Reddit

New Booklub post. And thanks Meri Risa, I was just testing posting, because my main page disappeared temporarily.

Check it out

Hows this sexy new template? Displaying a rate streak of OCD, I've labeled the last few months worth of posts, for your pleasure. Although now I'm worried I'm going to drive myself to think inside one of those labels for all new posts. Ah the tension of a mind that loves order and categories yet also craves the off-beat, the whimsical and the passionate. Pisces, eh?

This week I've picked up the weighty tome sent to Biz by his folks, Michael Palin's Diaries from 1969-1979 (The Python Years)*. I'm quite enjoying his thoughtful, descriptive and sometimes insightful musings on "what fills his days". When all strung together (and heavily edited) nearly 30 years down the track, it make a compelling narrative. Almost inspires one to keep a real true diary, rather than a motley collection of ramblings and links to the Sydney Morning Herald. Although maybe if I keep up with the technology and keep the page nicely archived, there will be a nice juicy publishing deal in it. In 2030.

*Nb, Betty Sue the Tariq Ali/John Ronson essay is quietly forming - one of these days it will make it onto booklub

Reads Books

Oh yeh, there's some stuff over at booklub.

John Birmingham

Writes a blog once a fortnight over at The Bullentin. And its free!

DeWitt., Dewho?

I am halfawy through reading The Last Samauri by Helen DeWitt. I chose this one grazing in the bookshop Gertrude and Alice, looking at actual paper pages, rather than its mention in some Hirbernian corner of the Internet. DeWitt may possibly be completely bananas. I like her immensely. Has anyone else read this satisfyingly chunky book? It appears to be her only one published, and the reading world nearly lost her there, but there's a tantalising piece on the website about another one coming.

What you readin' for

Not "What are you reading", but "What are you reading, for" - Bill Hicks

So all of youse get on over to the newly renovated Booklub and post (or comment), dammit! We have a latte-sipping literati reputation to uphold here. I don't even know who some of you are, but get to it, I wanna hear about what you're reading.

Ready read read

New post over at Booklub. Yes, I can hear you all screaming "for gods sake woman, get a life". I'm currently officially working on Project:Life.*


*One novel at a time.

Rollin Rollin Rollin

My favourite angry-think-necked-resident-of-the-United-States has his own tv show! And you can view all the little clips on the internet! Thank you...little sister's broadband connection.

Anyone who's lived in the US and watched Ann Coulter* check out Henry's love letter. There's also interviews with Werner Hertzog, Frank Black, Ozzy Ozbourne, Chuck D, Oliver Stone, and Sleater Kinney. All together Hunh-ree...

*Her latest book, is titled How to talk to a liberal (If you must) - lovely lady.

Chick lit

Recent reserch by the uni of London has compiled a list of liturature that has changed your life. The reseach, based on about 500 interviews found that "the novel that means most to men is about indifference, alienation and lack of emotional responses. That which means most to women is about deeply held feelings, a struggle to overcome circumstances and passion."

"We found that men do not regard books as a constant companion to their life's journey, as consolers or guides, as women do," said Prof Jardine. "They read novels a bit like they read photography manuals." Women readers used much-loved books to support them through difficult times and emotional turbulence, and tended to employ them as metaphorical guides to behaviour, or assupport and inspiration.

"The men's list was all angst and Orwell. Sort of puberty reading," she said. Ideas touching on isolation and "aloneness" were strong among the men's "milestone" books. "We were completely taken aback by the results," said Prof Jardine, who admitted that they revealed a pattern verging on a gender cliche, with women citing emotional, more domestic works, and men novels about social dislocation and solitary struggle.

Can you pick which list is which?

• The Outsider by Albert Camus
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
• Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
• Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
• High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
• The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• 1984 by George Orwell
• The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
• The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
• The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
• Middlemarch by George Elliot
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• The Golden Notebook by Dorris Lessing
• Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
• Rememberence of Things Past by Marcel Proust
• Persuasion by Jane Austen
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Oranges are not the only fruit by Janette Winterson
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Mill on the Floss by George Elliot
• Little Women by Lousia May Alcott
• Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert
• The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
• Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee