The Write Advice is an interesting collection of affirmations and sayings that you can enjoy whenever you need a little inspiration, to get yourself going, or just for a laugh. This is a neatly presented, well chosen group of sayings that can prove valuable for both changing your mindset, and finding camaraderie and support from the most lofty sources.
Category: Book Reviews
Book Reviews
A review of The Steele Diaries by Wendy James
The novel is easy to read and moves quickly, effortlessly creating that fictive dream that makes for a pleasurable reading experience, but this is anything but a lighthearted read. The complexities of parenting, the shifting trends of the art world, the struggle to balance self-actualisation and artistic fulfilment with responsibility and love, the way we create and define ourselves, and the relationship between the interior world and the exterior one are all covered with great subtlety and depth.
A review of Good Americans Go to Paris When They Die by Howard Waldman
There’s a spare loveliness to Waldman’s prose, infused as it is with loneliness, humour, and a deep sense of irony in the cyclical prison of our nostalgia for the past. Good Americans Go To Paris When They Die manages a delicate, and all too rare, balancing act between entertainment and introspection.
A review The Man Who made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren by Jonathan Lopez
There’s a spare loveliness to Waldman’s prose, infused as it is with loneliness, humour, and a deep sense of irony in the cyclical prison of our nostalgia for the past. Good Americans Go To Paris When They Die manages a delicate, and all too rare, balancing act between entertainment and introspection.
A review of Dirty Money by Richard Stark
Stark as a crime writer is beyond criticism. He does pretty much everything well. The way he writes dialogue, especially scenes where three or more people are talking, is well worthy of study. His art as a storyteller is to create problematical situations, uncertainties, iffy anxious stuff – and then to resolve them in a felicitous manner.
A review of Qmin by Anil Ashokan
Ashokan has come up with some nice options that are still Indian, but light, and so nicely presented, that you could serve them to the Queen. Most don’t take hours and hours of reducing either, which is another problem I’ve encountered with Indian desserts. The Kulfi has been drastically simplified by using condensed milk, and when served with figs and walnuts, it’s really lovely.
A review of Superior Saturday by Garth Nix
He creates amazing traps for his characters, some they can’t escape. (Of course, there are also monsters, puzzles and huge waves made of Nothing!) Then he wraps things up astonishingly, leaving with a cliffhanger that makes you hungrily crave the next book.
A review of Swimming with Crocodiles by Will Chaffey
This sense of both the fragility of nature, and the fragility of man within nature, becomes an underlying theme that carries Swimming with Crocodiles (Picador Australia) beyond simply a travelogue. We begin to identify with Chaffey as a character, and his development becomes meaningful, but we also put his experience into our own context, and it therefore becomes meaningful to us.
A review of The After Life: a memoir by Kathleen Stewart
Kathleen Stewart’s memoir is poetic, courageous, and shocking. She shows how children can be so badly treated, how women can be so badly treated, how the mentally ill can be so inadequately treated, that they can destroy themselves and others and the world continues on, oblivious.
A review of God of Speed by Luke Davies
Though Davies’ Hughes isn’t exactly a likable character, the intimacy is so striking and the intensity of the portrait so great that Hughes becomes someone entirely familiar. Not so much the grand aviator with all the superlatives of his status: richest, fastest, most inventive, but instead, a man like any other, pursued by demons and running hard to find a way to live through them.