There was a lot to like about this flawed but compelling follow-up to The Time Traveler’s Wife, Niffenegger’s phenomenally successful debut which must feel like both a blessing and a curse to its author. In a way, Her Fearful Symmetry feels like a time-travelling real first novel, promising a genuine talent who hasn’t quite figured things out yet. I enjoyed the setting and the atmosphere, the characters and their relationships, the story however is where I thought the book stumbled quite a bit.
“Yet who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?”
This Poirot novel was written as Christie’s response to her brother-in-law James, who had complained that her murders were getting too refined and anaemic. You’d hope that James’ craving for a ‘good violent murder’ was satisfied with this locked room murder mystery: its chief victim, a cantankerous wealthy patriarch, is found in a pool of his own blood, his throat cut, after making a noise described by witnesses as “a soul in hell” or “a stuck pig”.
I broke my tradition of never going out on a Monday night during a working week to watch this 1986 David Cronenberg horror film at the Astor Theatre.
This was a perfect book to spend time with while staying in bed with a nasty head cold: entertaining, fast-paced, insanely readable, deftly mixing froth and humour with heavier subjects like bullying, domestic abuse and single parenthood. My view of the novel is inevitably coloured by the excellent HBO mini-series, which I watched first, so I can’t help but compare. “The book is better” is a very routine remark about onscreen adaptations, but in this case I thought that both versions had their particular strengths and weaknesses.
I read this remarkable landmark sci-fi novel all over again immediately after I finished it, which is exceedingly rare for me. I simply wasn’t satisfied with my first reading, which happened in short bursts separated by long periods of time; this is a kind of richly detailed and imaginative book that’s best appreciated by immersing yourself into it for a while.
Science fiction is a perfect medium for exploring “what if” scenarios, and the thought experiment in The Left Hand of Darkness goes like this: what would a human society look like if people had no fixed gender, and male/female dualism didn’t exist?
I ended up going to this concert by a fluke, randomly deciding to scroll through the Melbourne Recital Centre program on a whim one evening two weeks ago. Hooray for random flukes.
I had expected this sports documentary about the backstage world of Russian rhythmic gymnastics to be a hard watch, and sure enough it was.
Intoxicating genre-hopping pop by a Colombian-American singer; live album from an experimental folk band that delves deep into the Nordic past; vintage sound and a genuinely great voice.
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