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The Library Is Open

A blog about books and writing, through rainbow-tinted glasses. Every book gets a gay rating.

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Author: James Whitmore

I am a writer based in Melbourne. I’m interested in nature and the environment, and queer books.

Review: The Dawn Of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow

A big history of people that demolishes the myth of progress.

Nonfiction, History, Anthropology, Archaeology, Politics

Review: The Story Of A New Name by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)

This second instalment of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet deepens and complicates the themes of the first.

Classics, Fiction, Italy, Novel

Review: Companion Piece by Ali Smith

A fittingly grim and anxious search for meaning in our anxious and grim times.

Ali Smith, Contemporary, COVID-19, Fiction, Novel, UK

Review: Take Care by Eunice Andrada

Poetry that investigates ‘taking’ in all its forms.

Colonialism, Environment, Patriarchy, Philippines, Poetry, Sexual assault

Review: A History Of Dreams by Jane Rawson

A witty and delightful novel about fighting evil.

Australian, Contemporary, Fascism, Female writers, Feminism, Fiction, Historical, Novel, Spec-fic, Witches

Review: Leave The World Behind by Rumaan Alam

A gleefully silly horror-comedy of the end of the world.

Apocalypse, Contemporary, Fiction, New York, US

Review: Bodies Of Light by Jennifer Down

A novel of surviving extraordinary trials.

Australian, Contemporary, Fiction, Melbourne, Novel, Stella Prize

Review: Tilt by Kate Lilley

Poems that are all about the hidden things.

Australian, lesbian, LGBTIQ, Poetry, queer, Sydney

Review: The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens

A contained and seething study of madness and familial obligation.

1960s, Fiction, Jewish writers, London, Man Booker prize, Novel, UK

Review: Son Of Sin by Omar Sakr

A heady mix of mundane and heavenly, the sins of the flesh and the yearning of the spirit.

Arabic writing, Australian, Bisexual, Contemporary, Fiction, Islam, Lebanon, LGBTIQ, Middle East, Novel, queer, Sydney, Turkey

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This huge history of the last 30,000 years of human existence sets out to demolish the myth of progress, that humans started out in simple tribes and ended up in complex Western civilisation.
The second of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels picks up immediately where the first left off, back at the wedding of the brilliant Lila Cerullo to grocer and neighbourhood businessman Stefano Carracci. What follows is a more sprawling but also more contained story, following Lila and narrator Lenu through Lila’s marriage and Lenu’s studies in their early twenties.
Ali Smith is done. At the beginning of this *cough* companion piece to her recent Seasonal Quartet, narrator and artist Sand is bummed out and in isolation, even bored with puns and wordplay (Ali Smith without puns and wordplay!?). It’s 2021 in the UK and lockdown is over but people are still dying by the hundreds.
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