Category Archives: Uncategorized

I found a couple of Kathleen Norris collections on Kindle, each containing a half dozen or so novels, and very cheap. Which is good, because after reading The Heart of Rachael and The Beloved Woman I’ve really gone off this … Continue reading →

The Sicilian summer was bringing out the abs and pecs again. It would once more reduce all movements to the consistency of molasses while enervating people with the sirocco, plague the countryside with tiger mosqitoes and forest fires, and make … Continue reading →

A mother, father and daughter living in an inner-urban house in a state of perpetual renovation. A visiting grandmother. And a little mini-lop rabbit. These are the protagonists of The Burrow, a short novel set in Melbourne during the final … Continue reading →

Off the blocks and running in the 2025 Reading Stakes. I’ve finished 3 books so far this year – all fiction, and one of them was even a recent, Australian, literary fiction title. A good start, since I struggled with … Continue reading →

While waiting for Kate Constable’s annual reading roundup, I thought I’d attempt my own. My record-keeping is not great, but with the help of this blog, the history on my library account, book group lists and a look at my … Continue reading →

Nearly the end of the year and the start of the next. I love the gap between Christmas and New Year; the week drifts by with no particular plan except to finish the leftovers and relax. Our son and his … Continue reading →

In museums, libraries and the landscape, a memory remains of a wilderness of unquiet graves, riddling marshes and storm-beaten cliffs. The stories to come and the commentaries that follow them were inspired by these memories, found in cultural artefacts whose … Continue reading →

I started reading The Children of Green Knowe by L M Boston for a Substack read-along (first I’ve ever done; will I do a knit-along next?), and immediately entered another world. It’s like being transported into a beautiful old-fashioned snow … Continue reading →

The idea that children’s writing is a lower form – a  brain-injured version of writing for adults, as (writer Martin Amis) Amis caricatured it – is as persistent as it is misguided. Children’s literature isn’t a defective and frivolous sidebar … Continue reading →

One of the gifts of growing older has been birds. My parents used to sit by the big window in this house, sometimes with binoculars or an old pair of opera glasses, and watch the birds in the garden. I … Continue reading →