Beyond Harry Potter – books for 10 to 13-year-olds
My 11-year-old son loved reading Harry Potter and Harry, Hermione and Ron kept him enthralled for almost a year as…
Do harrowing books prepare you for the worst or make you fear it?
I heard an interesting TED Talk on resilience recently, delivered by a mother who had lost her 12-year-old daughter in…
The best book characters I’ve encountered recently
As an introvert, I find that book characters can be better company than real people. Rather than exhausting me as…
Book review: A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville
It was interesting to read Kate Grenville’s historical fiction about the settlers’ experience of Australia straight after finishing Hannah Kent’s…
My favourite books of 2021
I’m a bit late off the mark with my best of 2021 list seeing I decided to have some laptop-free…
The bittersweet sense of an ending
My husband and I recently finished watching The Bureau on SBS, a series that followed the French intelligence service as…
In a life of ups and downs, reading is a constant
I have been fortunate enough to cuddle, squeeze and smell two babies who were only months old recently. It has…
Historical fiction is the ultimate 2-for-1
There is plenty to be learnt from fiction, where you can inhabit someone else’s reality for a time. But when…
Books in which setting is character, plot and mood
Some books are all about character, while others depend on their plot. Then there is another type of book altogether…
I’ll read anything written by my favourite authors … even if it’s a book about footy
In my mind, my favourite writers are organised in a heirarchy of how desperately I will try to get my…
