All Australians know Eric Bana as a Hollywood darling come from the streets of Tullamarine in Victoria. What most probably don’t know is that Bana has a hobby. As often as he can Eric pilots his Porsche 911 GT3 in the Australian GT3 Championship. Eric also still owns the first car he ever purchased, a Ford XB Falcon coupe, nicknamed ‘The Beast’.

Fairytales and wings, caressing and lying: neither one of us believed we could marry forever and always love. When summer comes, maybe with my old friends, we will laugh and cry along the blue grass of a beautiful sunny day and understand the value of love. Now, with new people and the last rain of winter, we sit at a coffee shop in Spain, viewing the water line knowing that with your soul I am never alone. One good day when you are alone, you will understand the water and that it’s not the same. The time is now, to be the Australian traveller.

The only thing that usually gets delivered to us at our local is a hefty tab, so it was nice for a change, to receive a couple of new books for review.

Europe in the 30s was the crucible that formed so much of what we now consider the modern world, and Steve Brook has crafted an amusing and ribald journey through that tumultuous time.

Brook had an Uncle Sam, about whom he knows almost nothing except that he died in a mental hospital in England, and this affords him the opportunity to create a life for this mysterious, unspoken-of relative, at the same time putting an interesting spin on events of the era.

ABC1: 9:30 Wednesday

ABC2: 9:30 Thursday

Has anyone seen this little gem yet? It’s very, very unusual American TV. It’s clever without being precious, the lead actress, Toni Colette, is not pretty in the American actress sense of the word, she doesn't appear to be starving to death and, to cap it all off, she can act!!

In early 19th century, poverty-stricken London, young tearaway William Thornhill works on the Thames as a lighterman, ferrying cargo and the landed gentry back and forth across the river.

Well, Tonstant Weader is off wandering around France at the moment and, with this being the Children’s Issue, a review of Alexandre Dumas’s classic novel The Count of Monte Cristo seems appropriate.

While it’s not specifically a children’s book, everyone I know who has read it did so the first time in their early teens. I say the first time, because it is one of those books you come back to over and over again.

Tonstant Weader feels like a dying gazelle being picked over by hyenas right now. It’s been, dear readers, a difficult month. However, given some time, this will all be history and I may see it with a little more perspective.

Reading some light history of bygone eras often helps me put a better perspective on my own life. For most people at most times, life was brutish, nasty and short. Most of the teeming billions who lived before us had lives of hardship, sickness and injustice. We are not meant to be happy, readers, we are just meant to be alive.

I’m right there with the vampire genre.

Bram Stoker, Keifer Sutherland, Boris Karloff, David Bowie, Keanu and Winona, Buffy and Angel. I even read all the Anne Rice books, that’s how willing I was to put suspenders on my disbelief and buy into the whole terrifying-bloodsucker-with-awesome-hair-who-lives-forever-and-always-bites-the-girl-in-the-end thing.

Recently, I read a lovely book about the pleasures of alcohol: Everyday Drinking by Kingsley Amis. It is a distillation (gettit!) of articles originally written for a monthly publication. It’s a beautifully written book, silky and deceptively simple.

Kingers covers the history of alcohol, recipes, the boozing man’s diet, tips for the stingy and a highly recommended guide to The Hangover. He is definitely your man for the cocktail.

L’Epicerie is in an unlikely precinct at 265 Glen Eira Road in Elsternwick. You will find it tucked discreetly between a garage and an odd looking bakery, in a small commercial strip away from the purposeful bustle of Ripponlea. Reassurance, however, follows the moment you glimpse through the windows and walk in the door of this small and charming establishment. Nestled in leafy Elsternwick but believably from provincial France, L’Epicerie is everything you would expect of a French wine bar come bistro.

...but I prefer reading.

Scared to Death by h is a large, slightly shrill and opinionated, but still very readable book.

Ever wondered where your taxes go? Why we’re taxed more and the services become progressively worse? Well, in part, it’s because governments are spending huge amounts of money on dubious causes.

WOW! They really nailed it for the final episodes of ‘Last Comic Standing’! How could you go wrong on an American ‘talent’ game show by being so politically correct as to have the handicapped dude make it through, along with the obvious choices of the stoner and the black dude?

Tonstant Weader hasn’t read much this month. Well, not anything worth reviewing anyway.

Work is boring and anxious - perhaps this is the definition of work. After a day fending off the irrational IT demands of a failing company, I don’t feel like reading that well-reviewed novel, translated from French, about the Parisian Jewry in the early years of the Second World War.

Second Chance

by Jane Green

(Penguin/Michael Joseph, $24.95)

0 stars

The Book of Other People

edited by Zadie Smith

(Hamish Hamilton/penguin, $45.00)

2**stars

 American Thrillers

 Historical Detection

Some legal fiction

An Amateur Art Critics Review.

The lovely and I were in Bendigo recently, and, as I am an unstoppably trendy and immensely cultured individual, we went down to the gallery to have a bit of a gander at the Archibald prize exhibition.

It was with a mixture of derision and trepidation that I clicked on a link recently emailed to me.

It dealt with a press release for an album that has been so long in the making that I’d given up hope nearly a decade ago and spent the time since praying to any deity that would still listen to my blasphemous arse cease and desist and not let this abortion of an album ever see the light of even the darkest of days.

There’s music you have on in the background at a dinner party, or you half listen to at a bar, during the lulls in conversation. There’s music you dance to, and there’s music you can’t fully appreciate unless you’re sweating in a mosh pit.

Bono, Neil and the way the cookie crumbled - a book review.

Warning (if you care): Plot Spoilers Follow

How I came to see Sex And The City is irrelevant, other than to say it was caused by an injured sister-in-law, pre-paid tickets, and me being a wonderful husband who would crawl across broken glass for my lovelywife. By the end of the evening I was wishing there’d just been some broken glass, or perhaps a cheese-grater with which I could masturbate.

Eat, Pray, Love

by Elizabeth Gilbert

(Bloomsbury, $24.95)

4****stars