"Maggie's Orchard" by Maggie Beer

I found this book yesterday at the second hand bookstall at the Adelaide Central Markets. It appears to be divided up by seasons, with chapters on particular seasonal ingredients, information and anecdotes by Maggie Beer, as well as recipes to showcase how to cook each ingredient. As Maggie Beer is South Australian, I thought this would be a great book to read to get ideas about which local produce to buy when, and interesting and tasty things to do with seasonal ingredients that I might not generally have considered cooking.

It's a non fiction book and full of recipes so I will be reading this slowly, in between reading novels. Once I finish reading the book I will post a review here, but it may be a while away :-)

Started reading: 23rd March 2014

"The Ocean at the End of the Lane" by Neil Gaiman

Reading this book is not part of the Aussie Author Challenge, Neil Gaiman is an author from the UK. This is the first book I have read by this author, although I'm aware he has written quite a few, and across different genres. I love the cover art of this book, even though I actually read it in kindle format which didn't have images. To me, this book is a mix of fantasy, fairytale, darkness. It's told from a child's perspective, and is childlike and simple in many ways, but it's not a book for young children. It is dark and magical and disturbing. Some aspects are very simple "bad vs good", others are more complex. It reminds me of the film "The Dark Crystal"...not in the storyline, but in the emotions I felt when I read it, or like a dark version of Enid Blyton's Far Away Tree. It's not a long book and I'm not going to go  into the details of it, I'm sure there's plenty of synopsis reviews available online. I can't say the book was totally enjoyable, but it did keep me turning the pages, and I didn't know what to expect, it felt like watching a dream sequence, I was aware on more than one occasion of experiencing that feeling you get when you wake up suddenly in the middle of a dream and struggle to figure out whether something that occurred was real or part of a dream/nightmare. 

Started reading on my kindle: 23rd March 2014
Finished: 1st April 2014
My score: 7/10

"I Came to Say Goodbye" by Caroline Overington

When I was doing the Aussie Author Challenge and Australian Literature Month last year I discovered Caroline Overington's books. The first one I read, "Sisters of Mercy" still haunts me at times. While "I Came to Say Goodbye" was also a page-turner, I think "Sisters of Mercy" is a more complex and chilling story.

I'm beginning to notice a bit of a theme running through Caroline Overington's books though...she is very good at depicting realistic characters on the fringe of society; often mentally ill or intellectually challenged, living pretty sad lives, possibly failed to be cared for adequately by society, who are caught up in horrific crimes (as victims or perpetrators or both). I think part of the chilling aspect often comes from the fact that the person who commits the crime often seems to be without remorse or even without the ability to see what they have done is wrong, and sometimes even think they are in the right. Lots of small pieces come together to tragic effect, sometimes making the reader consider the systems in place in society and whether they could have been effective at preventing the crime if different action was taken earlier. Caroline often tells her stories from an interesting angle or side character rather than from the character in the centre of the novel, in this case, most of the story is told from the perspective of the grandfather of a missing child, who is writing down a statement for a court hearing of events leading up to the crime.
"I Came to Say Goodbye" starts with a situation caught on CCTV footage which appears to involve a woman brazenly walking into a hospital and placing a young baby from the maternity ward in a green Woolies shopping bag and simply walking back out of the hospital and driving away with the baby.  Then the story jumps forward in time to the grandfather of the kidnapped child, who provides all the background story, revealing what could have happened to someone in order for them to do such a thing. Unlike "Sisters of Mercy" which was criticised by some reviewers for having an ambiguous ending, "I came to say goodbye" has a clear ending, even if it is pretty heart-breaking.

Started reading on my kindle: 21st March 2014
Finished: 22nd March 2014
My score: 7/10
Aussie Author Challenge Stats: Female author; Genre: crime

"Sorry" by Gail Jones

This book was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2008, and was recommended to me by a lady who works in Dymocks bookshop in Rundle Mall as a great 'Aussie author'.

I found the actual writing style and prose of this book to be quite captivating, it was simply beautifully written. I enjoyed reading the book just for the beauty of the language used. However as the book progressed I was left a bit unsatisfied with the actual story; it was quite a short book (approximately 200 pages), and so many of the themes and characters could have been explored in more detail. All the characters seem to be lonely misfits in one way or another, and the characters and the story are all quite tragic, and pretty far-fetched and unbelievable in many ways. Little snatches of Shakespeare appear throughout the book, and while at first I enjoyed this, it soon became overdone and a bit ridiculous in the remote Outback setting. The main character, a girl named Perdita, lives in the outback with her two strange, apparently mentally-ill parents.  The book spends a lot of time skirting around a traumatic event in Perdita's life that leaves her with a debilitating stutter, and although it is finally explained towards the end of the book, there is no justice, so I found the ending pretty empty and sad. My favourite characters were Perdita's two friends - a deaf and mute boy, Billy, and an Aboriginal girl, Mary, - they were by far the characters that I felt the most empathy for, and I would have liked to read more about them, and less about Perdita and her melodramatic mother and unlikable father.

Started reading: 9th March 2014
Finished: 21st March 2014
My score: 6.5/10
Aussie Author Challenge stats: Female author, New to me, Genre: Literary fiction.

"The Dirty Chef" by Matthew Evans

This book "The Dirty Chef" is an autobiographical account by Matthew Evans (From the "Gourmet Farmer" TV series on SBS) of his journey from being a food and restaurant critic in Sydney to setting up a small farm in Tasmania. He is really into eating locally produced, seasonal, organic, free-range, sustainable food, and also loves preparing, cooking and eating good quality and delicious food. His book is full of anecdotes of lovely, interesting and quirky characters, adventures and misadventures of essentially setting up a hobby farm from scratch with no real prior knowledge of what that might involve, and interspersed with delicious-sounding recipes. I read this book in kindle format, but I really wish I had bought it as a hard copy, as I'm sure I would keep referring back to it and looking up recipes etc which is a lot harder to do with an e-book I find. I found this book to be entertaining (humourous in parts), interesting and inspiring...over the last year I have personally been attempting to eat more local and seasonal food, shop at places like the Adelaide Central Markets for organic local delicious food, grow my own herbs in pots in the garden, and just enjoy cooking and eating clean healthy gluten-free food that tastes good and isn't pumped full of chemicals or shipped halfway around the globe and sold by big companies. It's not always possible on a tight budget, but I am enjoying trying to follow these ideas as much as I can. Additionally, I have been dreaming of a gourmet food holiday in Tasmania, taking a road trip down the east coast eating lots of local cheeses, berries, seafood and drinking wine... Given that I am already starting to get interested in this sort of lifestyle, I really loved this book and the insight it gave me into various aspects of organic, free range and local farming compared to what we are offered through big chain supermarkets. However if your a vegetarian you might not be as enthusiastic about many of the themes in the book.

I have only seen a handful of episodes of "The Gourmet Farmer" on SBS over the years, but now I have read this book I am quite keen to try to get a hold of the shows on DVD, and to look out for a copy of the author's other book "The Real Food Companion". 

Started reading on my kindle: 28th February 2014
Finished: 8th March 2014
My score: 9/10

Aussie Author Challenge criteria: Male author, New to me, Non-Fiction, Autobiography genre, foodie, first published in 2013.

"The Lieutenant" by Kate Grenville

I went into the Rundle Mall Dymocks bookshop last weekend, and asked a staff member there if they had a section for Australian fiction books. The helpful woman said that although they didn't have a section dedicated to Australian fiction, she could suggest a few authors that she thought were great Aussie authors. She recommended a few that I have already read and loved (such as Hannah Kent's "Burial Rites" and ML Stedman's "Light between oceans"), but she also suggested a few that were new to me (perfect for the Aussie Author Challenge), including Kate Grenville's "The Lieutenant" and Gail Jones' "Sorry".

I decided to try her suggestion of "The Lieutenant" by Kate Grenville first. The book is an historical novel (one of my favourite genres) set mainly in Sydney during the late 1700s. The main character, Lieutenant Daniel Rooke, is an astronomer with the First Fleet. He establishes a make-shift observatory just outside the convict settlement in order to look out for and record Halley's comet. The main focus of the book becomes the relationship that forms between David and a small group of native Aboriginals he befriends - in particular a child called Tagaran. While initially he is most interested in learning their language, a strong bond develops between them which has quite powerful effects on the path his life takes, contrasting starkly with the attitudes of the military/convict settlement of the time.

I really enjoyed this book. It was really beautifully written, the words seem to capture the essence of the wild landscape, the slice of history and the nature of humans. Kate Grenville has written several other books (both fiction and non-fiction) and I definitely will be reading more of her books in the future! Thank you to the helpful woman at the Dymocks bookstore for recommending this author to me! :-)

Started reading: 22nd February 2014.
Finished: 28th February 2014
My score: 8.5/10

Aussie Author Challange 2014: The author is Female, New to me, Genre: Historical novel.

"The Brain That Changes Itself" by Norman Doidge

Last night when I felt like reading I discovered my Kindle needed recharging *horror* so I decided to pick up a 'real' book and read that while it was charging, and now I can't put it down! What is more unusual is that this is a non fiction book, and although I do read non fiction books I usually read them slowly, chapter by chapter alongside devouring various novels.


"The brain that changes itself"  is by Norman Doidge, who is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and researcher in the USA. This book was originally recommended to me by my friend Georgie. This is a Non-Fiction book about the human brain and neuroplasticity. I heard an interesting scientific presentation by Simon Koblar on a similar topic recently and  his discussion of the potential for using patients stem cells from their teeth to help stroke patients brains recover. This seminar combined with my friend's recommendation inspired me to read this book. 

Started reading: 4th Feb 2014
Finished reading: 22nd February 2014
My score: 9.5/10

Really awesome book - very fascinating. I really recommend it, even for non-scientists, most of it is explained clearly, and it is just mind-blowing what the human brain can do. If your interested in stroke therapy, preventing dementia or old-age related memory loss, managing addiction, understanding autism - anything to do with how the brain functions and what it can be taught to do, how even adult brains have some level of 'plasticity' enabling them to recover lost function or develop new functions with the correct exercises - this is a must-read. There were 2 chapters that I thought were a bit too 'Freudian' for me, dealing more with psychoanalysis of sexual relationships and loss of a mother in infancy, which is why I gave the book 9.5 instead of 10/10, but apart from those two chapters the rest of the book is an amazing, insightful and well explained journey into neuroplasticity.