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How do I know this? I was randomly reading Secret Lives of Great Authors, by Robert Schnakenberg, when I began to notice that a lot of the featured writers were Aquarians. So I counted them all
Aquarius  10
Capricorn  5
Taurus       4
Gemini      4
Libra         4
Cancer      3
Virgo        3
Sagittarius 3
Scorpio     2
Pisces       1
Leo           1
And if you’re Aries you can just forget it. […]

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Last Christmas holidays I read Omega by Jack McDevitt because I failed to notice this bit on the blurb:
The tale - begun almost a decade ago in The Engines of God - continues…
If I’d known it was the fourth book in a series then I wouldn’t have read it first. But I did and now […]

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1. I got my new reading glasses and they are a marvel. They are the only ones I liked in the shop because they reminded me of my grandpa’s except his were held together by sticky tape. Notice the box they came in, blue velvet lined and fit for the crown jewels. The reading case […]

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This non-fiction book, by Kate Summerscale, is about a terrible crime that took place in Victorian England. You may have noticed I’m a little sick of hearing about how wonderful Melbourne is so would you believe that even in a Victorian murder mystery book I came across the following:
He moved first to the southern city […]

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Some of you may remember the controversy created by Vonnegut in relation to his comments about terrorists when he was interviewed by The Australian, a few years ago. Some of you may also recall that he died last year, aged 84, from a fall and not from smoking unfiltered cigarettes since the age of 12. […]

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Matilda recommended this book by Theodore Dreiser and when it arrived from Amazon, all 856 thin grey pages of Signet Classic with what I consider to be an incredibly daggy painting by Henry LeBasque on the front and back cover, not to mention a blurb that talked about the dark side of the American Dream… […]

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I recently read Voyage to Disaster by Henrietta Drake-Brockman which I bought last year when I was going through a bit of a shipwreck phase . In case you’re not familiar with the story, basically what happened is this; in 1629 the Dutch East India Company’s ship hit a reef in the vicinity of the […]

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Reader, I remember The Adventures of Guonacoman, a book about a TV series about a half man, half guanaco by Ben Pobjie like it was only yesterday, which it was. I’m not very good at remembering names, especially the names of actors, celebrities, close friends, parents, so for the entire book I was thinking that […]

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I got this because I enjoyed The Road, also by Cormac McCarthy. I must say I’m not a Cowboy and Western kind of gal and the people in this book really do say things like ‘hell, fire, and damnation’, ‘I aint never’, ‘bud’, and ‘I done been’. But wouldn’t ya’ll know it, by the end […]

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The only thing I’ve read recently is this novella by Italo Calvino. Calvino is just the bee’s knees as far as I’m concerned. I never cease to marvel at how he weaves a fabulously absurd tale out of the most implausible thing he can lay his hands on. Somehow his bluff always works
So this story […]

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