Tag: Literature
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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 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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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…
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J R: A Humble Cello Piece
None of William Gaddis’s books continue to be published in Australia. I had to order my copies of J R and The Recognitions from the US, ironically paying a premium for these pieces of art because, I suppose, that’s what America’s all about. It is truly tragic that Gaddis, arguably the person responsible for kickstarting…
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My first Murakami: Sputnik Sweetheart
There is simply no way for sex and love not to be messy. After all, have you ever seen somebody get shot without bleeding?
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Siddhartha and the Quest for Subjective Experience
Recently I have found myself embroiled in the concept of subjective experience and its importance in generating true understanding about particular concepts. The human experience is a particularly challenging idea to convey to another person; it is often challenging to the point of being impossible, a limit which we can asymptotically approach but have no…
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William Stoner and the act of loving
“Love was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a matter of both as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or poem, it says simply, ‘Look! I am alive.'”
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The Outsider (The Stranger) by Albert Camus
My close friend, Arend, gave me a copy of this novella for my 20th birthday. It was the Penguin Classics translation by Sandra Smith. It’s a very short read with a succinct, dense story told from a first person perspective of a man by the name of Mersault. Every thought within the novella is as…
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Out of Ireland; getting to know Robert Devereux
Out of Ireland is a novel by Christopher Koch; it is a diary of an Irish political prisoner, Robert Devereux, and the story of his exile in 1849 to Van Diemen’s Land penal colony for the incitement of violent revolution in Ireland. I chose to read this book purely for the reason that it was on…
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Infinite Jest, my thoughts
Just last week, I finished reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Infinite Jest is a book whose reputation preceded it, at least for me. As year 11 double major English students, my teacher, Mr. Bibbens, assigned us the novel to study for a whole semester, under the expectation that we didn’t have to finish it. This is an…
The Queanbeyan Review 