The 2010 PM’s Literary Awards Fiction, Non-Fiction, Young Adult Fiction and Children’s fiction shortlists have been announced last week. Continue reading
Author Archives: admin
Cookbooks display and events at Parramatta City Library
Parramatta City Library is hosting A State Library of NSW travelling display – ‘Australian Cookbooks from the State Library’. Two exciting events related to food and cooking will also be held at the library. Continue reading
Review – At home: a short history of private life
Title: At home: a short history of private life
Author: Bill Bryson
Sarah’s pick
Bill Bryson looked around his house, an old rectory in Norfolk, and used it as the basis for his latest book- examining the everyday things in our lives. Continue reading
Discussion paper from the Last Thursday Reading Group
In recently two months, the Last Thursday Reading Group has discussed ‘Reach for the sky’, a book written by Paul Brickhill. It’s about Douglas Bader, who was a skilled pilot. However he lost one leg to aerobatics. Then, he lost another one. He used his metal legs and trained himself back to RAF when WWII started. Bader was an excellent leader, fighter, and innovator. After colliding with a German Me-109, he sat out the remaining three years as a prisoner of war at Colditz Castle, near Leipzig, Germany, repeatedly testing the reputation of the fortress as an escapeproof prison. The same title movie was on screen in 1956. Bader’s story is a story of courage, determination and possibility of reach higher, no matter what. Continue reading
Review – The Pregnant Widow
Title: The Pregnant Widow
Author: Martin Amis
Dean’s pick
A novel which is essentially a male perspective on feminism is always fraught with danger. Especially if the main character of said novel is a randy 20 year old male whose main concerns in life are his sexual conquests. And yet, this is what Martin Amis has done in his latest satirical offering, The Pregnant Widow.
Set at the start of the sexual revolution, which Amis describes as ‘a time when girls began acting like boys and boys went on acting like boys’. The pregnant widow has at its centre, Keith Nearing, a 20 year old intellectual who spends the summer of 1970 in an Italian castle with his girlfriend Lily and her best friend Scheherazade. Keith longs to sleep with Scheherazade, the glamorous, and for most part, unattainable beauty who strolls around the castle grounds topless, and causes near riots when she walks down the street. When Keith eventually has his desires fulfilled from an unexpected source the experience haunts him for the rest of his life.
With the exception of Keith’s sister, Violet, who is a tragic victim of the sexual revolution due to her exuberant promiscuity, the majority of the characters in The pregnant widow are thoroughly unlikable. This is however, not always a negative, as the characters struggle to come to terms with the consequences of their actions in a time when all the rules of sexual engagement are changing. It would almost be tragic, if they weren’t so conceited and their predicaments so deserved and so comical.