This will hurt me...

  Dude on half a motorbike, Shag Bay. August 2021. The Humans   by Matt Haig Synthesizing 'clever' and 'funny' is a tough act in a novel. Too often, what is intended as humourous can land as smug or smarmy. Or, perhaps more often, tiresome and dull. Credit to Haig here, as I found  The Humans  both smug AND dull. The whole thing was just so obvious, laborious descended into a sickly sweet tweeness that was clearly intended to be sincere and wry. Perhaps it was my mood, as looking at other reviews here, I am clearly swimming against the current. Not for me. ⭐ 1/2

Evening clouds, Geilston Bay. August 2021. Everything Under   by Daisy Johnson Remix of the classic Oedipal myth? I found it alienating, abstruse and far too tiring to become absorbed in the story. Far too often I scratched my head wondering "Which character is this now? What timeline is this happening again?" only to sigh and keep going because the whole thing is too dreary and confusing to worry too much about it. For me, the mix of bleak social realism with a neo-classical retelling of a Greek myth just didn't work. The shifting timeline, fragmented storyline and preposterous plotline were more tiresome than energizing. There is a cold and 'deliberate' artifice that never gave me a sense that the author has just relaxed into the story. What we're left with is a self-conscious and turgid mess. ⭐ 1/2

Light on the hill, Macquarie Street, Hobart. August 2021. The Keeper of Lost Things   by Ruth Hogan This is not the book for me. I found it cloying, overly sentimental and filled with banal observations and predictable twists. Crikey, I'm bored just thinking back on it. If superficiality is your thing, and you won't bristle at the guileless, dated presentation of developmentally disabled characters and lazy anachronisms in the overused flashbacks, you might find this more bearable than I. ⭐ 1/2

The bins are out, Geilston Bay, August 2021. Boy Swallows Universe   by Trent Dalton After delivering a rather scathing critique of Dalton's last book -  All Our Shimmering Skies  - I am glad that I succumbed to the badgering of my darling wife to give his much-praised debut a chance. She is correct. This is the infinitely superior book. I suspect that this is largely because Dalton is treading more familiar ground. Unlike the new book, there's an authenticity to the place and characters despite the shaggy dog tale that emerges. This is a likeable coming of age tale that will have appeal to anyone with memories of growing up on the wrong side of the tracks in 1980s Australia. There's a heart to what could have been a bitter and unpleasant tale. Still, Dalton pulls no punches, and there are no shortage of triggers for anyone who grew up in violent, tumultuous households. I appreciated the sophistication that the author has sensitively explored the concept of how young peop...

Good morning. Federation Dock, Hobart. August 2021. A God in Ruins   by Kate Atkinson A "companion piece" rather than a sequel to one of my favourite books that I've read this year ( Life After Life . Much like the first book, this one is also experimental in form. Timelines skip backwards and forwards but (largely) avoid the 'parallel realities' that marked the earlier work. The experimentation did not disrupt the experience, and I found that it again afforded Atkinson the power to explore the concept of memory, fiction and imagination. If I didn't quite enjoy it as much as its predecessor, it was due to the presence of the distasteful Viola. Without a doubt, her character is an essential exploration of the intergenerational shift, but I did find her irritating to the point of distraction. There is a fine art to the wilful disruption of chronology that goes some way to explaining Viola's attitude. The resolution of the piece - like  Life After Life  - is ...

Sails above. Pier One, Salamanca, Hobart. August 2021. The Years of Rice and Salt   by Kim Stanley Robinson This is an immense book in all sorts of ways. Just shy of 800 pages, it is quite unlike anything that I have ever read before. A sprawling, opulent alternative history novel about human civilisation beginning with a twist that eliminates European influence from events post-1400. We begin with a small detachment of Mongol soldiers stumbling across the fact that nearly all of Europe has been killed by a plague of such magnitude that it has emptied most cities and towns, leaving on a few survivors to scrabble on. From here, we travel through a series of chronologically spaced sections over the next seven centuries on an alternate Earth in which the societies of varying forms of Islam, the vast Chinese empire and other Buddhist states dominate global affairs in the absence of western Christendom. The conceit is fabulous, and in embracing a broad approach to reincarnation, we can ...

  Sunrise over the Tasman Bridge. Hobart. August 2021. The Sweetness of Water   by Nathan Harris A terribly sad and decidedly still novel, this is not at all as I expected. I was pleasantly surprised by the light touch that Harris has applied to what is a brutal tale. Set in the south in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, I understood that the book would tackle issues of race and sexuality. Before starting, I was prepared for either an affected and anachronistic (but largely 'worthy') book or one that embraced the usual machismo (with a queer twist). This is neither. It weaves twin narratives quite effortlessly in a quiet way. The weak but thoroughly decent George Walker is at the centre, who anchors the novel to allow the natural exploration of themes not usually found in such books. Reminiscent of Sebastian Barry’s work,  The Sweetness of Water  is a lovely, lyrical novel. Moreover, Harris's fine writing achieves the complex interweaving of the grand and the...

  Zinc work, East Risdon Bay. August 2021. That Deadman Dance   by Kim Scott A masterpiece. In Bobby Wabalanginy, an intelligent and optimistic soul, Scott conjures up a narrator who will live long in the memory. Bobby, whose real name remains unpronounceable to the invaders throughout the novel, means "all of us playing together", a bitter irony given the course of events. Bobby is a marvel. Bright and eager for knowledge, he is a natural showman. These capacities allow him to shine in both his indigenous world and the newcomers to his land. Part clown, part shaman, the book does a magnificent job of naturally showing the reader the centrality of songs, music, and dance to the Noongar people of southwestern Western Australia. Bobby learns to speak, read and write in the white man's language, but a reoccurring motif throughout is the fundamental disconnect in understanding between the two cultures. His native culture is just as complex but more physical, present and eleme...

  Pole in the sky, Geilston Bay. August 2021. You Have to Make Your Own Fun Around Here   by Frances Macken You Have to Make Your Own Fun Around Here  strikes me as a book that is something of a fusion of  Derry Girls  and  Normal People , with a jarring murder/ disappearance side plot that is left unreconciled. As such, it did not quite hit the mark for me. In our narrator, the drifting Katie, along with best (!) friends, the toxic Evelyn and meek Maeve, we follow the unlikely trio. as they try to adjust from childhood to life in adulthood. For a story that centres on this cramped friendship, it is striking the extent to which these girls don't really like each other. I note that some reviewers took issue with the lack of resolution to the Katie and Evelyn dynamic, but the lacklustre death of their relationship seemed a natural course to me. What bothered me more was the seeming abandonment of the disappearance of Pamela Cooney. A number of clues/ red herr...

  Samurai, Hobart. August 2021. All Our Shimmering Skies   by Trent Dalton I have no problem with a protagonist being a precocious child, but there is a point where precociousness becomes aggravating, and young Molly Hook hit that point for me early on. In part, this is because I did not believe in her. Given the trauma and neglect of her upbringing - told in unyieldingly graphic detail - she is remarkably erudite and thoughtful. There is a difference between "taking a strength-based approach" to building a character and "taking the piss". In terms of other characters, Greta and Yukio were fine, albeit thinly sketched. My main issue concerns the construction of Aubrey. Dalton wants to have his cake and eat it when it comes to Molly's cruel uncle. Dalton frames Aubrey as evil personified, making some effort to explain how he came to be this way. We have many (many) pages expended on how the traumatising childhood of young Aubrey has programmed him with hate. Hate...

Setting sun, Geilston Bay. August 2021.   Lucky's   by Andrew Pippos Another book that chooses to advance its story irregularly. Dynamically shifting timelines are so typical these days that I am unsure whether the word irregular fits anymore! We primarily dwell in 2002, where the unmoored Emily leaves her failing marriage in the UK to set about researching and writing a  New Yorker  article about the rise and fall of a now-defunct Australian chain of family restaurants, one that ended in a mass shooting. Shadowing this journey is the mystery of her long-dead father's interest in what seems to be nothing more than a little bit of trivia on the other side of the world. From here, we jump back first to 1944 for a while, then back twenty years previously as we get our heads around the Greek diaspora. Between zipping back and forth to 2002, we spend a bit of time in the 1940s and 1950s on the emergence of the  Lucky's  empire and dissolution of a marriage. More...

Starlings, Lindisfarne. August 2021. All the Birds, Singing   by Evie Wyld As an oddly structured novel, the book features alternating chapters from the perspective of our narrator's present (told in the past tense) and her past (told in the present tense). Those chapters set in the present progress in an even and linear fashion. Those chapters set in the past hop and leap backwards in a disconnected and disjointed way. While this is an innovative way to capture our protagonist's haphazard and traumatic past, the fragmented nature of the telling is confusing at times. There is some evocative writing here, with those sections set on the remote sheep station and in the present particularly resonant. Other sections failed to convince, with the strange relationship with the withered Otto and the period of sex work in a port town in the Pilbara striking a bit of a dull note to my ear. We know very little about our central character, as Wyld lets the past emerge in fragments and half...

Pipes, Geilston Bay. August 2021. The Tie That Binds by Kent Haruf Despite the arduous and grim lives of the characters within, The Tie That Binds is an extremely gentle novel. There is an ease with which Haruf's prose emerges on the page, a plain-speaking directness that carries significant emotional heft. Covering 80 years, the novel is a slow burner that starts at the ending, whips back around to the beginning and meanders across a lifetime of (largely) sadness, missed opportunity and resignation to a life suffocated by a hateful and bitter man. Told in snippets of memories and assumed events, the book bears an elegant sense of time and place rarely seen. The town of Holt, Colorado, is a small but exquisitely realised world. It saddens me to think that Haruf's oeuvre only stretched to six novels, but I am looking forward to reading the four that I haven't read. ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2

  Droplets on a leaf, Geilston Bay. August 2021. Exploded View   by Carrie Tiffany Hmmm. Perhaps the fact that cars are quite possibly the least interesting things that I can imagine explains my coolness to this one. It's a bleak and sombre book, but I never quite believed it. The novel progresses through what is essentially one unbroken stream of consciousness from the mind of a young girl. Our narrator - dealing with significant neglect and abuse - struck me as too uneven to fully accept as authentic. This may well be due to her use of a Holden car manual to process her trauma. Still, there is an incongruity to her singular prescience, acumen and utter lack of agency that struck me as unconvincing. There is an implausibility to the car journey that serves as the centre point of the story, which is not helped by the feeling that the author gave up on it a third of the way through. I found the entire thing uneven and frustrating, which is disappointing as there are moments of ...

Blue sky and power lines, Geilston Bay. August 2021. The Lost Man   by Jane Harper A slow-burn mystery set in the hot and dry southwest of Queensland (the bit that is closer to Adelaide than Brisbane), I enjoyed  The Lost Man  a lot. While it is something of a murder mystery, the story isn't driven by a police investigation. It progresses through the examination of the intergenerational trauma of one dysfunctional farming family. More exploration of how brutalised Australian men deal with such trauma than boilerplate mystery, Harper adroitly captures the harsh landscape that centres the whole work. It is a strong addition to her previous books and continues the shift towards a more nuanced understanding of masculinity and loneliness in Australian settings. Well worth your time. ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Self-portrait, Hobart. August 2021.   Song of Solomon   by Toni Morrison A strange mix of genres that touches on the metaphysical without fully entering the world of magical realism. I suspect that I may have missed some of the nuances of the narrative because of my lack of familiarity with African folklore or the oral biblical tradition, so any confusion as to what was going on at times is entirely on me. Still, it is a deeply moving and affecting work, with a feeling of real sorrow at its heart and a range of fascinating and frustrating characters that will remain vivid long in my mind. ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

  Power in the lines, Geilston Bay. August 2021. Wanderers   by Chuck Wendig This is a long and intricate book with a huge cast of characters, every one of them annoying and flawed in their own special way. Just like real life! With this, a mysterious illness arises and stalks across the fractured United States in the midst of an election that pits a career politician (who happens to be a capable but cold and aloof woman) against a reckless and obnoxious billionaire with some decidedly nefarious allies. Yes, the parallels are stark and Wendig is not shy of sharing his thoughts on the matter. The centrepiece of the novel is the emergence of a sleepwalking illness that causes a (seemingly) random group of people to zone out and hit the road, walking with some kind of predetermined destination unknown to all. If you try and stop them, they explode (generally killing anyone nearby). Very messy. The beginning of the book introduces the sullen and irritable teenager Shana, who wakes...

  Broken bottles, Geilston Bay. August 2021. Under the Cold Bright Lights   by Garry Disher This is the first book that I've read by the prolific Australian crime write Garry Disher, and I am confident that it won't be the last. It's an interesting take on the modern police procedural, introducing Detective Alan Auhl, an old-timer back in the job after a few years away. Auhl has been roped into the cold case unit, finding himself surrounded by a younger group who aren't that excited to be sharing an office with an old-timer. He's a likeable chap with a tendency to drift through life, as exhibited by a rather bohemian home life and dissatisfaction with the system failures that lead to too many bad men getting away with crimes against women. We have several puzzling murders to solve against this backdrop, each progressing on multiple fronts and Auhl getting involved in a decidedly irregular fashion. These deviations from the usual tropes keep this one engaging all way...

  The Living Sea of Waking Dreams  by Richard Flanagan I have so many questions. What is Richard Flanagan trying to say here? What was with the colossal pivot about halfway through the book? Is it a book about dying? Or is it about Mental illness? Am I taking things more literally than is good for me? Perhaps the biggest question is, is Richard Flanagan okay? One of the treats of living at the arse-end of the world and fancying myself as the rugged outdoorsy type (land and sea) is that I occasionally bump into Richard Flanagan. Now, he wouldn't know me from a bar of soap, but I have shared pleasantries on more than one occasion on some matter or another. It's going to be very hard not to ask him what this book is all about the next time I bump into the bloke. I recall most vividly the awful Tasmanian bushfires of 2006, 2013, 2016 and the terrible fires in January and October 2019. I also remember the trauma of the seemingly eternal fires blighting the big island above and shar...

Jen looks out to sea. Binalong Bay, Bay of Fires, Tasmania. July 2021. Catch-22   by Joseph Heller Catch-22  is one of the rare books that I have returned to and re-read several times throughout my life. The first time was as a young and impressionable 17-year-old, and I delighted in the confidence Heller displayed in flourishing his love of language and deployment of marvellous words. After reading the novel, I am sure that I was willing to open up and use the full vocabulary available to me under the English language (and a few others to boot). It was darkly funny, and I took delight in the absurd wordplay and ingenious structure. The second time I read it, I was in my mid-20s and neck-deep working in a large, bureaucratic institution (a university). The complexities and absurdities that didn't strike me during my first read suddenly had more resonance. I came to appreciate the author's skill and cunning in replaying the same incidents repeatedly and the art beneath the nons...