This is my seventh Tim Winton book and I found that once again, I was captivated by this great storyteller. The novel is set in Fremantle, port city for Perth, in Western Australia. The great recession is underway elsewhere while Australia is having boom times, thanks to mining (as it happens the time and place are similar to another Australian book I just read, Prime Cut). Location...
Reza Aslan's parents came to the US at the time of the Islamic revolution in Iran and he grew up nominally Moslem. He became enamored with Christianity as a teenager, eventually fell out of love, but appears to have an abiding interest in the issues. He teaches creative writing. This book, as he says, …is an attempt to reclaim, as much as possible, the Jesus of history, the Jesus before...
Perhaps after this book, I'll move on to authors with no ties to Australia. We'll see. This police procedural was one I read about on Kim's Reading Matters blog and indeed, it was a good one. The story is set in 2008 just as the financial meltdown was occurring while the two small coast towns in Western Australia where the action occurs were booming because of nickel mining. Two...
This is another Australian book I've had on my to-be-read list thanks to Reading Matters' review of it. And as it turns out, it is the last of the Australian and New Zealand Literature Month books for me. It is set in the seaside town of Thirroul, not far from Sydney, an actual place that D.H. Lawrence visited in 1922. He wrote a semi-autobiographical work about this visit...
Everyone in this book is bereft. Despite the fact that the central event is the murder of a child and that her brother Quinn was suspected of the heinous crime and that he fled home the day of the murder and eventually served at Gallipoli and in France and that his mother is dying of influenza when he returns to tell her that he did not commit the crime, despite all this, I did appreciate and...
Several years ago I read The Shark Net, Robert Drewe’s memoir of growing up in Perth in the 1950s and 60s and was favorably impressed with it as you can see from the linked post about it. Now at last I’ve listened to one of his novels. After all, it is Australian and New Zealand Literature Month. The novel opens in rural Britain, perhaps in the 1880s, when Will Dance is a child and...
I have been looking forward to this 2007 book by Australian writer Alex Miller for some time, but I did save it for Australian and New Zealand Literature Month. I have loved his other books, especially Conditions of Faith. His books are not easy to find here in the US, though the Charlottesville public library and the UVa library each have several. The narrator is a retired professor in Hamburg...
You'll notice the road sign on the right warning about kangaroos or kiwis ahead. The happy news is that May is Australia and New Zealand Literature Month, a celebration hosted by Reading Matters. Not that I need any encouragement to seek out books by Australians… I am sad to have now finished the last book in the Langton Quartet: they were all wonderful. My take on each of them here:...
Today is the first day of Australian and New Zealand Literature Month! I can’t imagine a better way to begin than with the Langton Quartet by Martin Boyd, a quintessential Australian writer. It was Reading Matters that introduced me to him. Outbreak of Love is the third book of the Quartet; here’s what I wrote about the first and second. The quartet describes the Australian Langton family...
Jessica Anderson, One of the Wattle Birds. Whispering Gums was enthusiastic. UVa library has it. Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life: how we lose and find ourselves. Non-fiction by an American psychoanalyst practicing in London. Kim read it because of this comment by a blogger: "Everyone should read this book and feel it chip away any ice around their hearts, to let our admirable human...