981, Muriel Spark’s book was set in 1950; the narrator is a successful author looking back on writing her first book, Warrender Chase. I have thoroughly enjoyed Muriel Spark’s books in the past, A Far Cry from Kensington and Memento Mori and in the distant past, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. This one seemed to be a bit more odd than the others and to have a little less...
The advice to new writers is, I understand, “Write what you know.” Though the 78-year old Dame Margaret Drabble is hardly a new writer, she seems to have done that with this book. The characters are old and illustrate the various situations in which the upper middle class elderly find themselves. Often older characters in a book are looking back over the events that are the pivotal...
I have had in mind to read this weighty book (600 pages) about the arrival of Europeans in Australia written by an art historian for a long time. Between the original landing of Captain Cook in Botany Bay in 1770 and the arrival of the first wave of transported convicts in 1788, no British ships came to the area. The Botany Bay area would not have supported them; if Captain Phillip hadn’t...
Thanks to Liz for recommending this book; it’s been a great read. The title made me think it had some connection to the “pleasure” district of Edo period Japan (1600-1867) which I came to know through my affection for Japanese woodblock prints. Well, of course there is a connection: this book is set in New Orleans at the time of Katrina. One of the characters, looking at prints...
As a child I was terrified of the flock of chickens on my family’s small farm. I’m not sure which worried me most: their horrible feet, their scary beaks, their alien feathery bodies, or the apparently random movement of the noisy flock. So a book about training a raptor as a grief healing mechanism is incomprehensible to me and it languished on my Books to Read list for nearly three...