Hello St Marks

Yet another apocalypse novel, which makes me impatient and a poor judge of Alex Adams' 'White Horse'. It's good, probably quite good, but I've had my fill of the end of the world and found the constant switching between now (genetic plague causing death or mutation; cue monsters) and then (whiny Zoe, hard to love) required more effort than I was prepared to give. 

"The best novel about movie making ever written" says Sunday Express on the cover, and I'm not arguing. 'Shadows on a Wall' by Ray Connolly is terrific. It's a fat page-turner with a rowdy cast of characters set in the surrealist la la land of film studios, screenwriters, producers and actors, as a little play about Napoleon morphs into the most expensive movie ever made. Connolly is a screenwriter, so I imagine that's why this novel rings true and—first published in 1994—holds up wonderfully well. The perfect companion piece to this novel is journalist Julie Salamon's 'The Devil's Candy'—her brilliant and biting account of the making of 'Bonfire of the Vanities', released in 1992.

'The Devil Wears Prada' was a fun book and a great movie. 'Where the Grass is Green' is mildly fun, period. Beautiful rich white Americans and their problems is fertile ground for satire but Lauren Weisberger pulls her punches and settles for a predictable beach read. The saving grace is the sparkling relationship between insomniac sisters Peyton (glamorous news anchor) and Skye (suburban uber-mom), but even so, I now declare an end to my recent run of bubble-headed chick lit. 

In 'This Has Been Absolutely Lovely' all the familiar ingredients are in the mix: someone's pregnant, someone's addicted, someone's sad, someone's dead. The mum was a pop star. The daughter's a hippy. The neighbour's a spunk. The son is selfish. His wife is German. Set in a Sydney summer, it's light but tart and absolutely lovely. "Oh, it's a thing all right. I've seen enough things in my time to know a thing when it's right in front of me." That's Jane, my favourite. 

I can't remember if I've read 'The Shining' (published in 1977) but 'Doctor Sleep' (the sequel, published in 2013) was a bloody good read. It's so interesting watching a wildly successful author, fabulously skilled, play out a multi-generational career. 'Doctor Sleep' has some of the Stephen King tropes—a motley crew of friends standing against monstrous evil, and alcoholism. King is really interested in friendship and recovery, and 'Doctor Sleep' is hinged on the addiction and redemptive recovery of its hero. Plus child-killing, steam sucking, near-immortal bad guys and actual ghosties familiar to readers of 'The Shining' (or its movie), otherwise there's no story. Super fun. 

Cait Copper's cat has dreadlocks so we know which of the two blokes she'll end up with in 'The Last Bookshop', and yet the predictable plot doesn't reduce the joy of this lovely book one iota. Cait runs a bookstore in Perth, Western Australia—so I'm hooked right there. Emma Young is a bookseller turned author and it shows; this book is filled with bookshop lore and the best kind of conversations you have with book-loving friends—recommendations, distractions and "I've read that, too" moments.  "People always seemed to exist in blissful ignorance of their unbelievable good fortune at being able to purchase an original work of art, that had taken anywhere from a year to ten years to write, guaranteed to provide many hours of entertainment and education and insight, for as little as ten or twenty dollars... She would never understand it." Well said, Cait (and Emma). 

Robbie loses his memory every 179 days. As the calendar counts down to the next 'forgetting', he tries to protect his fragile identity before it's wiped clean once again. If you've seen 'Memento' or read S. J. Watson's 'Before I Go to Sleep', you know the territory is rich in twisty hypotheticals and should be fascinating. As Robbie wonders, "What was I doing except trying to shackle my future self, to bend him to my will?" It's an initially engaging conundrum (if a bit daft), but Breakey's take on the memory loss genre (sub-genre? niche?) is oddly dour for a supposed "compulsively readable love story", and a bit of a slog.