Emily Paull

Well, I keep forgetting but today is the last day of 2012.  I don't really know how I feel about this.  In many ways, it's been a terrible year but in others it's been one of the best and I feel like I really know myself now.  I know that I am not going to be an academic; I am going to be a writer (and for the foreseeable future, the cute indie princess at one of Perth's beloved small bookstores). One thing that I can say for sure is that I read a lot of wonderful books this year, so here is a list of my favourite reads.  Anything published this year is in bold.  I've also included links to any reviews I posted. * The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas * Beneath the Shadows- Sara Foster * To Kill a Mockingbird- Harper Lee * The Hunger Games  trilogy- Suzanne Collins (I know, I know, how lame...) * Bye, Beautiful- Julia Lawrinson * The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - Mary-Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows * The Drowner  -...

Friday Brown Vikki Wakefield Text Publishing Goodreads Friday Brown is quite possibly the best book I have read all year.  I read it with a breathless anticipation, hung off every word on the page, and felt heartsick when Friday did.  It is a book filled with poignant and subtle imagery and characters so realistic that you start to wonder if you've actually known them your whole life. It begins with a mother and daughter telling stories.  The mother tells the daughter about the family curse.  Each woman in the Brown family for generations has drowned on a Saturday, and so Vivienne has named her daughter Friday in the hopes that she will ward off the curse.  "Run like hell," she tells Friday.  "Or dive in."  These simple words seem like a mantra for living, and they stay with Friday on her journey.  When Vivienne succumbs to a cancer- she drowns in the fluid that builds up in her lungs- Friday hits the road.  She meets Silence, a l...

Goodreads "How far would you go to save someone you love?" Desi Priest returns to her seaside home after two years in prison.  What she did has polarized her friends and family.  Her daughter Maya is growing up without a mother, but she still feels Desi's influence when Luke, the town firebrand, begins bringing injured joeys to her caravan.  Pete, who has never stopped believing in or loving Desi, is still dealing with the consequences of supporting her.  He's had to give up working with the orang utans he loves to look after the woman he loves.  And her brother Jackson has met a girl who knows something that Desi does not.  Plus, everyone knows something more than they will say about the thing Desi did. This is a complex novel with multiple plots, most of them revolving around human reactions to looking after animals.  There are dolphins, whale sharks, orang utans and elephants, all of their plights heart breaking and moving.  In fact, in...

One: For the burgeoning chef... Delicious Home Cooking or Nigellissima Two: For the fiction reader.... The Secret Keeper or The Casual Vacancy (Both out in beautiful but pricey hard cover- the perfect gift for people who can't wait for the paperback!) Three: For the crime lover... The Racketeer Four: For the Young Adult... Looking for Alaska Five: For the Sport fan... This is Me  (Ian Thorpe) or Malthouse Six: For the historically minded... Pacific 360  or Eureka These titles can all be sourced here.

The Vintage Teacup Club Vanessa Greene 9780751548501 Goodreads The popular 'club' novel has been around for some time now, with several examples including Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club  being adapted into movies based on their great critical reception.  Like TJABC, The Vintage Teacup Club  follows multiple viewpoints and story lines with the club providing a centre and point of discussion and relief for each of the characters.  There is Alison, who is a retro queen with two daughters and a husband, who makes her money through vintage handicrafts- but she is facing the difficulties of raising teenagers-, Maggie who is unlucky in love and Jenny, whose impending marriage has her freaking out about a missing mother.  These are the key story lines.  For me, this book falls flat because these plots are allowed to take a back seat in comparison to the mission of the club, the finding of 100 vintage tea cups for the group to share. It is ...

The Secret Keeper Kate Morton 9781742374376 I know a lot of people who are thinking about splurging on this one for Christmas.  It is a whopping $35 a copy, which is exorbitant for a book, I know!  Luckily, I got my copy free from Allen and Unwin- I won it by retweeting a link and I couldn't believe my luck.  This means that I, poor starving student (well actually, not anymore...hmm...) can review this lovely tome for you all before you part with your cash. I've met Kate at a launch of her last book, The Distant Hours  which was hosted by my local Dymocks. She also replied to a rather squee-ing fangirl email I sent her a few years back after I devoured her first two novels.  She's Queensland's very own Glamazon author.  Gorgeous, a mother, and a fabulous author, it was almost too much that she was nice as well, but she was. But far be it from me to try and win your support of this book with a discussion of it's author.  After all, some of the...

Hello readers, I know that some of you may have just skim read the updates that I have been posting about the progression of my thesis over the past year.  And that's fine.  The purpose of these near-weekly updates has been to check in with myself mentally; to record what happens to me; and to hopefully inspire just one person to attempt what I have attempted this year. I am not going to lie and say that this year has been all sunshine and puppy dogs.  But I will say this.  Studying honours is an extremely worthwhile pursuit, and an excellent way to learn about yourself.  I do not mean in a purely academic sense.  Of course you learn your own limitations; for example I have learned that I am capable of being a serious writer who works with research and deadlines, but that academic work is not my cup of tea.  You will learn about your interests, including cultivating some new ones.  But you will also learn that you are strong and capable. ...

Lola Bensky Lily Brett 9781926428475 Goodreads Lola, a rock journalist, is followed by the dead.  She interviews a slew of famous rockstars- asking them boring, deadpan questions, and then getting distracted and talking about the traumatic experiences of her parents in a Nazi death camp. She then goes off on reveries in her head, remembering awkward scenes from her childhood.  The trauma of living with parents who are so altered by their experiences as Polish Jews causes Lola to struggle with her weight and with anxiety.   I have kind of a love-hate relationship with this book.  On the one hand, I love the subject matter.  On the other hand, I hate the awkward parallel that Brett tries to draw between the trauma of Auschwitz and the trauma of Free Love and drugs in the sixties and seventies.  I also hate the detached, monotonous narratorial style of this novel, which almost seems to be first person except that the narrator constantly refers to the ...

The Casual Vacancy JK Rowling 9780316228534 Goodreads It's actually been a few weeks since I have read this, but absolutely everyone who comes into the bookstore that I work at asks me what this book is like, and I thought I would put a little review up for all of you out there in the blogosphere.  It is a big book, and it does retail for about $40 Australian, but it was also a best seller before it even hit stores late last month.  The big question becomes, then, is it worth it? The story documents the lives of several families from the town of Pagford in England, following the death of town councillor Barry Fairbrother.  Prior to his death, Barry's pet project had been triumphing the welfare of people in the neighbouring Fields, a housing estate filled with prostitutes and heroin addicts.  It kinds of goes without saying that it's not for kids and it's CERTAINLY NOT Harry Potter, although the sheer Britishness of both sets of writing is the same.  Ro...

The Paris Wife Paula McLain 9781844086689 Goodreads It is infrequent that a contemporary work of fiction moves me to such lengths as could be described as obsession, but Paula McLain's account of the ill fated love story of Ernest Hemingway and Hadley Richardson achieved just that. McLain paints a picture of Jazz Age Paris which is peopled with the figures of literary mythology, from the Fitzgeralds to Gertrude Stein.  (I myself am fascinated by Zelda Fitzgerald.)  The extravagance, the drinking and the infidelity make that world sparkle, but also colour it with pain and heartbreak.  All in all, the book makes a poignant statement about the nature of heartbreak that will have you sobbing in sympathy. The writing style is well paced and suitably decorative, without a hint of cliche or purple prose.  This is a rare combination in a book which, while classified as literary fiction, is ostensibly a romance.  It is a perfect introduction to the writing...

By Gabrielle Carey and Kathy Lette ISBN 9781742759289 (TV tie in edition) You may more recently be aware of Kathy Lette as the author of The Boy who Fell to Earth  but in 1979, she and co-author Gabrielle Carey brought out a book which was to capture the essential essence of what it was like to be a beach-combing teenager. The book has touched the hearts of many Australians, and the new edition includes quotes from Kylie Minogue and Germaine Greer.  For the last few weeks, thousands of viewers have tuned in to channel ten to watch the television series adaptation, and have fallen in and out of love with Debbie and Sue and their whacky families. Imagine my surprise then to discover that the book is totally different.  For a start, Debbie and Sue seem totally indoctrinated into the Greenhills mindset, and are completely  blasé about drug taking and under-age sex.  At times they seem just as uneducated as the rest of the characters, and without the bad beha...

Those of you who have read my reviews before will know that Julia Lawrinson is one of my all time favourite YA writers.  Not only does she appear to have a stylistic and emotional range which is triple that of the normal person, but I can honestly say that once upon a time, Skating the Edge changed my life. It won't come as a surprise then if I tell you that her latest book, Losing It , only took me two days to read, nor that I rudely requested it from the library even though someone else was already reading it.  Oops.  What can I say, if you've had it longer than a week you're just not keen enough! Losing It  seems to have an almost American Pie like premise.  Four friends make a vow to lose their virginity before Leavers (which you Eastern States readers might know as schoolies' week) and plan to compare notes on their various liaisons when they get there.  Unsurprisingly, the initial pledge is somewhat motivated by vodka, as all the best worst decisi...

First of all, this book is so old it doesn't even have an ISBN. It also doesn't have a cover image or a title on the front, only on the spine in gold embossed lettering.  Published by Patersons press in 1948 (in Australia, 1933 if you were in England), Ewers' account of life on a poor but happy street was one of the first fictional portraits of metropolitan Perth.  It continues as one of few! Elman Day, a veteran of World War One with a stump for a leg, stumbles across Money Street on his way home one day and is captivated by the adopted daughter of the street, a young girl named Betty.  He is soon embroiled in a number of sup-plots, including a farcical attempt at setting up two of the street's older inhabitants on a date, the loss of a prized racehorse, and a rivalry for the affections of Betty.  At first it seems as if each tale, while amusing, has little to do with any other, but in time the author shows his hand and ties the plot together, if at times unconv...

I always have to read Tim Winton novels twice to fully take them in.   Cloudstreet , The Riders, Dirt Music ; all these are books which are read in a kind of relaxed fugue state.  The nostalgia and the landscapes wash over you.  Later, you think to yourself 'could that possibly have been in the book or did I dream it?' In her article "Place, Taste and the Making of a Tradition" published in Westerly, 1982, Veronica Brady mentions something she calls the Robinson Crusoe impulse- the desire to make a self and a world- which pervades Western Australian literature.  No novel demonstrates this more than Dirt Music. The protagonist, Georgie Jutland, is searching for a self, making one.  Luther Fox wants to forget his self and his past.  Instead, he makes a world. The pair live in the fictional coastal town of White Point, populated with fishwives, hippies, ex-cons and racists.  Their day to day lives are put under the microscope through the points of vie...

First of all, to the lovely lady who comes to the bookshop I now work in every Sunday, I am so sorry it took me almost a fortnight to finish this book.   We now return to our regularly scheduled broadcast. Late last month (or was it early this month?  Time folds in on itself these days...) Anna Funder's All That I Am was named the winner of the 2012 Miles Franklin Literary Award.  The sophomore novel from Funder (whose first novel was Stasiland ), All That I Am follows the plight of exiled Jewish Socialists Ruth, Dora, Hans and the writer Ernst Toller during the early 1930s and the beginning of Hitler's regime through the lens of Ruth's remembrances as an old woman in the early 2000s.  A poetic and slightly cynical novel, Funder has created a world of stark insight and through her characters she delivers a number of truisms on love, loss and the nature of human relationships tested by adversity. It is a stunning novel, and there is no doubt in my mind that it i...

Okay okay, so not strictly a Western Australian book, so lying around reading it since Monday night hasn't been a particularly productive use of my time... but I picked this one up at Big W for about 15 bucks and it's been sitting on the shelf staring at me for simply yonks.  Plus, a lot of the characters moved from Perth so it's not a massive stretch of the imagination to link it to my studies...  ahem. The Slap won tonnes of awards.  It's about 550 pages long, and it took me less than three complete days to finish.  I couldn't stop reading it, and when I had to, I thought about it.  (In fact, I think I bored History Boy by discussing it on the way to our date on Tuesday night.)  I first came across it when my Uncle's partner was reading it for Book Club but that would have been years ago.  Probably first year uni.  One of my English teachers absolutely RAVED about it.  Three and a bit years later, I'm reading it. The novel begins with...

The Merry-Go-Round In the Sea by Randolph Stow ISBN 9780143180074 Published by Penguin Classics, 2008 (First published 1965) One of the things that I love about books like this one is the quality of the sweeping family saga.  Drawing on the nature of memory, shared and individual, the narrative follows a line throughout not just a significant event but a string of them.  The reader is invited to watch the character grow and respond to a number of events and share in the special significance of each one. Image from Goodreads At the beginning of this novel, Rob Coram is eight.  Geraldton is his whole world and appears to be made up of a series of rural properties, each one belonging to a member of his family.  He has many aunt and uncles, and a multitude of cousins- they are a link to a family history which, for Rob, has taken on an almost fairy tale like essence. But no one is more at the centre of Rob's attention than his cousin Rick (who is actually some...

A Stranger in my Street by Deborah Burrows (ISBN 978-1-7426-1101-3) Pan Macmilllan, 2012 Imagine my surprise (and joy and a little bit of envy) to discover that finally someone has written a book about Perth in the 1940s.   A Stranger in My Street is the first novel from historian and lawyer, Deborah Burrows.  It follows the story of Meg Eaton, whose beau was killed in the war eighteen months before the story takes place.  Meg seems to be coping well, although she is secluding herself somewhat from the real world, until her dead boyfriend's brother Tom shows up in her street looking for her neighbour Doreen.  Doreen is nowhere to be found, and two days later Meg and Tom stumble across her body in an air raid shelter, and wind up involved in more ways than one. Burrows has used her skills as a historian to paint a realistic and charming portrait of Perth in the 1940s.  No scene seems like it has been adapted from an American film, and the places are easy to...

The Drowner by Robert Drewe (ISBN 0-7329-0858-2) Pan Macmillan, 1996 The best books leave you gasping for air, drowning in jealousy that you did not write them.  They fill you with the need to reread them, to prove to yourself the assumptions you have made.  They make sense only in a place of consciousness which exists in the space between reader and writer, and linger like perfume in the air a while after you've finished. Robert Drewe's The Drowner is one of the best books I have read this year. I stumbled across it by chance.  Looking for scholarly material on The Shark Net, I came across a discussion of water themes in Drewe's work.  If you've read The Drowner you'll know why this is.  The book powerfully evokes themes of water as an instrument of chaos, life and passion; something to be both feared and worshipped.  From references to Shakespeare's Hamlet to recollections of Western Australia's  past, Drewe paints a picture of tragedy and hop...

Coondardoo by Katharine Susannah Prichard Printed and bound by Halstead Press, Sydney (1956) First published by Jonathan Cape 1929 In the early decades of the Twentieth Century, on a rural North West property, two children grow up.  One is an Aboriginal girl named Coonardoo, who charms those around her with her disturbing beauty; the other is Hugh "Youie" Watt, the son of the station owner.  Hugh and Coonardoo are drawn to one another but must never act upon their feelings.  Relations between 'gins' and white men are looked upon unfavourably by most.  Hugh's detestable neighbour, Sam Geary, believes that all men like to indulge, but no one is honest enough to admit to it, and he bets Hugh that it is only a matter of time before Hugh and Coonardoo consummate their feelings... and if Hugh won't, Sam will. Widely regarded as one of Western Australia's first novelists, Katharine Susannah Prichard has earned her place in the canon with her unique tak...

If reading this book is anything to go by, Tom Hungerford was a larrikin with a heart of gold.  The Western Australian literary imagination (and the topic of my thesis) owes much to this man.  This three collection set of short stories follows three periods in Hungerford's life; his boyhood in the semi-rural paradise of South Perth, his coming of age at war and his growing political cynicism in the time after.  He wrote it all down, chronicled it if you will, I guess to make sense of it all. It is a best loved book. So why couldn't I love it? I read the first section, Stories from Suburban Road with enough interest.  Hungerford's descriptions of familiar places and feelings hit home for me, and I found myself delighting in the self realisations that reading the work brought.  In one story, 'Professor Murdoch and the Old White Road', I was excited to learn that the setting was in my own suburb!  And I laughed as Hungerford wrote of himself as a young w...

I remember distinctly the first time I read Picnic at Hanging Rock. It was in year 10, Mrs. Griffiths' class.  In my mind, she is an amalgam of all my favourite teachers at once.  Each term we were required to read at least one book.   Romeo and Juliet.   Then something from a box of classics she had stored under her board- I chose Mansfield Park , my first Austen.  Some other book that didn't stay with me.  And in there, either second or third term, I don't remember- Picnic at Hanging Rock.   Reading it that first time, I remember thinking that it was rather quaint and silly. The year is 1900.  A group of girls set out from Appleyard College in Victoria to have a picnic at the Hanging Rock in Mount Macedon, accompanied by the lovely Mademoiselle du Poitiers and the acerbic Greta McCraw. Three senior girls, Irma Leopold (an heiress), Marion Quade (a mathematics whizz) and the ethereal Miranda go to measure the base of the rock, with detesta...

Sisters.  The relationship between them can be so... complicated.  I've often tried and failed to describe that mixture of love, hurt, jealousy and idolatry that accompanies having a sister.  But Julia Lawrinson has not failed.  Her book, Bye, Beautiful does this as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Image Source Sandy Lansing is the middle child.  Her older sister Marianne is the golden child- beautiful, trendy, popular and desirable.  Her younger brother Laurence can do no wrong.  Wedged between them, Sandy feels invisible.  When her police officer father moves to a small country town to be the new Sargeant, Sandy must start over.  But compared to her siblings Sandy does a rotten job of fitting in.  And then there is Billy- Sandy's first crush.  Of course, Billy is immediately attracted to Marianne, whose engagement to a boy in Perth seems to be of little consequence, much the same way that Billy's mixed blood...

I made reference in an earlier blog post which I did about the first Hunger Games book to the fact that I like these books because of the comment that they make on the reality television phenomena.  This point was articulated particularly well by Mark Naglazas in his review of the film, which I have since seen.  At the time of writing that review, I was beginning to grasp an idea of how to interpret the books, the idea being that these books make some sort of comment on the way we live now while seemingly being completely disconnected with reality.  This is a feat which many books, particularly Young Adult books strive for and don't always achieve.  The reader is also an important part in this making of meaning, because while the writer may intend to say one thing, a reader is responsible for taking what they will out of it.  And I am a reader like everyone else. So, on the one hand, you could say that in the first two Hunger Games books, a character named Ka...

This review is about two things.  It is first and foremost a review of the 2009 novel by Suzanne Collins- The Hunger Games , first in the YA dystopian trilogy.  But it is also a lesson in reviewing, a lesson I am learning out loud on this blog. I had never intended to read The Hunger Games.   It seemed to me that it was another pop culture phenomena that would come and go like bushfire, sweeping through everyone I know and then leaving as soon as it came.  Also, some of the books had an endorsement from Stephenie Meyer on the front.  Now, long standing readers of my blog will know that I too was fooled by  Twilight.   I was fooled by the amount of press attention that series was given, by the number of people talking about the books, and by the fact that my younger sister (who never reads for recreation except in unusual circumstances) was into them.  I read them and I am not ashamed to say that I enjoyed them.  It was like being in a tranc...

(It's probably just me, but whenever I write "Writers Festival", I always feel I should be writing "Writers' Festival."  I mean, the rule for placement of apostrophes is "Whose item is it?  Place the apostrophe after the answer."  So e.g. Who owns the shoes?  The boy.  They are the boy 's shoes.  Who is the festival for?  The Writers.  So it is the Writers ' Festival.  But apparently not.  Must remember that.) ANYWAY. Sleepy little (lovely little) Perth had its socks rocked this weekend by the arrival of the literati.  They swept in from their garrets, wearing capes, rose coloured glasses with circular lenses and carrying bongo drums.  Okay, so perhaps they were a bit more... normally... dressed, but Frank Moorhouse DID have red suspenders.  A must-visit event for writers and readers alike, the festival promised (among other things) fiction writers, journalists, chefs/cooks, historians and general smarty-pantses...

I thought I would kick off a new round of reviews today and just give you a little taste of the kind of literature that I am trying to promote. Jon Doust's Boy on a Wire was published in 2009, and is a memoir style fiction about growing up in Western Australia during the 1960s.  The book's protagonist, Jack Muir, comes up from Glenoralup (near Bunbury?) to begin his years at the suitably vague 'Grammar School', an Anglican (?) school for boys that we are told is near a river.  My guess is that it is supposed to be Guildford Grammar, although the book's acknowledgements site Christ Church as being a reference.  I think that the setting is supposed to be largely amorphous- the school could be any boys school at the time, the trials faced by Jack could be anyone's trials.  And that is why we like Jack, as a reader, despite him being a trouble maker. Jack suffers from what everyone calls 'Pink's Disease'- a build up of Mercury in his system that ...

Love it or hate it, it's just over a week until Valentine's Day; that mushy, gushy day of holding hands and/ or throwing popcorn at people holding hands during movies/ picnics/ skydiving lessons etc. I've had my ups and downs with Valentine's over the years.  There was: Palentine's Day of 2009 (i think it was 2009) in which I saw the Wolfman with a bunch of other Singletons, the Valentine's Day I got dumped a few days before and had to call in depressed to work, and most memorably, last year, the Valentine's Day on which History Boy ordered a picnic off of the internet and took me to the foreshore to sit on blankets amid a sea of thirty-somethings who had the same idea.  (It sounds like I am poking fun... I'm not.)  This year it was my turn to plan Valentine's, and not to be outdone, I've planned TWO.  But more about that after the fact. Whether you're loved up and feel like mooning on the couch, or single and needing a little Mr Darcy in...