Once again it’s Karen’s (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon’s (Stuck in a Book) “Year Club” week. This time the year is 1937, and it runs from today, 15th to 21st April. As I’ve been doing for a while now, I am devoting my Monday Musings to the week. If the 1960s, from which our last “year” came, were exciting for many of us, the late 1930s were very different, particularly for those living in Europe. Of the 1930s, in general, Wikipedia writes that “the decade was defined by a global economic and political crisis that culminated in the Second World War”. For my purposes here, that ..read more

Once again it’s Karen’s (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon’s (Stuck in a Book) “Year Club” week. This time the year is 1937, and it runs from today, 15th to 21st April. As I’ve been doing for a while now, I am devoting my Monday Musings to the week. If the 1960s, from which our last “year” came, were exciting for many of us, the late 1930s were very different, particularly for those living in Europe. Of the 1930s, in general, Wikipedia writes that “the decade was defined by a global economic and political crisis that culminated in the Second World War”. For my purposes here, that ..read more

Thomas King’s “Borders” is the eleventh of fourteen stories in the anthology, Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers. Like the previous story by Duane Niatum, it was also written in the 1990s. Thomas King Anthology editor Bob Blaisdell provides some basic information about King, but I am supplementing that with information from Wikipedia which introduces him as an “American-born Canadian writer and broadcast presenter who most often writes about First Nations”. He was born in California in 1943, and “self-identifies as being of Cherokee, Greek, and Ger ..read more

Shankari Chandran’s Miles Franklin Award winning novel, Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens, was my reading group’s March book. Unfortunately I was out of town at the time of the meeting, but of course I wanted to read it – and I did, finally! Like many people, I think, when I first saw the book, I assumed it was one of those cosy crime novels set in a nursing home or retirement village. The title and the pretty cover certainly suggest that. Only a fraction of this first impression was right, though. It is set in a nursing home, and crimes do occur, but it is not a crime novel and nor is it cosy. I ..read more

Originally this post was going to be about South Australia’s reframed literary awards, but then I saw some news on another award, and decided to do a little consolidated post. Here goes… South Australian Literary Awards Some of you might be aware that in my sidebar I have a widget (or whatever it’s now called) for the current year’s major Australian Literary Awards – like the Miles Franklin, the ALS Gold Medal, the Stella Prize – focusing, mainly, on the fiction winners. One of the awards I had in that list was the biennial Adelaide Festival Awards. It was due again this year – but no awards w ..read more

I am back in the land of the Wurundjeri Wandoon people of the Greater Kulin Nation, that is, in my part of Melbourne, because not only was it Easter last weekend, but we wanted to take my Californian friend on a road trip through some of New South Wales and Victoria. We saw some great sights, but right now it’s time to get onto the meme … If you don’t know how the #SixDegrees meme works, please check host Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest. The first rule is that Kate sets our starting book. This month she set a fun challenge: we had to choose a travel guide from our bookshelves! What ..read more

For what it’s worth, given I’ve not read any of them, here is the Stella Prize shortlist. The announcement I received via email this morning describes it as comprising: a diverse mix, featuring novels, memoir and an essay collection. Three of these works are by debut authors, showcasing fresh voices in Australian literature.  To summarise from my longlist announcement, this year’s judges are writer, literary critic, Artistic Director of the Canberra Writers Festival and this year’s chair, BeeJay Silcox; Filipino-Australian poet, performer, arts producer, and advocate, Eleanor Jacks ..read more

In a long past Monday Musings I mentioned the names of several people who had commented on the state of Australian literature. Many of these were pseudonyms, including the intriguingly named “6×8”. I decided to dig further, and back in 2015, I pretty quickly discovered that his “real” name was Dick Holt. (It’s not always easy to track down pseudonyms used in the newspapers.) First published, The Bulletin, 29 October 1898, from Middlemiss I didn’t find a lot about him back then – besides his own writings – but from what I could gather, I ascertained that Dick Holt had t ..read more

Sigrid Nunez has been on my radar for a long time. So, why now? I blame Jonathan (Me Fail? I Fly!), since it was his post on Nunez’s latest novel, The vulnerables, that captured my attention and encouraged me to make now her time. What an intriguing book! I have no idea whether it is like her other books, but it certainly captivated me. What exactly is it, was my first question? A novel, says its subtitle. Its probably best described as autofiction, but it did feel at times like a book of essays. In fact, late in the novel, our narrator who, like Nunez herself, is a writer, refers to Virginia ..read more

It was through the Jane Austen Society of Australia’s (JASA) newsletter, Practicalities, that I learned of the death of Yasmine Gooneratne, a woman with whom I have crossed paths – one way or another – three times. She was an academic at Macquarie University, where I did my undergraduate degree; she wrote a novel, A change of skies (1991), which my reading group discussed back in 1996; and, she was the patron of JASA (and you know how I love Jane). You can find quite a lot about Yasmine Gooneratne on the Internet, if you are interested, so I’m just going to focus on a few points that struck m ..read more