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Lesley Jørgensen didn’t start writing with big ambitions, much less with the goal of picking up the CAL Scribe Fiction prize. Her entry, Cat & Fiddle, began life as the first piece that she had to write for her RMIT Novel 1 workshop. It grew into a humourous and touching multilayered portrayal of contemporary life, [...]

2013 has started and I’ve decided to make a resolution I can actually keep for a change, instead of committing to learn Arabic by audiobook over my headphones as I run an ultra-marathon in record time. This year I’ve made it easy on myself and resolved to do a lot more learning in my spare [...]

Much like festive food, I often find bestselling books to be either too saccharine-sweet or over-stuffed for my taste. So I wasn’t expecting to be instantly charmed when I finally picked up a copy of Jonas Jonasson’s debut offering, The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared. But it had me at [...]

The low-down on “Vile Kyle” has proved to be good reading material, reports News.com.au.  His new biography, with its wonderfully pun-y title of Scandalands, has apparently hit the top of the non-fiction bestsellers’ list after just a week on the shelves. Written by his former producer Bruno Bouchet, the book reportedly covers “everything from his [...]

The shortlist for the 2012 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction was been announced on Friday 5 October and it’s an impressively mixed bag. The nominated books will are as varied in location as they are in subject matter. They will take you up Everest, across UK on foot, and down into the slums of Mumbai. [...]

J.K.Rowling’s new novel was released yesterday. But before you rush to the shops with the kids in tow, be warned; if you’re expecting a bedtime story or a little light reading, her latest novel may surprise you. Described as her “first novel for adults”, The Casual Vacancy is a complete departure from the world of [...]

I love non-fiction and Neil Patrick Harris (in completely different ways, mind) but the announcement of his book deal has me less excited and more than a little confused about what, exactly, it is we will be reading. Not content with a mere biography or memoir, the scene has been set by press releases sent [...]

Since first being published in 1955, the Guinness World Records book has sold over 120 million copies to date in over 100 countries, but it’s not resting on its laurels. The newly-released 2013 edition comes packed with 3D technology, info-graphics and over 3,000 mind-blowing records; ranging from the amazing (oldest couple to run a marathon, at [...]

Browsing my friends’ bookshelves is always interesting but the books I love to get into (in more ways than one) are their baking books. Not every house has some but when I do come across a home with a well-stocked dessert-bookshelf, I can spend hours browsing and lingering over the lush photography. Puddings and cheesecakes [...]

It’s a departure from my normal non-fiction areas but I have recently been devouring dieting and exercise books. There was a few factors to me picking out these books, from some interesting new releases to my new hobby of running, but I will cheerfully admit my main motivation was superficial – I wanted to look [...]

Last week I posted about some good opportunities for aspiring writers who wanted to see their work published and also to achieve the far more elusive goal of actually getting paid for it. While writing can be its own reward, sometimes it’s nice to see some value placed on your work by others too (and [...]

Spring has sprung and if your spring-cleaning has uncovered your unpublished manuscript, or the warmer weather is simply stirring up your creative side, it’s a great time to get working on your writing. But what to do with your work once it’s written? There’s plenty of opportunities out there at the moment for aspiring writers, [...]

For the last month I have spent the first moments of each online day deleting 50 shades of spam. As part of being a Boomerang blogger, I keep an eye on book news. I’m signed up to a lot of publishers and author’s websites and newsletters, and get lots of information on new book releases. [...]

The Olympics are over and many sport-loving Dads from all over the world are feeling a little flat, my own father included. After several weeks with an excuse to always have the channel set to Sport he’s had to relinquish the remote. It’s not that he’s deprived normally; my Mum and I also like a good game played well but [...]

I love to fly, but I very rarely enjoy reading books about flying, especially while in an airplane: all too often they involve words like “plummet”, “screaming”, “disaster” and “splatted”. Nothing like reading a sentence that combines all four of those and then spending a few tense hours at several thousand feet staring out the windows [...]

Hello again! This is my first blog post in a bit as I have been busier than George R R Martin avoiding questions on when he’s finally going to finish the Game of Thrones series. I spent most of last month working on a conference, getting married in Fiji and taking a short honeymoon on [...]

I’ve always enjoyed the acerbic wit of Australian-born critic and writer Clive James, so it saddened me when I recently read that he is soon likely to write no more. Various newspapers reported on James’s struggle with leukemia, quoting directly from an interview he recently gave BBC Radio 4 program Meeting Myself Coming Back, and it seemed [...]

If you are the type who likes to put a pen to paper – or fingers to the keyboard, as the case may be – you’ll often find that your first thought after finishing a really excellent book is wishing you had written in. My writer’s envy goes off pretty often; set off by writers [...]

It has not been a good month for blogging. I hoped that things would settle down after the house move but it was not to be. I have since developed what can only be described as an Epic DeathCold, complete with hacking cough and tonsils of flame, sapping my energy for anything other than sitting [...]

This delay in posting this blog is thanks to a sudden and complete lack of internet. We moved house last week and – while our new internet provider promised us we would be back online in moments – as always reconnecting to the net has taken a couple of weeks, countless emails, and approximately 4 [...]

“Hey, did you finish that book I gave you?” “…um. No, not yet.” “That’s okay, I won’t spoil the ending for you. Are you enjoying it?” “…um. No. Not really. I don’t think I’ll finish it.” Ouch. It’s a trivial thing but I always feel bad when someone doesn’t like a book I gave them, [...]

Jennifer Miller’s novel, The Year of the Gadfly, is a hard to pin down. With a teenage protagonist who chats with the chain-smoking ghost of Edward R. Murrow, prep-school rules and secret societies, love stories and mysteries, and asides into extreme micro-biology and the personal and public ethics of journalism, it’s an unusual read. And that was just how she intended [...]

As winter draws in and the evenings get colder I find cooking more alluring. Slaving over a hot stove – so very unappealing in Sydney’s sticky-hot summers – becomes much more enticing as a way both to keep warm and to get a good meal in. And, having just discovered the farmer’s markets up the road, [...]

It’s Friday night and you know what that means – it’s book club night! Well, book and wine club. As I discovered last time, the first rule of book club is that you are totally allowed to talk about book club, provided you bring some wine. So while I might not be donning a micro-mini [...]

With a house move imminent it has become apparent that I own far too many books. Normally I can hide the overflow with a little creativity. Packing the shelves so there is two rows of books, not one, and more on top if there’s space ? Normal practice here at Casa De Libros. Persuading myself [...]

Yesterday we published part 1 of our interview with Elizabeth Haynes, whose debut novel Into the Darkest Corner deals with domestic abuse, obsession and OCD, and she discussed writing crime and suspense fiction. Today we have her hard-won advice for other writers starting out. She completed the first draft of Into the Darkest Corner, her first [...]

Elizabeth Haynes’s suspense-filled debut novel, Into the Darkest Corner, was penned as part of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in 2008. Just three years on, it sits on Amazon’s 10 Best UK Books of 2011 (alongside George RR Martin’s Dance with Dragons and Steve Jobs’s biography) and her second book, Revenge of the Tide, has [...]

This month my reading has been all about training dogs or children. Training one requires patience and kindness to build confidence, the other dominance, stern punishment and endless rote learning administered by a stern task-master. And probably not for the ones you think either. The stern approach, of course, is for the kids. Earlier in [...]

The finalists for this year’s Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) have been announced and it’s looking good for Australian non-fiction reader and writers this year.  The ABIA awards are voted on by booksellers and publishers, rather than literary panels, so rather than focusing on high-brow fiction these awards instead highlight what publishers and bookshops find [...]

The Easter weekend is drawing to a close and whatever way you like to celebrate your holidays I hope you had a good one; full of chocolate eggs and cute bunnies (if that’s your thing) and plenty of time to read brilliant books (because that’s everyone’s thing, right?). I was lucky enough to spend my [...]

…bring a bottle of wine, apparently. I’m not sure what the rest of the rules are – this is my first ever book club – but everyone was very clear about the wine. Despite a lifetime of loving books and reading books and obsessing about books and occasionally fresking people about by thrusting books at [...]

So this month, like most of Australia, I have been spending my spare time glued to the Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. It’s a page-turner in the traditional sense, and it’s very easy to see why this trilogy was quickly picked up for movie adaptation. The novels are set a post-apocalyptic America where the Haves live in [...]

It’s the end of an icon. The 2010 print set of the Encyclopædia Britannica will be the last one they make. After 244 years,  and with more than 7 million sets sold, the 2010 print edition will be the last set to grace the shelves as the iconic reference books move completely to the digital format. [...]

Some of you may have noticed a bit of a book-room and book-accessory theme on this blog in the last few weeks. Well, it turns out that once you start noticing these things they just keep popping up everywhere. My recent browsing has been filled with fascinating little book-related asides such as: America’s smallest library [...]

2012 is shaping up to be a year with plenty of notable dates. If you are following the Gregorian Calendar, today is a leap day. This means two things; firstly, that February really doesn’t know when to leave the party gracefully. (“It’s a year that’s divisible by four! Why don’t I just stay over? No, [...]

Last week I blogged about my desire find a house with a library (preferably one behind a hidden door), where I could pander to my love of reading and store my ever-expanding collection of books. I’ll cheerfully admit that my reach definitely exceeds my grasp on this one. House with libraries tend to come with [...]

My partner and I are house-hunting for a bigger place and I figure this is the perfect chance to select places that contain space for the ultimate home indulgence. Not a spa bath or sunroom or walk-in wardrobe (although they would be nice) – I’m gunning for a library. I’ve had a yen for a [...]

Regular readers will remember that I spent most of last month engrossed, entertained and occasionally utterly grossed out by John Long’s Hung Like an Argentine Duck, which literally digs up some of the weirdest evidence and facts from the evolution of sexual reproduction, including necrophiliac snakes and the possible inventor of sex from our very [...]

Recognise this rather guilty-looking face? Srs Rochester is srs. If you’re a fan of Gothic romances or if you’ve studied the Brontë sisters’ novels, you probably should. Let’s see if some text can jog your memory a little. “I knew my traveller with his broad and jetty eyebrows; his square forehead, made squarer by the [...]

December and the holiday season is a receding memory (even if several of my neighbors still have sad and tattered pieces of tinsel wilting on their doors and balconies) and we are entering what I call “the chocolate season” – Valentine’s Day and Easter. I don’t usually make a fuss over Valentine’s Day. It’s not [...]