I think I could love It Sounded Better in My Head by Nina Kenwood (Text Publishing, 2019). What better time to blog here again, two years after my last rambling. I’ve been reading the whole time, but putting reviews on Goodreads. Time for some backups (and pics of my dog reading).
“Tonight, everything is still possible.”
“Then the sky cracks open and the light shines through.”
Cracked by Clare Strahan (Allen & Unwin, 2014) has all things I love in a book: a waddling senior staffy, nature, graffiti, hot ranga who rides bmx, one angry young woman. My regular refrain: how did it take me so long to find this, get around to read it. Also, how has this book not won awards?? I’ll give it one now: Fav Book I Just Finished Reading.
This has spoilers. If you want to read with the spoilers hidden, go to my Goodreads version. (You don’t have to be a member to read it.)
Two weeks into my 2018 Reading Challenge half of January’s books changed, but I got through all four and loved my surprise additions. (No DNFing around here.) I also love Gabrielle Williams’ books, so I’ve been wanting to read My Life as a Hashtag (Allen and Unwin, 2017) for a year. It only took a reading challenge to make it happen.
“I was going to have the worst night of my life, and they should be there for it. That was what friends did for each other.”
Spoilers, spoilers, everywhere
I read Cry Blue Murder by Kim Kane & Marion Roberts (UQP, 2013) four years later – nothing new there. I have so many questions and my brain is in pieces after the discombobulation of that ending. WTF!? I do love, more than words itself, an unexpected unreliable narrator. And that narrator certainly sucker-punched us all.
“And the truth lies in none but in all.”
“As usual, I don’t know which way is north, but I know the direction of beauty.”
Last month my Book Group did Take Three Girls by Cath Crowley, Simmone Howell and Fiona Wood (Pan Mcmillan, 2017). A trio of prodigious writers, writing a stunning story.
Last year I fell in love with Frankie by Shivaun Plozza (Penguin, 2016). I have to reread her before book group at the end of the month. We’re discussing the Shortlist of the CBCA Book of The Year for Older Readers and I’m talking up Frankie. This is what I blogged last year:
“The past is with me; the present is here. The future is unmapped and changeable. Ours for the imagining: spreading out before us. Sunlight filled, deep blue, and the darkness.”
Cath Crowley’s Words in Deep Blue is a love letter to books and reading, the counterpoint to Graffiti Moon, a love letter to Art. Who wouldn’t love a story set in a second hand bookstore, starring a library of love letters secreted within the pages of beloved books.
“In my memories, he’s alive, so I can’t make my brain compute the information that I’ll never see him again.”
Reading Words in Deep Blue by Cath Crowley reminds me of when I read Graffiti Moon. How much I loved it, how much I wanted to be in Melbourne at night, bombing with Cropley. He was living there by that time and a few months later, on his last night, we talked for hours on the phone. That’s what he was doing and I felt like I was by his side. Continue reading “words in deep sorrow”
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