Latest Books
Want to know what kinds of books we read? You can find all of our previous selections as well as reviews written by members of our club below. Some they loved, others not so much. We trust you'll make up your own damn mind once you get to turning the pages. Watch out for a few spoilers too!
Books are added each month with our current book being the first in the list! Want to know what we're reading next? You'll have to attend a chapter as we only reveal our next book on the night of our meetings.
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess (1962)
November 06, 2024
In November we are reading A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. Grab a copy and get reading.
Read MoreHoneybee - Craig Silvey (2020)
October 02, 2024
In October we are reading Honeybee by Craig Silvey. Honeybee is a heart-breaking, life-affirming novel that throws us headlong into a world of petty thefts, extortion plots, botched bank robberies, daring dog rescues and one spectacular stage show. Honeybee is a tender, profoundly moving...
Read MoreFrankenstein - Mary Shelley (1818)
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...
Read MoreThe Riders - Tim Winton (1994)
August 07, 2024
In August we're reading The Riders by Tim Winton (1994). Grab a copy and get reading!
Read MoreThe Chase - Candice Fox (2021)
July 06, 2024
For July we're reading The Chase by Candice Fox (2021). Grab a copy and get reading!
Read MoreThe Son of Man - Jean-Baptiste Del Amo (2021)
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...
Read MoreThe Promise - Damon Galgut (2022)
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.
Read MoreWe Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson (1962)
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...
Read MoreHag-Seed – Margaret Attwood (2017)
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...
Read MoreBlack Tide – Peter Temple (2005)
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...
Read MoreWorld War Z - Max Brooks (2006)
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.
Read MoreAt the Mountains of Madness - H. P. Lovecraft (1931)
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.
Read MoreOpen Water - Caleb Azumah Nelson (2021)
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...
Read MoreSteppenwolf - Hermann Hesse (1927)
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...
Read MoreA Long Petal of the Sea - Isabel Allende (2019)
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...
Read MoreA Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemingway (1964)
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...
Read MoreShadowboxing - Tony Birch (2006)
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...
Read MoreInterpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri (1999)
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...
Read MoreSCOOP - Evelyn Waugh (1938)
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...
Read MoreMetamorphosis and Other Stories - Franz Kafka (1915)
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...
Read MoreThe Outsiders - S.E. Hinton (1967)
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...
Read MoreThe Magician - Colm Tóibín (2021)
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...
Read MoreWolf in White Van - John Darnielle (2014)
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...
Read MoreThe Glass Canoe - David Ireland (1976)
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...
Read MoreThe Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
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...
Read More400 Days - Chetan Bhagat (2021)
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...
Read MoreOne Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey (1962) Take 2
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...
Read MoreSharks in the Time of Saviours - Kawai Strong Washburn (2020)
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...
Read MoreThe Gun - C.S. Forester (1933)
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...
Read MoreAll Systems Red - Martha Wells (2017)
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?...
Read MoreThe Road - Cormac McCarthy (2006)
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...
Read MoreFarewell, My Lovely - Raymond Chandler (1940)
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...
Read MoreThe Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - (2000) Michael Chabon
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...
Read MoreThe Age of Reason - Jean-Paul Sartre (1945)
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...
Read MoreLast Orders - Graham Swift (1996)
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...
Read MoreStation Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel (2014)
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...
Read MoreBreakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut (1973)
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...
Read MoreThe Snows of Kilimanjaro - Ernest Hemingway (1936)
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...
Read MoreThe Talented Mr. Ripley - Patricia Highsmith (1955)
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...
Read MoreThe Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov (1973)
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...
Read MoreThe Hawkline Monster - Richard Brautigan (1974)
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...
Read MoreNotes from Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky (1864)
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...
Read MoreBreath - Tim Winton (2008)
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...
Read MoreThe Starless Sea - Erin Morgenstern (2019)
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...
Read MoreFrankenstein in Baghdad - Ahmed Saadawi (2013)
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...
Read MoreFahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury (1953)
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...
Read MoreWhite Teeth - Zadie Smith (2000)
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...
Read MoreHigh Fidelity - Nick Hornby (1995)
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...
Read MoreThe Water Dancer - Ta-Nehisi Coates (2019)
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,...
Read MoreCannery Row - John Steinbeck (1945)
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...
Read MoreThe Martian - Andy Weir (2011)
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...
Read MoreThe Messenger - Markus Zusak (2002)
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...
Read MoreA Man Called Ove - Fredrik Backman (2012)
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...
Read MoreLast Exit to Brooklyn - Hubert Selby Jr (1964)
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...
Read MoreHornblower and the Hotspur - C. S. Forester (1962)
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...
Read MoreTrainspotting - Irvine Welsh (1993)
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,...
Read MoreTo Name Those Lost - Rohan Wilson (2014)
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...
Read MoreHell's Angels - Hunter S. Thompson (1967)
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...
Read MoreDrive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead - Olga Tokarczuk (2009)
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...
Read MoreA Visit from the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan (2010)
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...
Read MoreFor Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway (1940) Take 2
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...
Read MorePraise - Andrew McGahan (1995)
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...
Read MoreGo Tell It on the Mountain - James Baldwin (1953)
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...
Read MoreSmall Gods - Terry Pratchett (1992)
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...
Read MoreStoner - John Williams (1965)
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...
Read MoreAsk the Dust - John Fante (1939)
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...
Read MoreNeuromancer - William Gibson (1984)
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...
Read MoreThe Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien (1990) Take 2
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...
Read MoreMen Without Women - Haruki Murakami (2014)
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...
Read MoreThe Plains - Gerald Murnane (1982)
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...
Read MoreThe Spy Who Came in from the Cold - John le Carré (1963)
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...
Read MoreThings Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe (1959)
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...
Read MoreMen Without Women - Ernest Hemingway (1927)
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...
Read MoreThe Eye of the Sheep - Sofie Laguna (2014)
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...
Read MoreThe Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (1979)
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...
Read MoreThat Deadman Dance - Kim Scott (2010)
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...
Read MoreAs I Lay Dying - William Faulkner (1930)
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...
Read MoreThe Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle (1892)
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...
Read MoreEast of Eden - John Steinbeck (1952)
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...
Read MoreJohnno - David Malouf (1975)
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...
Read MoreHam on Rye - Charles Bukowski (1982)
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...
Read MoreGod Bless You, Mr. Rosewater - Kurt Vonnegut (1965)
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...
Read MoreThe Dispossessed - Ursula K. Le Guin (1974)
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...
Read MoreThe Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway (1952)
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...
Read MoreThe Big Nowhere - James Ellroy (1988)
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...
Read MoreHome - Toni Morrison (2012)
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,...
Read MoreThe Jesus Man - Christos Tsiolkas (1999)
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...
Read MoreGood Omens - Pratchett & Gaiman (1990)
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....
Read MoreOn the Road - Jack Kerouac (1957)
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...
Read MoreA Brief History of Seven Killings - Marlon James (2015)
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...
Read MoreBlood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy (1985)
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...
Read MoreBrave New World - Aldous Huxley (1932)
October 04, 2016
We are still waiting on a reivew for this one. Are you up for it? Let us know!
Read MoreThe Roving Party - Rohan Wilson (2011)
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...
Read MoreTrout Fishing in America - Richard Brautigan (1967)
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...
Read MoreCasino Royal - Ian Fleming (1953)
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,...
Read MoreA Farewell To Arms - Ernest Hemmingway (1929)
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...
Read MoreDeath in Brunswick - Boyd Oxlade (1987)
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...
Read MoreTo Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (1960)
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...
Read MoreRumble Fish - S. E. Hinton (1975)
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...
Read More