Summer of reading – part 2

Our staff love to read, so we had to make this a 3-parter. There were just too many books!

If any of these books have tickled your fancy, go out and grab a copy from your local bookstore, from the library, from a friend or download a copy onto a mobile device. Also check out your local op shop – it’s amazing what books you can find there.

Finally, if you love the sound of these books, but you aren’t much of a reader, check out subscription audio book services such as Audible, or the audio book collection at your library.

Goldfinch – Donna Tart
I loved it. Couldn’t put in down. Fabulous characters and you can’t wait to see what happens to them. It’s amazing story told through a young teenage boys eyes as he comes to terms with a life changing event centred around a classic art piece in the back drop of the underworld art trade – never cried so much as I did with this book.

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions – Randall Munroe
If you love the absurd, with some maths and physics thrown in, you’ll enjoy this book a lot. The author answers strange, wacky and wonderful hypothetical questions he’s sent by his readers. So if you’ve ever wondered ‘if the moon would change colour if every person on Earth aimed a laser pointer at it?’ or ‘what would it be like if you travelled in time to the same place 1,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, or forward in time 1,000,000 years?’ The author gives detailed explanations and reasoning. Lots of interesting, nerdy fun.

Tex – Tex Perkins
Aussie bad boy of rock Tex Perkins – front man of Beasts of Bourbon and The Cruel Sea – writes about the good, the bad and most definitely ugly times of Aussie rock’n’roll. Getting into this book took me back to the days of going to pubs and letting lose to Tex’s gravelly voice as he belted out everything from punk to country.

Fishing for Stars (The Persimmon Tree #2) – Bryce Courtenay
Such an interesting fictional telling of a story about life, love, politics and business across Vanuatu and Australia. Like all Courtenay books it’s at times heavy, at times light-hearted. Thoroughly recommend.

The Savage Detectives – Roberto Bolagno
The way that Bolagno writes, particularly this book, makes me feel alive and in love with life.

Wind up Bird Chronicle and IQ84 – Haruki Murakami
Both of these books are totally out there in terms of story line!

One is about a guy whose wife goes missing and then shuts himself up in a well where he can strangely melt into the walls and end up in other places. The other is about an assassin who takes a wrong turn and finds herself in a parallel universe where there are two moons and strange doppelgangers. All in all, I couldn’t put either of those down.

The Farseer Trilogy – Robin Hobb
Hobb is an amazing fantasy writer. I love the story, the characters and especially her writing style, really rich and engaging. You can escape into these books for hours. These books have heart and she shares life lessons she’s learnt through the characters and the events that happen to them and how they deal with them. This makes them memorable and some of the best fantasy I’ve ever read.