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Showing posts from May, 2018

Missing the bus

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I missed my bus home from work last night. One of those situations where you're waiting at the lights, you see your bus, and just before the pedestrian walk light goes green to cross, the bus pulls away. Because it was long past rush hour, it was half an hour for another bus, so what do you do? You cheer yourself up by taking a bit of a detour, knowing there's a good book in your bag to read (an excellent book on writing by Christopher Vogler and David McKenna called "Memo From the Story Department.") The detour is McDonalds for an ice-cream. While I was waiting I spotted Richard. He's an eccentric character, one of the streeties you see when you work in the city. I've chatted to him a lot before, about books and sports and anything really. He used to wear a jacket supporting the same rugby league team one of my kids supported. A team that at the time happened to be the bottom-of-the-table team, and had been for many years. The book could wait. So I t

One of the 3 or 4 most famous novels

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I've been away a bit of late, so got to read a bit more than usual. In particular, I was quite taken with several books, all found on my mum's bookshelf. Go, Mum! One was a thriller called The Dry by Australian author, Jane Harper. I just found it sitting on a shelf in the spare bedroom, I hadn't heard of it before, hadn't heard of the author, just picked up the book, read the first page and I was hooked. Had me gripped from the beginning and even more amazing, I didn't skip to the end to see who the perp was. Amazing. So the story goes... a man has killed his wife and son, then himself. His old school friend, Aaron, returns for the funeral, planning to leave asap. But at the pleading of the dead man's mother, Aaron (a cop) decides to give it a few days to investigate, then he'll leave. Except, it begins to get curious as the questions mount as to whether it really was a murder-suicide. The setting was a small town suffering a crippling drought. Very at