CATEGORIES

I know I’ve devoted two previous blogs to rabbiting on about how little I liked Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander trilogy, and no one wants to revisit the issue less than me. But having gone two-thirds of the way through the trilogy and then having a freebie copy (and no, that’s not a euphemism for stealing—I [...]

Thanks to everyone who entered this competition. We had some amazing and totally creepy stories and congratulations on the high standard of entries. It was a close call, but the judges felt that the most hair raising entry came from Lucie Campbell. This is her story: Six weeks after my husband passed away my daughter [...]

I’ve occasionally wondered what my comeuppance would be for the sheer and shameless volume of books I’ve poached from others’ shelves. Something tells me I’m about to find out as, by the time you read this blog, I’ll be knee deep in moving house. While I have plenty of people who’ve kindly offered to help [...]

Recently I spent three posts writing about cookbooks and food, with one of those posts devoted specifically to chocolate. I feel that I should now balance things out with a post about exercise. We all know that exercise is good for us. And yet, so many of us do not exercise enough. For me it [...]

There are worlds where ships take travellers through space like taxis. Worlds where your worst nightmare destroys your greatest dreams. Worlds where magic makes the rules. What you have here is not a book, but a key to worlds that exist under your bed, in your cupboard, in the dark of night when you’re sure [...]

Here in Australia, we don’t really have massive shindigs for every single holiday like our American friends do. Give us a beer or a glass of wine and a grassy area and we celebrate in what is usually a much more laidback manner. Living in the opposite season to our Northern counterparts…I’m STILL dreaming of [...]

WIN THIS FRIDAY… Your own copy of Worlds Next Door by telling us in the comments section of our Worlds Next Door post about the weirdest, scariest or funniest thing that has ever happened to you… Worlds Next Door is a fantastic collection of funny, scary and downright weird short stories for kids aged 9 [...]

If you’re a fan of Shaun Tan’s work (and honestly, who isn’t?), this is news that is sure to get you salivating. Hachette have just announced that they will be producing a limited 1500-copy run of a The Arrival and Sketches from a Nameless Land Suitcase Collector’s Edition. This exclusive edition includes hard cover limited [...]

Our friends at the NSW Writers’ Centre have just given us a sneak peak at their upcoming program, so I thought I’d pass it on tonight - they’re running an extensive 5-week Writing For Children and Young Adults workshop with acclaimed author, Jeni Mawter… so, so tempting. Lots of you have mentioned creative writing on the Facebook Fanpage, [...]

It’s hard enough being a twelve-year-old and having to deal with teasing from the school bully because your parents have given you the unfortunate name of Lily Padd. But when Lily is forced to give up her bedroom for the French exchange student and share with her younger and annoying twin sisters, she thinks that [...]

“Woman has her range of duties, and her special functions, as man has his; and I would like to see each find his own place in his own level.” Sir Edward Braddon (Tasmania, Free Trade) House of Representatives, 23 April 1902. It well known that men don’t listen. Women, of course, can’t read maps. Women [...]

Today we’re pleased to welcome debut author, Angela Sunde to Kids’ Book Capers. Angela is stopping here on a blog tour with her new book, Pond Magic and she’s going to be chatting with us about her life as a writer and where her ideas come from. Hi Dee, It’s so nice to be here [...]

Widely reported in Australian book news over the past couple of days is the decision by Melbourne indie bookstore Readings to use a new Australian start-up’s web technology to launch an ebook initiative. This is big news for essentially everyone in the trade in Australia, not because the offering is especially mindblowing, but because of [...]

Should science fiction authors pay more attention to world economics? Could they use the GFC as the basis of a novel or two? Award winning science fiction author Sean McMullen has joined us today for a guest post about science fiction and economics… Should science fiction authors write about the economy? By Sean McMullen Science [...]

As anybody watching Q&A featuring former PM John Howard last night will tell you – it was a shoe-dodging, bio-battling spectacle the likes of which we’ve never seen. Whatever your political leanings, it’s hard to deny it made for great television. Howard appeared on the programme to spruik his recently-released political autobiography, Lazarus Rising, which, like Q&A [...]

Ever expressed an off-the-cuff opinion and realised, with a sinking heart, you were talking to an expert? Ever wish you’d boned up more – or at all – before an exam? Ever turned up confident to a job interview and sat there squirming as you realised they expected far more, and you were woefully unprepared [...]

I keep a list of blog topics in the back on my notebook, which I add to every time an appropriate idea crosses my mind. But not every thought that crosses my mind is worth a blog post in its own right, and so today I present… some random stuff. I like reviewing books. I [...]

No one told me this book would be so…well, awesome. Ok, so I lie. Many bloggers and critics have written about this book since it was first published in 2005. It has its haters and its not-likers, of course. But for the main part it’s been well-received, and when I found out it was being [...]

Today at Kids’ Book Capers, creator Judy Horacek and I talking about Judy’s hilarious and insightful new book, If you can’t stand the heat. Judy, what inspired you to write this book? If you can’t stand the heat is a collection of cartoons that I’ve done over a number of years.  Some of them will [...]

Around the blogosphere, especially among gadget-obsessed early adopters, you hear a lot about what various content industries that have latterly gone digital “should be doing”. They (and sometimes me) justify everything from breaking DRM to piracy by saying that if the industry in question were only doing things right – making things convenient for said [...]

This month is Breast Cancer Awareness month and Susanne Gervay’s latest book Always Jack tackles this difficult subject from a young child’s point of view. Always Jack has been endorsed by The Cancer Council & National Breast & Ovarian Cancer Centre NBOCC and will be launched in Melbourne this weekend. Always Jack was featured recently at [...]

CHOCOLATE! Is there anything in this world that can possibly compare? Well… okay… there is red wine and cheese, of course… and I’m sure that I’ll blog about them in the future, but for now — it’s chocolate! My last two posts have been about cookbooks and recipes, so it seems logical to conclude with [...]

Embedded below is the just-released second theatrical trailer for the first part of the final Harry Potter film – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Warner Bros. recently announced that it would not be releasing the film in 3D as previously announced, after realising the up-conversion to the third dimension would not be completed to [...]

Today we welcome cartoonist Judy Horacek to Kids’ Book Capers. She is the creator of seven collections of cartoons for grownups and five picture books for children. Judy’s new book, If you can’t stand the heat has just been released and as well as being an insightful commentary on so many important world issues, it’s [...]

It’s barely October, but it’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas. Or at least, shopping centres are decking themselves out to make us feel like it is to cash in early on (or even extend) our credit card buying frenzy. I have to admit, though, that I’m someone whom the Christmas spending frenzies and [...]

There’s a popular idea that the rise of the internet has given us short attention spans. It’s something book and long-form journalism publishers have been bemoaning for years. The internet is a compendium of short form content – short videos, pithy reportage, compendiums of weird and wonderful things and, of course, there’s 4chan. Content was [...]

Last week, I spoke on Perpetually Adolescent about bad books, and a friend passed on this link, and I laughed so hard that I had to share. EW.com compiled a list of its 15 scathing book reviews. a preview: Jeffrey Archer poses something of a problem for reviewers. On the one hand, his popularity makes [...]

Have you ever regretted words unsaid? I have. It’s a bit of a cliche, but I met him on a train. One of the good things about commuting to work (and believe me, there aren’t many) was the company of my fellow readers. Whether they were flicking through the twin of the book in my [...]

Twelve months ago I bemoaned the dearth of good books. Everything I either poached or forked out cash for turned out to be mind-numbingly dire, and I despaired that I would ever again find a good book. And by good I mean a gripping, page-turning magnum opus about which you obsess and for which you’d [...]

A Darker Music by Maris Morton is the inaugural winner of the CAL Scribe Fiction Prize. It’s a beautifully written novel, and the  prose is as evocative as the music theme that runs through the book. When Mary Lanyon takes on the job of housekeeper at Downe, a famous Merino stud she discovers a number of [...]

Sorry, bad books exist. I know. You’d be forgiven for thinking they don’t, but they do. On this blog and others like it, bloggers focus on and praise books that move, that affect, that inspire. Because we love reading. All reading is good. But is it… really? Sometimes, you struggle from page to page, wondering how, [...]

Being a book lover, I had been really looking forward to reading It’s A Book and I wasn’t disappointed. Print versus digital is the topic of the moment, and It’s A Book handles this contentious issue in a clever and humorous way. One of my other favourite topics is cats and from the moment the [...]

I’ve been using the new Kindle 3 for a couple of weeks now, and I think this is the first ereader device I’ve used that gets almost everything right. I’ve been using my iPad for months now to read books, and while the experience reading on the iPad is great, my attention span is often [...]

Following on from my Stieg Larsson/Salander rant, it’s come to my attention that The New Yorker’s Nora Ephron (who appears not to be related to Zac Efron, as I first worried) not only feels the same as I do about Stieg Larsson’s Salander trilogy, she’s penned it with great eloquence and parody than I ever [...]

More cookbooks today! I’m going to start off with some old ones, because over the years cooking has changed… and sometimes it’s nice to go back in time. Let’s start by going back to the 1970s with the Australian Women’s Weekly’s Cooking Class Cookbook. Although my copy is the 1992 reprint, it certainly looks like [...]

Mockingjay, the 3rd book in Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games series was released recently to the delight of thousands of fans, and this final saga in the trilogy doesn’t disappoint. Just like books one and two it’s full of action and suspense and feisty heroine, Katniss Everdeen is at her charismatic best. In Mockingjay, the [...]

What is it about dystopian fiction that really pulls at our heartstrings? I refused to see the movie The Road, based on the book by Cormac McCarthy, because I found the book so desolate. I am the first to start bawling in theatres, so I figure that if it’s really that great, then I’ll wait [...]

It’s all about testing the boundaries of sanity chez moi this week. I am taking time out from my copies of Crazy Like Us (non-fiction; on globalisation issues and mental health) and Stephen King’s Under The Dome (fiction; bad stuff happens and people go crazy). I’m researching another topic commonly associated with breakdowns in mental [...]