I’m at a bit of a loss when it comes to reviewing audiobooks – without being able to easily note favourite passages, I get to the end of the book with little ‘evidence’ of what I liked (or didn’t like).
I guess it’s worth mentioning narrators – in the case of these three, Perlman and Gilmore read their own work (I like hearing an author read their own work), and the Jordan is read by Caroline Lee, whose narration is always enjoyable.
Any thoughts on reviewing audiobooks? Continue reading
Seems there’s lots of good reading to be done this year (have I ever started a year not thinking the same…? No). Continue reading
Here’s my year in books (with thanks to the Goodreads record keeping tool): Continue reading
It’s a terrible thing to compare one Holocaust story with another…. But it’s kind of what we do when we read about a topic that interests us, isn’t it? Continue reading
Book: Continue reading
My May rewind includes one of the best books I’ve read in the last decade (hint: striiiiiike!) Continue reading
I’m a bit fickle when it comes to tele. I go through stages when I get sucked into a series and then other times, I hardly watch a thing. The last two months have been so busy and disrupted that I’ve gone days without turning on the television (actually, there was a two-week stretch of no tele in there…). But I’m feeling like some binge-watching, some new shows to hook me. Continue reading
Fairly sure I said something about not reading much about the Holocaust in the last decade or so because I overdid it in the eighties and nineties… Anyway, seems that went out the window when I read The Street Sweeper by Elliot Perlman and The Toy Maker by Liam Pieper, one after the other.
The books are similar in many ways – both tell the story of an Australian man living in the present alongside the story of a Holocaust survivor; both are set in the ‘Canada’ barracks at Auschwitz–Birkenau and examine the role of the Sonderkommando; both have themes of good versus evil, penance, and the measure of crime; both show that there are lessons in history.
“History can provide comfort in difficult or even turbulent and traumatic times. It shows us what our species has been through before and that we survived. It can help to know we’ve made it through more than one dark age. And history is vitally important because perhaps as much as, if not more than biology, the past owns us and however much we think we can, we cannot escape it. If you only knew how close you are to people who seem so far from you… it would astonish you.” (Perlman)
My recap of today’s Melbourne Writers Festival session, Barracuda: From Page to Screen will hardly do it justice – needless to say, the session was fantastic. Continue reading
