All About Books – Winter 2019

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Welcome to the latest edition of our reading suggestions guide, All About Books. As usual the guide is packed full of an amazing selection of books being published over the next 3 months in addition to the popular staff picks section. There is something for everyone no matter there reading tastes or interests.

Pick up your FREE copy of the guide at any one of our library branches or download it now for those on the go – just click on the cover above.Each cover or title in the guide has a link to our library catalogue to make reserving your copy even quicker and easier – why not reserve the book before it is event published!
Stay tuned for our inaugural kids edition of the guide which will be available soon.

May’s Reads: Book Clubs & Reading Groups

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As usual it has been a busy month for all of City of Parramatta Libraries Book Clubs and Reading Groups.

The month of May saw twenty seven Book Club Kits delivered to our Library Branches, making it simple for our wider reading community to pick up their Book Club Kits. Thanks to the Library’s wonderful courier, Vic who never gets upset when each day he arrives and there are more Book Club Kits waiting for him to deliver.

This month Book Clubs and Reading Groups read a wide range of titles, including both fiction and non fiction. Popular titles this month included ‘Bridge of Clay’ by Markus Zusak, and First Person by Richard Flanagan; both of which were read by four clubs.

Book Review: The Wife Drought

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The Wife Drought by Annabel Crabb

Book Summary

‘I need a wife’

It’s a common joke among women juggling work and family. But it’s not actually a joke. Having a spouse who takes care of things at home is a Godsend on the domestic front. It’s a potent economic asset on the work front. And it’s an advantage enjoyed – even in our modern society – by vastly more men than women. 

Working women are in an advanced, sustained, and chronically under-reported state of wife drought, and there is no sign of rain.

But why is the work-and-family debate always about women? Why don’t men get the same flexibility that women do? In our fixation on the barriers that face women on the way into the workplace, do we forget about the barriers that – for men – still block the exits? 

The Wife Drought is about women, men, family and work. Written in Annabel Crabb’s inimitable style, it’s full of candid and funny stories from the author’s work in and around politics and the media, historical nuggets about the role of ‘The Wife’ in Australia, and intriguing research about the attitudes that pulse beneath the surface of egalitarian Australia.

Crabb’s call is for a ceasefire in the gender wars. Rather than a shout of rage, The Wife Drought is the thoughtful, engaging catalyst for a conversation that’s long overdue. 

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