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Showing posts from June 27, 2021

“We soon found ourselves becalmed, the Steadfast languishing on glassy seas. When a breath of wind at last appeared, our progress was slowed again, this time by a massing of strange organisms. For days we laboured through the milky soup of a jellyfish bloom – millions of alien blobs crowding the water like malignant cells, their tentacles strung with debris, dragging at the hull.”

Beach wandering, Moorina Bay, Bruny Island. June 2021. The Trespassers  by Meg Mundell An entertaining little thriller set in a future in which climate change, an energy crisis, and a global pandemic throw the world askew. Mundell has used this conceit to explore notions of emigration, xenophobia, corporate greed, political cowardice and capitalism run rampant. The narrative unwinds through three distinctive voices: a formidable (but bruised) Glaswegian nurse-turned nightclub singer; the reserved English schoolteacher from a family fallen from wealth; and a deaf nine-year-old Irish lad cut adrift with just his mother by his side. I can't say that each character thoroughly convinced me, but the occasional jarring of inauthenticity did not hinder the story from moving along briskly. More jolting was a considerable shift from a claustrophobic murder mystery novel set at sea to a more nebulous political thriller. As I said, I liked it well enough, and I am always keen to read a sharp c

"As I lay there half-reclining, with blood streaming down from my head and hands, a North Vietnamese soldier appeared literally a metre away over a slight rise. My first reacion was, ‘What a fantastic shot!’ "

 A white-bellied sea eagle, Queen Elizabeth Cape, Bruny Island. June 2021. One Crowded Hour by Tim Bowden Neil Davis was the kind of man that I suspect would be decidedly out of place in the modern world. A Tasmanian who found himself struck by wanderlust in the 1960s and set out to southeast Asia to record the seemingly endless turmoil and upheaval seen there. Encompassing the Konfrontasi , the early ruptures of fighting in South Vietnam, the full-blown war in Vietnam, the overthrow of Suharto and descent into the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66, the flow of neighbouring wars into Laos and Burma and, most vitally to Davis himself, the destruction of Cambodia, the madness of the Khmer Rouge genocide and subsequent invasion by Vietnam. As close a friend to Neil Davis as anyone could be, Bowden has done an exceptional job compiling this autobiography. I did not expect to find so much joy in his formative years, which often feel like a makeweight in such books. Sorell and Hobart (part

“When a person undergoes such a drastic transformation, there's simply nothing anyone else can do but sit back and let them get on with it.”

Archway, Bruny Island. June 2021. The Vegetarian  by Han Kang My apologies; I am just not interested in mental illness porn. I found the book a turgid crawl through the mundanities of pain and misery. I am not a huge believer in trigger warnings (lest they spoil an invaluable experience), but this is a novel best avoided by anyone with an eating disorder. I can’t be certain if the author chooses to be deliberately strange or something that has been lost in translation is intrinsically and darkly peculiar. Either way, this was not a pleasurable read. ⭐ 1/2