Tag: book reviews

Book review: Shutting Out the Sun

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Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Generated its Own Lost Generation by Michael Zielenziger.
My rating: three stars

Japan is a country that’s had a Bit Of A Time. At the end of WWII is was bombed into atomic submission (twice) by the nation that would become the defacto dictator of political structure and positions of power, it experienced unprecedented growth and became one of the richest countries in the world.

Then, of course, there was a bubble and everything went tits-up. Security was no longer assured. Birth rates fell. Productivity fell through the floor. Entrenched ways of working started to inhibit growth, rather than spur it to nation-envying heights. And millions of adults locked themselves away from the world in voluntary seclusion, becoming hikikomori, individuals choosing to withdraw from the world entirely, often placing burdens on the familial unit.

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Book review: Gibbons and Dubliners

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Gibbons, or One Bloody Thing After Another by James Morrison.
My rating: four stars

There’s a bit of trepidation I feel in reviewing this one, as its author, a noted issuer of lamentations about terrible publishing design choices, is someone I know. (Inasmuch as sending him the occasional book and interacting on the sewer/binfire that is Twitter (amongst other places in the search for a replacement for said sewer/binfire) can be adequately called “knowing”.)

James was kind enough to send me a copy of the work (available now through Orbis Tertius Press!) as part of a by-mail book swap.

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Book reviews: Plows and Cactus Boots

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Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones).
My rating: five stars

I really don’t want to say too much about this book. Because I feel that to say too much would rob you of the absolute fucking joy of reading it for the first time yourself.

(Yes, it’s that good.)

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Book review: Crossing the Line

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Crossing the Line: The Inside Story of Murder, Lies and a Fallen Hero by Nick McKenzie.
My rating: four stars

I’m not going to lie: I’m reading this for different reasons (and have probably enjoyed it in a different way) than the usual reader. I’m digging in because at heart, while it ostensibly speaks to the murderous fuckwittery of one man, emblematic of a section of Australia’s elite forces, it also addresses the power that journalism can have, despite obstacles – legal, cultural and military – that might get in the way.

Perhaps it was us who were the fools for publishing without certainty of victory in a defamation court.
Masters always had a calm response to my second-guessing. ‘Was it in the public interest? Did Australians have a right to know? And was it true?’
The answer to all these questions was, yes, whether we could prove it in court or not.

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Book review: The Adventures of Christian Rosy Cross and Yellowface

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WHOOMP! HERE I AM.

In an attempt to not spend months between posts, here’s some reviews of books I finished in the past couple of days. They’re both a bit … well, me-ish … but perhaps you’ll get a buzz out of them also?

The Adventures of Christian Rosy Cross by David Foster.
My rating: three stars

The first David Foster I’ve read turns out to be right in my wheelhouse but also a bit of a ’70s let it all hang out holdover. This last part isn’t a particularly bad thing, but it does mean that when things get a bit hectic, the author has the ejector-seat trip of “hey man, it is what it is or was or whatever” that he can cling to.

Ahem.

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Book review: a few months’ worth, why not?

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As is eternally the case, I’m behind on my book reviews. Way more behind than I’ve been in quite a while. This post is three times as long as the last one.

(TWENTY-FOUR BOOKS WHAT THE HELL MAN.)

I mean, I did get made permanent at my new job. I did go to Dark Mofo (aka Goth Schoolies), though this – depressingly – turned out to be much more lame than expected. And I did catch COVID after three years of avoiding the bloody thing, giving me further evidence that I should really stay the fuck home as much as possible.

(Which, to be fair, probably counts as my House Words.)

Indeed.

Point is, there’s been a bit on. And so with a meagre clutch of excuses, let’s get to the books I’ve been reading since I last graced your eyeballs.

(Mercifully, I’ve been doing a bit more reading which, if nothing else, makes me feel a bit better. YMMV, mind.)

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Book review: The Anomaly

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The cover of Hervé le Tellier's THE ANOMALY, winner of the 2020 Prix Goncourt.

The Anomaly by Hervé le Tellier
My rating: four stars

Doubles have always freaked me out. Perfect example? The Black Lodge sequence from the end the second season of Twin Peaks: you know, Cooper is running around trying to avoid a maniacal version of himself, identical except for clouded eyes. The perfect image of something so mundane, something an individual sees every day – themselves! – except multiplied, with presumably ill intent.

There’s a long history of doppelgängers being evil, or at the very least a sign that everything is very fuckin’ far from okay – and their appearance is, understandably, a cause for concern.

(A special shoutout here to the Irish for using the term fetch to describe the same thing, which brings new depths to the demand that people stop trying to make fetch happen.)

Le Tellier’s The Anomaly takes the idea of the sudden appearance of a doppelgänger but adds a bit of a twist: what if there was a planeload of doubles?

Of course there are two of this guy. Of course.
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Book review: Waypoints

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The cover of Adam Ouston's WAYPOINTS: a shot of an orange sky with an airliner proceeding from behind clouds, contrails behind.

Waypoints by Adam Ouston
My rating: four stars

So you know Harry Houdini, right? The straitjacket-and-locks guy? Big hater of spiritualist fraudsters? Escapologist, man with a dynamic gaze? Eventually bought low by a sucker punch? You know, this guy:

It’s a look, I’ll give him that.

Well, it turns out that prestidigitation and being a momma’s boy weren’t the only things he was interested in: he also had a brief flirtation with aviation. Including Australian aviation: on a trip out here (organised at great expense), Harry was keen to be the first to attain powered flight on the continent.

(He ended up being third, though that didn’t really stop people blowing his trumpet, so to speak.)

This quest for aviation supremacy – and one man’s quest to reenact it as a sort of psychic salve – form the basis of Waypoints, Adam Ouston’s novel of uncommon energy and beauty.

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Book review: Faith, Hope and Carnage

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The cover of FAITH, HOPE & CARNAGE by Nick Cave and Seán O'Hagan

Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan
My rating: five stars

I’ve been a fan of Nick Cave’s work for a couple of decades, but I admit to having held a certain amount of cynicism about the guy (and parts of his output) over the years. Partially this was a bit of a pose, part of it was (perhaps justified) criticism at the increased deification and man-of-letters mantle he’d been gifted by certain parts of his fanbase, and by his home country of late, which of course disregards the fact that he had to fuck off to England and Germany before earning any sort of praise here.

The news of the death of Arthur, Cave’s son, put paid to that. Selfishly, it allowed me to focus more on the work than the man – it seemed like a particularly cunty act to want to run down a man (remember that Nick Cave & the Bad Everything photo?) in the wake of such terrible events. How would someone bear such a thing? How would they survive? How do you keep getting up in the morning?

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Book review: Mount Analogue

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A picture of the cover of the Tusk Ivories edition of René Daumal's MOUNT ANALOGUE: A NOVEL. Cover is green with dark blue lines, and features an image of a mountain range.

Mount Analogue by René Daumal
My rating: three stars

Here we go: a book about climbing mountains. About climbing one mountain in particular: Mount Analogue.

There’s a slight snag in this crampons-and-rope plan, however: the mountain doesn’t exist.

(I mean, until a voyage to a corner of the Pacific, where it’s suddenly discovered that it does.)

Were you expecting anything less from a book written by a pataphysician and Gurdjieff devotee?

(I wasn’t.)

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