Kathryn's Inbox

Book Sculpture Adelaide City Council Library When the Adelaide City Council opened the doors on their new library in Rundle Place, they decided to do a bit of innovative advertising ... in the form of several towers, made entirely out of books that had been deleted from their catalogue. It's an innovative way to advertise a library and to get continued use out of unwanted books, though I doubt they would have survived the weather for very long ...

Set in Melbourne during the late 1980s, Thornydevils is a sexy, action packed romp featuring larrikin and hard living journalist Peter Clancy. Peter likes his booze, his women and his coffee (especially, I suspect from the scene in Townsville, his coffee,) and is an all round decent guy in his own way. Working for Melbourne publication The Truth, Peter has found himself promoted to the position of columnist and in the possession of a police scanner ... and then his adventures with a drug ring begin. Although I have not read the first novel in the series, I found Thornydevils quite easy to read and follow. A number of the side characters were well-drawn (drag queen Concheeta and her boyfriend Ted for example,) and just the fact that the novel was set in an era of police corruption and in a time before mobile phones and the internet makes for a brilliant set-up. Recommended for fans of Australian crime literature. Finally, a big shout out to author TW Lawless for sending me a...

Cherry Bomb, the debut novel from Australian music journalist Jenny Valentish, is a roller coaster ride through the world of fame, sex, drugs and most importantly, rock and roll. Seen through the eyes of twenty-one year old Nina Dall, the novel tells the story of the rise to fame and inevitable fall of the Dolls, a band that Nina formed as a teenager with her cousin Rose. Running alongside the Dolls own rise to fame is the story of their Aunt, Alannah Dall who is trying to make a career comeback and who may just be a little bit threatened by her nieces and their rise to fame.  Cherry Bomb offers readers a no-holes-barred view of the Australian music industry as it is at present--from the indignity of the Dolls having to perform at the local shopping centre to their eventual success overseas--as well as giving an account of Nina's own troubled upbringing and her personal difficulties surrounding addiction and overcoming child sexual abuse. There is also the interesting bac...

Found this brilliant pre- Sesame Street (note the teeth) clip featuring Cookie Monster. This clip was created as a training video for IBM. A year or so later it was re-made with a green version of Cookie Monster and aired on the Ed Sullivan show. You can see that version below (note: the YouTube title is incorrect):

The final novel to be published by John Wyndham in his lifetime*  Chocky is a slow, menacing and carefully plotted tale about a pre-pubescent boy who is befriended by an alien voice known to him as Chocky. And everyone, including Matthew's adoptive father David (who narrates the tale,) believes that the boy is suffering from a kind of psychosis. The story unfolds slowly, though by the time Matthew is eventually abducted by his psychiatrist, is it obvious that Chocky is a real being who has possessed Matthew and is using him to study earth from afar. Unsurprisingly, given that it was published in the late 1960s, much of this novel feels very dated--the methods of psychiatry and also David's dismissive attitude toward his wife Mary and daughter, Polly. There are some lovely moments, such as where Chocky teaches Matthew to swim so that he may save Polly from drowning and where all of the members of the Gore family do their best to accommodate Chocky. The bulk of the narra...

Welcome back to Writers on Wednesday. This week I put my questions to Sarah Bourne, author of Never Laugh at Shadows ... Tell us a bit about yourself ... I was born and raised in London, escaped to work in the USA after college, and have been on the run ever since. My first training was in Occupational Therapy, and I worked in Mental Health to fund my passion for travelling, finally arriving in Sydney's Inner West where I intended to stay for two years, and forgot to leave. Now I run my own Counselling practice, teach Yoga and write. My husband, three children, two dogs and cat are all very supportive and long suffering when I disappear into books and writing for days on end. Tell us about your recently published book ... Never Laugh at Shadows is the story of Winsome Natakunda, a young Ugandan woman born into a family on the wrong side of politics. Her father was a Democrat in the brutal Amin and Obote regimes, and regularly taken away to be tortured for hi...

What Came Before is an occasionally erotic literary thriller about the nature of love, limerence and a man and a woman who caught in an exhilarating but toxic relationship. The novel opens at the frightening climax of David and Elle's relationship--he, a lawyer, is sitting in his car and confessing into his dictaphone that he has just murdered his wife. Elle, meanwhile, is floating above her body. Throughout the course of the novel, both David and Elle reflect on their passionate, but ultimately destructive relationship. Intense and often gripping, I found myself reading this one in a relatively short space of time. Author Anna George does a brilliant job of depicting David and Elle's relationship, showing how all the red flags were there from the beginning, but how Elle, blinded from infatuation, was unable to see them. It was also lovely to read about a different side of Melbourne, about its upper-middle classes. Likewise I enjoyed reading about Elle's work as a ...

My only regret about  September Girls is that I discovered its very existence after some controversy regarding the title on a certain popular book cataloguing website. That is kind of a shame, considering that this is a brilliant, well-written and challenging YA novels that I have read this year.  September Girls tells the story of Sam, an awkward virginal-but-horny teenager who spends the summer with his dad and older brother at a beachside tourist town. There is something a little bit odd about the girls in town--they are all beautiful, they all look very similar (thus making it difficult for many to tell them apart,) and for reasons that are unknown, they all seem to be drawn to Sam, particularly DeeDee and her older sister Kristle. In between the chapters told from Sam's perspective are narratives from the girls, who speak collectively as 'we' and would appear to wash up on the island at age sixteen and disappear again when they turn twenty-one. The only way t...

I'm running this one a week later that I intended, for reasons stated last week. Anyway, it's another favourite clip of mine from brilliant BBC comedy series The Young Ones. Wish I could find a clock like that one ...

As is traditional on Kathryn's Inbox on June 19 every year ... I would like to take the opportunity to wish Garfield the cat and his comic strip a very happy birthday. Thank you Jim Davis for all the laughs. 

I found a copy Naher's debut novel from buried amongst a pile of books at my local secondhand store. Something about the front cover, with its colouring that is as garish as it is dark and lack of capital letters anywhere, made it clear that this one was a relic from the mid-1990s a long-forgotten era in Australian publishing, where publishers tried to appeal to a younger market by making their books look a bit different and a bit more hardcore than what the adults were reading, drew me to the book. What the hell was this old thing? Would it be any good. And, frankly, it's kind of a shame that this book has such a strange cover and the unusual font used inside (Rotis Semi Serif,) is a bit distracting because the story itself is bloody brilliant. The Underwarf switches between the past, present and future to tell the story of Sophia, daughter of Zelda--an ambitious publisher and single mother--and her quest to learn the identity of her father, a journey which eventually...

Fountain, Rundle Mall Burt Flugelman's Spheres, or, the Malls Balls, might get all the fame, but don't under-estimate one of the other great icons of Rundle Mall, the Fountain. At present, this beautifully coloured and designed fountain sits directly outside of Adelaide Arcade, but it has moved several times since it was first installed in North Terrace in the late 1800s. The fountain (then a dull brown,) was later moved into Rundle Mall, near Gawler Place, before being repainted and moved again to its current location. 

Fallen is the first instalment of a four part series about Luce and Daniel. Daniel is a fallen angel, Luce is a young woman who destiny is to fall in love with Daniel in each of her many lifetimes. The only catch is that she always dies at about age seventeen, just as soon as she falls in love with Daniel, often spontaneously combusting when they experience their first kiss. (As one does.) Very rarely does a book leave me with as many conflicting feelings as Fallen did. I suspect that I would have loved reading this one when I was in my teens. As an adult who occasionally reads YA, however, it was a little well ... difficult to suspend my disbelief in places. The concept was brilliant; the gothic school where Luce and Daniel seemed confused and quite unrealistic. In the beginning it seemed as though Luce was in a reform school or juvenile detention centre, in other spots, they seemed to be in an strict, though co-ed boarding school which a bunch of inept teachers and dull subj...

First and foremost, a big bloody screw you to Rik Mayall for going and dying on us, meaning that I totally had to go and reschedule some of my Friday Funnies posts. (Amusingly, I had a different Young Ones clip to share this week.) Anyway, in all seriousness, Rik Mayall was a brilliant comedian and in keeping with his style of humour, I think it's totally appropriate to share this strangely prophetic clip. Enjoy. 

Once again, it's time for Writers On Wednesday. This week, I put my questions to Stefan Vucak ... Tell us a bit about yourself … As a kid, I liked doing things all other kids liked doing – un til I discovered books. After that, I was gone, lost in the universes those books opened up for me and dreaming of writing my own. I had a great time at school, even though English and its convoluted grammar rules did give me some trouble, but those rules gave me a grounding how to write. My first effort was pretty awful and I am glad it will never see the light of day. That thing went through two rewrites, but it still isn’t something I want to share. Call it my training wheels. My first successful book, although not perfect, a science fiction work, was presentable and I tried for a long time to break into the traditional publishing market while holding down a demanding job in the IT industry, which kept me very busy. But writing has always been a passion and a drive, ...

The second instalment in Richelle Mead's future/fantasy  Age of X series gets off to a slow start, before each of our three leads find themselves on surprising but life-changing adventures. While book one introduced us to the characters and the futuristic world of the Republic of United North America (Canada and parts of the US,) which is technologically advanced, once ravaged by disease and intolerant of all religion, book two expands on that world and the discoveries made at the end of book one about Gods and religions. For Justin, it's a trip to dangerous neighbouring country, Arcadia, where he will work as a 'diplomat' while Mae is appointed his bodyguard but will be posing as his concubine during their trip to the backward and sexist nation. (All of this is intended to help the scheming Lucian score political points, as he hopes to win the next election.) Young Tessa, meanwhile, has found herself an appointment as an intern to scheming journalist Daphne.  ...

Dark Heart, Art Gallery of South Australia During March and April the Art Gallery of South Australia had this unusual, half sunken house on their front lawn to advertise their Dark Heart exhibition. An intriguing advertisement, I couldn't resist taking a photograph before heading inside to take a further glimpse of this exhibition ...

I just knew that when I picked up this book and learned that the heroine was terminally ill, that it probably was not going to end well. That said, the ending was still a bit of a surprise. Sort of.  The Fault in Our Stars is a book that has received a lot of publicity in recent months, thanks in part to the popularity of the author with his target audience and the fact that it has just been made into a film, which opened in Adelaide this week. It tells the story of Hazel, a young teenage cancer patient who has lived longer than anyone expected her too, thanks to a tumour shrinking miracle. Hazel is a little bit too smart and a little bit too cynical at times, which is unsurprising given her situation in life. She is also horribly depressed and knows very few people her own age. Her parents insist upon her going to a support group for teenagers with cancer (which she loathes,) and there she meets Gus, a young man whose cancer has been supposedly cured after his leg was amp...

Saw this on the brilliant I Fucking Love Science page on facebook and just had to share. Clever.

Being Jade is a beautifully written, occasionally erotic and occasionally dark tale of a woman who lives by her own rules and challenging notions of what it means to love and what it truly means to be loyal to another person. Australian author Kate Belle (who wrote the brilliant novel, The Yearning ,) creates an interesting portrait of a marriage through her characters Banjo and Jade. When the novel opens, we meet Banjo as a ghost. He is recently deceased, killed in an accident shortly after walking out on his wife of more than twenty years. As Banjo tells us his side of the tale, we learn that the pair met when they were in their early teens. He has always been the stable one, from a good, charitable family. Jade was the ratty one, the daughter of an unnamed prostitute. Jade blossoms a little under the gentle guidance of Banjo's family, but we soon discover that her eventual marriage to Banjo will not be a traditional one. As Jade explains when questioned about one of her aff...

Welcome back to Writers on Wednesday. This week I am chatting to the brilliant and funny Darrin Mason, author of 33AD ... Tell us a bit about yourself … I have worked much of my adult life as a freelance cartoonist (I am an Australian Cartoon Award winner) whose work has appeared in a number of Australian newspapers and magazines (People magazine and The Truth newspaper to name but two) and as a producer at 4BC radio in Brisbane, Australia. I am one hell of a funny guy with a dark sense of humor who now writes stories that make as much light as possible of the things I find there. I also dabble in the dark side, full stop. That said, I have always returned in one piece so perhaps the dark side isn't so dark after all. Above all else though, I am a fan of Batman. (The 1960s TV version, the late 1980s/early 1990s Michael Keaton version, and the Christopher Nolan/Christian Bale trilogy are the only ones that matter. You can forget the rest). As the Metallica song goe...

We Are Called to Rise left me in tears. The debut novel Laura McBride tells a beautiful and complicated story of how a number of people in difficult circumstances find themselves rising to help others who are in need. Set in Las Vegas, the novel offers readers a very different picture of the city, devoid of the stereotypes that are usually seen in books, film and television. This isn't a tale of fast women and casinos, this is a tale of real people--Avis, whose husband is leaving her for another woman and whose son has returned from Iraq as a changed man, Roberta a woman who fights for social justice, Luis another soldier who is in hospital following a very traumatic incident and Bashkim, an intelligent eight-year-old boy who is the son of Albanian refugees. The first third of the novel allows us to meet the characters. A surprising incident occurs after Bashkim is assigned to be Luis' pen-pal for a school project, however another, far greater incident occurs about a third...

Haigh's Car, April 2014 Spotted this delightful vehicle parked on the edge of Gouger Street, just near CIBO a little before Easter. No doubt the car is connected with the company it is advertising, as there is a Haigh's store inside the Central Markets, just a few short steps away. A few weeks after taking this photograph I saw the vehicle and its driver again, but I was not quick enough to get a chance to speak with the driver. (Who probably has people bugging him with questions about the car and requests for chocolate all the time anyway.)

First of all, a big shout out to the Reading Room and publishers Allen and Unwin for my free review copy. Thanks! The Word Ghost is, without fail, a real treat. This eccentric tale introduces us to the equally eccentric (but utterly likeable,) Rebecca Abraham Budde, the daughter of a Church of England minister who is enjoying a most idyllic adolescence in a small town in England in 1973. Rebecca, who would rather be known as Abraham, is fifteen years old, and rejects politics, biscuits and bombs. She accepts Walnut Whips, David Bowie, Deep Purple and Dave. Dave, of course, being an attractive teenage boy that she sees every day at the bus stop and has never spoken to, but knows that he is 'the one.' Luck is in store when it turns out that Dave is equally attracted to her. Their romance is short lived, however, after a small mishap when Dave's mum arrives home early. (Cough, cough.) Rebecca and her sisters soon find themselves being packed up and moved to an even sma...