I've only read a few books by Stephen King, the "King of Horror, " because horror is not my favourite genre. However, his 1984 fantasy collaboration with Peter Straub, The Talisman, is a treasured hardback birthday present in my bookcase. 

What I liked about On Writing is how King presented his memoir as stand-alone vignettes — each chapter of his life could be a short story.

As someone who writes, I valued King's advice and examples on writing style and techniques, and I'll never look at an adverb the same again! ("The adverb is not your friend.")

Perhaps what I enjoyed the most were King's observations on the importance of books and reading, as exemplified in this quote from Even Further to Furthermore, Part IV:

I take a book with me almost everywhere. Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours lost in other worlds. Why, I wonder, doesn't everybody carry a book around?

But with due respect to Stephen King, I read his memoir on my battery-powered Kindle!

I bought Anne Frank Remembered by Miep Gies after watching the 2023 biopic series about her efforts to hide and save the Frank family from the Nazis, A Small Light.

I've read Anne Frank's diary, seen screen and theatre adaptations, and visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. I've also written a blog post reflecting on my experience with The Anne Frank Diary, revealing how I cannot think about Anne and her family without a mixture of anger and deep sadness.

I wept watching A Small Light and again when reading Anne Frank Remembered. The story and its ending are well known. But I recommend this book for those who want further insight into the bravery of Miep, her husband Jan, and fellow "good Dutch people", who Miep acknowledges in her opening sentences:

I am not a hero. I stand at the end of the long, long line of good Dutch people who did what I did or more—much more—during those dark and terrible times years ago, but always like yesterday in the hearts of those of us who bear witness. Never a day goes by that I do not think of what happened then.

I knew little about The Three-Body Problem, and nothing about its author, Cixin Liu, other than there was an adaptation of the book on Netflix (3 Body Problem), and its opening scenes depicting the violence of the Cultural Revolution sparked controversy and criticism in China. 

For those who haven't seen the Netflix adaptation, The Three-Body Problem is the first novel in Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. The series portrays a fictional past, present and future in which Earth encounters an alien civilisation from Trisolaris, a planet in the Alpha Centauri triple-star system. Spoiler alert: Earth and Trisloarians establish contact in the first novel.

I'm interested in history and science, and while listening to the audiobook, I wondered how much of The Three-Body Problem was fact and how much was science fiction. The Author's and Translator's Postscripts partly resolved this, but I wished they'd been at the start of the audiobook rather than the end.

However, the Postscripts inspired me to re-listen to The Three-Body Problem, which I rarely do. And that proved helpful because I discovered I'd missed key plot points on my first listening.

I loved reading and learning from Ray Bradbury's writing tips but enjoyed his memoir as much. I read a Kindle version of the book and highlighted many passages from it, including these two:

• My first decision about a career was at eleven, to be a magician and travel the world with my illusions.
• My second decision was at twelve when I got a toy typewriter for Christmas.

Could I suggest that Bradbury achieved both with his writing?

After watching the TV series on Disney Plus, I ventured down a rabbit hole with James Clavell's saga of feudal Japan, Shōgun. 

I read the brick-sized paperback of his classic novel (Coronet Books, 1976) in my early twenties. Rather than attempt to reread the well-weathered 1244-page tome, I listened to the two-part unabridged 54-hour audiobook version, narrated by Ralph Lister.

Towards the end of Part 2, I wanted to know how much of Shōgun was fact and how much was fiction, so I pulled my secondhand copy of A Concise History of East Asia by C. P. Fitzgerald (Pelican Books, 1974) from the bookcase and read about the Tokugawa Shogunate period in Japan (1603-1868). 

I was fascinated to learn that Clavell based his book on real people and events. However, he changed their names (Toranaga for Tokugawa, for example) and was flexible with timelines. There was even an English pilot and shipwright, William Adams, whose Dutch vessel was driven ashore on the coast of Japan in 1601 (Clavell's Anjin san, John Blackthorne). 

When I finished the audiobooks (after two months of enjoyable listening), I discovered Shōgun — The Official Podcast, a ten-episode companion to the TV series. In Episode 2, the producers and writers revealed they'd changed all the names from Clavell's novel except for the three lead characters, Toranaga, Blackthorne and Mariko, for "historical accuracy".

Revisiting Shōgun took me down a rabbit hole, but it feels fitting for a novel that's stayed with me for over forty years and taught me one of my few Japanese words, "Konnichiwa!"

In The Forever War, the British, thirty-year career journalist Nick Bryant describes how he fell in love with America as a teenager. He went on to earn a doctorate in American politics from Oxford and served in several postings as the BBC's American correspondent, including during the first Trump presidency. 

Bryant's insight into American history and politics had me gasping, groaning and swearing aloud many times. I'm not a fan of "modern America", but I hadn't realised the parts I dislike the most about it, the racism, fascist tendencies and false exceptionalism stretch back to its foundation.

If you are an Americanphile, this book should challenge you. However, if, like me, you do not share an America-first view of the world, then it may scare you. As Bryant writes in The Forever War, America's unending internal conflict can only spill over and harm the rest of the world!

My son gave me "Don't Make Me Pull Over!" for Xmas 2023 after our epic mid-December dad-and-son road trip from Sydney to Perth!

Ratay is American, so his Informal History of the Family Road Trip is written from an American perspective. However, I enjoyed learning about the history of road and interstate highway building in the United States and how it supported the growth of fast food takeaways, amusement parks, and motels and hotels along the routes.

I also recognised his tales of long drives in his family's station wagon in the 1970s, even if my Western Australian family never attempted anything as adventurous as driving our rusty HD Holden wagon from the outskirts of snowy, icy Chicago to sunny Florida for our winter holidays!

It was fifty years before I achieved that scale of road trip with my son in his trusty Toyota HiAce van, and thankfully, we didn't have to contend with snow and ice!

As I confided in 2018, my now twenty-something son loved books when he was younger, became a reluctant reader in his teens, and then stopped reading for pleasure, declaring it boring compared to YouTube. (Thankfully, he now reads nonfiction books about his passion, outdoor adventuring!)

However, throughout his reluctant and non-reading stages, my son has always bought me a perfect book for my birthday, Father's Day and Xmas. But I don't know how he knew I loved David Byrne's music, particularly during the Talking Heads and Brian Eno collaboration periods.

Byrne's book is part memoir and an exhaustive exploration of how music works —  on us and as an industry. The Observer newspaper lauds it as "wildly ambitious", and I agree. It's also wholly satisfying!

In The Forever War, Nick Bryant mentioned Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, published in 1985, and how American conservatives had howled down her depiction of Gilead as a bleak and unreal speculative depiction of America, or at least parts of it. And yet ...!

I hadn't read The Handmaid's Tale or seen the TV series, but inspired by Bryant's account, I listened to an audiobook version superbly narrated by Elizabeth Moss.

It's a mark of how much I enjoyed the book (though "enjoy" is not exactly the right word to describe how I felt about the premise and principal characters of the patriarchal, "religious" society) that on finishing it, I started listening to Atwood's 2019 sequel, The Testaments (narrated by other voice actors and Atwood). 

I highly recommend both, though I also recommend wearing a mouth splint to prevent grinding your teeth to the gums while reading or listening to the books, especially given recent Supreme Court rulings in America!

I'm glad that unlike those who read The Handmaid's Tale in the 1980s, I didn't have to wait thirty-five years for its sequel. However, in the end credits, Atwood speaks about the writing of The Testaments, and I think I can share part of this without giving any spoilers:

The Testaments was written partly in the minds of the readers of its predecessor, The Handmaid's Tale, who kept asking, "What happened after the end of that novel?" Thirty-five years is a long time to think about possible answers, and the answers have changed as society itself has changed and as possibilities have become actualities. The citizens of many countries, including the United States, are under more stresses now than they were three decades ago.

I'd seen posts in the ABC Book Club on Facebook about The Rules of Backyard Cricket but hadn't got around to reading it. And I'm glad I finally listened to Jock Serong's 2016 best seller as an audiobook, brilliantly narrated by Rupert Degas.  

It's the story of two cricket-obsessed and fiercely competitive brothers, Wally and Darren. Encouraged by their single mum, the brothers grow up to play for Australia but can't leave their past behind. 

Anyone who's read or listened to Serong's novel evoking the crack of bat-on-ball in backyards, grade cricket grounds, or at major sporting arenas like the MCG and my local SCG will know that this is a gross simplification of The Rules of Backyard Cricket. But I don't want to give any spoilers, apart from what you might read in the cover blurb, except to say it's more than a crime or sports novel.

The bonus of the audiobook version is Degas's voicing of the younger brother, Darren, narrating the first-person tale of his and Wally's backyard cricket days to the heights of playing for Australia and how it affects their lives and those around them on and off the field.