The stars aligned nicely when it was time for another title from 1001 Books and news came my way of a Margaret Atwood Reading Month at Consumed by Ink.  I have been meaning to read Alias Grace for ages…

By the time Alias Grace was published to great acclaim, Atwood had already written eight novels.  She has written so many now that Wikipedia groups them by decade, and Alias Grace sits with The Robber Bride in the 1990s as examples of novels in which female characters are deployed

to question good and evil and morality through their portrayal of female villains. As Atwood noted about The Robber Bride, “I’m not making a case for evil behavior, but unless you have some women characters portrayed as evil characters, you’re not playing with a full range.”  (Wikipedia, viewed 31/10/18)

Alias Grace also gets a mention at Wikipedia in the discussion about…

Lloyd Jones is one of my favourite Kiwi authors, and when recently the NZ Book Council tweeted for suggestions for The Best Ten, he was one of mine.  Which reminded me that I hadn’t read Paint Your Wife, one of his books that I bought after discovering Mr Pip (2006) which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker.  I’ve also read Hand Me Down World (2010) and The Book of Fame (2000), and you can find my thoughts about them here.)

Set in the 1970s with flashbacks to the postwar years, it’s the story of a declining town and its idiosyncratic community, which gives the novel a universality in these times when country towns are declining all over the world.  New Egypt used to have a paint factory but now it doesn’t, and so the task ahead is to revitalise the town with ‘projects’ to…

No Third Person is a very interesting little book: it’s an essay about how Hong Kong perceives itself in the 20-odd years since reunification with China. I heard about it in a review at the Asian Review of Books a site which is

… the only dedicated pan-Asian book review publication. Widely quoted, referenced,  republished by leading publications in Asian and beyond and with an archive of more than two thousand book reviews, the ARB also features long-format essays by leading Asian writers and thinkers, excerpts from newly-published books and reviews of arts and culture.

It’s free to subscribe and it often has enticing reviews of fiction that we might otherwise not hear about, and although the reviews of non-fiction tend to be ‘scholarly’, occasionally there will be something that piques my interest— as No Third Person did.

The book is published by a new initiative associated with The Asian…

There’s one book universe I’d love to live in, and that is the Harry Potter Universe (as a witch of course). Not only would I be able to do so many everyday things faster, but I’d also be able to really appreciate Halloween. Whilst the films only briefly touch on Halloween, each book mentions Halloween in a lot more detail, so, here are my five reasons to want to experience a Hogwarts Halloween.

1. Massive floating pumpkins! Need I say more?

2. You can meet vampires, werewolves, merepeople and any manner of magical creatures.

3. I always imagine that the Great Hall would be decorated really well and could be made to look really spooky.

4. The ghosts would really be in their element and it would be interesting to meet the Headless Hunt!

5. I feel like the Halloween common room parties would be really fun with a magical element…