It’s really not a Top Ten Tuesday without me bending the rules a little…
This week’s topic (hosted by The Broke and the Bookish) is all about favourite covers of books that you’ve read. It’s an ace topic as I have been known to judge a book by its cover. Rather than look back on jacket art that I have loved (and read), I looked at my TBR stack and picked out ten books that I bought based on the cover. Yes, I’m that shallow. Continue reading
First Chapter, First Paragraph Tuesday is hosted by Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea – it’s is a weekly meme where you share the first paragraph (or two) from a book you are considering reading.
I love lad-lit. I’m fairly sure the genre is yet to be sullied by stuff that’s churned out to keep up with demand but then again, maybe I’ve just managed to hit on the best of what’s on offer. Love Monkey by Kyle Smith shows great lad-lit promise – humour, an over-analysis of relationships and a comparison to High Fidelity. Yay! Continue reading
I couldn’t resist a coming-of-age story about footy and my home town, Melbourne (not to mention the fact that it’s Australian Literature Month, hosted by Reading Matters) – so I picked up Eleven Seasons by Paul D. Carter.
“Melbourne, 1985. Jason Dalton sits on his bed and counts his football cards, dreaming of the day he too is immortalized in the public eye. He’s young and gifted, a natural player who can do anything with the ball in his hand. If only everything else in his life was as obvious to him as playing. Gold Coast, 1991. The bottom has fallen out of Jason’s life; he’s now a high-school dropout, tired and wasted on the Gold Coast, with an explosive family secret still ringing in his ears. He needs to get his life back. But first he needs to find out who he is.”
The aspect of this book that appealed to me most was the setting – Melbourne in the eighties and early nineties (despite the blurb above, it’s not about Brisbane). More specifically, Eleven Seasons is set in the suburbs where I grew up (and where I still live) – references to Victoria Park in Hawthorn, Burnley train station, the Fun Factory in South Yarra and a crumby student flat opposite the cemetery in Carlton could have all been scenes lifted from my life.
“They park on Drummond Street, half a kilometre from Princes Park, in what Dean calls ‘the secret spot’ – a disused parking bay behind housing commission flats.” (every footy fan has a ‘secret parking spot’) Continue reading
This is what’s at my front door this week.
Yes, it’s footy season. That special time when my weekends are planned around junior football. In a new family best, we have six separate footy commitments in the weekly schedule, not including trying to get to see these guys:
I enjoy watching it (preferably Carlton but I have been known to attend any old game) and I particularly love watching my own kids play, whether it be a match or kick-to-kick in the backyard.
I also don’t mind reading about footy. Honestly, I don’t get into the Herald-Sun’s weekly 80-page football lift-out but I don’t mind a football theme in a story. I have four on my winter to-be-read list: Continue reading
Are you familiar with the nursery rhyme ‘There was an old woman who swallowed a fly…’? Eleven by Mark Watson is a sophisticated version of that.
The story centres around radio DJ Xavier Ireland, whose single action, or rather lack of action, has a domino effect in the lives of eleven people living around him in the city of London.
There’s elements of Sliding Doors in this book – every so often the narrator hits the fast forward button and you get a glimpse at the fate of a particular character –
“Jamie – who lives in the garden flat downstairs, and will one day develop an antibody against two kinds of cancer…” and “The owner of the corner shop, a cheerful paunchy middle-aged Indian man who will die in three years’ time, puts Xavier’s items into a blue plastic bag…”
The story is carefully crafted, the crossover moments between the characters, seamless. I’m sure it’s far more difficult to mesh so many characters stories than Watson makes it appear. Continue reading
Bravo! It’s as good as This is Where I Leave You.
I’ve read lots of Jonathan Tropper since I happened across This is Where I Leave You a year ago. It was a remarkable book – it had me laughing out loud and bawling my eyes out within the space of one page. The books I’ve read of Tropper’s since then have been terrific but lacked the emotional vulnerability of This is Where I Leave You. Until now. Tropper’s latest book, One Last Thing Before I Go, has it all – lots of laughs, plenty of tears and beautifully vivid characters.
One Last Thing Before I Go is the story of Drew Silver, a guy who has made the odd mistake in life – his fleeting fame as the drummer for a one-hit wonder rock band is nearly a decade behind him. He lives in the Versailles, an apartment building filled almost exclusively with divorced men like him, and makes a living playing in wedding bands. His ex-wife, Denise, is about to marry a guy Silver can’t quite bring himself to hate. And his Princeton-bound teenage daughter Casey has just confided in him that she’s pregnant—because Silver is the one she cares least about letting down. Continue reading
Warning: don’t read this book after you’ve had abdominal surgery. I laughed so much that I feared I’d undo my surgeon’s handiwork.
My first thought when I began reading Matthew Norman’s debut novel, Domestic Violets, was ‘surely he’s not an American’ – the style of humour was altogether too cutting, too sarcastic and too dry – much more like what I’d expect from an Australian or British author. Needless to say, I liked it. Very much (and yes, Norman is American). Continue reading
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature created and hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Each week a new ‘top ten’ challenge is posted – anyone can join in. This week’s topic is a ‘read alike’ – in other words, pick a book and then suggest ten similar books that readers might also enjoy.
The book I have selected is Nick Hornby’s About a Boy. Hornby is perhaps the godfather of ‘lad lit’ (also known as ‘dick-lit’) – whilst I don’t ever imagine my husband would be tempted by my bookshelf full of Candace Bushnell, Sophie Kinsella and Jennifer Weiner, I often stray into ‘lad lit’ – basically they’re still stories about relationships (from a male perspective) and they’re usually very funny. So the same as chick-lit, without the hot pink cover!
If you haven’t read any Nick Hornby, start with that (and no, seeing the movie of About a Boy starring Hugh Grant doesn’t count). Here are ten more lad-lit titles to check out: Continue reading