Updated review of The Bottomless River, by Anthony J Langford
Bottomless River by Anthony J. Langford My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Bottomless River begins in a small town in rural Australia. Three mates, Danny, Tom and Jen, regularly get together at a river bank for harmless fun and banter. But their carefree world is poisoned when they get drunk one night. Danny cannot […]
Reviews of Looper and Melancholia.
I have recently seen two very good movies in my two favourite science fiction tropes apocalypse and time-travel. Both were vastly different in ambition and scope. Looper is an action adventure time-travel film while Melancholia is a quiet drama about the end of the world. Looper In Looper time-travel is used by future criminal […]
Indigenous Writing
Indigenous Writing. A few months ago I wrote a post about the lack of indigenous characters in Australian fiction. I determined then to read more novels with Indigenous Australians in them that were hopefully written by Indigenous Australians. I have just finished Peter Docker’s The Waterboys. Peter Docker is not an Indigenous Australia, but […]
Review of Things We Didn’t See Coming.
Things we Didn’t See Coming is a collection of nine stories with the same unnamed central character. The stories are told in a linear order and follow the life of the main character from his childhood to his death. The first story is set on New Year’s Eve 1999 and subsequent stories extend fifty years […]
Ebook Price Survey.
Ebook Prices. Another seven weeks have passed since I last checked the prices of Amazon’s 100 best-selling ebooks. The trend of ebooks becoming dearer, that I reported in August, seems to have stabilised. At the lower prices, six ebooks were 99c as compared to seven at that price in August and three in June. This […]
My Writing Stats and a New Article on Divine.
Writing Stats. Like many men, I am fascinated by statistics. One of the ways I display this fascination is by keeping a record of the number of words I write each day. This record includes both fiction writing and the writing of articles for the Divine website. Recently I checked my word count record […]
The Ten Best Apocalyptic Novels I Have Read.
I finished reading Justin Cronin’s apocalyptic vampire novel The Passage a week ago. It is a brilliant novel in both the way it is written and the story. Cronin introduces dozens of characters, each with individual fears and problems that make them easy to empathise with. The Passage is one of the best adventure epics I have read. […]
Author Tony Birch Visits Wangaratta
As part of the Melbourne Wheeler Centre’s “On the Road” program, author Tony Birch was in Wangaratta last Wednesday. Birch’s novel Blood was nominated for this year’s Miles Franklin award. I went and saw him talk primarily because he had some indigenous blood in him and I am curious about how his writing might portray […]
New Article on Divine – Review of Me and Her.
Divine News I have a new article on the Divine website, a review of Me and Her, a memoir by Karen Tyrrell. It is about her life with Bipolar Disorder. The review is very different from the personal review I had previously posted on my blog. This is the first paid book review I have […]
The French Battle Amazon. My Writing Expenses.
Those Communist French. I read recently that the French government fixes the price of books so that French bookshops, including those online, cannot discount books by more than 5% of the RRP. On further investigation I found this article in the New York Times. French legislators even dictated to Amazon that its publishers can charge […]