Things That Are Making Me Happy This Week

01. Best night at the Wheeler Centre seeing Sloane Crosley. She talked about writing both fiction and nonfiction, noting that “In complimenting fiction, people say ‘It’s so believable, so realistic’ but in complimenting memoir they say ‘It’s unbelievable!’”. Plus I was thrilled to hear that there’s a movie script for Cult Classic underway, and that her new work of narrative nonfiction focuses on grief (Grief is for People, out next year). Continue reading

I’m waiting for… 2022 edition

Proving that I don’t actually care about my never-really-shrinking-TBR-list is this list of new releases that are on my radar for 2022. Continue reading

Melbourne Writers Festival 2019

The MWF 2019 program was announced at 7pm. I’ve been busy since then making long lists of authors, events, dates and times.

The theme this year is ‘When We Talk About Love’. I LOVE the graphics and that sparkly heart (and a friend quite rightly pointed out that they need to have this vase everywhere, at all the venues). Continue reading

How Did You Get This Number by Slone Crosley

If I was to follow Slone Crosley’s rules*, I’d have been to Kilwa Kivinje in Tanzania.

Crossley’s essay collection, How Did You Get This Number, opens with a piece about her visit to Lisbon. At age 30, she decided that she ought to fulfil a preteen promise to herself, ‘…that one day I would spin [a globe] and point and travel wherever my finger landed.”

Okay, I’ll wait while you rush off to spin a globe and see where you land. I know you want to. Please report your result. Continue reading

20 Books of Summer (except that it’s Winter)

Cathy at 746 Books is hosting the 20 Books of Summer reading challenge again this year. As Cathy states, it’s the most relaxed reading challenge you’ll participate in (swap books out, change your target, do whatever). Continue reading

The Clasp by Sloane Crosley

Last week I visited Canberra, and popped into the Cartier exhibition at the National Gallery. It was spectacular. In fact, it was so sparkly it was obscene (it’s hard to believe that emeralds and rubies as big as golf balls are the real thing).

So it was fitting that my holiday reading was Sloane Crosley’s first novel, The Clasp. Continue reading

20 Books of Summer (except that it’s Winter)

Cathy at 746 Books is hosting the 20 Books of Summer reading challenge again this year. By Cathy’s own admission, she doesn’t have a great track record with her own challenge… But I do! As I’ve done in previous years, I’m using this challenge to read from my to-be-read stack (with a particular focus on hard copies). The challenge is straightforward – read twenty books between June 1st and September 3rd. Continue reading