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So You Want To Be A Book Reviewer Panel at Continuum 2018
I promised a run down of Continuum and I realised I would have to do it bit by bit so here is the first panel on being a book reviewer. So You Want To Be A Book Reviewer I was joined by Elizabeth Fitzgerald and Stephanie O’Connell (better known as Figgy). Figgy writes for a rock and roll magazine and so her reviewing tends to be mostly within that genre of books though they are expanding a bit to take in other genres. Elizabeth is an editor who has her own book review blog where she reviews science fiction and fantasy work. Me, I was the journalist book reviewer. I…
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Maudiegirl and the von Bloss Kitchen by Carl Muller
The first author I read this year is not an Australian female writer but a Sri Lankan male one. It was Carl Muller and his book Maudiegirl and the von Bloss Kitchen. I thought it would be prudent to try and read more POC authors this year as well as try to understand a bit more about my own English language literary background and read more Sri Lankan authors. Carl Muller can come across as crude. His stories about the Burghers (the mixed race descendants of European colonisers and native Sri Lankans) feature life in the raw as it was in what seems to be early 2oth century life in…
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The Paper House by Anna Spargo-Ryan
My heart fell out on a spring morning… ~ The Paper House by Anna Spargo-Ryan Grief is an ever present theme in Australian literature. We are a nation of writers fascinated by either lack or loss. That, in itself, intrigues me. And it intrigues me that much like Anna’s opening line here, that we never run out of ways to twist and use language to be able to describe so well the nuances of the nature of that grief. And language and the use of it is what strikes me so immediately with The Paper House. This is Anna’s first book, one she has worked on for ages, one that…
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Robin Bower’s Beyond Home
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Kerry Greenwood's Unnatural Habits
I discovered Greenwood quite by chance somewhere around 2007. And ever since I have eagerly awaited the next installment of a Phryne Fisher or Corrinna Chapman mystery. You can just imagine how thrilled I was when ABC started airing the TV series of Phryne Fisher last year. Accordingly I was excited to find a new offering – Phryne’s 19th outing Unnatural Habits. I bought it to read on my flight overseas at the end of the year and avoided it till I was in my plane seat. Phryne is much the same, the same devil may care attitude towards social conventions that don’t make any sense, the same thrill…
