Blog Archive

1 February 2024

New in the Great Writers Series - Stendhal and Hazlitt

It’s the beginning of another month and today we publish the latest in Michael Duffy’s series, ‘Michael Duffy Interviews The Great Writers’. Michael Duffy is a former journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald as well as an Australian novelist. The premise of this series is that he has an opportunity to interview famous writers and profile them. His profiles are interesting and entertaining, but they also draw on the exact words the writers said or wrote about themselves and their work in their own lifetime.

This month Michael publishes his first double profile: Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his author name, Stendhal, and William Hazlitt, an essayist, critic and philosopher. Hazlitt is little read now and you may not have heard of Stendhal’s two most famous novels, The Read and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma, but each was influential in their time and contributed to the intellectual atmosphere of the Romantic period. Weirdly enough, there’s even a sex scandal tucked away in there!

The Great Writers project pages can be accessed from page menus under the ‘Projects’ tab, as well as through the large display panel with buttons on the main page of this website. But since you’re here, here is a link to the Project Page, and here is a link to the Stendhal / Hazlitt profile. Enjoy!

- bikerbuddy

12 February 2024

Homer returning to the Reading Project

I don’t imagine that anyone follows this infrequent blog. It’s mostly about things happening with this website or with books in general. That ‘perfect reader’ who follows every utterance assiduously on this page (it’s sentences like that that assure me no such creature could exist in this world) would know that plans for this site got a bit derailed last year with various things happening in life. And this month, so far, has also been fairly busy, culminating in two trips out and back from Dubbo, starting from Springwood where we live in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, in one weekend. We were helping our son move to Dubbo where he is just beginning his career in Dubbo hospital this morning.

So, this morning feels like it could be a good day to start getting back to things (as soon as I do the washing!) One of the projects I regretted neglecting last year was our reading of Homer’s The Iliad. The plan was to do a series of pages on each book. I had completed eight of the twenty-four books of The Iliad last year when I realised the project would have to be put on hold. Despite only completing a third of the book, I’ve noticed that this project remains quite popular on our site. Once it’s finished I hope to give the same treatment to The Odyssey and Virgil’s The Aeneid. If all goes well, Book 9 of The Iliad will be completed by late tomorrow.

Our project page for The Iliad can be accessed from the Projects tab in the menu above or by clicking here.

There are also other ongoing projects on this site which I hope to give more time to. But in May I also plan to do a small project around an Australian novel. More on that in the coming days when I have time!

- bikerbuddy

16 February 2024

A morning of book buying

Every now and then I have a reason to venture into Sydney for a book or two and while in there I go very silly. By ‘silly’, I mean buy books, and by ‘very’ I mean too many.

This morning I merely went silly and thought I’d display the books I bought here:

Ava Barry’s Windhall and Chris McGillion’s East Timor Books, The Crocodile’s Kill and The Sand Digger’s Skull, are by two local Blue Mountains authors I have only just heard about. They’re crime novels, a genre I don’t read a lot of, but I thought I’d give them a go. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man is an apocalyptic vision of the future which has inspired other science fiction novels and films. I’ve read Frankenstein several times, but never this one. I thought I’d give it a go, too. Finally, there is Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma. I finished Stendhal’s The Red and the Black on my train journey this morning. I decided to read it after Michael Duffy posted his profile/interview of Stendhal and William Hazlitt on this site at the beginning of this month. I quite enjoyed it and it sent me looking to read Stendhal’s work. Now I have his other major novel to read whenever I get around to it!

- bikerbuddy

19 February 2024

The Great Writers #7 coming next month!

Over the last six months we’ve been publishing a series of faux interviews in which Michael Duffy, an author who lives in our area of the world, profiles some of the most famous writers. While the interviews may be a fiction, the ideas and beliefs expressed by the authors in these interviews are taken entirely from the authors’ own words, said or written by them.

Next month we’ll be publishing the seventh in The Great Writers series, an interview with Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary. Michael Duffy says of Flaubert and his novel, “Madame Bovary blew open the European novel, so we owe him a plug, despite his tedious character.”

Tedious or not, Duffy’s interview makes interesting reading. Read it next month!

- bikerbuddy

27 February 2024

Reviewing a local author

Last Saturday night I had dinner with Michael Duffy, who contributes The Great Writers project to this website, as well as two other local Blue Mountains authors, Ava Barry and Chris McGillion. Chris McGillion is the author of the East Timor Crime series and Ava wrote Windhall. I wrote in my post of the 16 February that I went into Sydney to buy these books. I wanted to sample their work before I met them.

Ava and Chris weren’t aware I’d bought their books, so they both turned up to dinner and offered me the books I’d bought earlier in the week. I thought it was very kind of them. I promised Chris I would find someone else to share his work with. I also received Ava’s second novel, Double Exposure, which I hope to get to in the not too distant future.

I’d read Windhall by the time we met for dinner last Saturday, and I was a good way into Chris’s book. I had genuinely enjoyed Windhall, and found myself enjoying Chris’s book, too. I’ve had a busy few days, so I’m yet to get back to reading it.

This morning I’m publishing a new review for Ava’s book. Someone said I would have to write nice things about it because I had met the author. But that’s not true. I’ve written a positive review because Windhall is a great mystery novel set around the history of old Hollywood of the 1940s.

Click here to read my review of Windhall.

- bikerbuddy