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Tim Winton’s The Turning (2013)
Last night I went to a preview screening of Tim Winton’s The Turning, presented by director and producer Robert Connolly. The book it’s based on is a collection of seventeen short stories from one of...
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11.22.63 by Stephen King
Early in Stephen King’s time travel story, 11.22.63, protagonist Jake Epping has settled in to the town of Derry in the late 1950s (those familiar with King’s oeuvre will recognise Derry as the...
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Commentary: Mastering Meaning – The Futile Search for Answers in The Master
Epiphanies about art are few and far between. You remember them. So it goes with me and Grade 7 English, when we analysed George Orwell’s Animal Farm. As my teacher unpacked the meaning and symbolism...
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Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian is a fitting title for Cormac McCarthy’s brutal anti-western. The book is heavy with blood, thick streams of the arterial liquid pooling and coagulating at its dark heart. McCarthy...
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Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
One of my favourite novels is Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451, a document that posits a futuristic dystopia where books and liberty alike are immolated in streams of fire. It’s touching and prescient and...
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Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk
Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club – through Tyler Durden – stated that “self-improvement is masturbation. Now, self-destruction…” Invisible Monsters – written before Fight Club but released afterwards – is...
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The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
The Goldfinch is the third novel in just over twenty years from Donna Tartt, an author whose first novel The Secret History remains one of my favourite books of all time. The Goldfinch is an inspired,...
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Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
The metaphor at the heart of Cat’s Cradle is the titular cat’s cradle, a mess of string criss-crossing into a web of X’s. But why the name? Where’s the cat? Where’s the cradle? This confusion and...
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Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee
The Nobel Prize winning Diary of a Bad Year is a structurally unique piece of reflexivity, presented as three distinct texts combined on each page: the first, a piece of left-wing political commentary...
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Remembering Terry Pratchett
Two and a half months ago, Terry Pratchett passed away. I didn’t say, or write much about it at the time. It felt wrong to expound upon my feelings about the man. Despite the fact that he’s my...
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