Hans Heysen – Art Gallery of South Australia

I visited Heysen’s studio near Adelaide recently and I picked up this primer at the gift shop. It’s a Ronseal of a book, providing a nice overview of the artists’s career and an incidental increase in my knowledge of Australian art in general.

Transition – Iain M. Banks

Banks always writes easily digestible prose, but the plotting here is so Byzantine that I lost the thread a fair few times. Pitched as a hybrid of his two styles (with M or without) it is actually an unambiguous sci-fi yarn, incorporating some terribly clunky war-on-terror/GFC satire and a plethora of oddball characters.