What are you reading Monday is hosted by Shelia over at Book Journey. Head over and check out what others are reading!
I've missed a week or two! Sorry - started a new job and all that!
What I finished since I last posted (click the links for my reviews)
She's Come Undone - Wally Lamb
Don't Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs, She Thinks I'm a Piano Player in a Whorehouse - Paul Carter
Mr Rosenblum's List - Natasha Solomons
What I am reading now
How To Make Gravy - Paul Kelly
From Goodreads:
This extraordinary book has its genesis in a series of concerts first staged in 2004. Over four nights Paul Kelly performed, in alphabetical order, one hundred of his songs from the previous three decades. In between songs he told stories about them, and from those little tales grew How to Make Gravy, a memoir like no other. Each of its hundred chapters, also in alphabetical order by song title, consists of lyrics followed by a story, the nature of the latter taking its cue from the former. Some pieces are confessional, some tell Kelly's personal and family history, some take you on a road tour with the band, some form an idiosyncratic history of popular music, some are like small essays, some stand as a kind of how-to of the songwriter's art – from the point of inspiration to writing, honing, collaborating, performing, recording and reworking.I love Paul Kelly. He is a true icon of Australian rock music. He is currently touring How to Make Gravy - four nights, different song list each night. It would be magic! Trying to work out if I could manage to go to one of the four when he comes to Brisbane - if it's not already sold out and I can work out which night I'd most like to go to! For all of you Paul Kelly virgins out there, here is the title song, How To Make Gravy.
Paul Kelly is a born storyteller. Give him two verses with a chorus or 550 pages, but he won't waste a word. How to Make Gravy is a long volume that's as tight as a three-piece band. There isn't a topic this man can't turn his pen to – contemporary music and the people who play it, football, cricket, literature, opera, social issues, love, loss, poetry, the land and the history of Australia … there are even quizzes. The writing is insightful, funny, honest, compassionate, intelligent, playful, erudite, warm, thought-provoking. Paul Kelly is a star with zero pretensions, an everyman who is also a renaissance man. He thinks and loves and travels and reads widely, and his musical memoir is destined to become a classic – it doesn't have a bum note on it.
Expect a few other songs when I post the review!
What's next?
Still working on the library books. Everything listed here was from the library so I am making progress!
So what are you reading? Leave me a link!
