Books

Climate change sceptics shouldn’t have to resort to juvenile ‘Gotcha’ tactics to get attention. But Professor Ian Plimer just did. And his target? Schoolteachers. Nice.

Prime Minister John Howard aided and abetted him, speaking at the launch of Plimer’s new book, How to Get Expelled from School: A Guide to Climate Change for Pupils, Parents and Punters.

The first bit of devious trickery is evident in the title - the ludicrous implication that a student would get kicked out of school for asking questions is just a nod to the conspiracy theorists who think the world’s scientists are engaged in an enormous scam.

Continue reading "How Plimer’s climate change book might just work" »

Boganomics: Why Bogans Like The Things They Do is another not-quite-scientific look at bogans from the same bastards who brought you Things Bogans Like. This excerpt is brought to you by the sometimes bogan Punch Team.

Taking a journey into the bogan mind can be a bewildering experience. The sheer volume of mental tricks and short cuts that the bogan has devised is so daunting that many psychologists prefer to deny that bogan psychology even exists, rather than acknowledge it and delve in.

While this denial has no doubt made their lives more comfortable, this book sets out to answer the questions that Ivory Tower Academic Latte Intellectual Arsehole Nobodies (or ITALIANs, for short) are ill equipped to tackle. Let’s begin.

Continue reading "Why bogans like Harvey Norman and other mysteries" »

Some poncy academic has compiled a book of essays on the philosophy of Alice in Wonderland. It infuriates me when brainiacs do this.

I get it. They’re bored of fossicking around in their corduroy jackets, trying to restructure the periodic table or extract metaphysical themes from 17th century poetry, so they cast their brilliant minds over popular culture.

And so we get wordy polemics on satire in South Park, the didacticism of Lady Gaga and this beauty: Perspectivism and Tragedy: A Nietzschean Interpretation of Alice’s Adventure.

Continue reading "Alice belongs in Wonderland, not a thesis" »

“Good grief!” said the goose.
“Well, well!” said the pig.

“Who cares?” said the sheep.
“So what?” said the horse.
“What next?” said the cow.

This is the hardest column I’ve tackled in a long time. For days, I’ve taken different angles.

Continue reading "This is one of the hardest columns I’ve ever written" »

It’s every hack journo’s secret fantasy to pen a novel.

Given that it can only be a matter of months until some upper-management genius develops a business model for the ailing print media industry that involves we human content providers being replaced with 100 monkeys (uncomplaining langurs based in a Mumbai cubicle farm, no doubt) sat in front of 100 typewriters, I’ve decided to start work on a book that will generate me some J.K. Rowlingesque coin.

It’s going to be what we literary types call “allohistory” (aka alternative history). In this genre it’s traditional to write about how things would have turned out if the Nazis won WWII but that particular mule has been whipped to death, so I’m spinning a yarn about would have happened if Sweden, following the economic shocks and stagnation of the ’70s, had lurched to the Left.

Continue reading "Life will be Swede when I pen my allegorical bestseller" »

Welcome to this week’s I Call Bullshit. Get ready to get steamy. The hot topic du jour is romance novels and the apparent threat they cause to women’s sexual health.

A UK medical journal has published a piece from ‘agony aunt’ Susan Quilliam arguing that bodice-ripper romantic fiction is discouraging condom use and giving women crazy ideas about orgasms.

Before we go any further, let’s have some gratuitous ‘literary’ sex scenes, just to give you the flavour.

Continue reading "ICB: Steamy romance novels are bad for your health" »

Imagine if the construction workers union, the CFMEU, issued a statement calling for Maoris and Islanders to be banned from working in the building industry. Or if the white-collar Australian Services Union demanded an end to all those pesky Indians stealing our jobs in IT.

They would be howled down as racist protectionists, accused of taking the nation back to the dark days of the White Australia Policy, offending the principles of inclusion and diversity by denying people from other countries a chance to settle and work here.

It might be 2011 but the actors and journalists’ union, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, has this week launched a campaign which is the artistic equivalent of legislating to keep the kanaks off the canefields in the early 20th century.

Continue reading "Aussie actors unite - we grew here you flew here" »

So the love of your life has just broken your heart into a million tiny pieces. Never fear. Help is just a click away.

You too can mend the hole in your soul for as little as $9.95 (plus postage and handling). Self-help books might seem, like, so 2007, but rest assured, there’s still heaps available online.

If you’re on a deadline, try How to Mend a Broken Heart in 30 Days. Or maybe you’re after something a little more drastic. They say the Amazon best seller, Exorcising Your Ex is a real head-turner.

Continue reading "The break-up industry is totally out of hand" »

Late Sunday night it was revealed on Twitter - by a well-known TV presenter whom I assume approved - that David Hicks had just received a standing ovation at the Sydney Writers’ Festival.

I wanted to know what they were cheering and tweeted: “Fact he abandoned wife and kids? Fact he thought OBL terrific bloke?”

There was no answer, but soon after another tweet arrived, from a complete stranger, saying: “God I am so glad you said that… I am no right wing jerk BUT I draw the line.”

Continue reading "Hicks ain’t no Che Guevara" »

We parents do it tough these days. Seems there’s no aspect of child rearing which doesn’t attract a “tssk tssk” from some know-it-all with a bunch of letters after their name. But we’re about to have the last laugh, thanks to a brilliant new book.

Go the F—k to Sleep hasn’t even been released yet, but has soared to number one on Amazon based purely on pre-orders. It’s no biggie why. The book taps into the belief that our children are mollycoddled to death – something many of us feel, but dare not speaketh lest we break the delicate eggshell of acceptable modern parenting.

As the book’s title alludes, sometimes enough is enough. When the bed has been tucked, bedtime stories read and lullabies sung, it’s over. It’s time to go the f—k to sleep and give mummy and daddy some mummy and daddy time. And there’s plenty more mummy and daddy would like to say too…

Continue reading "“Go the f—k to sleep”. What parents really want to say…" »

Reading the news yesterday that the United States bookstore chain Border has gone into bankruptcy, I began to ask myself how long it could possibly be before a big Australian chain met the same fate. Unfortunately the wait wasn’t long.

A press release came out that afternoon announcing that REDGroup, who control Borders Australia, Angus and Robertson and Whitcoulls in New Zealand, were being placed into administration. This will affect 260 stores.

Really, it is a wonder this didn’t happen earlier given that Australian booksellers have been defying the laws of market theory that would have sent other businesses bust long ago. There are a few reasons why this was pretty inevitable. One involves parallel import laws and the other the internet, but the two are closely linked.

Continue reading "Publishers and book sellers have sealed their own fate" »

Come Christmas Day, many members of the book-reading class are likely to wake up to find a copy of Things Bogans Like (TBL) in their stocking. The book was released in late October but its publicist, Nicola Pitt, is “expecting a spike in sales just before Christmas as people buy the book to give to friends and family. It’s one of those gifts that result in lively Christmas lunch conversation”.

Needless to say, those having lively conversations about Things Bogans Like, which has spun off the wildly popular website of the same name, are not themselves likely to be bogans and any bogan who does stumble upon the book is unlikely to find much to laugh about.

In contrast to Kath & Kim’s Jane Turner and Gina Riley, the six young men (who’ve opted to remain anonymous) behind TBL satirise what they perceive as the pretension, racism, ignorance, unabashed self-interest, clumsy social climbing, sheepish conformism, hyper consumerism and reactionary politics of Australia’s rapidly gentrifying lower orders without the tiniest sliver of empathy or affection for their targets. The vicious humour of the book is irradiated with class condescension of the let’s snigger about what those people watch (trashy current affairs programs), buy (Buddhist-themed home furnishings) and name their children (Chanel or Armani) variety.

Continue reading "I, for one, welcome our new bogan overlords" »

I have a confession to make. This isn’t easy, but I feel the time has finally arrived to come clean.

No doubt, my actions will bring shame upon my family, friends, colleagues and various stores I frequent, but I can no longer hide in the shadows. If there is a God, I pray he forgives this twisted soul and all its hideous imperfections.

Here goes: I don’t care much for Harry Potter.

Continue reading "Somehow I missed the Hogwarts Express" »

I remember once going to Guantanamo Bay on assignment and reading “Lolita” on the military jet en route. 

I didn’t think anything of it until I noticed a few people giving me sideways glances. 

It made me wonder if it weren’t slightly inappropriate reading material for a public place.  Sort of like clipping your toenails at the dinner table.

Continue reading "Well readhead: the most arrogant interview ever" »

As Lazarus rose (albeit for a book launch) this week, the gaping leadership chasm that has been the Prime Ministership since John Howard’s departure was glaringly exposed.

A recent article in The Spectator on John Howard had the by-line “Remember when Australia had a real PM?”  It’s a fair question.

John Howard’s re-emergence on the national stage this week, along with a raft of shoe-throwing unwashed Howard-haters, only served to remind the public what it has been missing: conviction politics.  Plain and simple.

Continue reading "Recent PMs haven’t risen to fill Lazarus’s shoes" »

The Punch will be live blogging the former Prime Minister John Howard’s appearance on the Q&A program this evening. You can join in from 9:30 PM AEDT.

Continue reading "How honest is John’s version of history?" »

I have not read the book Eat Pray Love, nor have I seen the movie Eat Pray Love.

In fact I rarely eat, rarely love and haven’t prayed since the third quarter of the AFL Grand Final.

I am therefore in a uniquely untainted and unbiased position to be able to say that this deformed abomination of fertiliser-grade horsesh-t should be blasted back into the hellish furnace of retardation from whence it came.

Continue reading "Pray for salvation from this banquet of self-love" »

Jung Chang’s Wild Swans and James Joyce’s Dubliners don’t make my list of “books that changed my life” but as required reading for my grade twelve English class and therefore the sole focus of my attention for an entire year, let’s just say they’ve stuck in my mind.

If I ever want to remember what it felt like to devote an entire year to reading a couple of books, I only have to grab them down from the bookshelf and flick through the curled up pages and read the number of Post-it-notes still stuck to the spine or the lead pencil scrawled in the margins; a testimony to the days, weeks and months spent poring over the content, the characters, the plot line, the history and in the case of Wild Swans, the extensive family tree printed on the inside cover.

Yes, both books eventually did my head in. Yes, I often questioned their impact on my future life, the one that was sooo hard to see from my bedroom desk. But I’m glad I read them.

Continue reading "Don’t ditch literature in your final year" »

One recent evening, my husband posed the question: If you only had three months left to live, what would you choose to read?

The discussion was travelling along perfectly well until he raised a name guaranteed to set me on a rant: Harold Bloom.

Bloom is a professor at Yale University and the author of many books including How to Read and Why.  That title alone makes me want to employ the great Dorothy Parker quote: “This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly.  It should be thrown with great force.”

Continue reading "Well read-head: Throwing the book at literary snobs" »

With the whole nation absorbed in post-election intrigue, I’m declaring today’s reading list a politics-free zone.  But before I do, I’d like to nominate my favourite ‘what the?’ moment from the coverage of the election campaign.

I rule out going with Mark Latham’s transformation into a ‘journalist’ because it’s far too obvious.  An in-depth analysis of the size of Julia Gillard’s earlobes is a hot contender but also too predictable, given the fun cartoonists have been having with that issue for years.

A front page profile of Rhys Muldoon certainly caught my fancy, complete with its ‘Underbelly’ style photo, implying that the ‘Playschool’ actor had some sinister inside influence in Canberra. But to my taste, nothing topped this rolled-gold quote in a revealing profile of Kevin Rudd: 

Continue reading "Well readhead: the politics-free zone" »

There’s been some buzz around a recent article in New York magazine titled: ‘All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting’. The cover of the publication shows a mother holding her baby with the cover line ‘I Love My Children.  I Hate My Life’.

The author Jennifer Senior (a mother herself) explores a wide range of research on parenting and reports that it overwhelmingly supports the view that parents are not happier than their childless peers, and in many cases, are less so.

She writes about the changing views of childhood in Western society, arguing that before urbanisation, children delivered their parents an economic advantage that’s no longer evident:
‘If you had a farm, they toiled alongside you to maintain its upkeep; if you had a family business, the kids helped mind the store.  But … as we gained in prosperity, childhood came increasingly to be viewed as a protected, privileged time, and once college degrees became essential to getting ahead, children became not only a great expense but subjects to be sculpted, stimulated, instructed, groomed … kids in short went from being our staffs to being our bosses.’

Continue reading "Well readhead: Everyone’s talking about parenting" »

Our society puts great stock in the merits of hard work.  You know how it goes.  If you work hard enough, you can achieve anything. 

Fail to achieve a goal?  If only you’d worked harder.  For an upcoming Lateline interview, I’ve read a book called Bounce by Mathew Syed. 

His theory is that God-given talent is a myth and that the key to achieving greatness lies in how hard you’re prepared to work. I’m not sure I buy all of that.

Continue reading "Well readhead: the illusion hard work alone triumphs" »

They come from far, they come from wide. They come with a fire in their bellies and a penchant for the written word that not even a million monkeys on a million typewriters could even dream of topping no matter how many sonnets they secured or peanuts they procured with their feverish and dexterous opposable thumbs. They are, of course, and without a shadow of a flickering doubt - bad writers.

The bad writer is a mystery for the ages. A mystery, wrapped in a riddle, snug as a bug in a tightly woven and off-white or eggshell coloured woollen rug.

The fact remains that since man has walked the earth since time immemorial, our command of language above all is what has set man apart from beast; what has separated the men from the boys (by men I of course mean men, and by boys I mean animals).

Continue reading "I hate bad writers with a fiery passion in my heart" »

In his new memoir Hitch-22, the public intellectual Christopher Hitchens writes that he now drinks ‘relatively carefully’.  By that, he means only a glass of scotch and half a bottle of wine at lunch, followed by the same at dinner and occasionally a nightcap.

Hitchens’ drinking is the stuff of legend.  In fact, according to family folklore, his first fully-formed sentence was ‘Let’s all go and have a drink at the club.’ 

A 2006 profile in The New Yorker (which among other things notes that ‘Hitchens only recently gave up smoking in the shower’) describes Hitchens as ‘drinking like a Hemingway character: continually and to no apparent effect.’

Continue reading "Well Readhead: Hitchen’ my wagon to the Prat Pack" »

I can’t remember how I stumbled across it, but it has really threatened my Christian faith. It’s a book unlike any other, challenging my worldview and giving me nights of tossing and turning in a cold sweat.

The book is The Christian Mother Goose Book by Marjorie Ainsborough Decker, and it’s enough to make anyone an unbeliever. No doubt in good faith, Mrs Decker has ‘improved’ the nursery rhymes you and I know from childhood into ones she feels better communicate the Christian message. So, ‘Lavender’s Blue, Dilly Dilly’ begins:

Lavender’s blue, dilly dilly
Lavender’s green
Teach me to say, dilly, dilly
John 3:16.

Continue reading "Morris Gleitzman and Christian Mother Goose" »

You’d have to be living under a rock not to notice the hype surrounding the release of Sex and the City 2. Yep, it’s that obvious, Carrie fever is sweeping the world, and some people are getting antsy.

Antsy because they’re over the hype (and given it’s at saturation point it’s totally understandable) or because they simply can’t wait to indulge themselves in the latest instalment to one of television’s most popular foursome.

I don’t know if it’s sheer coincidence or clever timing, but the movie happens to coincide with the release of an entirely different chapter (if you pardon the pun) in Carrie Bradshaw’s life, depicted in Candace Bushnell’s latest novel, The Carrie Diaries (Harper Collins, $30.95). It’s probably the perfect complement to the movie’s release given the fact that it takes readers back to the mind and soul of their on-screen heroine’s high school days.

Continue reading "What’s love got to do with it? Well, everything actually" »

The other day at dinner, my friends and I were discussing the Ten Commandments.  It’s party, party, party when you roll with my posse.

My friend George claimed that God originally made Eleven Commandments, but that one of the tablets was smashed so only ten were left (the actual Bible story is that there were two lots of Commandments; Moses smashed the first batch in anger and then a second series were produced).  Whatever the facts, George’s story excited me enormously.

“I’ve got a great idea for a movie!” I cried.  “The Eleventh Commandment!  What if it wasn’t really smashed and there was a race to find it, like secret treasure?”

Continue reading "Well readhead: There’s Nothing New Under the Sun" »

We all know the Prime Minister writes books but does he read them? We are left wondering because the author of Jasper and Abby and the Great Australia Day Kerfuffle did not take part in a landmark survey of federal politicians’ reading habits, to be published this Wednesday in The Australian Literary Review. 

Tony Abbott was not so shy, revealing his favourite novel to be J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings. 

Julia Gillard played it safe with Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, Joe Hockey showed his SNAG side with Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Peter Garrett was immersed in a Bunnings catalogue (he also mentioned March, the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by the one-time Fairfax reporter Geraldine Brooks).

Continue reading "Revealed: our federal politicians’ favourite books" »

Welcome to a new week @ The Punch.

Today in 2007 JK Rowling completed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It was the 7th novel in her series.

I’ve had the last quarter of Marilynne Robinson’s 2004 novel, Gilead, waiting patiently for me on the bedside table for a year or so, hoping to be granted the honour of completion (I often struggle with the reading endgame).

Now, transported away from the bedside table on holidays, I’ve at last reached the end of this exquisitely poised depiction of a dying preacher recording a memoir for his young son.

The book is replete with theological and anthropological gems, the fruit of the author’s deep knowledge of the Bible, of ministry life, and of the significance of the shape of our close relationships on our sense of life’s meaning.

Continue reading "A novel way to belief this summer" »

Last fortnight, I posted my ten favourite links from the year’s Well-readhead.

This time, I’m going a step further with my Christmas holiday recommendations, posting my favourite fiction books of the year, along with my top five non fiction books and top five TV series on DVD.

If you’re looking for something to do over the holidays, let me simply say: my name is Leigh, I’m from Queensland and I’m here to help.

Continue reading "Well readhead: Summer holiday reading and viewing" »

I recently gave an address at the Media 140 Conference in Sydney about the impact of social media on journalism.  I was invited to speak about the ethics and professionalism of the way I use twitter.  Today’s post is adapted from my remarks.

My guiding principle is ‘If in doubt, leave it out’. 

In other words, when it comes to what I put on twitter, I err on the side of caution - as I do with what I write or broadcast generally.

Continue reading "Well-readhead: How and why I use Twitter" »

In identifying the most revolutionary discovery or invention in human history we are confronted with a bewildering choice: from fire and the wheel, through to electricity, nuclear fission and the silicon chip. But one stands out. Simple in conception and design, but revolutionary in its impact – the printing press.

The Gutenberg bible, the first book printed with moveable type only 570 years ago, opened up the written word to all of humanity. It forced open the closed books of religion; it empowered discovery and research.

Just imagine a world without books and literacy. We would have no internet. Our knowledge would be limited to that which had been passed on by friends or acquaintances, or by those in power – be they religious or secular. For this was the world before the printing press.

Continue reading "More expensive books are a tragedy for us all" »

I regularly find myself chairing panels at writers’ festivals or in bookshops and I give a standard spiel at the beginning of every event.

‘We’ll have time for questions at the end,’ I say, ‘And let me emphasise that we want questions, not statements.  If you stand up and make a statement, I will cut you off and publicly humiliate you.’

It usually gets a laugh ... until they realise I’m completely serious.

Continue reading "Well-readhead: Don’t make me publicly humiliate you" »

Don’t you just hate it when you’ve bought a new toy and before you’ve even got it out of the box you’re friends are saying you’ve wasted your money?

I know someone who has the new Kindle, which was released in Australia last week.

If he is the same sort of technoholic as I am, he would have been crestfallen when before he’d even unpacked it one of our acquaintances said: “Have you seen the Nook? Bet you’ll regret the Kindle.”

Continue reading "Yes, books are great but we said that about CDs" »

Before Ben Cousins, there was Wayne Carey. The full forward from Wagga became the King of North Melbourne and the greatest train wreck of them all.

His legendary love of a bender – and a life without boundaries - culminated in a famous sex act somewhere between the tooth brush holder and the soap dish with his best mate’s wife.

Carey was the perfect example of a sports star whose self-loathing only increased the more the public fell in love with him. I don’t know if he’s ever met Andrew Johns, but you’d imagine they would have plenty to talk about.

Continue reading "Wayne Carey: Your typical angry white male" »

My parents never taught me how to cook, they just taught me how not to.

My 50-something father still burns fish fingers, and has done since I was three. Probably earlier.

My mother micro-waved all of the nutrients out of anything I ever ate.

Continue reading "The way to good cooking may be learning what not to do" »

‘Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code. A novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name’. That’s how Salman Rushdie described Dan Brown’s 2003 blockbuster in an interview with the Lawrence Journal-World in 2005.

Rushdie isn’t alone in his unflattering assessment of Dan Brown’s writing. More recently, professor of linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, Geoffrey Pullum told the Daily Telegraph that ‘Brown’s writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad’.

And Pullum isn’t just being a high-minded literary snob, either; the professor has a point. To illustrate his case, Pullum cites a passage from Angels and Demons in which the lead female character hears about the death of her scientist father. ‘Genius, she thought. My father . . . Dad. Dead’ writes Brown.

Continue reading "In praise of Dan Brown" »

‘There,’ I said, balancing the candle I’d snapped off the broach in the palm of my hand. ‘What do you think?’ I ran my other hand through my hair, pushing back my recalcitrant fringe. My fingers came away moist. It was hot in the workroom, but that wasn’t the only reason I was sweating.

Even though I had been making candles ever since I could remember, I awaited Pillar’s opinion nervously. It wasn’t that Pillar was such a great candlemaker; in fact, he often lamented how pedestrian and ordinary his work was and that he only earned enough lire to survive. Pillar was right. His work was nothing special, not compared with the work of the master candlemakers who lived on the salizzada and controlled the Candlemakers Scuola, but what he thought mattered terribly to me. While he lacked the artistic flair of the masters, or their golden ducats to spend on exotic waxes and wicks, his candles were solid, the wicks dependable, and they burnt long and brightly.

‘Well?’ I pressed. He didn’t usually take so long to offer his opinion. ‘Can we afford to purchase more beeswax?’

Continue reading "Book extract: Tallow" »

Australia’s creative industry has again shown its canny ability to frame a debate.

The recent dispute over lifting restrictions on parallel book importation has been cast as a classic good versus evil battle. On the one side, we apparently have the noble educated patriots, boldly standing on the last line of defence for Australian culture, and on the other we have a mounting tide of sub-standard (foreign made) literature and a cabal of neo-liberal charlatans hell-bent on unleashing it on the young impressionable minds of Australian readers.

Author Tim Winton says the Productivity Commission is “hostile to Australian rights.” Louise Adler, CEO of Melbourne University Press, launched a shrill attack on the Productivity Commission as “neo-liberals and economic fundamentalists.” 

Continue reading "Spare me the artists’ pain, change book import laws" »

Everyone in Australia knows that books cost a whole lot more than they should.

The absurdity in the debate about whether to make books cheaper is that politicians who will make the final decision – some of whom are beating their chests about our cultural heritage – are voting with their mice and buying books online from cheaper online retailers overseas.

Our website The Punch is surveying the nation’s MPs about their media consumption, including the use of new media, the type of technology they use, and how they buy movies, music and books.

Continue reading "Book debate is absurd when we’re buying them overseas" »

Fathers Day - or in our house Feathrs or Farthers day depending upon the cards I received last year - is nearly upon the kids. Last year I got lots of cards - approximately 8 by my count. I don’t have that many children nor did I discover I had some I didn’t know about. Instead my known children were extremely productive; to the tune of 2.67 cards per child. What is more, they were all self-made.

We now have a rule at home that Hallmark holidays should mean that no money should be spent that would go anywhere near Hallmark. That means everything is made.

Not only did I get the cards but several paintings and a treasure hunt. The last one was imaginative but, ultimately fast, because my then 6 year old son organised the whole thing but didn’t have the patience to wait for me to decipher his clues and took me straight to the treasure.

Continue reading "Don’t buy my book for Fathers Day" »

Today is the 64th anniversary of the mass publication in America of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a book considered one of the most influential of all time. 

What a pity I’ve actually never read it. 

And this is despite the fact that I’ve owned a copy since I was 17, when everyone else I knew read it. Or did they?

Continue reading "Five reasons to read the book before watching the movie" »

EDs: Simone Holzapfel worked as Tony Abbott’s media advisor when he was in the Howard Government ministry.

In many ways, Tony Abbott is one of a kind. In a focus group-led political world where our leaders too often speak in clichés, perfectly deliver their politically correct lines and image is everything, Tony Abbott stands apart. But will his frankness translate to political success or failure?

The thing about Abbott is that you don’t have to like him, or his views, but you have to respect him.  Because, unlike many of his colleagues, you know where he stands because his views on just about everything - no matter how challenging or difficult the issue - are on the public record.

Continue reading "Tony Abbott: The last politician to speak his mind" »

The Productivity Commission’s recommendation for the removal of parallel importation restrictions on books is a cause for celebration for book lovers in Australia.

By that I mean the millions of Australian consumers who will benefit from the removal of these outdated protectionist measures.

The books debate this time round (there have been five earlier reports to Government - all but one recommended the full removal of protection, while the fifth recommended partial removal) has predictably been dominated by hysterical doomsday claims from authors and publishers.

Continue reading "Freeing up the books market is great news for readers" »

Recently, a stranger walked up to me in a café.

‘Is that The Sydney Morning Herald you’re reading?’ she asked.  She looked about 30 and her hair was tied back in a ponytail. I told her it was and she immediately drew closer to take a look.

‘I just need to see yesterday’s word,’ she said.

Continue reading "AMARKEEGO spells GEEK-O-RAMA: Well read-head" »

I borrowed my first book from the University library the other day. I realise that doesn’t really seem like a big deal but for me this momentous occasion becomes interesting because I am a third year student. In the three years I’ve been at Monash, I’ve not once borrowed a book until now. In fact, the only time I visit the library is to steal free wifi and there was that one time I forgot my notebook so I had to use the free computers to check Facebook.

But the reason I haven’t borrowed a book before is not because I’m a bad student. I mean, my grades are only average but I think that might have something to do with the number of hours I spend drinking instead of studying.

Continue reading "Who the hell is Dewey? Books on life support" »