November 06, 2024

In November we are reading A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. Grab a copy and get reading.

October 02, 2024

Dysphoria sucks. Unlike euphoria, dysphoria is often a pervasive and persistent state of mind, particularly when the cause of the dysphoria is something physical like a part of your body - your hands, your legs, your nose, your genitals.  Yep, gender dysphoria has got...

September 04, 2024

Clearly this is a work of fiction, after all monsters aren’t made in secluded, upstairs rooms at the university of Ingolstadt; more likely they are what men uncover about themselves on their journey of becoming, the journey into their masculinities.And clearly too Frankenstein is...

August 07, 2024

In August we're reading The Riders by Tim Winton (1994). Grab a copy and get reading!

July 06, 2024

For July we're reading The Chase by Candice Fox (2021). Grab a copy and get reading!

June 05, 2024

Stanley Kubrik was a filmmaker who knew a thing or two about man’s predilection for a bit of the ultraviolence. His sci-fi epic “2001: A Space Odyssey” begins with a tribe of hominid apes in the veld being driven away from its water hole by...

May 01, 2024

 The Promise by David Galgut promises a lot to the reader. Critically acclaimed, man booker prized winning and very ambitious in scope. It’s a family drama set against the back drop of South Africa’s churning history over decades. 

April 03, 2024

Sometimes, the TGBC crew give you just the kick in your pants you need to read something that’s been on your list for ages. For me, that was ‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle’ by Shirley Jackson, and it did not disappoint. Jackson’s...

March 06, 2024

I like Margaret Atwood. She has remarkable ideas and a clarity of style that makes reading most things she writes quite pleasurable to read. She has been around a long time – her first book being published in 1964, and she has gone on...

February 09, 2024

Black Tide is the second book of a series of four by Miles Franklin Award winner, Peter Temple. These books are about Jack Irish, a suburban Melbourne solicitor, who is recovering from the murder of his wife by an ex-client, by doing some basic...

December 06, 2023

For the 2023-2024 summer holiday break we read World War Z by Max Brooks. A review by one of our members will be up soon.

November 01, 2023

In November 2023, we read At The Mountains of Madness by H P Lovecraft. A review from one of our members will be up soon.

October 04, 2023

Open Water is an ambitious and at times confronting novel that contrasts a modern story of young love against a broader social commentary on racial prejudice and masculinity. The book is deeply lyrical, with poetic passages and refrains that echo the book's soundtrack of...

September 06, 2023

Steppenwolf takes us on a profound exploration of the human psyche, offering a lens through which we can examine the inner struggles faced by men in the modern age. While Hesse's literary craftsmanship is undeniable, the book can be quite a heavy read, as...

August 02, 2023

What a curious mixture of a novel is this book. At once a page turner and at some junctures, a must put down book. If I may be permitted a quote so soon, "Between thirty and forty people died every day, first the children...

July 05, 2023

*“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”* A Moveable Feast is a classic example of an older...

June 07, 2023

The trouble with Tony Birch’s semi-autobiographical first book, Shadowboxing, a linked group of short stories set in the pre gentrified Fitzroy working class slums of the late 60s and early 70s is not that it isn’t good. It is a fine read, exemplary in...

May 03, 2023

The book is a cohesive compilation of beautifully written and astutely observed short stories. The thread running through the book is the is the exploration of the complexities of human relationships, particularly within the context of cultural and personal displacement. In each story, Lahiri...

April 01, 2023

At first glance Scoop is s novel of chance, coincidence, and manipulation…. but only at first glance. For inside the cover of SCOOP lies the semi-autobiographical confession of a man shunned by his peers, of a family fallen from grace and rejected by those...

March 01, 2023

I approached Kafka with some trepidation, having been amused, but largely confounded by The Metamorphosis many years ago. I am naturally an empirical (some would say concrete) thinker. I like knowable truths and tend to approach books (and film, and art, and music…) with...

February 01, 2023

I went into the outsiders with no prior knowledge of the book, author or movie and found myself quickly drawn in, finishing the whole book over two days. I can’t say I always take to the “classic” novels but I found this one easy...

December 07, 2022

The Magician by Colm Toibin is a dramatised biography of the life of German author Thomas Mann, his relationships with family, his writing career from early success to Nobel Prize to political exile, and his influential voice being used (or not used) during the...

November 02, 2022

Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle is a thought-provoking novel that explores the nature of reality, the power of imagination, and the devastating consequences of loneliness. I thought the novel was beautifully written and Darnielle's prose is incredibly readable, relatable, evocative, and in...

October 05, 2022

Somewhere in the inner western suburbs. Thursday afternoon. February 2023. “I don’t go in for that craft shit. Two schooners of Resch’s love.” The barmaid with the undercut and Nirvana t-shirt sneers silently, her hand squeezing the beer tap. Cold amber fluid is expelled...

September 07, 2022

Scott F. Fitzgerald’s story takes place between Long Island and New York in the early 1920s, the time of prohibition in America. The story is narrated by Nick Carraway, a lost soul who in trying to find his place in the world after returning...

August 03, 2022

There was a cartoon published recently on the web depicting an image of author Chetan Bhagat speaking to a reader. Bhagat’s script balloon says “On a scale of 1 to 10, how bored are you?” The readers response is “11 … and I still...

July 07, 2022

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest tells the story of Randle Patrick McMurphy, a convicted criminal who fakes being insane so can serve his sentence for battery and gambling in a mental hospital rather than at a prison work farm, thinking this will be...

June 01, 2022

This book was acclaimed by Barack Obama as one of his books of the year, but without his unique cultural connection to the material, us mere mortals were left with an interesting read that never completed its promise. The book felt like a deeply...

May 04, 2022

Last month’s TGBC Book to was C. S. Forester’s The Gun. Published in 1933 it preceded Forester's well known Hornblower series. Like the Hornblower novels, it is set during a time of war, and like that series, doesn't hesitate to describe in detail the...

April 06, 2022

All Systems Red is an exploration of what it is to be human. The dystopian view of the future challenges the idea that sentience and humanity are binary concepts of either on or off, yes, or no, and instead responds with a resounding… maybe?...

March 02, 2022

Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road, is a harrowing novel that details the journey of a nameless father and son through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. In a month that has seen both Russia threaten to use nuclear weapons against any protagonists who may attempt to intervene...

February 02, 2022

Even Michael Caine read Farewell, My Lovely. Check the opening shot in Get Carter from 1971. This is the second of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe books, following The Big Sleep. It comes from the era when pulp fiction was the entertainment of the day. This...

December 01, 2021

In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Joe Kavalier a young jewish artist escapes from the Nazis in Prague using techniques based on a knowledge of Houdini’s escape exploits. He meets his cousin Sammy in New York and together they convince Sammy’s boss...

November 03, 2021

I’ve been attracted to existentialism ever since I was expressing my personality via Radiohead lyrics on my pencil case and Evangelion posters on my wall. So, I was interested to try this book out. It wasn’t what I expected. This novel takes place over...

October 06, 2021

Last orders is the story of 4 men taking the ashes of their friend Jack Dodds through to Margate, save for his wife who refuses to abandon her duties. Spanning almost 50 years of their history together in post-war London, the book explores themes...

September 01, 2021

One of the founding, though little remarked upon premises of Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, is the idea that, regardless of what fate may befall humankind, the works of William Shakespeare will endure and even have something useful to offer. It’s an...

August 04, 2021

"Like nothing you've ever read before (TM)". What happens when you mix a car salesman who is losing his mind, a released convict with no place in society, and a pulp author whose work is lost in pornographic magazines? Utter chaos, glimmers of the...

July 07, 2021

No one wants long short stories. That’s just false advertising, like popping into a fast food restaurant and joining a queue. And so it’s with both a tip of the hat to Hemingway and a sense of relief that Snows of Kilimanjaro respectfully obeys...

June 02, 2021

Note: This review contains spoilers!!! The Talented Mr Ripley is literally a story about a guy who gets away with murder. Two in fact. Set in the exotic past of 1950s Europe through the lens of well to do American ex-pats, it is a...

May 05, 2021

This is probably the most influential book you have never read. You will be amazed at the movies, music, theatre, dance, graphic novels, books, tv and radio, all influenced by it, just check Wikipedia. Sympathy for the Devil is the most immediately famous for...

April 07, 2021

The Hawkline Monster is a Gothic Western. Indeed, this book was the first to have Gothic Western in its subtitle. What exactly is Gothic Western? Well, generally the story of a mysterious cowboy on the road to a dark place. Hawkline is not particularly...

March 03, 2021

I tend to read the books at club from an entirely ignorant standpoint. I don't read the blurb, I don't research the author, and I try to avoid any running commentary in the pool hall. Every now and then, though, I've previously read the...

February 03, 2021

‘When you make it, when you’re still alive and standin at the end. You get this tingly-electric rush. You feel alive, completely awake and in your body. Man, it’s like you’ve felt the hand of God. The rest is just sport’n recreation, mate. Give...

December 02, 2020

"Stories are a communal currency of humanity." --Tahir Shah, In Arabian Nights This is a story of doors and those who dare to seek those doors which open to things not understood or that embark the traveler upon journeys not anticipated . A door...

November 04, 2020

Frankenstein in Baghdad (FIB) is at its core a commentary on sin. How do we countenance our actions as moral, when the longer we live, the more these values are contradicted by our own moral compromises? FIB explores this in the world of post-invasion...

October 07, 2020

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” Fahrenheit 451 is a passionate book about the importance of books. It is about knowledge, including knowledge’s power and importance, but also the vulnerability of knowledge in...

September 02, 2020

‘What’s past is prologue’. Zadie Smith clearly chose Shakespeare’s words carefully when looking for a preface to a novel that is rooted firmly in the past. This quote has also served as a preface to at least one of Salman Rushdie’s novels and it...

August 05, 2020

Top 5 things about this book It is beautifully written. Nick Hornby writes with such restraint that the reader is left with ample room to fill in the detail of where the action occurs. We are allowed to use our own imagination and understanding...

July 01, 2020

Approach this book like you would a winter swim at the beach. Just dive in. It will slap you and disorient you straight away, turning your world upside down. Then it will envelope you and lull you with its calm. Every now and then,...

June 03, 2020

It's easy to be swept up in the reputation, celebrity, and strength of Steinbeck synonymous with Of Mice and Men, East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath. Perfectly explained by Nick Pitts, considering Steinbeck, "It's going to be a tasty meal, but you've...

May 06, 2020

A boys own adventure set on the big red planet, The Martian sets up our ‘hero’ biologist/astronaut Mark Watney as a McGuyver type character who can solve almost any problem with a little know how, a few tools and occasionally some luck. Stranded on...

April 01, 2020

Ed Kennedy is a out on his luck taxi driver, with friends he doesn’t particularly like, a job that’s going nowhere and a family that either dislikes or is disappointed in him. One day, he foils a bank heist and gets chosen by some...

March 04, 2020

In the first few pages it's clear Ove is the archetypal curmudgeon and he's going to spend the entirety of the book coming good. Roll out the supporting cast of a feisty and persistent neighbour, the wayward kid who needs a father figure and...

February 05, 2020

Hubert Selby jnr’s controversial first novel set in post war Brooklyn and describes a world a far cry from the gentrified borough that exists today. The characters that populate this world are poor, desperate and are yearning for intimacy. They dull their pain with...

December 04, 2019

Avast there me hearties ! Now there are no actual skull and crossbones bearing pirates in this book, the 3rd of the popular series about our early 19th C Napoleonic war hero Horatio Hornblower, but there is a wide range of nautical characters here...

November 06, 2019

[The Soul] exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished - and, in a more general way, on those one supervises, trains and corrects, over madmen,...

October 11, 2019

It’s no easy thing to write simply yet evocatively. Hemingway aspired to do it and yet often, I would argue, failed, The Old Man and the Sea being the clearest exception. Others, like Tim Winton, have gotten better at it over time, straying in...

October 02, 2019

I promised to write a review of this before starting, and maybe I shouldn’t have. I found it impossible to get far through the book, and discussion with my fellow (more dedicated) Hobart goons reassured me that I didn’t miss that much. Why did...

September 04, 2019

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, the thirteenth novel of acclaimed Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, follows Duszejko (emphatically not to be called by her given name), as she interprets the suspicious deaths of various men from her remote village through the...

August 07, 2019

In “A Visit To The Goon Squad” Jennifer Egan, over the space of thirteen chapters, gives us thirteen different viewpoints with sometimes only most tenuous of links between characters to achieve a darkly funny, often traumatic and wholly rewarding novel. Each chapter plays out...

July 02, 2019

I am a big fan of Hemingway’s writing - the man not so much. His ability to evoke a particular time and place is what has drawn me to his work. The Sun Also Rises, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and A Movable Feast are...

June 04, 2019

“Praise” is essentially a fairly dark romp through the early twenties life of Gordon, a young man who has left the family farm in regional Queensland for a non-life in Brisbane. That is, Gordon is almost defined by his lack of ambition, his ambivalence...

April 30, 2019

It’s Harlem, it’s 1930-something, and it’s Johnny’s birthday. But there will be no celebration today. No candles and cake, soda and dancing. Rather, there will be blood, fire, darkness and righteousness. Why not? Because God is in the house. The action of this incredible...

April 02, 2019

If I had been asked to recommend a book to begin exploring Terry Pratchett’s ‘Discworld’ or to come to grips with why he was such a popular writer, Small Gods would not have been the book I would have suggested. Instead I might have...

March 05, 2019

WARNING: BE ADVISED THE FOLLOWING NOVEL STONER FEATURES NEITHER HABITUAL MARIJUANA USERS, NOR REFERENCES TO CANNABIS OF ANY KIND. First published in 1965, ‘Stoner’ is author John Williams’ second novel. Garnering poor sales upon its release, it received a generally positive critical reception. It...

February 06, 2019

Ask the Dust opens with a brief introduction by Charles Bukowski who describes John Fante’s 1939 novel as “my first discovery of the magic.” If you, like me, discovered the magic from Bukowski’s 1971 novel Post Office then you are in for a real...

December 04, 2018

Rastas in space – who wouldn’t love a book that features dreadlocked Rastafarians flying space tugs. I must admit this came as a surprise in a novel about a dystopian future and the efforts of an AI to break free of the shackles imposed...

November 06, 2018

Rightly lauded as being among the most important literary narratives concerned with representing – and reflecting upon – the experience and legacy of America’s Vietnam War, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990) is a self-described “work of fiction” that is, nevertheless, a clear...

October 02, 2018

Men without women is a collection of short stories the common thread being the title of the book. However it’s almost without saying that each story revolves around women or more to the point a woman and their relationship (or lack thereof) to the...

September 29, 2018

‘A mirage of landscape, memory, love, and literature itself’- Murray Bail, author of Eucalyptus As I kayaked up the Wye river, blissfully enjoying the smooth paddling stylings of my partner, the silence was broken by a shout from a fast approaching canoe: “Hey, aren’t...

September 06, 2018

Bleak, pointless, dull, brutal, frustrating. These words summarise the world of espionage and counter-intelligence depicted in John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. It’s difficult to leave the book feeling hopeful or bright. This tale of moves and counter moves...

August 01, 2018

A book that’s reputation certainly precedes it. I think my preconceptions made me anticipate that this book was more “important” than it was “great”. But I was totally wrong. Sure, it is historically significant; they call it the first third-world classic, and for that...

July 04, 2018

First published in 1927, Men Without Women is a collection of short stories by Ernest Hemingway. This collection offers vignettes of life, snippets fleetingly seen as though we were travelling through the scenes of the stories. This was my first time reading Hemingway, I...

June 05, 2018

If someone was to ask me if I wished to read a story about the cycle of domestic violence through the eyes of a young family member further stigmatised by a developmental disability, I would have probably retreated to my current comfort zone of...

May 01, 2018

An over the top, ridiculous, million mile an hour adventure with surprising glimpses of deep philosophical musings on the profound and the everyday. The first installation in Douglas Adams Trilogy of Five, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy sets the scene and tantalises the...

April 03, 2018

Noongar writer Kim Scott conjures an unwritten history. Set in the years following white settlement in Western Australia, our narrator Bobby Wabalanginy nails it when he realises of his new colonial cohabiters; ‘we all learned your stories, but you were never interested in learning...

March 08, 2018

As I Lay Dying – Southern Gothic or Hillbilly Vaudeville? I loved this book! My chapter (Williamstown) discussed it at length, but it wasn’t till I reread it at home in preparation for this review that I discovered how much I had missed the...

February 06, 2018

The trouble is… it isn’t very good. Really? But it’s immensely famous! A classic! What sacrilege is this? What was the problem? Was there something wrong with the story, the plot? Not at all. Each chapter formed a well-crafted little crime drama, complete with...

December 06, 2017

It is without doubt that John Steinbeck’s East of Eden is a daunting novel to undertake simply due to its sheer size. Weighing in at just over 700 pages, Steinbeck’s 1952 work details the interwoven stories of two families as they grapple with life's...

October 31, 2017

**A sprawling riverside elegy Full disclosure: I am a Queensland expatriate.** Like most expats abroad I exhibit the tell-tale signs: bad news from home is met with a contemptuous snort and accompanied by mutterings about a banana republic; and any good news or persons...

October 04, 2017

Ham on Rye, a semi-autobiographical account of Charles Bukowski’s coming of age, begins with his earliest memory. Under a table staring at the legs of adults in Germany in 1922. It continues with his migration to Los Angeles. His difficult childhood living under an...

September 29, 2017

Camp Book 2017

September 05, 2017

"Those who write on Heaven’s walls should mold their shit in little balls. And those who read these lines of wit Should eat these little balls of shit." Kurt Vonnegut. A name that is almost onomatopoeic. The Gs, the Ks and the Vs gets...

August 01, 2017

'Science fiction' is a much maligned term. Hearing those two words coupled summons images of treckies squeezed offensively into orange skivvies and weathered paperbacks in bargain bins featuring wide chested blondes shooting giant insects with laser beams. But science fiction at its best is...

July 04, 2017

In Ernest Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago’s search for The Big Fish is a means for turning his luck and reputation around. More than just a mere fish, the marlin of his dreams is an elusive phantasm, a possibility to focus...

June 07, 2017

The character tropes of the noir genre are: the anti-hero, the dirty cop, the femme fatale and the snarky deadpan one. ‘The Big Nowhere’ has them all. Set after Ellroy’s first LA novel ‘The Black Dahlia’, this novel follows the story of Sheriff’s Deputy...

May 02, 2017

In the 2012 novel Home, Pulitzer Prize winner and Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison again returns to the themes that have dominated her literary career: race and identity. These are certainly substantive themes to take on, and while this is one of Morrison’s shortest novels,...

April 05, 2017

How important is a sense of belonging to the health of a man's psyche? And what happens to a man when he cannot "belong" no matter what he does? Rejection by society, and the soul-crushing, dehumanizing damage done by the resulting isolation, is a...

February 28, 2017

‘Good Omens’ (or more precisely Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch) is often listed as one of the funniest books of all time – with good reason. Given the subject matter, this may be a bit of a surprise....

January 31, 2017

Kerouac hammered out this semi-autobiographical novel on a single scroll of paper in just three weeks, describing road trips he took between 1947 and 1950. This rapid approach comes through in the writing, which is loosely structured and informal, uses a lot of slang...

December 06, 2016

A brief history of seven killings doesn’t pull any punches. Right from start James throws you in to the deep end, trying to drown you in names, places and pages and pages of near indecipherable lingo. But that’s not to say it’s unwelcoming. Centring...

November 01, 2016

Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West An abattoir - Dying trout – A journey – The kid – Language barriers – Whisky and whores – Liquid prose - A blood bath – The vanquished – Chaos lurking The bar is dimly...

October 04, 2016

We are still waiting on a reivew for this one. Are you up for it? Let us know!

September 30, 2016

Can the success of a work of fiction about the atrocities perpetrated on the aboriginal people by our early colonial forebears suggest we are coming of age in accepting that awful truth? Or might it simply be described as a “good read” and then...

September 06, 2016

The TGBC Review of Trout Fishing in America assumed that the novel Trout Fishing in America would be about trout fishing in America, which is not neccessarily to say it isn’t. Trout Fishing in America is a bizarre and hallucinatory novel(?), that plays with...

August 02, 2016

Daniel Craig's James Bond was the first Bond I properly got to know. In my young mind James Bond was unreasonably handsome and effortlessly cool, but at his core was an action hero. He had more literary credibility and maturity than a John McClane,...

July 05, 2016

Published in 1929 Ernest Hemmingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” is a semi-autobiographical account of the tragic love affair between American ambulance driver Frederick Henry and British nurse Catherine Barkley set against the backdrop of war torn Italy. Hemmingway uses the short tight prose with...

May 31, 2016

Set in the late 1980’s Boyd Oxlade’s novel Death in Brunswick is a claustrophobic, greasy, alcohol fueled trip back in time, to a place we at the Brunswick Chapter know well, Sydney Rd. Against a backdrop of grimey pubs, overfilled graveyards and suburban Australian...

May 03, 2016

“Remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.” That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. “Your father's right,” she said. “Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make...

April 05, 2016

A whiskey fueled conversation between James and Alex about Rumble Fish by S. E. Hinton. A: So, James, we read Rumble Fish. What did you think about the protagonist?J: I hated him. He’s dull. He’s not willing to learn. He makes mistakes but he’s...