Oh dear. What can I say?
You all remember James Frey, right? He wrote a hugely successful memoir about his experiences with addiction and recovery which I, along with millions of other people, devoured and found fascinating. I reviewed and commented upon it on my old blog, but strangely, it wasn’t till this woman named Oprah [...]
Sue Miller is one of those writers you can trust. I’m hard-pressed to think of any author, except Anne Tyler, with whom I can feel more confident that when I pick up a novel I am going to get a good, well-written story with some thoughtful insight into character.
The Senator’s Wife alternates between the perspective [...]
So after I read The Turning, I said I wanted to read a novel by Tim Winton. I picked Dirt Music mainly because it was such a great title. It’s a story set in Western Australia, about an unlikely liason between two people who are both at the end of their rope in one way [...]
This book won the Giller Prize this year, and I think (after some reflection) it was deserved, although I’m still overwhelmed that Cloud of Bone, which I think is a better novel than most of the shortlist, wasn’t nominated. But I’ll lay aside my bitterness over that enough to admit that Late Nights on Air [...]
Good Grief was another one of those serendipitous judging-a-book-by-its-cover library discoveries I was very happy to have made. In one of Anne Lamott’s books she talks about going to a library during her father’s illness and looking for the funny books about cancer — and getting a strange look. I think you’d get the same [...]
There are books I plan to read, books that are recommended to me or that I catch a review of, like the five or six books currently on my “Want to Read” list on Facebook’s Visual Bookshelf. Then there are books that I’ve never heard of, that catch my eye entirely by accident, often as [...]
Whistling in the Dark is the story of Sally and Troo, two pre-adolescent sisters growing up in a working-class Milwaukee neighbourhood in the late 1950s. Behind the usual nostalgia for childhood in a simpler time is a dark shadow: two young girls have been molested and murdered in the neighbourhood in the last year, [...]
The Turning is another of the books that was recommended and given to me while I was in Australia. Before I even opened the cover I had to overcome two of my deep-seated prejudices: I’m resistant to fiction by men (despite numerous great examples to the contrary), and I generally don’t enjoy short stories. [...]
Once again, with her third novel, the fabulous Joshilyn Jackson has not let me down. Jackson, a Southern U.S. writer (and amazingly funny blogger, at Faster than Kudzu), is the perfect balance between a literary and popular writer — her prose is thoughtful and beautifully crafted, but it never gets in the way of the [...]
Before leaving Australia I was given a small (but heavy, for a person who only travels with carry-on) packet of Australian fiction so that I would have the opportunity to learn a little about the literature of the country in which I’d just spent two weeks. One of the books included in the package was [...]
