Emily Paull

Adulting: How to become a Grown Up In 468(ish) Easy Steps Kelly Williams Brown Harper Collins If there was one thing I learned while I was house-sitting this month, it was that I really wasn't all that prepared to live on my own.  For instance, did you know that if you don't rinse dishes properly, there's a high likelihood that you will end up drinking dish soap?  Or that you can't put sausages in the fridge for a few days, then freeze them, then defrost and eat them, even if they're gourmet?  Enter Adulting, the new bible to my maturity. Based on the hit blog , Kelly Williams Brown's book is at once a meditation on lessons learned whilst growing up, and a survival guide for the newly graduated, the job seeking, the freshly moved out and the just plain grown up.  It is the kind of book that makes the perfect gift. At once practical and hilarious, the book contains such highlights as: how to have indoor plants and not kill them, the Seven Dwarves of To...

The Mimosa Tree Antonella Preto Fremantle Press From the Blurb It’s the summer of 1987 and Mira is beginning her first year at uni. She’s got a radical new haircut, and an all-black wardrobe — she should be having the time of her life.  But it’s hard to get excited about anything when you’re being smothered by your crazy Italian family, enrolled in a course you’re not interested in, and expecting nuclear warfare at any moment.  Even a new best friend and the magnetic boy from art class can’t wipe away the image of a looming mushroom cloud. And Mira’s right. Her world is about to explode, but it’s not the skies she should be checking. My Review Do you remember the first time you read Looking for Alibrandi?   I do.  My friend Emily M. had gotten the only copy out of the school's library and was really enjoying it, so I went and got a copy out of the Bull Creek Library.  I remember that when I opened it, a sewing needle fell out of the spine.  It was...

The Dinner Herman Koch Text Publishing 9780770437855 As I often say to customers in the bookshop where I work, there are a lot of really great novels being translated into English at the moment.  Diego Marani, whose novel New Finnish Grammar went so global that when the Guardian reviewed it, they put it down to genius.  Jonas Jonasson's The 100 Year old Man Who Climbed out of the Window and Disappeared - a best seller pretty much everywhere you go in Perth. And then there's Herman Koch's The Dinner. From the Blurb: "On a summer evening in Amsterdam, two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant for dinner.  At first, the conversation is a gentle hum of polite small talk- the banality of work, the latest movies they've seen.  But beyond the empty words, terrible things need to be said, and with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened. Each couple has a fifteen year old son.  The two boys are united by their accountabili...

One of the best pieces of advice that I have ever been given about writing is don't become a writer- be one. That means:  Have a day job to support your writing .  Prioritize time to write.   Keep a journal.  Have a project on the go.  Eavesdrop on conversations for research .  Stick to deadlines or break them if you have to.  And most importantly, never give up. On a spur of the moment whim yesterday, after reading this article on why there was no Vogel Award for the 2013 round, I decided that I was going to send in something for the 2014 award.  Yes, I am aware that the award closes on the 31st of May, and yes I am aware that my shot of winning is something like one in a bazillion.  I'm also aware that the manuscript I put aside two years ago and thought was awesome is pretty rough and naive.  So I'm going to try and finally live by that advice that I was given, rather than just taking it up when I feel like it.  And I'm r...

I never like to review things negatively. For a start, just because one particular book and one particular reader have been unable to connect on a meaningful level, it doesn't make the book bad per se.  Remembering that reading is always subjective, I have usually taken the approach of reviewing something lukewarmly if I did not take to it. I have, on occasion, suggested that I need to maybe give the book a second chance. Booklover Book Reviews , whose blog I have been reading a lot this last month uses a great system in reviewing, in which every book is given a rating in terms of writing quality and story.  This is fantastic because it recognises both the potential of the idea and the skill with which it was realised, indicating that perhaps when a book goes wrong it could have been saved by a better plot or a different author. Today, I want to write about Oh Dear, Silvia  by Dawn French but I also want to reflect on the process of reviewing a book you didn't like....