Jennifer Byrne from the First Tuesday Book Club on ABC1 says her comfort book is Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk. She read it when she was a teenager and it resonated. It’s the story of a Jewish teenager in the 1930s, living in New York with dreams of becoming an actress – she falls in love [...]
Review
See… now the logo makes sense! I don’t usually do restaurant reviews on this blog but Friday night we went to Pata Negra, the new Tapas bar open on Stirling Highway… opposite my fave Vietnamese restaurant TQR. It was fantastic. The food was ALL good. Of course I am rubbish when it comes to Tapas. [...]
You know I liked the Twilight series, so it should come as no surprise to learn I went to the movie. In fact I went with three other mums in Dippity’s class – with the four girls who sat a few rows in front of us. Sit with their mothers? You’ve got to be joking. [...]
I think this is Tim Winton’s best novel. He has lost his earlier pretentiousness. His writing is spare, evocative and compelling. The tale is told by a paramedic in his 50s who attends an accidental hanging. He knows it’s accidental because of events in his youth, and so you are drawn into this tale of coming [...]
I had no interest in picking up Helen Garner’s latest novel The Spare Room. Helen has always seemed a little worthy, a little hard core for me. I based this assessment on what I’d seen of her in the media and some vague memory of her writing something on sexual harassment… I haven’t actually read [...]
I like Val McDermid’s writing. I always have. From Wire in the Blood to her lighter novels, they never fail to entertain. Highly descriptive, great character profiles, a page-turning plot. In The Grave Tattoo the action centres around the discovery of a 200 year old body in the peat of the Lakes District. The body [...]
First of all, I LOVED Gone With the Wind. The sweeping saga, the feisty heroine, the dashing, rich, and rather butch hero… with a soft side. *Swoon* And I’ve not loved sequels written by random authors. It was there on the “new” table at the library and well, what was a girl to do? I [...]
Remember how we won that quiz nite way back in July? Well last night we used the prize – a $500 voucher at Lamonts in Cottesloe. Winners are grinners. This is another Kate Lamont restaurant to go with the East Perth posh dining and the more rustic fare in the Swan Valley. The business model [...]
This Jane Austen novel has at it’s heart an anti-heroine. Miss Fanny Price is invited to live with her rich uncle, aunt and cousins as an act of charity and is treated perhaps a little unfairly, a little more strictly. Made to feel her inferiority. She is a prim and proper miss. Timid and shy. [...]
Donna Tartt doesn’t write many books. It was at least ten years between The Secret History – which I loved – and this new novel The Little Friend. Donna Tartt’s books are dense novels. Rich novels. Long novels. At the end you feel intimately connected with her characters (possibly because it has taken so long [...]
