Review by Leanne Hall, Kids' Book Specialist, Readings Carlton
Whilst initially reluctant to read any book featuring a cow and
a garden gnome on the cover, I will always be grateful that I got
past my initial prejudice and read the sprawling, rollicking,
chaotically perfect Going Bovine.
A very deserving winner of the 2010 Michael L. Printz award,
Going Bovine is the tale of Cameron, an American teenager
diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, commonly known as Mad Cow
disease. Cameron's already a pretty cranky and disconnected youth,
but when the hallucinogenic symptoms of his disease start to take
hold, his life starts to become increasingly terrifying and
entertaining. It's hard to describe such a rambling novel that
takes the reader on a road trip across America, from voodoo-jazz in
New Orleans, to happy-clappy religous cults addicted to positivity
and smoothies, to spring-break-girls-go-wild shenanigans in
Daytona.
All along the way Bray lampoons American pop culture and
highlights (with affection) the various insanities afflicting her
country and its teens. This is a gutsy, touching, hilarious
rollercoaster ride of a book that can be enjoyed equally by adults
as well as teens.
Review by Joe Rubbo, Readings State Library of Victoria Manager
When Walter Mason spends the night in a beachside monastery, he
wonders if some early rising monks might think him an apparition of
Di Lac, the fat, smiling Buddha of the future. This is an apt
description of my own impression of Mr. Mason after reading the
personal and amusing account of his voyages in Vietnam as a
festively plump foreigner.
Possessed of a fluid and receptive engagement with spirituality,
Mr Mason directs his exploratory trip into the religious practices
and beliefs of individuals and groups in contemporary Vietnamese
society, finding charisma in all facets of Vietnamese life. I
became more and more engaged with Mr Mason’s comical and touching
stories, related in the sort of personal, unpolished style that
heightens humour and forgives gentle moralising.
Review by Louise Swinn, Editorial Director of Sleepers Publishing
There’s been some advance fanfare for Reality Hunger, a
provocative new manifesto from this University of Washington
creative writing professor. In a work that is a series of hooks,
Shields writes: ‘Don’t waste your time; get to the real thing.
Sure, what’s “real”? Still, try to get to it.’
Often a novel begins with the note, ‘any relation between the
characters and real people is entirely coincidental’, which can be
blatantly untrue. In 1722, Daniel Defoe tried to pass off
A
Journal of the Plague Year as an actual journal and in
1595, Sir Philip Sidney had to fight for the right to ‘lie’ in
literature. So we have come full circle. And yet, as per James Frey
et al, we don’t like to find out we’ve been lied to for the sake of
a good story.
Reality Hunger’s main concern is the blurring of the
boundary between fact and fiction, the new ways we need to learn
how to tell stories, and how to read and understand them. Then
Shields takes apart plot. Writers beware: literature is
marginalised; Shields urges us to accept that and use it to our
advantage. It seems appropriate, in the year Salinger leaves us,
for this new text to be obsessed with authenticity and the search
for what is ‘real’. ‘It’s all in the art. You get no credit for
living.’ Read it first: argue later.
Review by Martin Shaw, Book Buyer at Readings Carlton
The long summer draws to an end, our publishing houses
emerge from what feels like a long recess, and we have
new and exciting offerings to behold! A particular stand-out so far
this year has been Affirm Press’s terrific first couple of
offerings in their short-story series, overseen
by Rebecca Starford.
In a show of remarkable industriousness, she has
now co-edited (in her own time no less!) a
brand-spanking-new literary journal, in order to – as the
editors have it – ‘reinvigorate and re-energise’ a medium
that sometimes risks a certain staleness. An outstanding
design concept is perhaps the first feature which lifts this
journal above the average; some snappy book reviews, a cartoon
from the redoubtable Oslo Davis, an extended interview with
Sarah Waters, and stories from some of the most exciting exponents
of Oz Lit (including Kalinda Ashton, Patrick Cullen and Chris
Womersley) all indicate that this publication has every
intention of becoming a fixture in our literary
world.
Oh and there’s a clutch of diverse and approachable non-fiction
articles too, all an ideal length for the more time-poor among us.
My only gripe is a rather inflammatory piece by Gideon
Haigh on the alleged decline in Australian literary
reviewing – but it attests to KYD’s mission to be at the
forefront of debate and exchange, for all who care about
books, writing and ideas.
Review by Mark Rubbo, Managing Director of Readings
To Hamilton, the case is clear cut and the current growth of
greenhouse gas emissions will lead to a catastrophic rise in global
temperature. Indeed, he argues that even if governments had the
political will to act promptly and resolutely – and radically
restructured their economies and societies – it may still be too
late. He quotes one analysis that claims the world is irreversibly
headed for 2.4 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial
levels. At that degree of warming, we would lose the Arctic summer
sea ice and see the melting of the Himalayan–Tibetan glaciers and
of the Greenland ice sheet.
In an earlier book, Hamilton introduced the concept of our
growth fetish. It is the developed (and now the developing) world’s
addiction to consumption and to economic growth at any cost that
has got us into this predicament, he argues. Ironically, says
Hamilton, if we took stringent measures to stabilise greenhouse
gases over the next 40 years to a level where we may have a chance
to survive, then the cost to world GDP in 2050 would be 2%.
Reducing atmospheric carbon will not inhibit economic growth; it is
the only way to ensure it is sustained.
Hamilton is pessimistic about the world’s ability to introduce
measures that would give us a chance; governments are compromised
by the pressure of powerful interest groups, such as the coal
industry, to emasculate their climate change policies. All
political parties are compromised to a greater or lesser degree and
the recent experience in Australian politics is a vivid example of
this. Hamilton’s book is a sobering one; it will be dismissed as
scaremongering by the interests that deny global warning and
alarmist by others. If the science is right, then we have little or
no time to act.
Hamilton provocatively concludes his book by calling on citizens
to break laws that protect those who continue to pollute the
atmosphere in a way that threatens our survival.
In the wake of the science-fiction phenomenon Avatar,
it is conceivable that 3D blockbusters may become the default for
years to come as studios strive to emulate the giddy box-office
heights of James Cameron. This is not a criticism of
Avatar – it is a pulse-quickening experience – but even
the most brightly lit displays can become wearying on the eye.
Duncan Jones’ first film, Moon, is a delightful
antidote for those craving ideas that seem beyond the churn of
Hollywood studios. Using old-fashioned models and seventies-looking
interiors, Jones has created a highly realistic lunar station, from
which Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) monitors and maintains a one-man
mining operation. In this near-future all our energy problems have
been solved by the discovery of Helium3, a clean fuel found on the
dark side of the moon.
Moon gives us Sam Bell at the end of his three-year
contract. He is desperately tired and lonely, bickering with his
robot helper GERTY (voiced with sinister ambiguity by Kevin Spacey)
and chatting at length with his indoor plants. The long-range
communications satellite has been out of commission and contact
with his wife and daughter has been exclusively through video
recordings. With only weeks to go before he heads home to Earth, it
seems all Sam has to do is wait.
But waiting alone on the moon for three years has taken its
toll. Bouncing slowly across the cool dusty pock-marked terrain in
a lunar truck, Sam is spooked by a vision and crashes into one of
the automated Helium3 harvesters. When he awakes in the infirmary,
GERTY fussing about him, Sam’s understanding of the world begins to
change. GERTY seems reluctant to impart information about the crash
and unusually obstructive when Sam wishes to leave the station.
What ensues is a surprisingly early revelation of a key twist, from
which inexorable conclusions are reached. In uncovering truths
about his work, Sam begins to question who he is, why he is caught
in his predicament, and what it is to live in the age of the
corporation.
Underpinning these questions is the film’s minimalist aesthetic.
Grey exteriors are punctured by harsh slashes of sunlight. Earth
looms large, mournfully luminous but also distant and abstract.
This is what it must be like to go to work alone on a mine site,
awakening to straight-lined white interiors laced with moon-dust.
Sam’s spacesuit doesn’t gleam - it too is dusty and scuffed.
Moon abounds with such quotidian details of the working
life. This is not 2001, more Silent Runnings meets Outland. It is
not a film about gadgets - it is equally as fascinating to watch
GERTY cut Sam’s hair as it is to see him unloading Helium3 three
from a moving harvester – and the film builds its momentum around
Sam’s re-conception of truth rather than any space-age
technological conceit.
It is a beautiful film to watch, too, but where Moon is
most extraordinary is its emotional depth. Sam Rockwell delivers
the best performance of his career as an exhausted workingman
prodded into action. Complemented by a stunning sonic tapestry from
Clint Mansell, Moon is an intensely thoughtful and
original interrogation of what our horrid, corrupt and exploitative
monster of a world is up to and heading for, entirely explored
through one man’s confrontation with himself.
Review by Leanne Hall, Kids' Book Specialist, Readings Carlton
I came late to the Skulduggery Pleasant series – starting with
the third book,
The Faceless Ones, and then following it with Dark
Days, the fourth. I enjoyed Dark Days so much I’m now
reading the first two books back to back!
For the uninitiated, Skulduggery Pleasant is a skeleton
detective/sorcerer who works with his partner Valkyrie Cain (aka
former ordinary Irish schoolgirl Stephanie Edgley) and a host of
other characters to defeat the many powers of evil.
In Dark Days, Valkyrie must undertake a dangerous
rescue mission to retrieve Skulduggery from a hellish dimension
ruled by the Faceless Ones. There’s no time for her to take a
breather afterwards, though. There’s the matter of the Desolation
Engine – a bomb that could wipe out thousands – that has fallen
into the wrong hands. I can’t say much more without spoiling a plot
full of surprises, but I will say that the book ends with Valkyrie
on the verge of a major identity crisis. This is smart, funny,
contemporary fantasy that’s up there with the best, easily as good
as the books of Cassandra Clare or Eoin Colfer.