Kathryn's Inbox

Just sharing this Peanuts comic for fun. I love the fact that Charlie Brown is being well, a bit of a wanker, and then Snoopy gives him exactly what he deserves. 

Although I have long been a fan of Doctor Who, I have never read any of the comics. When I found this beautifully presented collection in Dymocks, I decided to change all that and give it a go. I'm glad that I did. The Doctor's adventures translate beautifully in comic book form.  This book features two full length stories, Agent Provocateur and The Forgotten. In Agent Provocateur, we meet the Tenth Doctor and Martha who are going out for a quiet milkshake ... and end up embroiled in a fun but almost nonsensical story featuring an alien who is hell bent on killing off entire alien races and starting a war. The Forgotten is a slower and probably the better story of the two for a reader such as myself who is a bit unfamiliar with the Doctor Who comics. In this adventure, the Tenth Doctor and Martha find themselves in a museum dedicated to the first nine doctors. Meanwhile, the Tenth Doctor is losing his memories and Martha has to help him remember all of the previous ver...

"What is life but a series of inspired follies?" Pygmalion  by  George Bernard Shaw

Neville Shute's classic novel about a group of people in Melbourne slowly awaiting their deaths from radiation poisoning following a nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere is as chillingly real now as it was when it was first published in 1957. Set in the early 1960s it tells the story of three people, Peter Holmes of the Royal Australian Navy, who is married with a small child, Dwight Towers, an American naval officer who made his way to Australia by chance and refuses to accept that his wife and children are dead, and Moira, a spirited young woman who knows that she has nothing left and that her own death is inevitable.  Perhaps one of the most interesting things about this novel is its sense of inevitability. The human race has, essentially, stuffed things up for themselves. There is no one left in the Northern Hemisphere, and the radiation sickness (as it is known in the novel,) is slowly travelling further and further south. The characters know that they only have a fe...

A post shared by Kathryn White (@kathrynsinbox) on Aug 21, 2017 at 3:56pm PDT I spotted Wally recently in a side street just off Rundle Mall. I hope he's having a good time in Adelaide! (Nah, not really. This is a traffic signal box on King William Street.)

As an author, there is nothing worse than reading negative reviews of my work. It's bad enough knowing that someone hated my book enough to dedicate an entire post to it, let alone the fact that they took the time to search for gifs and then decided to post the review everywhere and now other people are liking that review. It's the kind of crushing, soul destroying feeling that makes me want to lock myself in a darkened room and never, ever come out, let alone write anything again. Well, I would, except for the fact that I can be a rather vengeful person in a lot of ways. I figure if anyone goes to that much trouble to write a negative review then they would probably enjoy the fact that they have just completely ruined a lifelong hobby for me and the best way to get revenge is to keep on writing seeing as they would probably hate that. Jokes aside, it is unpleasant being on the receiving end of a negative review. Over the years, I've found some different ways to cope with...

What if you were a twelve year old boy, on crutches, staying an a small apartment with the father that you barely knew, and, in the middle of the night, you witnessed a murder? That's the premise of The Fall , a brilliant, suspense filled novel for middle-grade readers. Sam is a pretty smart and resourceful kid, but he is taken by surprise when he sees a body fall from the apartment above his. He knows that the body must have been pushed, but when it disappears and his dad, crime reporter Harry doesn't believe him and then goes missing, Sam finds himself without much evidence and no support to help him prove that there has been a crime. And someone may now be after him ... I thought that the novel was cleverly written and had enough to keep readers of any age entertained. Sam, I think, is a great character for boys to identify with--he's smart and resourceful, but most important of all, he's human. It's mentioned that he's had issues with bullying at sch...

A post shared by Kathryn White (@kathrynsinbox) on Aug 15, 2017 at 6:28pm PDT I snapped this chap on Pirie Street recently, just near theAdelaide City Council chambers. For some crazy reason, he reminds me a bit of the giant from Jack and the Beanstalk.

A little bit mad, a little bit frivolous, full of shit, irreverent and completely entertaining--that sums We Ate the Road Like Vultures the first adult novel by Australian author Lynnette Lousbury. In February 2001, sixteen year old Lulu runs away from her family's cattle farm in Australia. She travels to Mexico, where Jack Kerouac is alive and well, and enjoying a suitably fitting retirement. Joined by Christian backpacker Adolph, Lulu finds herself on a crazy and unpredictable series of adventures. This one was a short, though entertaining read. I thought it was a fitting tribute to Kerouac and On the Road. It's the kind of read that is perfect for when you're in the mood for something different. Recommended. This book was read as part of the Aussie Author Challenge 2017

The prospect of a new Roald Dahl book is a very exciting thing. Billy and the Minpins is a re-imagining of The Minpins, one of Dahl's last stories, presented in an exciting new junior novel format and with new illustrations by Quentin Blake (who is, of course, the most famous and best remembered of all of the illustrators who worked with Dahl.) I do not remember The Minpins from my childhood at all--presumably the school library either didn't have a copy, or the book proved so popular that it was constantly checked out. Or maybe by the time it was published Australia I had reached that awful and foolish age where I believed that I was too old for certain things. Anyway, I was quite excited for the release of Billy and the Minpins, and happy bought a hardcover edition from Dymocks. I read the novel in the space of an hour, pausing constantly to enjoy the illustrations. Billy is a small boy who lives on the edge of a very dangerous forest. He is warned by his mother no...

A post shared by Kathryn White (@kathrynsinbox) on Aug 17, 2017 at 7:24pm PDT This city bank likes to keep their bank safe ... and sparkly! Love the lock!

One of the weirdest things about the internet--and the shitty way that we now communicate with each other on a daily basis--is our reliance on memes. With a meme you can take basically, any person, photograph or pop culture icon and alter its meaning to suit whatever you would like to say. The results are funny (except when they're not, which is often) and may or may not be used to emphasise a point. Peanuts is, of course, an iconic comic strip and it gets used for various memes often. The memes can be clean:  A bit inappropriate:  Or downright vulgar: And the worst ones take Peanuts so far out of its original context that, sometimes, I'd really like to shake the person who came up with them. The thing about memes is that they're art, but they are not necessarily good art. When you take something like Peanuts out of its context, you're also taking away the very element that made the strip so successful--that it was about seeing the world ...

Surprises, like misfortunes, seldom come alone. Oliver Twist  by  Charles Dickens

Shaped by three different narratives, set in three different continents during three different eras, The History of Bees is a beautifully written novel that is equally a story of parents and their relationships with their children as it is a dystopian that ponders our future. William is a biologist living in England in 1852, who after a bout of depression decides to work toward something more. Wishing to work with his beloved son Edmund, instead he discovers just how intelligent--and plucky--his daughter Charlotte is. In 2007 in the United States, George comes from a long line of beekeepers and is keen to pass his family heritage on to his only child, Tom, who has other talents and other ideas about his future. In China in 2098 Tao works to pollinate trees by hand--a job that she is massively overqualified for--and hopes to spare her son Wei-Wen from the same fate. Then something very unexpected happens ... In recent months I've had the pleasure of reading and reviewing a nu...

A post shared by Kathryn White (@kathrynsinbox) on Aug 23, 2017 at 2:56am PDT This is what happens when you walk through Rundle Mall in the rain and decide to photograph a local icon. Magic.

Saw this meme doing the rounds and it really made me laugh. The first time I read Harry Potter and the Philospher's Stone, the movie was well, a bit of a way off still, yet I pictured Snape almost exactly as he appeared in the film.