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AWW Gen 0 Roundup
Australian Women Writers Gen 0 Week 14-21 Jan. 2024 Sun. Woman and Labour (1911), Olive Schreiner (wadh) Mon. Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft (Brona) Tue. Our Literary...
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Mrs Gaskell & Me & the Independent Woman
Australian Women Writers Gen 0 Week 14-21 Jan. 2024 For her second contribution to AWW Gen 0 Week Sue/Whispering Gums has reviewed Nell Stevens’ Mrs Gaskell & Me (2018), a hybrid memoir and...
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Light from Uncommon Stars, Ryka Aoki
Light from Uncommon Stars (2021) was recommended to me by one of you, Lou or Melanie probably – sorry I don’t remember – I bought it on Audible, listened, liked it and promptly forgot it (and forgot...
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No Longer at Ease, Chinua Achebe
Black Africa Project 2024 Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) was an Igbo man from Nigeria. It seems that prior to decolonization, identity was tribal rather than ‘national’; but after independence from Britain...
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Lazy Summer Days
Journal: 113 Denmark surf beach on a summers day Gee has chosen a lovely spot to settle and bring up my grandkids. The south-west coast is cooler and damper than the rest of the state, and that will...
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Orwell on Antisemitism
Brona’s Reading George Orwell 2024 As you can see from the date on the cover, Orwell is writing in the last two or three years of WWII. The essay I am reviewing here, Antisemitism in Britain, was...
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The Yellow Wall-Paper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Australian Women Writers Gen 0 Week 14-21 Jan. 2024 If, like me before last week, you haven’t read Gilman’s short story ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper‘ (1892), then follow the link to Project Gutenberg, and...
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Rose in Bloom & 1937
Journal: 114 I read Little Women for the first time just a few years ago, and then happened to see Rose in Bloom in a charity shop on the Murray Valley Hwy near Yarrawonga – I’d stopped to buy a pie...
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The Famished Road, Ben Okri
Black Africa Project 2024 Ben Okri was born in 1959, in Minna, in central Nigeria. His parents, who were Urhobo and Igbo, took him to England when he was 2, for his father to study law, and returned,...
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Son of Sin, Omar Sakr
Journal: 115 Omar Sakr is a thirty-ish, bi-sexual poet and writer “born in Western Sydney to Lebanese and Turkish Muslim migrants” (website). The protagonist of Son of Sin (2022), Jamal, is a young...
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Franny and Zooey, JD Salinger
JD Salinger (1919-2010) has always been my favourite prose stylist. He didn’t write much, and of that, until a couple of years ago I finally caught up with The Catcher in the Rye (1951), I had only...
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We Need New Names, NoViolet Bulawayo
Black Africa Project 2024 NoViolet Bulawayo (1981- ) was born in and lives in Zimbabwe. She went to the USA for her tertiary education, commencing with a community college in Kalamazoo, Michigan....
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Milly’s Moving. Again!
Journal: 116 Denmark ocean beach (Australian Geographic) That ‘Again!’ is a bit unfair, this should be the last one. Our daughter has come up with a really great opportunity for Milly to buy and build...
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In a Wilderness of Mirrors, Ric Throssell
Ric Throssell (1922-1999) was the only child of Katherine Susannah Prichard and Hugo Throssell. He was a soldier in New Guinea in WWII, then a diplomat, which he remained until 1983 despite his career...
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Worth Wile, PC Wren
1937 Club I collected PC Wrens in my teens and twenties, old, heavy papered, clothbound editions from John Murray’s “Imperial Library” mostly, though Dad found me a Beau Geste with a dustjacket for...
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ANZAC Day and Empire
Al-Jarmaq News: Shatie refugee camp, (Twitter, March 2024) In writing this blog, I’ve never hidden my politics, but mostly kept them at least in the background, not that we don’t all quite often...
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Working, Reading
Journal: 117 There are only two bitumen roads out of Western Australia, the Eyre Highway across the Nullarbor, and the Great Northern Hwy through to Katherine and Darwin (and a year ago, the northern...
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The Opposite of a Person, Lieke Marsman
If people were evil, and I wished to be good, then I had to make sure I was the opposite of a person. How did I come to buy this unusual book (on kindle)? I have no idea. Whoever’s review it was that...
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American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
I have no interest at all in violent movies, nor do I normally read violent books, but I have been curious about the status of American Psycho (1991) as a post modern classic since interviewing...
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The House of Rust, Khadija Abdalla Bajaber
Black Africa Project 2024 Khadija Abdalla Bajaber is a young woman, as you can see, Kenyan – from Mombasa – and of Hadrami descent. I came to the The House of Rust (2021) via Marcie/BIP pointing out...
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