I’ve been meaning to add video content to LiteraryMinded for yonks! I’ve interviewed authors on stage, I’ve read my own work aloud, I can write about books - but speaking alone into a camera is an entirely different kettle of fish…
Tag Archives: book review
Guest review: Chris Flynn on Justin Cronin’s The Passage
September 7, 2010 – 5:30 pm
The Passage Justin Cronin (Aus, US) Orion 9780752897851 Reviewed by Chris Flynn It’s funny how movies influence books so much these days. The fact that The Passage was optioned by Sir Ridley Scott for $1.75 million within a week of Cronin settling on a $3.75 million publishing deal for his vampire apocalypse trilogy is unsurprising [...]
Read and Seen: Revolutionary Road
February 17, 2009 – 10:49 pm
The first in a series of simultaneous book and film reviews by LiteraryMinded‘s Angela Meyer and Celluloid Tongue‘s Gerard Elson. Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates (orig. 1961, several editions: Aus, US) Angela says… Revolutionary Road opens with a moody series of observances and a sense of foreboding – 1955, Western Connecticut, settled yet restless characters, cars too [...]
The Comfort of Figs by Simon Cleary
December 16, 2008 – 7:29 am
9780702236433, UQP, 2008 (Australia) This book opens in the past, with the sight of a body falling from a bridge. In the present, Robert O’Hara makes small gestures – planting fig trees, comforting his distraught girlfriend after an attack on them both, easing his way into an old man’s life to learn the secrets of his [...]
Seduce Me by Megan Clark
November 11, 2008 – 7:48 am
9780758209818, Kensington Fiction, 2008 (Aus, US) So it begins and ends with sex, and there’s a whole lot of juicy business in the middle, but Seduce Me also has an intriguing storyline and vivid, memorable characters. Megan Clark utilises the characters’ sexualities to round them out – desires, fulfillments, vulnerabilities and disappointments. Carissa has a [...]
Late Connections by Aileen La Tourette
September 16, 2008 – 7:20 pm
2008, Ilura Press, 978921325052 It’s a shame to read a story that feels as though it has been wrestled into the wrong medium. Aileen La Tourette’s Late Connections might have made a good dramatic play with its style, overt exposition, and historical setting. We begin in Paris, where seamstress Annie Doulard works on the dress [...]
Blood & Tinsel: A Memoir by Jim Sharman
August 3, 2008 – 6:13 pm
9780522853773, Miegunyah Press, August, HB (Aus, US) A version of this review was first published in the June 2008 issue of BOOKSELLER+PUBLISHER magazine (c) 2008 Thorpe-Bowker (a division of RR Bowker LLC). Jim Sharman relays the story of his life rhythmically, like a play or film. Childhood memories of boxing sideshows are cut between [...]
The Miernik Dossier by Charles McCarry
May 18, 2008 – 5:24 pm
Scribe, February – Trade Paperback, 9781921215605 (Aus, US) Scribe have wisely decided to reinvigorate cold war spy novel The Miernik Dossier , which centres around paranoia, suspicion and misconceptions. A mixed band of secret agents (American, British, African and suspected Soviet) travel from Switzerland, through Eastern Europe to the Sudan. American spy Paul Christopher attempts [...]
The Spell Book of Listen Taylor – Jaclyn Moriarty
January 10, 2008 – 7:19 am
Macmillan, September 2007, 9780330423489 (Young Adult) (Review first published in Viewpoint, vol. 15, no. 4, Summer 2007) The Zing family have a secret. Every Friday night they meet in the garden shed to discuss it. Listen Taylor’s Dad has just moved in with Marbie Zing. Listen wonders if it might be the secret of happy [...]
The Children by Charlotte Wood
October 27, 2007 – 9:25 am
9781741753356, Allen & Unwin, 2007 The perfect book for me is one that is about the extraordinariness of everyday life – the things that human beings acknowledge, and the things they deny; the amazement, comfort and simultaneous hurt in personal relationships; the wealth beneath the surface, but also the necessity of surfaces. Charlotte Wood looks [...]
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