Showing all posts about books
The redemptive power of reading books
23 December 2021
Ally Colquitt, writing for The Guardian, on the part reading books played in her rehabilitation, while serving a prison sentence a few years ago.
This was the mindset I was in when I was alone in my cell at Silverwater Mulawa centre, awaiting “classo” (classification) – with a broken TV, no pen and paper, nothing to do except think. I noticed that the previous inmate had left a couple of library books on the table. I picked up an abandoned copy of Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol and began to read. I didn’t know the impact that poem would have on me, and how it would play a part in changing my world view and my life direction.
Colquitt argues those incarcerated should have greater access to books, and why not? Especially considering some of the publications sitting on the shelves in bookstores stand to be destroyed if not sold, wouldn’t it better if they could be of help to others?
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Melbourne Writers Festival summer reading guide
21 December 2021
Wild Abandon by Emily Bitto, Scary Monsters by Michelle de Kretser, Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead, and Seven and a Half by Christos Tsiolkas, are among inclusions on my to-be-read list, and the Melbourne Writers Festival summer reading guide.
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Scrublands, by Chris Hammer, most read Libby ebook in 2021
16 December 2021
Canberra based Australian crime writer Chris Hammer’s 2018 novel Scrublands was the most read ebook on the Libby reading app this year in Australia. Unsurprisingly, Overdrive, the developers of the app, said 2021 saw record issues of digital titles, with the pandemic resulting in fewer than usual physical book loans, given many libraries were closed because of COVID lockdowns.
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Vale Anne Rice, author of Interview with the Vampire
14 December 2021
American author Anne Rice, best known for her 1976 book Interview with the Vampire, and the subsequent series of sequels called The Vampire Chronicles, died on Saturday, 11 December 2021, aged 80. Other of Rice’s notable works include The Feast of All Saints, and Servant of the Bones.
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The books your favourite authors recommend
13 December 2021
Apart from literary award long and short lists, book recommendations from the world’s best authors are a sure fire way to find novels to add to your to-be-read list. Along with American writer Min Jin Lee, and British author Kazuo Ishiguro, Australian novelists Anna Funder, Helen Garner, Hannah Kent, Sofie Laguna, Alexis Wright, and Craig Silvey, talk about their favourite reads of the past twelve months.
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Sally Rooney voted top fiction writer in the 2021 Goodreads Choice Awards
11 December 2021
Beautiful World, Where Are You, by Sally Rooney, has been voted the best fiction title for 2021 by Goodreads members, who voted for books across seventeen categories in the annual Goodreads Choice Awards. Congratulations to all authors whose works were nominated this year.
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books, literature, novels, Sally Rooney
To all the people who’ve blocked me on Twitter
11 December 2021
“For everyone who blocked me on Twitter”… I can’t tell you much about the book itself, but there’s a book dedication you don’t see every day, as seen in The End of Gender, by Canadian sex neuroscientist Dr Debra Soh.
Via Paul Dalgarno, on Bookstagram.
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Sci-fi and fantasy novels with disabled characters
11 December 2021
Kit Kavanagh-Ryan, a presenter of The Book Show, has put together a selection of five science fiction and/or fantasy novels featuring central characters who are disabled.
Sometimes, however, speculative fiction creates a space where readers and writers get to imagine ‘crip futures’ in our fiction: spaces real or imagined where we question our idea of what ‘normal’ bodies and minds look like – what normal means at all.
Maybe it’s the sort of novels I read, titles usually found on literary award shortlists, but now that I think about it, few of them include people with disabilities.
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Good Weekend’s Christmas reading guide 2021
8 December 2021
I’m sure we’re going to be seeing a few of this lists over the next few weeks, but the 2021 reading guide from Good Weekend, contains some choice titles, fiction and non-fiction.
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Australia’s lending rights scheme needs to recognise ebooks
6 December 2021
In Australia, when you borrow a print novel from a library, the author is eligible to receive a small payment, as a compensation for missed book sales. Surprisingly though, if you loan one of their titles through a library ebook service, such as Libby, writers are not recompensed. This is because Australia’s lending rights scheme does not – yet – recognise electronic books and audiobooks, despite – in some cases – an eighty percent increase in ebook lending in recent years. It is a situation Olivia Lanchester, CEO of the Australian Society of Authors, says needs to be rectified.
“If it only remains applicable to the print world, and libraries are increasingly reducing their print collection, then over time our fear is that the payments will go to fewer and fewer Australian authors,” Lanchester said. “We want it to be a broad-based scheme that really captures everyone whose books are being read via libraries.”
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