Ernie > Recent Status Updates

Ithaca is the second longest episode, the last to be written by Joyce.
It is written in the form of the Catholic Church catechism, question and answer and is loaded with pretentious, latinate, multisyllabic, redundancies, rare terminology, archaisms, neologisms and other languages ancient and modern. It is written in the present tense and abounds with parentheses and I found it the most difficult episode to read.

And now, something completely different, entitled and opening as a film script.

I'm giving up at this point: too many cliches in prose , characters and plot of US sailors on a gunboat up the Yangtze in 1925.

Straight into Tudor London. I am rationing my reading rate, otherwise I'll be racing through this superb finale to Mantel's Cromwell trilogy in my plague year isolation with nowhere to go.

I am at last catching up with this novel that almost everyone in Australia seems to have read. I am enjoying the combination of boyish exaggeration and fantasy within the drug dealing desperation of the suburbia that the writer probably knows well from his time as a journalist for the Brisbane Courier Mail newspaper.

Max Brood famously disobeyed Kafka's dying wish to have all his unpublished works and papers burnt after his death in 1924. Brod and his secretary Esther Hoffe catalog and preserve his papers in bank safe deposit boxes then after Brod's death the Israel Supreme Court heard a bizarre case to decide where the papers will reside, in Germany or Israel while Czechoslovakia made no claim for them. An intriguing read.

The fall of Anne Boleyn becomes even more intriguing with these new details. Fascinating new information, eg historians and family history ennthusiasts owe Cromwell for beginning the register of baptisms in every parish church from 1538 (but not for a good reason: to reveal any Anabaptists, 25 of whom were burnt at the stake earlier).

An enjoyably slow read for the fascinating details derived from meticulous research through masses of documents while speculating about the missing ones from Cromwell himself.

Don Watson is such a good writer. I thought I'd be skimming a lot but he has held me. I've put off reading this for many years but as an election approaches with an opposition daring to introduce more economic reform to achieve more fairness in the tax structure, I though it timely to read of the triumphs and travails of Keating and staff, who dared mightily.

A fascinating account of life in Bucharest at the time of the outbreak of the second world war, from the point off view of Harriet, newly married to Guy who is an English lecturer at the British Council.

I'm celebrating YA week with this fictionalised biography about the early life of Malcolm X written by his daughter Ilyasah Shabazz and writer, Kekla Magoon.