Book Review: Aftershocks by Michelle Tom
Memoirs are too often judged only by the power of the story. Tom’s story is powerful and moving all right, but also as beautifully written as any literary fiction. Aftershocks is Tom’s first book but she began her career as a print journalist, in New Zealand, and it shows – in a good way. Arresting imagery,…
Book Review: Hunger by Roxane Gay
Hunger is so raw, poignant and compelling that it hurts to read it. At the most superficial level Hunger is a memoir about Roxane Gay’s body – specifically her very tall (6’3), very large (200 kgs +) body. Gay details her daily indignities and humiliations as a woman of size moving through a world designed…
Book Review: ‘Death by Dim Sim’ by Sarah Vincent
Every day at about 3pm Sarah Vincent would get up from her desk at work and haul her 122kg body across the car park to the food van across the way. Every day she would order three dim sims (or four or five) and eat them. And every day as she lumbered back to her…
I’ll read anything – if it’s good enough. H is for Hawk is better than good.
A market researcher once asked me “What do you want to read about?” I can’t remember what I said but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t “I’d like to read about how an academic Englishwoman lived out her grief through raising and training a goshawk.” And that’s the thing, isn’t it? We read in order to…