This is my second Thea Astley book; the first was Drylands and I admired the beauty of the writing about a grim place and time. I picked up this one because I read a post by Whispering Gums listing favorite quotes from it and I found that the language is irresistible. When we meet Kathleen, the main character, she is well on her way to elderly incompetence which we learn from the...
I picked up this 1975 novel because the author kept turning up on my radar screen and I saw the book had been acclaimed as a great one. It is the story of a family in the late 60s and 70s set in that stylish world of a New York City architect whose family has the perfect life in a lovely old house outside the city. It is told in an appealingly episodic way: Nedra and Viri know how to...
This story is told by a housekeeper, a Japanese single mother, who works for an agency that sends her to various households. Her latest assignment is the professor, who has a very high turnover in housekeepers. He's problematic because while he had been a brilliant mathematician, an accident left him with a short-term memory that lasts only 80 minutes. He has an excellent memory for anything...
It took some time for me to be prepared to read this Man Booker Prize winning book that someone said was the best book that will ever ruin your weekend. I was both slow to pick it up and slow to make my way through the searing parts. First I will say that the book was worth enduring the sections about the Japanese slave labor that built the railroad across Thailand to Burma. I came away...
This 1999 book came onto my radar around the time of our trip to Alaska in August. As fine a book as it is, it's just as well I didn't rush to read it before the trip as it only glances upon Alaska. It is about the boats, the water, the 1792 exploration of the area, the death of a parent, the end of a relationship, and very little of that occurs in Alaska. Raban says I had a boat, most of...
These are books I've read in 2014, not necessarily published this year. I read 47 books this year, of which 16 were by Australian authors. The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis. A successful and revered Israeli government minister flees with his young mistress when their affair is uncovered. They return to Russia where each grew up and land by chance in the household of the man who...
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa. Reading Matters enjoyed it. Audiobook. The narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr Here by Richard McGuire, a graphic novel. Plato and a Platypus Walked into a Bar… audiobook. The Dark Sacred Night by Julia Glass Euphoria by Lily King. Audiobook. Academy Street by Mary Costello...
Remember that eerie music from sci-fi movies of the 50s? That sound was created by a theremin. Here's the studio session for the theremins for the most famous of those movies, The Day the Earth Stood Still. Us Conductors is a fictionalized account of the life of Leon Theremin, its inventor, and you can see it played by one of the characters in the book here. Theremin narrates the...
I found this book on Tony's list of the best fiction in 2013 and I agree it was a great book to listen to. Set in the 1920s, it is told in the voice of Rose, an orphan who becomes a typist in a police precinct in Brooklyn. Though she is a very proper person herself, through her job she has seen it all and has become inured to the miscreants of the world. One day a beautiful and...
Having admired Touch by this author, I was eager to read this one. It is an action-packed tale of a lobster-fishing dynasty on a small island, founded by the much-mentioned Brumfitt Kings, who had arrived on Loosewood Island 200 years earlier. Brumfitt was an artist as well as a fisherman and a well-known one; tourists come to the island to visit the scenes he painted. The narrator is Cordelia...