CATEGORIES

One of my greatest gripes about being vegan (or vegetarian—the same rules apply) is also a rather politically incorrect one. That is, that it’s assumed I thrive on the smell of incense, that I have musty-smelling dreadlocks, and that I wear tie-dyed clothes. I’m not that kind of vegan, and the mis-lumping irks me no [...]

How far would you go to obtain a book? it seems, is actually more than a hypothetical. I waited for months in breathless, is-it-here-yet anticipation for a rerelease of The Magnificent Chicken: Portraits of the Fairest Fowl, a book about chickens (hereafter referred to as ‘chookens’). Those who know me know I have a bit [...]

There are few books more suited to the Ones I Wish I’d Written category than Jeffrey Brown’s Darth Vader and Son. A pint-sized picture book, it’s brilliantly as much a book for big kids as small ones. In fact, I suspect many a new parent who grew up with Star Wars will be buying it [...]

Alongside To Kill A Mockingbird, Animal Farm would have to be up there as one of the most-loved books we were required (forced) to read at school. While I struggled with Shakespeare (though the waffle is clever, my small brain still found it waffle), Brave New World (the book’s extremely dated) and anything poetry-related, Animal [...]

A book. A book by Indira Naidoo. A book by Indira Naidoo about growing vegies on your inner-city balcony. Could there be any trifecta much more exciting than that? The Edible Balcony tackles the problem most of us environmentally conscious city folk struggle with: How to grow edible goodies we shouldn’t—but do—go to the supermarket [...]

I’ve blogged a bunch about Matthew ‘Oatmeal’ Inman’s genius blogs*. Now I get to blog about his just-released book, The Dog Paradox, which is built on his comic by roughly the same title. If you haven’t had the pleasure and pain of laughing so hard you think your ribcage might combust, then being struck by [...]

I’ve been reading and hearing about an award-winning transmedia app created by former McSweeney’s managing editor Eli Horowitz. Suffice to say, I was both intrigued enough to want to download this app, but wary enough that it might be so hipster I’d want to avoid it. I gave it a whirl after finding out The [...]

Going vegan while hampered by a gammy knee and while trying to conquer a PhD is arguably not one of my smarter moves. The knee injury was unavoidable. (I was mown down by an opposition player.) The veganism is, arguably, unavoidable too. It’s always where I’ve been heading—some 23 years of vegetarianism were really aspiring [...]

Every writer goes through a patch where they stumble upon books they could have written. Said books send them into an I-should-have-written-that, I’m-never-going-to-make-it tailspin (cue diva-like facepalms and internal wailing). Me? I’ve found two books (three if you count the just-released sequel to one). The first (with its related second) is Weird Things Customers Say [...]

This New York Times article just won a Pulitzer. Frankly, I’m not one bit surprised it did. Snowfall documents, through a six-part, transmedia tale that incorporates text, images, video interviews, video footage, simulations, and interactive maps, an avalanche that occurred at Tunnel Creek in the US. Snowfall is exquisite and haunting in terms of both [...]

The New Yorker’s style has always been double consonant-inclined, although even they aren’t entirely sure why this is the case: The style book gives no reason for this spelling choice. What would be the point? Nothing makes the eyes glaze over so totally as the effort to codify the rules for doubling consonants when adding [...]

I tried to obtain a review copy of Caroline Hamilton’s One Man Zeitgeist: Dave Eggers, Publishing and Publicity when it was first released as a prohibitively expensive hardcover in 2010. And I was, I’ll admit, summarily miffed that the publisher wasn’t even polite enough to issue me a ‘nice try, but you can pay for [...]

I realise I’m coming to Argo about six months and a wallop of Academy Awards nominations later, but how good is that film?! My penchant is for non-fiction tales, so I’m particularly partial to films based on truth-is-stranger-than-fiction events. And there are few tales that could be any stranger than the one involving a fictional [...]

It’s with enormous wish-I’d-thought-of-this envy and even greater gratitude that I blog about this next website. It’s also with genuine stomach pain that well may be from a laughing-induced hernia. But first: some background to the website’s inspiration. We’re all familiar with Lorem Ipsum dummy text. That is, the suitably generic, repetitive, and non-distracting text [...]

One of the perks of my job specifically and the interwebs more generally is that I get to seek out, muse over, discuss, and then write about brilliant, off-the-wall, quirky, and fun concepts. That job admittedly comes with a veritably enormous amount of envy. How, I often wonder, do people come up with such insightful, [...]

In recent days I’ve spotted at least two articles extolling the death of ‘whom’. And as inappropriate as it is, I’ve got to admit that I’m rather relieved and even a lot happy. You see—and this is something that’s entirely uncool to admit as a writer and editor who’s supposed to know and do better—the [...]

I’d heard lots about writer and researcher Charlotte Nash. Not only had we completed the same post-grad writing and editing course, we also had mutual friends. But it took until last week for me to meet her officially, when she joined Write Club, our informal but occasionally productive support-meets-gossip group. It turns out Nash, who [...]

There are few more terrifying ways to awake—in the developed world, at least—than because a possum is ferreting about on your bedside table. As melodramatic as it sounds, I have a book to thank for rescuing me. Or at least for waking me up before who knows what befell me. Suffice to say, I’ve added [...]

Presents for bibliophiles are always difficult to find. The eternal, unanswerable question is: Which book to buy them when they’re likely to have already read it and everything around it? List masters Buzzfeed have compiled a handy list of complementary gifts, for those who have read everything. Their recommendations include the: iPhone book doc, from [...]

The problem with writers penning runaway bestsellers is that they’re the outliers but they’re viewed as the benchmark norm. Quibble however you will over the quality (or lack thereof) of their work, but JK Rowling, Dan Brown, and EL James are the notable exceptions to the authorial rule: They might have made so much money [...]

I’ll keep this blog brief because my others have a habit of getting, well, long. And instead of writing what I think, I’m hoping to pick your brains (in the nicest possible way, of course—that’s not an entirely pleasant visual). I’m on the hunt for innovative ebooks. As in, ones that represent new and engagingly [...]

There are two authors in my reading life whose work is best read after having heard them read it themselves. They are also two authors whose restrained, understated, off-the-wall approach to observation and storytelling continues to blow my mind. Both of those authors also happen to contribute to one of my—if not the—favourite podcasts of [...]

I can’t help but follow ‘yo’ with ‘mama’, but I’m happy to try to rectify my ways. Especially when it involves a kid-led solution to a long-running English Language awkwardness. It appears that Baltimore’s best young-uns have devised a gender-neutral solution to the age-old issue of the English language requiring gender-specific pronouns. That is, how [...]

The mature thing to do when you both have enormous, suffocatingly impending deadlines as well as knee surgery and an enforced lay-off coming up would be to save up a good book for the latterly mentioned respite. I, of course, did nothing of the sort, head-in-the-sanding it ostrich style to pretend that I didn’t have [...]

Technology-induced complete loss of zen means only one thing: retreating to the stationery cupboard and re-reading some fave books. I’m too time poor to revisit whole books, especially after spending over six hours yesterday trying to get a PDF to a readable stage on my iPad Mini. It’s an issue I blogged (read: ranted) about [...]

Oh sweet mother of dog, can anyone help me work out how to download and open a goddamn PDF book on my iPad Mini? I bought the book. The default reader is Overdrive, but Overdrive doesn’t support PDFs and won’t download the file. I cannae work out how to download and open the book via [...]

‘Isn’t saying that copyright laws are turning our children into criminals the same as saying arson laws are turning our children into pyromaniacs?’ is just one of the salient, incisive quotes about music piracy in Chris Ruen’s just released book, Freeloading: How Our Insatiable Appetite For Free Content Starves Creativity. If the title hasn’t already [...]

The inaugural Stella Prize longlist was announced today, something met with much frisson (at least it was in my one-person household). The announcement has been a long time coming, both because Australian female authors have traditionally been overlooked when it comes to literary prizes and because it’s taken some time for the Stella Prize to [...]

There are few more pleasant surprises than finding out that the woman some have labeled ‘most powerful woman in the world’ and the ‘librarian’ to it is being interviewed by your favourite interviewer. The woman in question is Wikimedia’s Executive Director, Sue Gardner. Her interviewer was none other than Richard Fidler. Gardner was in town [...]

This review follows on from Random Romance Part 1 of 2: Breaking the Rules. In Bloom, 36-year-old married mother of three Emma Eddington feels fat, forgotten, and all-round frumpy. Her husband works all the time and her children see her as their housekeeper meets taxi driver. She’s also frustrated because the misbehaving family dog has [...]

The merger between Random House and Penguin sparked much speculation about what the new company’s title would be, with ‘Random Penguin’ a clear, outlying favourite. That the company opted for the less fun ‘Penguin Random’ was a slight disappointment to us all, and we’ve all continued to run with ‘Random Penguin’ instead. Random House Australia [...]

I had my own Sylvia Plath moment this week, by eerie coincidence just days before the 50th anniversary of her death. The ancient, galvanised something-or-other pipes that channel gas to my apartment’s stove sprung, well, the plumber stopped counting at four leaks. I spent days inhaling gas, first inadvertently and then deliberately as I tried [...]

There are some weeks so bad that only comfort food and obscenely expensive aspirational purchases can save you. I’d argue I’ve just had one of those, having found out I have two tears in my knee and require an arthroscopy, getting flooded twice as badly as I did in 2011, and discovering that my stove [...]

Breakout shoe-selling social enterprise TOMS has recently become the McDonald’s-like lightning rod for all that is wrong with well-meaning charitable organisations. The TOMS premise is that for every pair of canvas shoes it sells, it gives one pair to a child without shoes in Africa (or insert other struggling country or continent here). All of [...]

Book cover design is something of an obsession for those of us who’ve ever worked as booksellers and/or who hope to one day have a book published. So when the New York Times (AKA the purveyor of all things good) issues a list of 19 of 2012’s best book cover designs, we tend to pay [...]

Life and natural disasters have kept me a bit quiet of late (I won’t bore you with the details here, but I will bore you with them in my next, soon-to-be-posted blog, which charts me consoling myself over these testing times by purchasing an iPad Mini). Said disasters are precisely, though, why I’m happy to [...]

As if it wasn’t enough that my shelves were already teeming with awesome books I’ve still yet to read, 2013 is set to release some further stellar titles. There a three due to be released in the first quarter that I’m particularly looking forward to (and that I will likely clear my schedule for—if you’re [...]

Two men, one surname, albeit no blood relation. That’s the now-iconic link between Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and national football team captain Andres Escobar, whose paths crossed under fateful circumstances. The latter was a poor, morally minded boy who dreamed of playing football professionally. The former was a self-made Robin-Hood-figure man adored by the [...]

I’ve been vegetarian for more years than I’ve not, but despite my best intentions I’ve never quite made it across the vegan line. That’s largely because I’m an infamously fussy eater and an equally terrible cook—veganism requires a bit more cooking creativity and prowess than I’m currently capable of. Recently, though, I’ve been heartened to [...]

My thirst for podcasts is insatiable, with those auditory suckers the very things that most often propel my legs into exercising when they (and I) would rather be plopped on a couch. Which is why I get grumpy when I run out of fresh podcasts, as I have over this recent break. I totes know [...]