Mondays: Mailbox/What Are You Reading/Musings

What’s the last thing you stayed up half the night reading because it was so good you couldn’t put it down?

I can stay up late for reading. And for any novel that I am reading at that time. The last novel was Dead Head by Rosemary Harris. I finished it late night. And today I plan to finish Blood Over Badge by Wayne Farquhar and if I don't finish by evening, I am gonna stay up late for it!

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Mailbox Monday has moved over to Rose City Reader for the month of January 2011. 

I received the following:

The Paperbark Shoe by Goldie Goldbloom

It’s a tale set deep within the Australian outback in 1944, following the simple, yet terribly complex, lives of the Toads. Gin Toad, an albino, was plucked from a lunatic asylum when Toad saw her at the piano and proposed. Her eagerness to escape the involuntary confines takes her to Wyalkatchem and a life centred around livestock and children. All is peaceful until two Italian POWs are placed with them as farm hands. These intruders soon force the Toads to look within themselves--Gin being overpowered by what she has and will lose. The quirkiness and diversity of the leading characters in this book will appeal to anyone who’s a little left-ofcentre. It’s an easily accessible novel that will satisfy readers interested in Australian and Italian history and the great ‘outback’ tale.

Clamor by Elyse Fenton Poetry


Written in part while Fenton’s husband was deployed as a medic in Baghdad, Clamor loosely follows the narrative arc of weeks breathlessly suspended between imminences: word or silence, return or tragedy, heartbreak or gratitude. Yet these are poems that refuse to be sentimental or didactic. Instead, they marry with lyric ferocity the personal and the political in an examination of language and love in 21st century wartime.

Therapy by Sebastian Fitzek
A twelve year old girl, Josy, has an inexplicable illness and vanishes without a trace from the doctor’s office during treatment. Her father, Viktor Larenz, a well-known psychiatrist, withdraws years later to an isolated North Sea island in order to deal with the tragedy. Here he receives a dangerous visit from a beautiful stranger. Anna Spiegel is a novelist and she suffers from an unusual form of schizophrenia: all the characters she creates for her books become real. And in her last novel she has written about a young girl with an unknown illness who vanishes one day without a trace. … 
Is the inconceivable possible? Do Anna’s delusions describe Josy’s last days? Viktor Larenz begins the therapy in an attempt to uncover the horrible truth.
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Currently reading
1) Blood Over Badge by Wayne Farquhar
2)Too Rich & Too Thin by Barbara DeShong

Posted review of
Dead Head by Rosemary Harris