Emily Paull

It's been all quiet on the blogging front from me lately, and for the most part I haven't been writing much of anything else either. I usually love this time of year.  I love setting goals, I love smashing those goals out of the park.  But I haven't quite learned when to cut myself some slack and I think that perhaps that's a good place to start with goals for 2016.  Right this moment, even though it's New Year's Eve, it just feels like a regular old Thursday. One of the goals I didn't manage to complete in 2015 was to read 110 books, which was 10 more than the 100 I managed last year.  There are a few excuses I could give, one of which being that I started studying online, on top of continuing to work four days a week.  But at the beginning of December, I was pretty determined that I was going to make it.  I worked out that I needed to read about thirty books in thirty days to make it, which seemed do-able until I realised that one of those books was J...

I'm often reminded how lucky I am to have grown up a reader in a country like Australia, where there are so many writers publishing complex and diverse books particularly for young people.  Some would argue that on the diversity front, we aren't quite there yet, but through important discussions I see happening every day on social media and at conferences in the non-virtual world, I believe that the YA genre will probably be the first to get there.  Far from being navel-gazing stories which would only interest teenagers, novels in the YA genre deal with issues which affect people of all ages, but look at them through the eyes of teen protagonists, who are often observers to difficult situations but don't always get a chance to make their voices heard. Clancy of the Undertow  by Brisbane writer and bookseller Christopher Currie is a shining example of the power of Young Adult literature.  Whilst reading it, I was reminded of many other great YA novels; those of ...

The days are getting longer and the nights are warm and perfect for reading.  In November, I read a lot of different books, a few of which I probably never would have selected for myself if I were left to my own devices.  There were fewer reviews than normal, but I am slowly getting my mojo back in that area of my life.  Writers block may or may not be an actual condition, or it may just be a convenient excuse to not do any work because I'm scared to fail in my current project, but regardless, November was an abysmal month for writing.  Coincidentally it was #Nanowrimo for many writers and to those of you who participated, congratulations to you for giving it a go.  The book I am working on at the moment began its life as a Nanowrimo project in 2009 and it's getting a restructure now. But enough about books written.  Onto books read. The Dressmaker by Rosalie Ham This is the novel on which the Australian film of the same name is based.  It is ...