If you’re an artist–an author, a painter, a musician or an actor–who has chosen to live a creative life, you can’t avoid anxiety. It’s part of the process, inherent in the work you do. Coming to grips with that anxiety can be the difference between working and not working, which can be the difference between a fulfilled life that has meaning and one that is unsatisfying and meaningless.
Category: Book Reviews
Book Reviews
A review of Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg
So Writing Down the Bones isn’t just a guide for writers to write better, it’s a guide for living better and for integrating that life with work that is immensely meaningful. This is a book that will open doors of perception that won’t be closed again when you close the pages.
A review of FireSong by Aaron Paul Lazar
The story of the Underground Railroad is also compelling and Lazar handles the history beautifully, deftly weaving it into the story, and allowing the reader to discover and enjoy each piece of information along with Gus and Camille. Managing a delicate balance between action and reflection, Lazar’s latest book FireSong is a delightfully satisfying read full of warmth, humour and drama.
A review of If You Go Into the Woods by David Gaughran
If You Go Into the Woods is probably not best suited to readers who prefer their stories neatly boxed with all the answers lined up. But for those readers who, like me, love punchy, entertaining reads with a bit of mental gymnastics thrown in, you can’t go wrong with this one.
A review of Selected Poems of Dorothy Hewett edited by Kate Lilley
By the time the work gets to “Days of Violence days of Rages”, the extended poem becomes an incantation of pain moving Alice through an entire lifetime of sex, communism, childbirth, betrayal, loneliness, illness and death. It’s both intensely powerful and at the same time, self-indulgent and bitter.
A review of The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales by Mark Samuels
What makes this a fun collection to read is the mode of writing in the same style as those early horror tales with formal language and settings built as if they existed in the netherworld. These are stories where everyone seems to whisper and creep, except they aren’t very predictable.
A review of The Moral Lives of Animals by Dale Peterson
Dale Peterson takes the unusual angle of examining how evolution has shaped animal behavior in the area of cooperation. He uses research in cell biology to talk about the limbic brain, emotional responses to things like tickling, fear, grief and love
A review of Five Bells by Gail Jones
This is a novel that, like Slessor’s poem, explores time, and the way in which it flows between and across character. When Ellie, James, and their pivotal teacher Miss Morrison learn about the Clepsydra – the Chinese clock that consists of vessels that leak time, Ellie and James are excited. Time is a process “of emptying and filling, a fluent time-passing, not one chopped into pieces.”
A review of According to Luke by Rosanne Dingli
It isn’t just the natural world that is richly described, but also the iconic places that the characters visit, from the Saydnaya convent in Damascus to the Rabat Priory in Malta, along with the many paintings and sculptures, all described with the kind of meticulous detail that helps the reader sympathise with the love that Jana has for the places and work.
A review of How to Survive a Natural Disaster by Margaret Hawkins
How to Survive a Natural Disaster is, in turns, a disturbing and very funny novel of frailty, change, and a kind of survival. Each of the characters makes multiple transformations, both internal and external, that move between appearance and the reality underneath. Artifices come and go and finally disappear by the book’s end.