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Same old same old? Reading Flannery O’Connor
My very long time thinking about God and nihilism, while for sure, enhancing my enjoyment and understanding of the story, had another impact. It led me to be, dare I say it, a touch bored by the whole thing.
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Reading Gravity’s Rainbow
I have absolutely no idea what to say about this wonderful book, but I am going to try. I picked up Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, one of those monsters some call a ‘magnum opus’, off the internet three months ago. I’ll be totally candid, I’d been told it was hard to read, but interesting,…
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The struggle against sin: The Brothers Karamazov
How do we square in our hearts good people who do bad things? How do we understand that the world’s greatest sinners, murderers and traitors and genocidal racists, can be full of love for their friends, can be generous to the needy, or willing to suffer for the good of others? The answer Brothers offers…
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Empathy in Raymond Carver
In so much other fiction, and in life in general, empathy is presented as a virtue, as inherently linked with kindness, sympathy, charity, and compassion. But, to Carver, empathy can create benevolence or malevolence, for any number of reasons. He tends to present empathy as its own beast, and above all, as a method of…
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Rugby’s league problem
Looking back, if I were an ordinary worker in Redfern or Glebe in 1910, I would almost certainly have sided with league.
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Travelling Earthsea with Ursula Le Guin
Pat reads Ursula Le Guin’s fantasy classic. “If ever you want to delve into a world that is utterly fanatistical, but explore the lives of the people within whose struggles are so strikingly like our own, Earthsea is surely for you.”
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The Value of Philosophy
Bertrand Russell was a British philosopher, mathematician, and political activist who lived from 1872-1970. His magnum opus is generally considered to be the Principia Mathematica which is a three-volume work establishing the foundations of mathematics using logical axioms and symbolic logic. Russell then proceeded to venture into the field of epistemology. I started my recent…
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The Light in the Eye of the Sheep
Once again, I come to you with a novel recommended to me by a dear friend. It seems to be a good way to choose literature, by having someone else determine whether it’s worth reading or not beforehand. The novel in question, The Eye of the Sheep by Sofie Laguna, was mentioned during a discussion…
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What I love about Seinfeld: The Marine Biologist
Sure, funny has an energy, but it’s the structure of funny that gives that energy life. In the height of the show’s success, The Marine Biologist took to the screens for the first time, and to me it typifies the character of the Seinfeld project.
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The God of Small Things
The friend who gifted me this book described it as her second or third favourite book. She had found a copy of it in one of those street libraries – the kind where you swap one book for another – and picked it up for me hoping that I would read it and write a…
The Queanbeyan Review
Literature, Australian football, Rugby, Cricket. Written on Ngunnawal country. Follow on twitter @qbynrob
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A thug’s game played by … thugs?
For the first time in rugby history national teams are, to the man, players who first took to a rugby field knowing there might be one day a chance of competing for money – now the effect this had on their psyche is playing out on the field.
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A love-hate letter to David Foster Wallace
“You, not something like you, but you, are one of the voices inside my head, and having read you so young, I don’t know whether it’s mine or yours. But you know what, David? I don’t like that voice very much. It’s usually more trouble than it’s worth. You aren’t one of the good voices.”
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May the days be aimless
There is a rhythm in this novel. Not a rhythm to its prose, that’s an analogy you’ve probably heard a lot, but to the entire piece of work. Beneath every piece of music lies a beat. Not the beat played by the instruments, I mean beneath even that. Beneath the beat is the original beat.…
The Queanbeyan Review 