Tag: book-reviews

The Bedside Bookstack – September 2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, Corsair, 2010

Is it a novel or a collection of linked short stories? It doesn’t matter. I just loved it. You could feel how much she was enjoying setting limits and making up her own rules – no POV twice, show the passing of time, write a short story in as many different styles as possible. I mean, a short story through Powerpoint slides, that’s just genius!

Bennie Salazar and his assistant Sasha work together at Sow’s Ear record label. Forwards, backwards and to the side, each chapter gives us a little more of their story through friends, lovers, colleagues and family. How did I not know about this?? It’s been out for ages and even won a Pulitzer. Ne’er mind. Crisis averted. I know about it now and have the Candy House, her latest book, ready to go.

The Love That Remains by Susan Francis, Allen & Unwin, 2020

I had an author chat with Susan Francis for the September Books at the Bowlo and it was such a pleasure to read this book again in preparation. Full disclosure, Susan is the first writer friend I made when I moved to Newcastle, so I write this as a friend and reader.

Her beautiful memoir is proof that the story isn’t always the story and truth is certainly stranger than fiction. She starts out looking for her birth parents, moves to Granada with her husband and then discovers a secret from his past. There’s a lot I’m not saying so you can read the book without any spoilers but it was humbling to share this intimate story.

The Axeman’s Carnival by Catherine Chidgey, Europa, 2022

This is the first book I’ve ever read which is narrated by a magpie, Tama. It took me a little bit to get used to but then it seemed just as it should be for a magpie to be charting the toxic marriage of his owner and the random fame their magpie-human relationship has brought to the quiet hill-country farm they live on. Tama’s father always warned him about humans. He wasn’t right about all of them but he certainly has a point.

The Bookshop Woman by Nanako Hanada, brazen, 2024

My mistake was thinking that this was a novel, so I struggled and wanted it to be more than it was. Once I realised it was the author’s own story of meeting strangers and giving them book recommendations, it all changed. Then it became a fascinating insight into the rich and diverse world of Japanese books and literature and its own list of suggested reading essays, novels, manga, haiku and so many short story collections! The only disappointment was seeing all the asterisks next to the list of books, meaning they aren’t available in an English version.

I loved that she recommended Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap. I don’t think it was ever published in Australia. I only know about it and have my copy because many moons ago I was an intern at the Berlin International Literature Festival and he was one of the guests. Nice guy. Great book.

Australiana by Yumna Kassab, Ultimo, 2022

Following on from A Visit from the Goon Squad, this is another novel/short story-cycle. When is something a collection of short stories rather than a novel? I guess when there is a continuing narrative. I’m a big fan in any case (another one to check out is Melissa Manning’s Smokehouse).  I love following a character at a point in time, magnifying in on them, then panning back out to follow someone they’ve brushed up against until we put together the bigger picture of a community and its unique characteristics. This is what Yumna Kassab did in her debut The House of Youssef with an urban setting. Australiana comes after she spent 3 years in Tamworth. This feels like a darker collection with heat and drought and desperation driving many of dynamics.

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev, Penguin Classics, 1986

I’ve got a pile of classics sitting at home. Every time I consider reading one, I think of the tiny font and the curly sentences and I’m already tired. But somehow, I made myself pick up Turgenev and give him a go (I loved his short story in the George Saunders collection A Swim in a Pond in the Rain).

The pleasant surprise is that he’s really easy to read. It didn’t feel like the mental effort of some others, like an assigned task to suffer through. Style wise, it was a real pleasure. However, I ditched it more than half way through because I was getting impatient with the long philosophical conversations about nihilism.

I know, I know, the whole point is the generational divide, in this case also showing the new ideas for a new Russia of the sons against the more stuffy traditional and institutional ideas of the fathers but after a while it just felt like men shouting at me and by page 189, I just wanted some peace and quiet.

A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J Maas, Bloomsbury, 2016

Yep, I’m back in the ‘Court of…’ spicy romantasy franchise. I’ve heard things taper off in the next few books, so I might leave it here but what I appreciated was that the deeds Feyre committed in the previous book and her transformation from mortal to immortal have left her with some pretty severe PTSD and rather than move on neatly to the next thing, a good portion of this book is a slow recovery from that trauma…..albeit aided by a new love interest.

If you enjoyed reading this and want to hear about the next bookstack, subscribe to my bi-monthly newsletter below.

Processing…
Success! You're on the list.

The bedside bookstack – July 2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.

The Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, One World, 2023

I’m completely spent after finishing this terrifying read. Things that happen in ‘other’ places like emergency law, surveillance, disappearances of loved ones, unlawful detention and state brutality are suddenly happening in Ireland, to a normal family.

Eilish is a working mother of four. She has two teenagers, a tween and a baby. One day her husband is taken into custody and kept as a prisoner. A few weeks later her oldest child is ordered to leave school and attend compulsory military service.

There are mass protests and arrests. It’s unclear who can be trusted and what survival looks like under this new regime. I was quite paranoid and sick reading this and often furious at Eilish for her actions but what would any of us do put into that situation?

It’s a good reminder of why art is important and not to take what we have for granted. 

The Miller Women by Kelli Hawkins, Harper Collins, 2024

Three generations of women drive the narration of Kelli Hawkins’ new psychological suspense. Joyce, Nicola and Abby Miller all have secrets. When one of Abby’s schoolfriends goes missing, her mother Nicola, worries more that Abby might have something to do with it because the Miller women are capable of darker deeds than their gardening and baking lead you to believe. 

I was lucky enough to talk to Kelli at our July Books at the Bowlo about some of the inspiration behind this story and her process. It’s hard to such much without straying into spoiler territory but it has great female dynamics and questions of family and inheritance at its core.

Mrs Hopkins by Shirley Barrett, Allen & Unwin, 2024

Two years ago, I gifted myself Invocations #3, an art work by Helen Brancatisano when my brilliant cousin, artist Miriam Cullen, held an exhibition with her. It’s three girls in a tree and some abstract cockatoos in the sky. It looks like such a moment of joy and freedom and seemed like a good reminder to play and stop taking everything so seriously.

Then Helen told me that it was part of a series she did based on Cockatoo Island where girls had been locked up for being poor and homeless. The girls rioted about their conditions and the picture was actually them trying to get the attention of a busy working harbour. I liked it even more, now it was also about pluck, freedom and courage.

So, I was thrilled when I found out that Shirley Barrett’s final book was about the Bileola School for girls on Cockatoo Island, the girls who live there and Mrs Hopkins the new school mistress. I ripped through this horrified by colonial NSW and the powers that be but fascinated by the story of those on the island.

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff, Hutchinson Heineman, 2023

This book is a love letter to nature and the resilience of the human spirit. A young girl is running, escaping a plague-ridden frontier town in 1600s America. Her hunger and fear keep her moving ever onwards through the unfamiliar wild country. It’s winter but she is clever and resourceful and after so much time in the natural world, she becomes part of it.

This is written almost like a fairy story, not the Disney kind but one of the older M-rated ones. It’s visceral and dark with danger all around and no guarantee of a happy ending.

Magnolia Parks by Jessa Hastings, Orion, 2021

Magnolia Parks is part of London’s It scene. She’s gorgeous and rich and so are all her friends, particularly BJ Ballentine. BJ and Magnolia are made for each other and were together for years. But then he broke her heart. Now ‘it’s complicated’ and they spend a lot of time doing what people who love/hate each other do.

If only toxic relationships didn’t make for such addictive reading, cos really most of the characters are repulsive and treating each other badly and every cliché of rich and entitled you could imagine…and yet I kept turning those pages like I press ‘next episode’ on a streaming series.

Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell, Profile Books, 2019

As a reader and a writer, book shops are one of those cherished places. Secondhand bookshops maybe even more for the serendipity factor. You can’t know what you’re going in for because you can’t know what you’re going to find.

I like these bookseller books that diarise their days. Each one has it’s own feel depending on where it is. Shaun Bythells’ bookshop is in Wigtown, Scotland. It’s frequented by locals and tourists and from his anecdotes it’s clear that ‘there’s naught as queer as folk’.

His buying trips were also a good read. He spends a lot of time driving out to remote castles and manors houses looking through their libraries, uncovering originals and rarities. For someone in Australia, it’s crazy how calm he is about having books from the 16th Century on the shelves!!

I did a little search and was happy to see that his bookshop is still open. He survived COVID and thus far the Amazon encroachment of all things retail. Wigtown is also home to The Open Book, an airbnb you can rent if you want to run a book shop for a week – apparently booked out for the next 3 years. Who knew?

Cool Water by Myfanwy Jones, Hachette, 2024

The Tinaroo Dam is a piece of history for the Herbert family. Victor Herbert was the butcher for the temporary town that serviced the workers. His son, Joe Herbert, used to take the family there and now his son, Frank Herbert is there for his daughter’s wedding.

But history isn’t water under a bridge (or low in a dam) and each of the Herbert men lives with ghost of the previous generation.

Set in the 1950s and now, this is the gnarly landscape of family dynamics and all that’s been left unsaid for too long. Oh humans!

Processing…
Success! You're on the list.

The bedside bookstack – June 2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.

In the Middle of the Fields by Mary Lavin, New Island, 2016

Mary Lavin is known as one of Ireland’s best short story writers. Colm Toibin writes a beautiful introduction in this edition, about how she doesn’t fetishise Ireland for foreign readers (many of her stories appeared in the New Yorker). She writes more about people’s dynamics and inner life than politics or culture. Her Irish women especially, are more than the stereotype of widow, tired mother or spinster. She’s so evocative, conjuring isolation or grief or joy in a few simple sentences and then keeping it there while she moves the story ever onward.

I’m dipping in and out of this collection, having decided that gorging on an anthology like I often do is theft to the individual stories. Consuming them one after the other doesn’t let me savour them or reflect.

The Raptures by Jan Carson, Penguin, 2022

It’s early nineties Northern Ireland and the Troubles are in full swing. Every night on the telly there are stories about bombs and fighting. In the small town of Ballylack a primary school child gets sick and dies. Then another one. And another. These are Hannah’s classmates. Her family aren’t Catholic or Church of England. They’re Evangelical, so she was already an outsider before the dead kids started talking to her.

There’s communities, conflict, faith and magic realism in this book, which sound like much more of an awkward mix than they turn out to be on the page.

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones, Vintage Books 2018

Celestial and Roy have only been married 18 months when he’s accused of a crime he didn’t commit and sentenced to 12 years in prison. They remain married on paper but by the time he’s released early, they haven’t spoken in two years.

This is a big one. Like a Tolstoy tableau, one marriage plays out as a reflection of modern America with race, incarceration, inherited trauma and questions of loyalty and ownership at its heart.

Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson, Viking, 2021

In a South London pub a man and woman meet. Something starts between them, a connection that dodges definition. They’re both creatives, both scholarship kids who tried to fit in with their white peers, both sick of their friends matching the appearance of someone police are looking for.

This reads like stream of consciousness, a rhythmic parallel to the soundtrack of our narrator. It’s a very cerebral read and I picked it up with a flu fogged head and gave it a good go. I stayed the course for more than 100 pages but then abandoned ship. Not for me for right now.

The Grazier’s Son by Cathryn Hein, Harlequin, 2024

As mentioned, it’s been a bit of month, so it was nice that this month’s Books at the Bowlo author was rural romance writer Cathryn Hein. After hearing her talk about daydreaming along country roads, hero helicopter pilots and vintage fashion, I thought this might be just what I needed. Joining Stirling and Darcy on their bumpy road to happiness via embezzlement, infidelity, injuries and a surprise inheritance from an estranged father was just what I needed amidst my sneezing and sniffles.

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, Grove Press, 2015

A communist sleeper agent narrates this story during occupied Vietnam and in America after the fall of Saigon. I haven’t finished it yet but it’s right down there in the details. His voice is so distinct, incredibly dry yet conflicted about the compromises that are made and the moral questions of what he does. The bloody mess of war is not some aerial shot in this book. It’s right up close. The body count keeps climbing but unlike the faceless and expendable lives in an action movie, these people have names and families and lives they were living.

If you enjoyed reading this and want to hear about the next bookstack, subscribe to my bi-monthly newsletter below.

Processing…
Success! You're on the list.

The bedside bookstack – Summer 2023 & 2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this Summer.

Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell, Tinder Press, 2013

Wow!!! I already loved Maggie O’Farrell and marvelled at how it is she does what she does in Hamnet. I liked The Marriage Portrait and After You’d Gone but this is one of those books where I just had to keep putting it down for a moment and taking it in. The thought on repeat was Yep, that’s exactly how it is!

She just nails it in this one with her observations of young children, her recreation of parenting, her family dynamics which are that perfect mix of infuriating and endearing and of course how irritated and scratchy everyone gets in the heat. I loved everything about this book and want to reread it again to see if I can pinpoint the alchemy and find how this perfection is possible.

The Body Country by Susie Anderson, Hachette, 2023

This collection of poetry captures all moments great and small, the memory of a mother or riding on the back seat of the school bus. She shares how sacred some of life’s simpler moments can be. There is a strong sense of place, Country and culture throughout the collection and it’s just as good to have on the bedside and read one at a time as it is to just gobble up.  

Complement this with her interview on the First Time Podcast. She has some sage and beautiful words about process which I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about.

Games and Rituals by Katherine Heiny, 4th Estate, 2023

Love short stories. Tick. Big fan of Katherine Heiny. Tick. So, obviously her short story collection was very welcome under the Christmas tree. If you’re not familiar with Heiny from Early Morning Riser or Standard Deviation, let me prepare you. Expect giggles, bad decisions, regrettable sex, characters who walk to the beat of their own drum, plenty of ‘oh no she didn’t’,  the quotidian at its very best and worse and moments of truth so uncomfortable that you just need a moment to let it sink in.

Lioness by Emily Perkins, Bloomsbury, 2023

If you like angry ageing women having a gutful and shedding their usual social niceties, then this cracker of a book is for you. Throw in some wealthy voyeurism and pitch perfect blended family dynamics, personal identity and the ethics of privilege and it still doesn’t do justice to the energy and breadth of this story.

Therese comes from humble beginnings but has married older and into money. When her developer husband is accused of corruption she starts to question blind loyalty. At the same time her neighbour, Claire, is suddenly liberating herself from everything she’s been told to be as a woman – mother, wife, employee. She’s made strong by presence of something primal and innate and proximity to this makes Therese wonder who she is anymore after all these years of adapting and who she might be if she too just dropped the act.

The Sitter by Angela O’Keefe, UQP, 2023

In the early outbreak of COVID, an Australian writer sits in her Paris hotel room trying to write a book about Hortense Cezanne, Paul Cezanne’s wife. She often struggles with it and eventually it is her own story that comes out as a gift for her daughter.

Hortense narrates the story. She’s been released from the past and watches the writer as she moves through the motions. There’s a touch of the Claire Keegan in this story, in the unhurried actions and observations as women’s lives and regrets play out quietly.

Clock Dance by Anne Tyler, Chatto & Windus, 2018

This is only my second Anne Tyler. French Braidwas my first andI love loved how it was put together almost as a set of linked short stories. Clock dance is similar except the stories always follow Willa Drake and the final one is much longer than any of the others. We see the 24 hours her mother goes missing when she’s a teenager, the day she is incidentally proposed to in her twenties, the accident that kills her first husband 20-years later and the phone call she gets to come and look after the daughter of her son’s ex-girlfriend.

It’s hard to describe Anne Tyler but she’s all about the quotidian and relationships and for me that’s where all the gold is!

Salt River Road by Molly Schmidt, Fremantle Press, 2023

The previous three books I’ve read have been set in New York, Baltimore and Paris, so it was brilliant to be back under Southern skies in Molly Schmidt’s debut. It made me realise how important local stories and publishers are.

Set in Noongar country in South Western Australia, this follows the Tetley family and its five children in the immediate aftermath of their mother’s death. Grief, racism, legacy and family all play out under the hot sun and long days of a summer of loss.

Absolutely & Forever by Rose Tremain, Chatto & Windus, 2023

Marianne falls in love with Simon Hurst when she’s still at high school. She loses her virginity to him and they swap letters but then he moves to Paris. It’s 1960s England and her options to ‘make something of herself’ are down to marriage or secretarial work. She’d happily marry Simon but that’s not going to happen.

This is the story of a broken heart and how life does goes on, eventually.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, Vintage 2009

I only knew this as a movie from the mid-noughties. It had Kate and Leo who made it look good like they do with everything. I now know that though they’re good at what they do, a large part was because they had excellent material to work with.

The story is actually pretty depressing, two people who thought that they’d make more of themselves or for themselves desperately trying to revive (Him) and survive (her) their life together in the suburbs with two young kids.

It’s so oppressive and stifling but so magnificently written. With a light touch he scratches the surface and there it all is the gaslighting, power plays, dishonesties and desires that can get normalised in relationships and parade themselves around as love.

Cult Classic by Sloane Crosley, Bloomsbury, 2022

Lola is the chronically cynical, pithy quipping thirty-something we’ve come to expect from New York narrations. She’s engaged but unsure and suddenly starts bumping into ex-boyfriends everywhere.

I didn’t finish this one. It’s clever and funny and there’s plenty of people who love the super-cynic but I was sick in bed and needed a little more wonder and a little less over-everything in my life.

If you enjoyed reading this and want to hear about the next bookstack, subscribe to my bi-monthly newsletter below.

Processing…
Success! You're on the list.