Fantasy Free

I finished The Passage yesterday - I was trying hard to concentrate on its ending in a noisy optometrist's waiting room , so the book sort of ended with a whimper rather than a bang. I had thought about reading The Gift next but it's set in the fantastic location of Annar, not Australia. And right now I am not in the mood for fantasy. Not a genre I would ever choose to read and not my ideal Australian novel. The Passage was good, so nice to read of a local area, 50 or 60 years ago, before all the development we have today. Anyway, The Gift is not a gift so it can wait (and wait and wait ...)

Instead I will try a bit of dated (?) humour in they're a weird mob. Much better!

Busy, Reading

Whoops, nearly let a month go past without updating this blog. Tamarisk Row was a sad sort of book, young boy growing up under the cloud of a father caught up in the vicious cycle of gambling. Then embarked on the very good, but chunky The Trout Opera; everything in that book that I like about reading Australian literature - the land, its history and its people. This one set in the Snowy River area, from 100 years and more ago, in Jindabyne, Dalgety as well as modern day Sydney, even Murwillumbah and Mt Warning, where we visited 18 months or so ago, in Northern NSW.

I have now started reading The Passage by Vance Palmer, published in 1959. It's set on a coastal passage about a family who is scraping by living off fishing. The setting is tiny coastal settlements on the brink of subdivision and tourism. Good reading.