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Tweet from Marisa Wikramanayake (@mwikramanayake)
https://t.co/3wTfCwP8kr
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Book review: Ben Marcus' The Age of Wire & String
Ben Marcus – The Age of Wire & String I’m reviewing books for the West Australian. Here is the one from last Tuesday that I only just found an online link for. Buy a copy every Tuesday & the weekend to see what I review & follow along on Twitter: @mwikramanayake
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Alison Morton's Inceptio
No, I did not make a spelling error – it is Inceptio NOT Inception. If you think it sounds like a thriller, you would be right. If you thought it sounded like a Dan Brown novel you will be gratified to know that you were wrong. Dan Brown could do with a few lessons from Ms Morton. All stories start with a “What if?” moment. But here the “What if?” moment is colossally huge. What if at the end of the Roman Empire, a group of citizens struck out and formed a small nation-state to continue living the way they had in Rome and that country persisted through the ages, adapting to become…
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Australian Women Writers Challenge, Book Reviews, Events, IPEd Con 2013, Journalism, Political journalism, Projects, Science journalism, Updates
Where have I been?
Recovering mostly. The conference is over. But the organisation part of it isn’t. There are accounts to be finalised and even now, still a lot of emails to answer. So let me digress to answer the most often asked question via email now: Conference proceedings will be posted on the website and you will all be emailed to be told when they get uploaded. But what else have I been up to? Well, I have had a particularly weird and busy time of it and a lot of it has involved writing. So without further ado, here is the list: I have reviewed: Amanda Curtin’s Elemental which will end up in…
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Caitlyn Nicholas' Drive Me To Distraction
Note: Apologies for missing one week, readers. I was ill. Hopefully, I will catch up fast. I didn’t intend to read romance novels for the challenge. Romance novels are not really my thing. Mostly because I have had past bad experience with many a cliche and many a bodice being ripped by some soldier in the 1800s. But then I got a link sent to me for Caitlyn Nicholas’ Kindle version of Drive Me To Distraction. And for once it wasn’t a cover image of a couple in a wanted/unwanted embrace. It was a car and a woman dressed in jeans staring straight at you. Also there was “distraction” in the title…
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AWW 2013: Marion Halligan's Murder On The Apricot Coast
When I first found this book, I was thrilled. Crime fiction is the genre I love diving into and it always thrills me to find a potentially interesting, intriguing new crime fiction author I haven’t found before. And then I realised it was the sequel, not the first offering in the series. So I searched the shop in vain for another Halligan but there was none to be found. I didn’t want to miss something by reading them out of order. Eventually I walked out of the shop with Murder On The Apricot Coast in my hands. And I started reading. There is the promised murder of course but there also…
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Real men do read – they just don't let the sexy, geek goddesses know.
Rob Kennedy, an Australian poet (and male for the purposes of this discussion) asked this question in a blog post recently: Do real men read books?* He had several issues with this question: What the hell constitutes a “real man” anyway? To which I nod my head furiously because yes, what the hell are we discussing when we talk about “real men”? What makes one man more “real” than the next, apart from the fact that maybe he isn’t some intangible figure in your brain…… moving on. The reason he asked the question in the first place was because he had found a lot of American based programs and websites…
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AWW 2013: Ann-Marie Priest's Great Writers, Great Loves
I am not entirely sure where I picked it up from. But I live in Fremantle where there are three Elizabeth Bookshops and a plethora of other bookstores and secondhand bibliophile’s havens (or heavens if you prefer). Its prior home could have been anywhere but most probably had an address within the Fremantle post code. But I like writing and I like anything to do with Virginia Woolf so of course it somehow came home with me. Priest’s idea is not a new one. People often comment and ask writers which character in book X is based on them. Readers often assume that what is discussed in a novel, though…
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AWW 2013: Amanda Curtin's Inherited
Precision is what comes to my mind, first. Amanda Curtin likes to write about connections, between person to person, between person and object, person and landscape. And about how those connections make us feel. Or why they are unique to us. Why they don’t make any sense or at least a different kind of sense to others. The back cover blurb for the book tells us: Inherited brings together stories about the gifts and burdens we inherit from the world or from those we love, and what we, in turn, leave behind. Inherited is her latest collection of short stories. And every word in each story belongs…
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AWW 2013: Marj McRae's Not A Man
“The hero is an eunuch.” said the author Marj McRae. “Wait, what?” was my reaction. She emailed me the link, I downloaded Not A Man in e-book form and dove in. An eunuch – I expected there to be a few descriptions of not so very nice things – violence and rape. I mean, it’s a young boy being castrated. And frankly, I was stunned by the level of research and detail. I now know a lot of very interesting things about castration and about Oxford. That’s right, Oxford. As in Oxford University. You see, Shuki, is not content with the fate of other eunuchs – lovable as along as…
