Cread video

Watch new and intriguing bookish videos including author interviews, book readings, literary lunches and more.

Cread video #5 Re-gifting the gift of reading with Mailbooks For Good. Also, see our post about it here.

Cread video #4 The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts author Dr Gary Chapman appears on Oprah's Lifeclass and oprah discovers her love language. The book has sold more than 900,000 copies and is headed for a million after Dr Chapman's Oprah appearance. In this video, Dr.Chapman explains how knowing which love language your partner speaks can transform your relationship. Couples across the country demonstrate how this concept brought their marriages back from the brink of divorce. Plus, The View co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck—one of Dr. Chapman's biggest fans—explains how the book changed her marriage.



Cread video #3 - Putting some Hope back into the community

Tim Costello is a national living treasure, the Head of World Vision Australia and something of a moral conscience for Australia. Concerned about the debilitating negativity that has crept into Australian public life, Tim has sought to balance this by collecting inspiring and thought-provoking stories of hope from all around the world. From encounters with the Dalai Lama and Barack Obama, through to stirring moments shared with the hungry and the suffering, Tim’s stories are a celebration of love, faith and life. Listen to Tim talk about new book Hope.



Cread video #2 - The best beard in writing

Thomas Keneally's The Daughter of Mars was recently reviewed by Cread and now you can hear the author speak about writing this outstanding novel. His answer as to how he decides whether to treat his meticulously researched material - as fiction or non-fiction - is instructive to any budding historical writer. And of course his beard continues to be outstanding in its own right...


One click shopping: get your copy of The Daughters of Mars.

 Cread video #1 - The next JK Rowlings?

Samantha Shannon wrote her first novel as a 20-year-old Oxford student before landing a seven figure book dealing with Harry Potter publishers, Bloomsbury. Her distopian novel called, The Bone Season is set in 2059 and features a "rampant clairvoyant" who is captured by the repressive government and held captive in the secret-city of Oxford. Watch Shannon describe her books and also discuss those that inspire her.

<

Popular posts from this blog

Book review: The life to come by Michelle de Krester

Image
One of the characters I most enjoyed in Michelle de Krester's The life to come is Sydney's inner west. I arrived in Newtown on a yellowy January morning in the early 1980s and lived above King St near the start of Erskinville Rd for six months before a succession of terrace houses across Newtown, Emmore and Macdonaldtown. Coming from the country to study 'Communications' I could easily have been minor character fodder for the author, momentarily shuffling by in ill-fitting jeans alongside the ubiquitous Pippa and George (that is, they are the only characters appearing in all five sections of what is an artfully decentralised narrative). I might not have done too well descriptively from de Krester's pen. She finds a way to poke holes in all of her characters, perhaps with the exception of expat Christabel who is the most downtrodden of characters, but not by the author, who otherwise sustains a mildly scornful, disapproving or comedic tone. For example, Geo
Read more + comment »

Book review: The Nowhere Child by Christian White

Image
Little Sammy Went is gone, and while The Nowhere Child tells us where fairly quickly - who, how, why and at what cost takes the rest of this fast-paced book to uncover. I use the cliche 'fast-paced' on purpose because like most genre books, except for the exceptional few, the 'fast-pace' does rely on cliches to a fair degree. Which is not to say The Nowhere Child is a poor novel. Rather it is a clever book, with more than enough periods of real tension and surprise to keep the reader turning pages (or flicking them as the case may be). Clever because it embeds just enough themes that are deemed praiseworthy and admirable in the subjective group-think world that is publishing. (That is not a criticism of the book or publishing, just a reality in these days of thought-fear.) Of course there is the obligatory references to reading and authors - we must worship at the the book altar of course. Being set in both Australia and the US may explain why at times Matth
Read more + comment »

Author Richard Flanagan's speech to the Garma Festival 2018: full transcript

Image
When my father died at the age of 98 he had largely divested himself of possessions. Among what little remained was an old desk in which he had collected various writings precious to him over the years: poems, sayings, quotes, a few pieces he had written, some correspondence.  Photo: From Garma Festival 2017 Among them my elder sister found a letter written by one of my father’s cousins many years before. In it she told my father that his mother, my grandmother, was of Aboriginal descent, and that in her family she had been brought up to never mention this fact outside of the home. My father loved discussing interesting letters with his family. He never discussed this letter. Yet he kept it. The story of covering up Indigenous pasts was a common one in Tasmania, where such behaviour was for some a form of survival. There is no documentation to prove my father’s cousin’s story is true, but that doesn’t make it untrue. It leaves the story as an unanswerable question mark over my
Read more + comment »