Reading Matters

Late last night London time the longlist for Australia's top literary prize, the 2014 Miles Franklin Literary Award, was announced. It's quite a strong list, although I'm shocked that it doesn't include Christos Tsiolkas' Barracuda and Alex Miller's Coal Creek, but I do like the fact it features some new authors that I've not heard of before. Still, I think when push comes to shove, it's going to be a big battle between two old favourites: Tim Winton and Richard Flanagan. In the meantime, I've taken a leaf out of Trevor's book (who did something similar for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize) and listed all the longlisted titles here with a cover image, brief synopis and a round-up of reviews by bloggers. The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt by Tracy Farr (Available in the UK as a Kindle edition) "This is the story of Lena Gaunt: musician, octogenarian, junkie. ANZ Litlovers' review The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan(Not yet available outside of Australia. "It is 1865.

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Public Bookshelf - Romance novels The 10 Most Disturbing Books Of All Time In my younger days if I heard a book or movie was disturbing or hard to handle I generally took that as a challenge. Most books generally turned out to not be too bad, but occasionally I’d come across something that would leave me with a sick feeling in my stomach for weeks. I’ve largely outgrown this “genre” of late, but here are my picks for the ten most disturbing books of all time. Any one of these books is capable of leaving you feeling a little depressed at the least, and permanently scarred at the worst. I’d say enjoy, but that doesn’t really seem appropriate … 10. Blindness is a book with a truly horrifying scenario at it’s heart: what if everyone in the world were to lose their sight to disease in a short period of time? 9. Anti drug crusaders should stop airing goofy commercials that nobody takes seriously and start pushing to have Requiem For A Dream made required reading for every high schooler in the country. 8. Naked Lunc is another ode to drug addiction. 7. 6. Bleak. 5.

There Are Only Six Basic Book Plots, According to Computers But now, with the help of CERN-level mathematics and computers, researchers have evidence that the appropriately named Booker was off by just one, probably. “I did some distance similarity metric calculations and machine clustering to see if I could identify archetypal plot shapes,” Matthew Jockers told me over the phone. “The short answer is, yes I did, and there's six or sometimes seven.” That little ambiguity, Jockers explained, is because the data collecting and sorting technique “involves picking at random from 50,000.” “There's six about 90 percent of the time,” Jockers said. Matthew Jockers is a University of Nebraska English professor working at the forefront of “digital humanities,” where databases and computing tools are used analyze more books than any one person could read. There are sort of two ways of looking at what “plot” is, according to the work of the Russian structuralist Vladamir Propp Jockers released the tools via the website GitHub, so you can map plots at home.