One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

Bee! Bath Street, Sandy Bay. October 2011.

Two books this week, both very different.

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald features a small town filled with odd characters who are at once marvellously horrid, pathetic and courageous.

It’s a short novel, and with an oddly unredemptive conclusion (which is generally up my alley). As it is, the chief moral is the ways in which bullies can be given enormous power by lots of people not bothering to do very small things.

One of the chief pleasures of this book is the vivid recreation of time and place: a bleak seaside village during the late-1950s in a Suffolk, England. The weather and the topography of the area are characters in themselves.

I've really enjoyed everything I have read by Fitzgerald, and The Bookshop is no different. Highly recommended.

The Comfort of Strangers is Ian McEwan's second novel, a tale set in Venice that explores a disintegrating English couple that endeavour to resurrect their relationship through a series of encounters with a peculiar local couple.

This tale of sexual perversion and obsession is not for everybody. It's well constructed and has a slow build towards an horrific climax. Not for the faint-heartened.

Comments

Daydreamer said…

I like Dean Koontz weird tales but I do like this his usually end up with good triumphing over evil. Not so sure I could read your 2nd offering here.
Thanks for visiting my blog.

21 October 2011 at 09:33

Leovi said…

Delicious photo, that bee will produce a rich rosemary honey.

21 October 2011 at 10:14

Kris McCracken said…

Daydreamertoo, it has a rather dark heart.

Leovi, that's the hope!

1 November 2011 at 14:28

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral...

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke...

In dreams begin responsibilities.

A life at sea, that's for me, only I just don't have the BREAD. That's right, Theme Thursday yet again and I post a photo of a yacht dicking about in Bass Strait just off Wynyard. The problem is, I am yet again stuck at work, slogging away, because I knead need the dough . My understanding is that it is the dough that makes the BREAD. And it is the BREAD that buys the yacht. On my salary though, I will be lucky to have enough dough or BREAD for a half dozen dinner rolls. Happy Theme Thursday people, sorry for the rush.

This will hurt me...

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