Opinion: In Defence of BookTok

Posted 5:45pm Saturday 17th August 2024 by Ellie Bennett

As an English major, I am entirely qualified to be the type of person who shits on other people for what they choose to read; to be the type of person who sees BookTok as encouraging ‘the wrong kind of reading’. But I don’t. My decision to major in English stemmed from a love of Read more...

Students Really Suck At Returning Library Books On Time

Posted 5:10pm Sunday 2nd May 2021 by Alex Leckie-Zaharic

I have a confession to make. I’m a criminal. My $9 library fine (for a second-year psychology textbook, if you must know) is now over a year overdue and contributes to precisely 0.39% of the $2321.20 in library fines incurred by Uni and Polytech students. Campus Watch, you know where to find Read more...

The Road By Cormac McCarthy

Posted 1:09pm Sunday 8th October 2017 by Jessica Thompson Carr

This book will take you a day or two days tops to plough through. At times it’s thrilling, but the format is simple and McCarthy has dropped all quotation marks and “he said” / “she said” to make the writing have a smooth feel. A father and his son (unnamed) push Read more...

Half a Yellow Sun

Posted 11:42am Saturday 30th September 2017 by Jessica Thompson Carr

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is truly a master of words. She combines history with fiction beautifully, and brings us close to the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970), which I knew nothing about beforehand. The book follows the lives of five characters: Ugwu, a boy from a poor village; Olanna, an Read more...

A Keeper of Sheep by William Carpenter

Posted 12:54pm Sunday 24th September 2017 by Zoe Taptiklis

The cover of this novel almost tries to warn you off with its bleeding grey pinks. Any millennial trying to express themselves through the last available port, fashion, should chain a copy of A Keeper of Sheep around their neck. Carpenter’s novel is a must read for anyone who wholeheartedly Read more...

The Virgin Suicides

Posted 1:26pm Sunday 17th September 2017 by Jessica Thompson

The Virgin Suicides, written in 1993, is, I suppose, a haunting depiction of the ‘enigma’ that is girl-hood. Set in small town Michigan in the 1970s, the novel is narrated by an anonymous group of boys who obsess over the Lisbon sisters. There are five sisters: 13-year-old Cecilia, Read more...

The Secret History

Posted 12:29pm Sunday 10th September 2017 by Zoe Taptiklis

The Secret History is difficult to place into a temporal setting. Initially, based on the characters’ diction and the elaborate descriptive passages, I thought it was set in the ‘50s. The excessive use of home phones, the ones wired to the wall, made me think it was the ‘70s. Read more...

The Case of the Missing Body

Posted 2:14pm Sunday 3rd September 2017 by Zoe Taptiklis

It has been a treat reading this book. It took me under an hour to read, but it’s taken days to digest. Imagine not knowing what your body is. I’ve always said that I have parsnip legs; they’re long and effing pale, wide at the top, tapering out into teeny little toes Read more...

The Lost Daughter

Posted 12:50pm Sunday 20th August 2017 by Jessica Thompson

"Books, once they are written, have no need of their authors."   Nobody knows who Elena Ferrante really is. An Italian writer, she (could be a he, but everyone assumes…) is mainly famous for her coming of age Neapolitan novels. Ferrante has been named one of the 100 Read more...

Nutshell by Ian McEwan

Posted 12:05pm Sunday 13th August 2017 by Zoe Taptiklis

Ian McEwan claimed fame from the world of non-literary oriented folks when Kiera Knightly had sex in a library, a scene that won the novel, and movie, Atonement, a permanent place in the collective memory of popular culture. I confess, I’ve tried to read Atonement several times, and I never Read more...