JM Donellan

Category: review of everything in the world

  • 100+ books a year 2017: the good

    This year I – along with the rest of the known universe – have been feeling increasingly disenfranchised with the state of modern journalism. The 24-hour-news cycle, Russian fake news farms, real news being called fake news, fake news passing as real news, fake juice being called real juice and then placed into $400 dispensers, it’s…

  • 100 books a year part 2: the bad and the weird

      THE BAD THE WATER KNIFE First off, I have to say the concept here was admittedly great. A criminal underclass emerging to illegally distribute water is sadly a very believable near future and this aspect was well executed. There’s a scene where the pricing gauge on a commercial water pump breaks and the characters…

  • 100 books a year

    For the last five years I’ve read a minimum of 100 books each lap around the sun. Here’s a quick rundown of my most rated, most hated, most celebrated and most complicated from the first half of 2015. Have you ever wished that a renowned author would tackle Arthurian legend in the form of an…

  • 100 Books A Year 2014 part II.

      Here Come the Dogs by Omar Musa There’s a reason why this book is appearing in a myriad ‘best of’ lists this year – well more than one actually – in short; it’s really fucking good. It’s a bleak, unflinching and sometimes hallucinatory piece of work that flips between poetry and pose with disconcerting ease. Omar’s…

  • Killing Adonis by J.M. Donellan reviewed by J.M. Donellan

    First of all, I was highly disappointed that this novel was not written by Tim Winton. As every reviewer knows, the only good novels in Australia are those that are either written by Tim Winton or try very extremely hard to sound like his work with the addition of a mild idiosyncratic twist. Perhaps a…

  • 100 books a year

    For the last three years I’ve set myself a goal of reading 100 books a year. I’m often asked how I ‘manage’ to do this and the answer is simply that people make time for the things they value. Some people lift weights 7-9 hours a week, some people watch entire seasons of a TV…

  • Love Letter To Brisbane pt 1: Books & Bars

    Listen, here’s the thing; I love this city, and feel like a lot of people overlook the good things in their own cities and spend too much time complaining about the traffic and such. So I’m going to put together a couple of posts celebrating some of my favourite things about Brisbane, starting with this…

  • R.I.P. Rave

    As a teenage music nerd, my bedroom walls were perennially populated by posters featuring various scowling dudes with guitars looking down on me lying on my bed losing myself in my headphones whilst devouring Rave magazine. Growing up I always thought that being a music writer would be the most inconceivably, unbelievably, incontrovertibly cool job imaginable. Years later, I moved…

  • People often ask me: “What is the worst album you’ve ever reviewed?” Here is the answer.

      Amazingly, appallingly, astoundingly terrible The cover of Tenacious D’s Rize Of The Fenix (and yes, that is how it’s spelt) features a picture of a penis stylized into the form of a phoenix with flaming wings. If you’re thinking ‘well, that sure as heck doesn’t bode well…’ then you can tell where I’m going…

  • Cut Chemist @ BNE Hi Fi reviewed for Rave magazine

    After the debacle surrounding D12’s non-appearances at the disastrous Heatwave festival it would seem that American hip hop acts are starting to garner a reputation as being unreliable. Continuing this trend, tonight’s opening time has been shifted back an hour and there seems to be a great deal of confusion as to what time the…