I adore Emma because it reminds me of what we should expect from men when it comes to courtship; the gallantry of Mr Weston, the generosity of Frank Churchill, the chivalry and honesty of Mr Knightley and the perseverance of Mr Martin.
We should only accept hand-written and delivered invitations (not text messages), and must always be collected by carriage. All hail Jane Austen: the original chick-lit author.
With tongue-in-chic and cheeky chutzpuh, Becky Sharp was the Madonna of her day, flaunting tradition and challenging hypocritical sexual mores. And what a survivor. After the nuclear holocaust, all that will be left are a couple of cockroaches and Becky. Okay, she had a few minor faults – snobbery and sexual kleptomania (Becky climbed the social ladder – lad by lad); husband-hunting ( she wasn’t interested in Mr Right, but Lord, Sir, Marquis, at the very least!) …..But we’re talking 1810. With no vote, no union, no fixed wage, no welfare, no contraception ……..what options were available to women? Apart from factory work, being a governess or doing domestic service, it was prostitution or marriage. (Often a tautology in those days.)
The razor-sharp satire ofVanity Fairis as topical and relevant today as ever. A tour de farce.
The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul by Deborah Rodriguez, Bantam Australia, $32.95
Sunny is a Southern gal who’s made herself a home, and a buzzing small business, in the middle of a war zone. Her coffee shop in Kabul, Afghanistan, is a place where men check their weapons at the door, and women support each other in one of the most misogynistic places on earth.
Sunny’s 60-year old landlady Halajan is hiding a life-long love affair. Young Yazmina is taken in, after being stolen from her village, and is desperately disguising a burgeoning pregnancy. Wealthy American Candace has escaped her loveless marriage and run away with her Afghan lover. And journalist Isabel is asking all the right questions of all the wrong people.
Author, Deborah Rodriguez lived and worked in Kabul, and wrote the bestselling memoir The Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind The Veil. This is her first work of fiction, and it hums along with humour and understanding.
Hans Bengler is a 19th century loser, running away from his purposeless, hopeless life in Sweden.
Deep in the Kalahari Desert he finds a young boy who’s survived the massacre of his entire family.
With the kindest of intentions he adopts the child, re-names him Daniel, and takes him home to Sweden.
But his ignorance, alcoholism, and lack of imagination, condemn an intelligent child to life as a freak show exhibit, and worse. Daniel dreams of his family, his home, and of his rich culture, and he shows determination and courage in trying to save himself.
Sweden’s Henning Mankell has conquered the world with his wildly popular crime writing. With this latest novel he addresses deeper historical and cultural issues.
He often writes about Africa and says he has one foot in the desert and one in the snow. His understanding of both cultures is striking. Daniel is deep, strange, disturbing, and tragically beautiful.
Three mysteries unfold together in this latest Armand Gamache novel, keeping even the sharpest of readers in suspense from page one. He’s one of the truest and bravest Chief Inspectors, but what went so badly wrong that it drove an anguished Gamache to seek solace with an old friend in snowy Quebec City?
Will he find comfort in investigating the murder of a fanatical archaeologist, who died while trying to solve a centuries-old mystery? And has he jailed an innocent man over the murder of a hermit in the picturesque hamlet of Three Pines?
Louise Penny delivers the complete package needed for a brilliant suspense novel: believable and complex plotting, characters with depth, atmosphere and location that takes you to a different world.
If you haven’t read Penny’s Armand Gamache novels start now, Bury Your Dead stands alone, but I’d recommend reading The Brutal Telling first.
Carrie Kent creates sensational television by manipulating grieving victims of crime, and luring explosive confessions from the perpetrators.
She’s rich, famous, and demands perfection in every part of her life, except for her own performance as a mother.
It’s not until her own son, Max, is stabbed to death that she realises she knows nothing about his life, prompting her to hunt down his friends and enemies, and expose the truth about his murder.
The only witness is his girlfriend, Dayna, she’s not talking, but is she a match for his determined mother?
The strength of Someone Else’s Son, is the way the author plays with the chronology. Max’s last days, are intertwined with Carrie’s investigation into his death, and with her own past.
It builds to a tense climax on the set of Carrie’s show. Can she be saved from the heartbreaking truth about Max’s death? And is there a future for Carrie or Dayna without him?
Do you find teenagers to be vain, self-obsessed and materialistic with an infuriating sense of entitlement? Many people attribute these feelings to being old, grumpy and disillusioned, but a US study has another theory: we feel that way because it’s true.
Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University presented a paper in Melbourne yesterday that claimed today’s youth has been swept away in an “epidemic of narcissism”.
Twenge conducted psychological testing of 16,000 university students aged 18 and 19 across the US and found 30 percent were narcissists, compared to just 15 percent in 1982.
The professor presented her findings at the International Society for the Study of Personality Disorders Congress yesterday.
She said celebrity culture, the rise of social networking and modern parenting styles that see parents constantly telling children they are “special” has contributed to the rise in narcissistic tendencies.
Narcissism is a personality trait that is noted by an inflated sense of self, an inability to empathise, vanity, materialism and selfishness.
Your say: Do you think teenagers today are more narcissistic than they were in the past? What do you think is to blame for the increase in selfishness and vanity? How do you think we can stop more young people becoming self-obsessed?
Left: Kelly before her rhinoplasty, Right: After the surgery
A few months back I got a nose job. The week before the operation I told my Editor I was having it done and she took one look at me said, “great story – write it’. Gak! I wasn’t overly keen to share the fact that I was undergoing cosmetic surgery with more than two million readers but I’m a journalist at heart and, just like my editor, I know a good story when I see one. So I put my misgivings aside and did what she said – wrote about the experience in detail.
The story ran in our March issue over four excruciatingly long pages, one of which featured nothing more than a terrifyingly close up picture of my face. On the day the magazine hit the stands I felt queasy. How would people react? What would they say? I strode into the office that day, shoulders squared, ready to cop the flak. But something truly unexpected happened – nobody said a word.
I would have assumed that nobody had seen the story, or they had but weren’t the slightest bit interested (which I’m totally comfortable with – promise), but I knew that wasn’t the case. How? Because when I raised the topic absolutely everybody within earshot heaved massive sighs of relief then raced over to drill me for details. People weren’t just curious – they were utterly enthralled. So much so they wanted to know every gruesome detail and then some. I get that. I really do. Lord knows I’m fascinated by the topic of cosmetic surgery too so I understand. What baffles me is why so many people feel they can’t just inquire about your cosmetic surgery – even when you’ve just shouted it to the world via the country’s biggest selling magazine.
Let me paint you a picture. Just this week I had my hair blow-dried by a positively gorgeous hairdresser who had clearly read the article. He badly wanted to talk about it, but just couldn’t quite bring himself to raise the topic. He came close several times but lost courage. Eventually he told me he’d seen some recent pictures of me with straightened hair… then he paused. And paused some more.
“Oh,” I said, grinning.
“Do you mean the pictures of me in the story about my nose?”
“Yes, yes, yes,” he said, just about falling over with relief.
“How was it? When did you have it done? Was it painful?”
He asked me question after question and as he did everyone in the room gathered closer. The salon assistant (male), the PR executive (female), the PR assistant (female) had questions of their own and soon we were all chatting and laughing about ‘good’ cosmetic surgery Vs ‘bad’ cosmetic surgery, what we’d be willing to do and what we’d never consider and so on. This was true sharing and the vibe in the room was warm yet positively thrumming with intensity. For a good 10 minutes we were shrieking and giggling and talking over one another. Every one of us had passionate views and we were happily sharing them. So what was it that stopped everyone from simply stating they’d seen my article and wanted to talk about it?
Is it shame? Overt shyness? Do we feel that raising the topic of improving yourself constitutes bad manners? As I said earlier, it baffles me. We live in a society that is rabidly obsessed with looks and accordingly cosmetic surgery is a hot topic and while we’re entirely comfortable discussing the topic in general, the underlying rule seems to be that if you actually have cosmetic surgery then you must keep that to yourself. Do anything else and you’re somehow embarrassing yourself and along the way, everyone else. Well, in the quest for a good story I’m afraid I’ve bucked that trend. Because bottom line – I’m okay with my having had cosmetic surgery – so why aren’t you?
Read more of this story in the March issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
Your say: Would you confront a friend or colleague if they had plastic surgery? Why do you think people don’t like to ask, even when it is obvious someone has had “work done”?
The Queen’s Dolls’ House by Lucinda Lambton, Royal Collection Publications, $35
When you’re a royal princess after the ultimate dolls’ house who do you turn to? Who else but the country’s top architect, the guy whose day job is to design stately homes. And so it was that Princess Marie Louise, Queen Victoria’s granddaughter commissioned Sir Edwin Lutyens to make a dolls’ house as her gift for Queen Mary. Mary loved objets d’art, the more diminutive the better, so this was sure to be a hit.
The resulting piece finished in 1924 – now owned by Queen Elizabeth II – is dazzling and the subject of this delightful hardback filled with photographs of the house’s rooms and garden.
Marvel at the beautiful classically-painted ceilings, the library of miniature tomes, the gardens with 1920 Atco lawnmower and nesting blackbird and the night nursery with royal cradle.
Life by Keith Richards, Hachette Australia, $49.99
Who knew the old rogue was so popular? I’d always thought of The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards as a minority taste – yet here’s his autobiography storming the bestseller lists. No small feat given it’s a $50 hardback, huge, and that’s one raunchy life he’s describing.
Even allowing for my own partiality (I interviewed him for 60 Minutes and needed anti-swoon pills) this is one of the great muso books: funny, honest and surprising. On sex: “I never put the make on a girl in my life. I just don’t know how to do it.” Drugs: “Mick [Jagger] chose flattery, I chose junk.”
As for rock ‘n’ roll, well, music is the life, and what Keith co-wrote and played was the soundtrack for many of ours, so it’s fascinating to hear where the stories and songs came from. The miracle is that he remembers. That he’s alive at all. Turns out he never did go to Switzerland to get his blood drained and replaced, but pretty much every other tall tale of excess you’ve heard – and then some – turns out to be true.
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