News.
Castlemaine Chapter Founded
TGBC is pleased to announce that we will be opening a chapter in the Victorian town of Castlemaine in March. Castlemaine is a town with a long history, great bookshops and many fine drinking establishments. It was meant to be and now it is. Happening at The Bridge Hotel, details…
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TGBC Book Swap 2018
Yet again piles of our goons have participated in our end of year book swap. This year we had 140 goons get involved and send guys they have never met a book, or books, or books and booze, or books and booze and a knife. I personally got a book about the lives of two fighters…
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Goon Profile – Alex Dobson
Name: Alex Dobson **Chapter: Sydney Who are you: Wine wanker, pasta nerd and passionate lover of, and advocate for, all forms of creative expression from fashion to fine art. How long have you been with TGBC: TGBC: March 2015? How did you end up coming to TGBC: Shay messaged me…
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Ask the Dust - John Fante (1939)
Ask the Dust opens with a brief introduction by Charles Bukowski who describes John Fante’s 1939 novel as “my first discovery of the magic.” If you, like me, discovered the magic from Bukowski’s 1971 novel Post Office then you are in for a real down-and-out, gritty, poor decision…
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Windsor and Yarraville Chapters Kick Off
2019 is off to a flying start with 2 Melbourne Chapters opeing tonight. The first is one directly between the existing Footscray and Williamstown Chapters in the notoriously civilised but likes to party suburb of Yarraville, which continues our ongoing expansion into the western…
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TGBC Movember Team – 2018
This last month a bunch of our goons grew moustaches (or ran k’s) to raise money for vital men’s health research and there was truly some shockingly bad ones. Seriously, on its best day this clubs not exactly an oil painting but the mo’s really turned that shit up to eleven. But…
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Neuromancer - William Gibson (1984)
Rastas in space – who wouldn’t love a book that features dreadlocked Rastafarians flying space tugs. I must admit this came as a surprise in a novel about a dystopian future and the efforts of an AI to break free of the shackles imposed by the hard core Turing Police on the…
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The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien (1990) Take 2
Rightly lauded as being among the most important literary narratives concerned with representing – and reflecting upon – the experience and legacy of America’s Vietnam War, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990) is a self-described “work of fiction” that is, nevertheless, a…
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Men Without Women - Haruki Murakami (2014)
Men without women is a collection of short stories the common thread being the title of the book. However it’s almost without saying that each story revolves around women or more to the point a woman and their relationship (or lack thereof) to the central character. It’s hard to…
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The Plains - Gerald Murnane (1982)
‘A mirage of landscape, memory, love, and literature itself’- Murray Bail, author of Eucalyptus As I kayaked up the Wye river, blissfully enjoying the smooth paddling stylings of my partner, the silence was broken by a shout from a fast approaching canoe: “Hey, aren’t you the guy…
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The Spy Who Came in from the Cold - John le Carré (1963)
Bleak, pointless, dull, brutal, frustrating. These words summarise the world of espionage and counter-intelligence depicted in John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. It’s difficult to leave the book feeling hopeful or bright. This tale of moves and counter moves is…
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Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe (1959)
A book that’s reputation certainly precedes it. I think my preconceptions made me anticipate that this book was more “important” than it was “great”. But I was totally wrong. Sure, it is historically significant; they call it the first third-world classic, and for that alone it…
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