Any Human Heart by William Boyd

This is a chronicle of the 20th century sewn together by a human narrative. This human (who is, of course, only fictionally human), is Logan Gonzago Mountstuart, born Uruguay 1906, died France 1991.

Over the course of his life he:
*met Picasso, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and other luminaries of the century,
*pissed off the Duke and Duchess of Windsor,
*wrote a couple of books,
*got involved with some Spanish anarchists and acquired a couple of works by Miro,
*was a prisoner of war in Switzerland,
*slept with his mate's girl (and that's not the worst of it),
*married 3 different women,
*narrowly escaped a rape charge,
*met his dead wife's husband,
*lectured at a university in Nigeria during the Biafran War,
*ate dog food,
*got involved in a plot with the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and
*had a threesome with a few pros sometime in his 70s.
Impressive, no?

Any Human Heart is Logan's journal. He goes quite for years, muses endlessly on himself at times, and is remarkably uncritical of himself in the main. Just like any journal you're not supposed to be reading, I read this one with ferocious speed. It was as though, at any moment, Logan might come in and find me trying to shove the book back under his mattress, pretending I'd never seen it.

It's not necessarily great writing, and at least once every 50 pages or so I wanted to punch Logan in the face, but I couldn't put this down. I am certain there are hundreds of historians gnashing their teeth flailing their arms around in despair at this book, so little faith do I have in its accuracy, but none the less, I have learnt to spell Biafran, and that's not shit. What this book achieves is the personalisation of history: It's the same phenomenon as the difference between what you feel if you hear, '83 people died in Blah today when a huge Thing happened', compared with 'My aunt lost her leg today'. It's all about how much you can take it at once. And seeing the 20th century as a 1 man story makes it digestible.

Actually, compiling this list, I realise Boyd has just, pretty much, used violence and conflict as flippers in the pinball game of Logan's life. I guess he could've used inventions, or medical advancements, but then Logan would've been a scientist, and everyone knows writers are way more interesting, darling.

So. Yes. Read. Enjoy.

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

As a long-time fan of Indian fiction, I was surprised that I had never heard of this author before, but it seems everyone else was keeping him a secret from me. It even has the slightly dubious distinction of ending up on Oprah’s Book Club. Mistry seems to be the working-man’s Rushdie – telling these big tales of Indian life without all the bells and whistles (and more full stops).

But that’s what I love about Indian fiction; smelling the streets from the descriptions, seeing the crazy colours, knowing the overbearing families that make up this insane sounding country that I’m desperate to get to one day soon. And while the story is undoubtedly brilliant (and the ending one of the most heartbreaking I’ve read), the writing is just a little bit plain. While other Indian books I’ve read have been in vivid technicolour, this was black and white. But maybe I just missed something, because it was Sam’s favourite read of the year and it’s made many others I know cry. It just didn’t have the same impact on me for some reason. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t sections of this book that made me want to scream ‘This is so unjust and unfair and frustrating!!!’ I have a feeling that’s what being in India would be like on a daily basis.

It’s not as brutal as Adiga’s The White Tiger, or as epic as Naipul’s A Bend in the River. It has this pervading resignation to it, that the characters rally against with everything they’ve got, but in the end, Mother India and her Darkness are too strong for the humble tailors who are the protagonists of this tale.

Truth by Peter Temple

I do love a good page turning crime thriller from time to time (hell, I even went through a James Patterson stage in my late teens *shudder*) and before this book blog began, read The Broken Shore, the prequel to Truth, which incidentally won the 2010 Miles Franklin Award.

The fact is, they are practically the SAME book. Slow burning, hard boiled cop married to the job at the expense of his other relationships, crooked pollies and filthy pedos the fodder for what is a fairly grim and ultimately unsatisfying read. You read and you read and you read (then read some more) and it’s all built up until the last 60 or so pages when THE BIG REVEAL happens – but by that stage, I didn’t really care.

Also, this book is so masculine that I’m surprised that a penis didn’t jump out from the page and whack me in the face at some point.

“Vickery gave him the long look. “Yeah, well, the drugs fuck with your brain, my brother-in-law, another prick, he came up with all kinds of shit, incest, you name it. It’s the Super K.’

‘When was it made?’

‘What?’

‘The tape?’

‘Dunno. What’s it matter?’

‘Could matter a lot.’

Vickery turned his back to the bar, glass in hand, looked around the dungeon. ‘Anyway, the problem here’s the wife, bloody Grace’s found God fucking never-never-land shit and she’s sent the DPP the tape.”

Practically smell the beer can’t ya?

Whiter Shades of Pale: Stuff White People Like by Christian Lander

This is the book of a blog. Both are completely hilarious. Neither, however, are about 'white' people. They're mostly about insufferably smug upper-middle class dicks. Like me. And you. I concede that calling your blog 'Stuff Insufferably Smug Upper-middle Class Dicks Like' might not have gotten you the same amount of attention though, Chris, and is there anything insufferably smug upper-middle class dicks like quite so much as they like the attention of other insufferably smug upper-middle class dicks?

Sorry, have I said that I love this? Because I do.

Standouts include:
Self Aware Hip Hop References -

... white people find it particularly hilarious to take slang and enunciate every word perfectly.
“Homey, that bernaise sauce you made is wack. Do you know what I am saying? For Real.”
“Well, I used a different type of butter. I switched the style up, so let the haters hate and I’ll watch the deliciousness pile up.”

Camping -

If you find yourself trapped in the middle of the woods without electricity, running water, or a car you would likely describe that situation as a “nightmare” or “a worse case scenario like after plane crash or something.” White people refer to it as “camping.”

Mostly, I love this because I am an insufferably smug upper-middle class dick, and the only thing this book/blog combo fails to identify are the two things we love more than anything:
1. Ourselves
2. Reading about ourselves in an ironic fashion.

Thanks Chris.

Moonraker by Ian Fleming

Once pulp fiction passes a certain vintage, it enters a canon all its own. Clearly, Fleming's Bond novels meet this description, and therefore I will not apologise for indulging in what is essentially literature's answer to a toasted cheese sandwich on white bread with margarine and plastic cheese - delicious, but in no way nutritious.

Here are some of the choicest morsels:

'... their heads were all close-shaved... and yet, and this struck Bond as a most bizarre characteristic of a the team, each man sported a luxuriant moustache to whose culture it was clear that a great deal of attention had been devoted. They were in all shapes and tints: fair or mousy or dark; handlebar, walrus, Kaiser, Hitler -- each face bore its own hairy badge...
... there was something positively obscene about this crop of hairy tufts. It would have been just bearable if they had all been cut to the same pattern, but this range of fashions, this riot of personalized growth, had something particularly horrible about it against the background of naked round heads.'

and this:

'Why had he imagined that she shared his desires, his plans?
... He shrugged his shoulders to shift the pain of failure -- the pain of failure that is so much greater than the pleasure of success. The exit line. He must get out of these two young lives and take his cold heart elsewhere. There must be no regrets. No false sentiment. He must play the role which she expected of him. The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette.'

Bond, don't you see Old Chap, is just Agatha Christie with cars and guns. Honestly - replace the Brit with a Belgian, replace talk of nuclear armament with talk of a flower show, replace the Beretta was some arsenic, and Bond and Poirot are basically the same person. Is it any wonder I can't wait to get my hands on the next one?

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

Dear Mr. Franzen, you are one ANGRY mo-fo. Overpopulation, globalization, environmental terrorists, actual terrorists, hipsters, Republicans and Democrats are all equally loathed in this 500 page tome. Having not read The Corrections despite Hammill’s praise in this very blog, I had no idea what to expect; all I knew was that the Publishing Establishment salivate over this man. He was on the cover of Time magazine with the heading of ‘Great American Novelist’ for Chrissakes – as far as I can tell, he’s written two books of note. Not twenty. TWO. Americans are well lazy.

However.

This is brilliant. Engrossing, unexpected, unflinching. We all know people like this and hope that we don’t turn out like them. Characters jump around the chapters, get all sweaty and dirty, are benched by Franzen and then called up again when you thought they’d been sidelined from the game permanently. Shaky marriages and ungrateful children run alongside bigger plotlines of environmentalism and corruption, and the only time it got slightly bogged down where the more in-depth explanations of political lobbying which was lost on this little black duck (hey, so my uni major was Lit and not Politics. So sue me). I think one day, I managed to work an eight hour day and still read 250 pages. I was hooked.

I advise anyone reading this to shell out for this over your Christmas break and spend a couple of solid days reading. Enjoy.

Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

This book has a kind of interesting genesis: Wolfe was one of the 'new journalism' movement's founders, and this was his first work of fiction. It was originally serialised in Rolling Stone. The serialisation could easily account for if not excuse the fact that it's about 200 pages too long, until you discover it was drastically rewritten before becoming a novel. Whoops.

There was a point in the middle where I kind of wished someone would sneak up on me and tear out some pages from the middle, but then, by the end, I COULD NOT stop reading it. At least 10% of that was because I was sick of the sight of it, but I can't attribute all my enthusiasm to that. When you're hungry, and someone hands you a deep friend hunk-of-shit burger you tuck in, unthinking, and then before you know it you're half way through, bad bread forming a difficult ball in your mouth and over-friend bits of fried stabbing you in the palatte. You realise your situation and are disgusted. Craving something nutritious, fresh, crunchy etc, you plow on regardless, until you're brushing crumbs off your shirt and wondering why you feel slightly nauseous. And then it's over, you move on. Why we do this, no one knows. Well: Book, burger, the similarities are obvious.

You know when two really hot people have a baby, and it's hideously ugly? Or when two really athletic people have a baby, and it's a total unco? It was kind of like Dostoevsky and DeLillo had a baby and it was Bonfire of the Vanities: it was neurotic and minute in it's analysis of humanity, but over written and dull, full of stereotypes and contained not one single woman with more than 2 dimensions. Some parts of it are very clever, and funny, and there's no doubting that dude is asking some great questions. And maybe it's meant to get monotonous?

I'd say leave it on the shelf unless you need a doorstop.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

This blog has for one thing highlighted my eclectic tastes in books, for I am just as impressed by McCarthy’s cannibalistic on the road missive as I am by this sweet tale of Second World War covert book lovers.

A loan from Sam’s sister, it was a lovely book to read. Perfectly pleasant, likeable characters and a yesteryear charm (that in most cases I would usually find unbearably saccharine and twee) are deftly presented by author Shaffer. Her heroine Juliet is kick-arse in her own 1940s way, refusing marriage proposals and having a homo best friend, and has this sensible yet whimsical quality about her (Amber, you may very well hate her...I’m just saying she had her own charms). Adding to the book’s appeal is the back story of the author; a 70-something librarian known in her family for her exceptional storytelling, sits down and pours out this book, only getting too ill to quite finish it. In steps her niece Annie and puts the finishing touches on it. You would never guess that essentially two people have authored it as the voice and narrative are seamless. Book goes onto become a worldwide publishing smash, and while it’s a shame Shaffer didn’t live long enough to see it, kudos to her for writing it all. Better late than never I reckon.

Oh, and did I mention that the whole book is written in letters? Again, a somewhat dated way to write a novel, but it really did complement the era and made me yearn for all the letters I’ve sent over the years, and how rad it is to receive one in the post. The whole thing really is a bit of a love letter to books, with the main characters meeting via a book that used to belong to Juliet ending up in Guernsey and friendship born out of mutual love of Charles Lamb (how many people have I become friends with based on their bookshelf? Methinks quite a few, and a case in point: when Josh and Brock visited our house a year or so ago, he exclaimed “Nik-nik! We practically have all the same books!”) No surprises there kiddo.

The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler

With train rides and boats and pistols and hotels and Mr. This and Madam That and no forensics to get in the way - that's how I like my murder stories. In addition to these crucial elements, this little gem, set across the 20s and 30s, also covers a range of other topics one ought to be familiar with, like the Greece/Turkey conflict, and the political unrest in Serbia -don't you know? - and travels through Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Switzerland and France where things are tidily resolved.

It's also one of those fantastically self-referential pieces of prose where the main character, Latimer, is a British author of detective fiction. How, you might ask, does the author nail this character so cleverly? Genius.

On the whole, this was perfect plane/beach/pool/cocktail reading, without being, ah, brain-damaging. Ish.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

This one came highly recommended by my Dad, who raves about McCarthy’s prose and his themes of ‘amoral violence.’ So recommended in fact, that before I had the chance to read the book, he took me to see the movie, which was pretty amazing, but also wrist-cuttingly (yes I know this technically isn’t a word) Grim with a capital G.

But in this case I’m glad I’d seen the flick pre-book, because I’m not sure I could have quite grasped the apocalyptic landscape without a visual prompt. And it was a rare case of neither book nor film disappointing; I thought both stood on their own very well. To sustain a novel with just two main characters, without names, as they walk across a land destroyed by an unknown and unnamed phenomena is quite a feat, and one that McCarthy handles with unquestionable skill. Basically he has a million different ways to describe this void world, and each of them hits their mark in creating this bleak, hopeless no-man’s land. It’s actually quite an extraordinary journey with Man and Boy, and their sparse dialogue manages to do so much with so little; their conversations about whether or not they’re the good guys, and the part where the Boy talks about carrying the fire...well, it just about breaks your heart.

It’s one of those books where the author has managed to, very cleverly, ask All The Important Questions, without beating the reader about the head with them. I dare anyone to read this book without spending the next few days hypothesising about what they would do in the Man’s situation; I came to the conclusion that I would have definitely used the bullets when I had the chance and ended it all. But then it niggles at you – the very essence of humanity is our hope that the next day will be a better one, and the idea that being a parent means to protect and not harm. It’s powerful stuff and worth the discomfort.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl

There is no doubt the author of this book is a massive show-off. Not only is every chapter named after a great important novel, a narrative convention is to pepper the main character’s thoughts with lines from hundreds of books and texts; which is quirky, but can get fairly tedious (‘Cockatoo Mobile Library’, Lovelock, ’10). But you know what? Ms Pessl gets away with it because Special Topics is a cracking, highly original read so haters will just have to suck it up.

Blue Van Meer is our precocious main character, a gifted teenager going through a school each semester with her academic dad as he follows university work across the country. At Blue’s latest school, a mysterious teacher, one Ms Hannah Schneider, invites her to be part of a special club, The Bluebloods, who seem to hate her but tolerate her due to Hannah’s interest in her. When Hannah takes the group camping and is found hanging from a tree (not a spoiler – it’s in the first chapter and book’s back cover), the real conspiracy around Blue’s whole existence begins to unravel in the most fascinating and unexpected ways. It’s kind of like a gothic Sweet Valley High novel, with misfits instead of perky blonde twins.

And Blue for all her annoying intellectualism, has endearing flashes of being a normal teenager and not one of those totally unbelievable too-grown-up-to be-real characters, like the meltdown she has after being told she kisses ‘like a tuna’. No amount of Joyce quoting and brain power can soothe the sting of an insult like that to an adolescent.

I liked that I was about halfway through the book and I couldn’t see where the plot was heading, or exactly figure out what the character’s motivations were; usually this would frustrate the hell out of me, but Pessl’s rhythm and turns of phrase kept me hooked.

“Jade and Lu were still developing nations. And thus, while it wasn’t fantastic, it wasn’t too terrible for them to have a backward infrastructure and a poor development index. But Hannah – she should have been much further along. She should have already established a robust economy, free trade, peacefulness – it wasn’t looking good for her democracy.”

And then when the book kicks into final gear, it really barrels towards a ripping finish. You may be a little bit of a show-off Ms Pessl but I forgive you.

Unpolished Gem by Alice Pung

I won’t go so far as to say ‘unpolished turd’ but this book had all the fizz of a flat bottle of softie. As I did the directionless browse in the bookstore (see Hammill’s Winchester review), the blurb got me: “This book does not begin on a boat. Nor does it contain any wild swans or falling leaves” which I thought was a clever nod to the influx of Asian memoirs in recent years. I’d also recognised Pung from a few Age bylines, so it was a tantalising combination of leftie writer and learning more about other cultures and feeling as part of a global community (see Stuff White People Like).

There’s no doubt Alice is likeable, has her heart in the right place and had an interesting upbringing, with her family displaced in a refugee camp as they fled from the Khmer Rouge. It purposely avoids the heaviness of books that have gone before it like ‘The Killing Fields’ and ‘Before They Killed My Father’, instead focussing on the more suburban challenges of growing up Asian in Australia. Unfortunately this material is clumsily handled; the comedy is a bit forced, as are the tender moments. I wanted to know more about Alice’s parents, but you got the distinct sense that Alice herself was viewing them from the outside looking in, so there was never that much insight into their lives.

Like Judith Lucy’s autobiography, I would have happily read Unpolished Gem as a Good Weekend feature, but as a whole book it feels a little flimsy.

Mister Pip Lloyd Jones

Who would've thought you could put Boo Radley and Jean Rhys' Mrs Rochester in a book about Dickens set on an island in Papua New Guinea during the civil war of the 1990s, and come up with such a credible, moving, lyrical, enthralling work of fiction as this? Not me, that's for sure. To me, on paper, this book is akin to putting ice-cream, avocado and soy sauce in a muffin tray and coming up with mushroom stroganoff. But somehow, through some means that I wouldn't hesitate to describe as a special kind of genius, that is pretty much exactly what your man Lloyd Jones has gone and done here.

I cried and laughed in almost equal measures and I encourage you to crack it open for a chance to do the same.

Kudos, Mr Jones. You're welcome in my literary kitchen anytime.

The Map That Changed The World Simon Winchester

Thank-you, thank-you very much! Ladies and gentlemen, in accepting my prize for reading the nerdiest book of the year, I would only like to say that it has been an absolute pleasure to engage with a book of this intelligence and complete oddness.

I walked into Foyles one Friday night, and spent at least an hour browsing the fiction. The number of books I picked up and turned over beggars belief. And for all their colourful covers and enticing blurb hooks, I wasn't interested to open a single one of them. This was confronting. Where was my book? It was Friday night and I had a date with a bath and a glass of wine, damn it, and if Book didn't show up, there was going to be trouble.

I went over to the information desk and asked where to find Simon Winchester's titles, and was swiftly directed to the 'nerd' section. My only other encounter with him was The Surgeon of Crowthorne, and I completely loved it. I'm not sure what exactly drew me back to Mr Winchester on this day particularly, but I had a vague sense that I wanted a book that might, just maybe, make me a little bit smarter by the end than I was when I started.

And boy did he deliver. For someone who briefly studied geography, the historical and political content of this book is fascinating (the rocks I could take or leave, if I'm honest). William Smith lived an impossible, tragic life, but without his work, the world would be an incredibly different place. Well, the world wouldn't actually be any different, we'd just know a hell of a lot less about it.

Yes, this book is about rocks and fossils and the relationship between them, which on the surface (pun intended) is not something you want to tuck down and read about on a Friday evening, but if you dig a little deeper (this pun also intended), this book is so, so much more. The whole notion of creating, against the wishes of the church, and on your own in the rain with a hammer, an entirely new kind of science; to go out, day after day, for your whole life, trying to understand a little bit better how the world works, despite being met with such appalling indecency from so many of your fellow men: it's truly astonishing what this brave man achieved.

The tenderness with which Winchester describes Smith's struggles, and the enthusiasm with which he champions his achievements, is enthralling. The delicately drawn chapter heads are incredible, and there's just the right balance of rocks and people in this superbly well crafted biography. The way Winchester does this, takes his little writing torch and shines it on unheralded figures of our not so distant past, is laudable and I look forward our next meeting.

Till then, I'm thinking of picking up a Paullina Simons or Paul Coelho. Or something.

A Million Little Pieces James Frey

I'm not going to say I 'read' this book, when in reality there was at least as much skimming as reading, but who's asking? The reason I picked this book up in the first place was this article I think you sent me ages ago, Nik. I did some study on literary fraud as a student, and it's something I find pretty fascinating, especially when it comes to the strange, fact/fiction realm of biography. Pretending you, or your book, are something you're not is done, it seems to me, for one of two reasons: a) to denigrate the people you fraudulently represent, or b) to trade on their name/experience/situation and increase your sales. No, Helen Demidenko /Darvill/Dale or whatever it is you're calling yourself now - you do not do anyone any favours by representing them fraudulently.
So, in this article, when Frey said:

“Frankly, I don’t even care,” he says, exasperated. ... “I don’t care, if somebody calls [A Million Little Pieces] a memoir, or a novel, or a fictionalized memoir, or what. I could care less what they call it. The thing on the side of the book means nothing. Who knows what it is. It’s just a book.It’s just a story. It’s just a book that was written with the intention to break a lot of rules in writing. I’ve broken a lot of rules in a lot of ways. So be it.”

I figured he fell into category b. I mean, I see his point - who cares? it's just a story - but I disagree. A Million Little Pieces is a good story, fact or fiction, but the writing is abominable. If I'd started this book, thinking it was true, and I was celebrating with this man, his journey through detox, I might be able to put aside the atrocious prose for the sake of the humanity of the whole thing. But if I'd struggled through the shit heap of unpunctuated garbage, thinking it was a memoir, only to discover it was just plain old bad writing, I would've been pissed too, Oprah.

The only reason you'd try to pass this off as memoir, you'd think, is to extract cash from bleeding heart redemption story lovers. And it worked - you were a bestseller - but your book is shit. I'm not saying your experience, whatever it might have been, wasn't an interesting story, but your book, James, was the badly written poetry of a stoned year 9 girl. I'll give you the Fury, young man! I can imagine the feeling of reading this thinking it was memoir and discovering later that, though the author may have, at one time, drank too much, the story was in fact, fiction, might have felt like the time I accidentally went to a Christian hip hop show: I knew I was going to see hip hop, but when, after the second track, there was no smacking up of bitches or pimping of rides, and it slowly dawned on my that I wasn't watching what I thought I was watching, I became outraged. Technically, it wasn't bad hip hop, but it wasn't what I wanted, or what I thought I'd be getting. I felt betrayed, and the only reason I can imagine they weren't explicit about the role their faith played in their music was so that fools like me would fork out for tickets, come, and possibly find my love of Hey Zeus. 'Fraid not.

Anyway, like I said: badly written, good story. And why does it matter? Because of a. Representing this book as a memoir denigrates people's real, lived experiences. The harm in letting people believe that stories like this are true when they aren't, is that this story misrepresents the experience of rehab, and makes real experiences look, unglossy, undignified, unexciting, unremarkable and dull. When in reality, I think I deserve a medal when I go a week without biting my nails. It's not glamourous, it's personal. People want to believe in redemptive stories like this (and why that is is another question altogether), and they are out there, but they're in The Big Issue, not in large advance book deals. And maybe it's too much to ask people to recover from this kind of thing, and then be honest, and eloquent, and media savvy, but then, maybe glorifying drug rehab is flawed in itself.

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

What an odd little read this was….I loved and hated parts of it in equal measures. Loaned to me by someone who warned me that the author was much better at short stories than the full length shebang, I embarked with few expectations (the freedom of being loaned a book as opposed to shelling out your own hard-earned cash and thinking ‘This thing better be good’).

Main character Tassie is awkward and unworldly, but not unintelligent, when she moves from her family’s potato farm in the Midwest to attend college. She rooms with a girl who’s never home in a rundown part of town, and finds a job as a nanny for a couple who are about to adopt a child.

Something is a bit off about this couple from the start; he’s a lawyer who doesn’t attend the adoption appointments while she’s a chef who is prone to uncomfortable outbursts. Sarah Brink makes some high demands of Tassie, and flies her out with her to meet their baby, an African-American girl called Mary.

The book wants to be many things, and in zooming off in a million tangents, manages to leave many of its ambitions unfulfilled. But it’s an intriguing read nonetheless, even though it doesn’t quite pull it off. There’s Tassie and the weird couple with something to hide (revealed in a massive anti-climax, which is hugely disappointing since we’ve invested so much in it), a Muslim wannabe terrorist for a boyfriend, some really annoying characters posturing over how good they are for adopting black babies and a family member’s death in Afghanistan – which is all jam packed into the last third of the book. This means none of these worthy plotlines are going to get the full attention they deserve.

I’d describe it as a better than average coming of age tale; what elevates this book is the beautiful writing and Moore’s accurate portrayal of Tassie – who is just trying to fit in and figure out what the fuck the world is all about, with the adults around her giving her no clues. I’d be curious to read Moore’s short stories after this full-length effort almost gets there.

Holding the Man by Timothy Conigrave

Ahh Penguin Classics. Bringing good stories to the people for under $10. I became aware of this book as it has been turned into a super successful play in recent years (which I haven’t seen but have heard great things about). It’s the true story of the author, a young gay man, and his relationship with the captain of school football team, at Xavier College in Melbourne in the 70s. Not only is John the footy captain, he’s Italian – so his parents go absolutely spare when he tells them he’s gay. Conigrave’s parents are slightly better, but one can imagine how being gay 30 years ago went down. These sections were infuriating in just how small minded people were (and to be honest, probably still are). For a parent to disown their own child based purely on their sexuality is just wrong and stupid.

John becomes a physio and Tim becomes an actor, getting in NIDA and moving to Sydney, where the two “take a break”, which involves Tim getting it on with loads of dudes. They get back together and end up both testing HIV-positive, which back in the day was helpfully known as ‘gay cancer’. The book candidly documents John’s struggle with the disease, as Tim looks after him and tries to block out his own impending sickness.

This book was published just before Conigrave’s death in 1994, but stops after John’s passing – I can’t imagine how heartbreaking it would be to watch your lover of years and years waste away, and also knowing that you had the same illness. It’s a pretty brave book in that it doesn’t gloss over anything, which had its confronting moments to read, but it’s a better book for it. It’s actually not all that well written, with Conigrave’s writing lacking any flourishes, but it has an authentic quality that was quite endearing, and I could see that its material would make for a brilliant play.

I think Conigrave wrote the book that he always wished existed when he was a young guy coming to grips with being gay; and luckily now for a generation of boys it does.

The Boy Next Door by Irene Sabatini

I actually read this book right after Oscar Wao, and they were a little similar in topic (war-torn countries, dictators, snippets written in another language and colloquial references) but this one took itself a lot more seriously. Author Sabatini is from Zimbabwe where the novel is set, and it explores the nation’s identity struggle post-independence through the eyes of Lindiwe Bishop, who is witness to an event that shapes her entire life.

It’s a slow burner, which is a bad pun since the first pivotal moment is Lindiwe’s next door neighbour’s house burning down, killing a woman – teenage occupant Ian is the suspect of the arson that caused the death of his stepmother. It sets off a chain of events that tie Lindiwe to Ian, and the book charts their tumultuous relationship, and the breakdown of the country around them.

Lindiwe works hard to rise above her poor childhood to become university educated and is very aware of her colour and standing in society, while Ian, the white ‘Rhodesian’ wants to pretend the whole world is colour-blind; Lindiwe is constantly challenging him on her struggle to be recognised as equal (such as when they go camping together, and a group of white campers invite Ian to join them for drinks – and tell him he can bring his ‘girl’, or help, along – Ian does nothing to correct them) and the whole book revolves around both of them educating each other.

The period in which the book is set is hugely interesting to me; it’s a turning point in Africa where shit really started to go south. So this is watching it at the beginning, and the first signs of how awful Mugabe’s 30 year rule is going to be are showing.

There are some frustratingly slow moments, and Sabatini is a master of restraint, but sometimes I felt she held back too much with certain plotlines; I’m sure she meant to leave some aspects ambiguous but it meant that I wasn’t wholly satisfied by the end. However, a deserving winner of the Orange Award for New Writers in 2010.

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

For some reason, I found the opening sentence of this book one of the most uninspired pieces of prose ever: “Lloyd shoves off the bedcovers and hurries to the front door in white underwear and blacks socks.” Perhaps I don’t like men named Lloyd (Lloyd Bysouth, you’ve scarred me, you primary school pervert). This is a book written by a journalist, which is always dubious; just because you smash out eight 250 word stories a day does mean you can write an awesome novel. And for a stretch, it’s set in the newsroom of an international newsroom in Rome…and what a surprise, the author worked as a correspondent in Rome! Where does this man get his ideas, you wonder in amazement?

The layout is kind of cute, with each new character and their job title introduced by way of a newspaper headline (example: U.S General Optimistic on War – Kathleen Solson, Editor-In-Chief) but the book is let down by what’s in the chapters; namely, some terrible writing. It really would have been better served as a collection of short stories, because with one or two character’s chapters, he really nails them, such as the satisfying set-up and reveal around Abbey Pinnola, the luckless in love chief financial officer, who is burned by an employee she fired – the book really lifts at this point but it’s too close to the end and nothing else is written that well. The men are all portrayed as hardened hacks, and the female chief of staff a total ballbreaker – no breakdown of stereotypes here. Which is a shame, because as a journalist, surely Rachman could have offered a more interesting perspective on his profession than this Year 12 quality offering.

On The Science of Not Reading Books by Amber

Here are some facts:
1. There is rarely a lot of sun where I live
2. When there is sun, I need to be in it
3. There is a relationship between sun exposure and number of books read, illustrated belowSee how, when there's not a lot of sun, like in Winter say, book reading is high. Then, when sun exposure is really, really super high, like when you're on holidays in a hammock, book reading is high, but in the middle, when sun exposure is kind of middling, book reading suffers. That's where I'm at at the moment. All I can do in the sun right now, when it's shining, is drink cider and roll around in the grass. So.

I did read one book, The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al-Aswany and while vaguely enjoyable it really was just a poor man's version of Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag by Rohinton Mistry, which is a freaking awesome, Raymond Carver-esque short story collection of untold brilliance. Alaa Al-Aswany's characters were a bit 2 dimensional and his style just wasn't the evocative genius of Mistry. That said, I did hear the dude interviewed on the BBC's World Book Club show and turns out he's actually a dentist, so you know, maybe I shouldn't have expected too much?

In other reading news, I'm completely addicted to reading The Economist and have taken out a subscription. This is complemented by my other dirty little addiction, an economics podcast from NPR called Planet Money. I've become completely fascinated by the idea of economics - HOW DOES IT WORK?!?! What is this mad crazy system of money that makes the world go round? Or not go round, as increasingly seems to be the case? And how in the name of God are all these chumps making arse-loads of money out of a system I don't understand but am completely beholden too? Anyway, I'm loving it. It's like reading takes from another world...

So. In short: I'm reading a really nerdy magazine, and there aren't any books on the horizon for about a month or so.

Yours, with apologies and cute graphs,
Princess Amber Margaret

Holiday Reading Extravaganza by Various

A month-long holiday equates to a grown-up MS Read-a-thon for me. I love nothing more than packing a stack of books, lying somewhere with amazing scenery in the sun and devouring some choice words. You also want to choose books that are good, but not so good that you can’t bear to leave them in the spot that you finished them, ditching some excess baggage and making room for a newbie.

Since I can barely remember some of these, I won’t mess around.

The Lucy Family Alphabet by Judith Lucy

I started reading this on the plane, so it was the perfect pick up and put down type book, essential for when you’re on the move and not needing to get too involved with anything demanding. As Amber observed after reading it, it’s not a real book, which is true – it would have made a better Good Weekend feature. But parts of it were laugh out loud hilarious, probably only because I could imagine her whisky-voiced delivery. Non-Aussie readers would have absolutely NO IDEA what to make of this, and probably the thing I liked most about it was its sense of place; a crazy 70’s Australia filled with racist dads, cocktail franks and bad furniture.

A Song in the Daylight by Paullina Simons

Take the shame. I’m embarrassed to admit that I took this 700 page phone book with me, but I’d read one of hers in Brazil and chowed through it (the much better, or at least at the time, A Girl in Times Square, but on reflection I was probably just desperate for a book in English by that part of the trip). This was total housewife porn, where the woman has the perfect life, with shitty descriptive crap like ‘Larissa didn’t have a single mole marking her alabaster skin’ – who the fuck doesn’t have a mole on their ENTIRE body? Is she a robot? Anyway, it was completely vacuous and the two main American characters died the most ridiculous death in the outback of Australia. The end. Rancid. And I gained about 2kgs back in my suitcase. It was well shameful.

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

This was freaking awesome – one of those ‘It’s raining on my tropical holiday so I’m just going to read this book in 8 hours’ kind of reads. A book where the animal analogies actaully mean something, and aren’t just some lazy author threading. I’ve long had a soft spot for Indian authors (that original voice is like no other – punchy and so descriptive you can smell what they’re talking about) and it really took me from the poverty afflicted Darkness to the pollution filled streets of New Dehli. Take me there now.

Petropolis by Anya Ulinich

Post Chernobyl pulp fiction, of which I cannot recall much, so clearly I didn’t rate it.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larrsson

I personally blame this book for kicking off my ‘Illiteracy Disease’ of the second half of my trip; I started reading this, got about two-thirds of the way through, got to London and then couldn’t read a word that wasn’t accompanied by a glossy picture for the next fortnight. Of course it could have had something to do with arriving in London, but I prefer to blame this book, which was a pretty good plot spoiled by some grossly violent details. Goes to show that when you finally cave and read a book just because everyone you see on the bus is, things will not be pretty and there was a reason you didn’t read the goddamn thing in the first place. This is why I’ve never read Harry Potter and never will.

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Ahh the feted ‘Book You Take for the Plane Ride Home’ – possibly the hardest choice of all, but this beauty delivered on so many fronts. It was like reading a hip-hop song, if you can bear with me; original, fierce, lyrical and with something pretty important to say. Diaz as an author from the Dominican Republic has this completely unique insight into the atrocities committed in his country (which to be honest I knew nada about – I suspect his target demo) and is able to create what is almost two tales within one; an achingly funny and tender fiction book about the hapless Oscar Wao, with its pigeon pairing an unflinching non-fiction exploration into political corruption in DR.

Mystery Book by Unnamed Author

DISCLOSURE: This book was a 'gift' from the boss of the company that owns the company that I work for. It came with a syrupy letter saying something about how amazing it is that after working in publishing for so long a book can still move you and aren't words great and aren't we all really priviledged to work here and make books like this bullshit bullshit etc.

I read the book - it was free, afterall - and I know the adage about peering into the gobs of gift horses, but this one, it must be said, came at me with it's mouth wide open and it's rotten teeth and halitosis plain for all to witness. It doesn't take a veterinary denitst to tell you that this 'gift' was as a completely transparent attempt to save money on marketing by having me do it for them for free.

'Fraid not, Mr. Hyphenated-Surname, not this little reader, no Sir. I mean, perhaps if there were a more direct link between sales of this book and my salary, I'd be reading it on the train, offering to loan it to my mum, dropping its name into random conversations with friends etc, but there ain't. So I'm not. There was no offer of commission in the letter you sent accompanying the book so I can only infer that it really makes diddly-squat difference to me what happens to it. Bury it under a pile of compost for all I care.

Also, it was crap. The cover is pretty and very eye-catching, and characters were kind of engaging, but the narrative was, oh, how shall I put this? Shit. Maybe if you hadn't spent so much on the foil on the cover, or let the extent get so out of hand that by half way though I was wishing someone would tear out some of the pages, or if you'd maybe considered being slightly more economical with the chapter heads, you wouldn't need to sell so many copies of it that you'd blatantly attempt to use your workforce, gratis, to start some kind of whisper campaign about it like we're a bunch of teenage girls and this is Twilight. Just a thought.

So, you know, thanks for the book and all that, but far from telling anyone to read it, I'm not even going to tell anyone what it is. I'm shoving it under my compost heap and hoping that, like shit in a garden bed, something useful actually comes out of it. Unless, of course, you'd like to reflect this in my salary somehow? No, didn't think so.

Maybe I'm wrong, and you just really value your workers and really thought this was brilliant and wanted to share it with us? Well then I have another suggestion: next time you want to enourage my love of reading and remind me why I work in this slavishly underpaid industry you could just add the wholesale value of a book (reflective of the staff discount, if you like) to my bank account (you've got the details) and I'll read whatever I like. Thanks.

Girl Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

“A successful suicide demands good organisation and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.”

HA! I loved Kaysen’s dry and detached observations about being viewed as crazy, even more commendable since this is her story about being locked up in a mental institution for 2 years in the 60’s. She was in the rock-star McLean Hospital, home to fellow nutty alumni such as Sylvia Plath, Ray Charles and James Taylor, and was admitted after a 20 minute consultation with her doctor. Having been diagnosed with ‘Borderline Personality Disorder’, Kaysen seemed to me like a slightly moody, anxious teenager, barely grown and displaying some vaguely subversive tendencies that wouldn’t get a second look at now – she was vegetarian, slept with her English teacher and didn’t want to go to college. She must be nuts, let’s throw her in with society’s rejects.

Becoming a writer, Kaysen tracked down her medical records, which must have been strangely illuminating, since it never really was made clear to her why she was there. She obviously needed some time chilling away from the world, as she didn’t really protest or try to bust her way out, but her story does beg the question – what were her family doing? Why was she there for two years? Answers aren’t all that forthcoming, and Kaysen focuses more on the day to day of being in a loony bin, which she does in an engaging and direct style. There’s an awesome chapter called ‘Velocity vs. Viscosity’ which describes the fastness and thickness of insanity in a way that gave me great insight into mental illness, and the fragility of the mind.

Breakfast of Champions or Goodbye Blue Monday by Kurt Vonnegut

It was just over a year ago that I read Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. This book, it would be fair to say, broke my mind a little bit. It broke the way I thought about time, and lead to such incidents as me visiting Greenwich and stomping on the line of GMT shouting 'Take that, time!', to the amusement of my friends and the horror of the attendant. This resulted in an afternoon in Greenwhich park with me saying things like 'If time is a place, there are only 2 dimensions, and we're all flat. Everything is flat'. It's not really picnic conversation. Still, now, I am perplexed as to how one is to reconcile this made up ridiculous idea of the 'passage of time'. Daylight savings is minor crisis I endure twice a year when I think 'Why bother keeping time if we're only going to change it to suit ourselves?'. My dear friend Guy, whose couch I was calling home when I read this book, seems to be able to tell, before I've even opened my mouth, when I'm about to being a rumination on the topic of time. He'll invariably try to distract me with something shiny, or alcoholic, or just take his head in his hands and say, 'No, Amber. No talking about time'. Poor Guy.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVED Slaughterhouse-five: I dream of having the perspicacity of the beings on Tralfamadore to be able to see through time, but it has had some pretty deep reverberations. For example, I no longer believe in the concept of being late. So, on the basis of what that book has done to my life, and my ability to meet people in bars without coming off like a completely steam-punk worshiping freak, I hesitated to embark on Breakfast of Champions.

Ok, that's a lie: I didn't hesitate. I couldn't get into it fast enough. A friend gave it to me at her leaving party while she was packing to go overseas, in the kind of way you haphazardly discard your belongings in this process - you're ecstatic at the thought of off-loading something to someone else, no matter how precious, simply because it means you don't have to pack it. So, I made my excuses, left the party, and went home to start the book. I was not disappointed. I should have known I wouldn't be, and if I wasn't such a rudimentary creature who experienced time as linear, I could've told you how much I would enjoy this book before I even started it. Alas.

Breakfast of Champions or Goodbye Blue Monday is also illustrated by the narrator (who is also the author - Philboyd Studge). This paragraph in the preface sets the tone perfectly:

This book is my fiftieth birthday present to myself. I feel as though I am crossing the spine of a roof--having ascended one slope.
I am programmed at fifty to perform childishly--to insult "The Star-Spangled Banner", to scrawl pictures of a Nazi flag and an asshole and a lot of other things with a felt-tipped pen. To give an idea of the maturity of my illustrations for this book, here is my picture of an asshole:

And so on.

This books is the biggest piss-take ever. Nothing is sacred and, in a sense, since as it plainly says in the preface, this book is an attempt "to clear my head of all the junk in there--the assholes, the flags, the underpants... I'm throwing out characters from my other books too. I'm not going to put on any more puppet shows..." this book is even a piss-take of writing. Vonnegut recycles characters from his and other people's writing. It would be lazy, if it weren't so incredibly well crafted and superbly executed.

It's an anti-novel of a sort. A good sort. An hilarious, laugh-out-loud, read-pages-to-your-mates sort.

If that's not enough to get you to the library, allow me to refer you to p.22 of the 2000 Vintage edition:

Intimacy by Hanif Kureshi

All men are bastards, apparently. They'll marry you out of some misplaced sense of obligation (and because they don't fancy being alone), have kids with you, shag other women with no guilt whatsoever and fantasise about leaving you. And then they will leave you with a note on the kitchen table with no real explanation other than 'I can't do this anymore'. Greash. Get my a white dress and a priest stat.

I know that not all men are bastards, but this novella doesn't fill me with confidence (much like the distubring portrait of suburban dreams gone sour in Richard Yates excellent Revolutionary Road). This is a fairly bleak and depressing insight into the workings of a male mind, and the protaganist of this piece Jay, is apathetic, selfish and unlikeable.

The theme can be broadly described as 'when is enough not enough?' - that weird feeling when we know we should be happy with our lot (health, family, a job) but still something is missing.....that first world depression of not feeling like we've achieved enough despite a wealth of love and happiness. Now that's something that men and women can relate to.

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

The cover of this book proudly states ‘the Pulitizer Prize winning author of March’, so I had fairly high expectations of Geraldine Brooks’ writing skillz. I mean, they don’t just hand out Pulitizers these days do they? Perhaps, like Sandra Bullock winning a Best Actress Oscar, ol Geraldine just snuck in with the best of an average bunch that year. Or maybe I read too much, and have gotten to the point where a book needs to be REALLY amazing for me to even be vaguely impressed.

Following the journey of Aussie book restorer Hannah to retrace the history of a sacred Jewish Haggadah, salvaged by a Muslim librarian during the Bosnian war, it covers a huge amount of narrative ground; and in doing so, spreads itself a little too thin. There’s the rabbi during the Spanish Inquisition, a slave girl from the 1400’s, an Austrian physician and then the modern story of Hannah, all interwoven and revealing how the book came to be. One of the book’s strengths is that the historical detail seems well researched, and paints a rich backdrop for this manuscript mystery.

The bit that made me cringe the most was the characterisation of Hannah; Brooks seemed to be trying waaaay too hard to make her into this no-nonsense ocker chick and it totally grated on me. The relationship between book nerd Hannah and her over-achieving, cold neurosurgeon mother came across as clichéd, and the Father-She-Never-Knew-Big-Reveal fairly unbelievable. Oh and the attempt at sex scenes – so very Mills and Boon.

I imagine that this would have been the perfect candidate for an Oprah’s Book Club recommendation…..and if you know me, that’s not considered very high praise.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Remember earlier in the year when I read A Spot of Bother? Right, well, The Corrections succeeded where that failed. I would like to send a copy of The Corrections to Mark Haddon with a 'spot the difference' style questionnaire.

The Corrections includes a whole load of things that I enjoy in books: tales of middle America, mental illness, ponderances on the nature of humanity, wrong and broken sex scenes of more than one kind, hysterical characters, analysis of success and failure, etc. All this, I tell you, as well as words sewn together in ways that make me want to sing, like:

Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.

and

The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end.

In The Corrections, Franzen catalogues the offences of life against the mind and body without ever once belittling his characters; using humour among a vast chache of techniques, but not resorting to humour while employing few other tools. (Mark, are you reading this? That's the answer to Question 1.)

Given how I've just raved about it, this will seem strange: I spent every second page of this book thinking, 'I've read this,' and then, 'but I have no idea what happens next...' Which, in essence, is half the reason I wanted to start this blog: I'm really good at writing down the titles of books I read, but I write them down in whatever notebook I happen to be using at the time, 95% of which are somewhere in my mother's garage and, therefore, useless since I am not in my mother's garage. Introducing... the portable book log! - blog! It's what Internet intended.

Thanks to my darling Badger for sending this along.

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

Broke is boring, is the conclusion and point of this book. No shit George. Good on you though for putting yourself through grinding poverty to undergo a social experiment and then write an insightful book about it. I have neglected Orwell throughout my reading years, only to finally pick up my dusty copy of 1984 last year. It was like everyone told me it was – pretty good (and now I keep hearing references to ‘thought crime’ in songs; it’s always nice when you get the literary pop culture reference). I wish I had read this when I first arrived in London, because there are so many parallels between mine and Orwell’s (and I’m guessing pretty much all antipodeans that turn up to Old Blighty poor as possums) experience, just to varying degrees. Working as dishpig? Check. Walking to work because you can’t afford public transport? Check. Washing yourself at work because there was no hot water at home? Check (the place I was housesitting, the thermostat broke while the homeowner was away – it was March and freezing). So I felt I could relate to the Paris chapter, and especially the chaos of working in restaurants, with the hierarchy of chefs and waiters. Oh the heady days.

So it seems that being broke in Paris is a whole lot more exciting than being a tramp in London, because that is where the action ground to a halt, and I trudged through the pages to get to the end. I even picked it up one Saturday morning around 9am, read about 3 pages and then fell back asleep, book crushed under me, which never happens unless I’m completely bored, which I was by that stage. I kept waiting for his luck to change, but as he explains towards the end, poverty is an ongoing, relentless cycle, and once you’re there, it’s very hard to get a foot hold back amongst the middle classes, which sadly rings as true now as it did back then.

Streets of Hope by Tim Costello

Odd choice I agree, but for some reason this has been on the back of my ‘to-read’ list for some time. Since the tagline is Finding God in St Kilda and I live very close by in Elwood, I thought I better read up just in case I bumped into him and didn’t recognise the dude (hairy unwashed men in dresses and Birkenstocks are not uncommon sightings in the ‘hood).

I’ve always thought Tim Costello was a pretty interesting guy, especially the whole ‘my brother was the country’s treasurer saving rich people money while I live in a busted old church’ (this book was written before he became CEO of World Vision in the 2000’s). So some of it’s kinda dated, but I really enjoyed reading the history of St Kilda as the go-to place for good times back in the day, and its ongoing reputation as a refuge for all people and things broken. I didn’t know he was also Mayor of St Kilda (back when individual councils each had their own mayor – bureaucratic nightmare) and it seems that he did a pretty good job of looking after his constituents without going all preachy on them. He also practiced by day as a lawyer, which makes me think he may have some sort of mild job schizophrenia. Even worse than phlebotomist/bank teller/editor Hammill here.

The narrative is completely ramshackle, switching from parts of his life story growing up in suburban Blackburn, to St Kilda history, then to full on theology which was a bit much for me to stomach. While trying to figure out why prostitution is so rampant in society and on the streets of St Kilda, he writes “Pulling and pushing the right tabs of flesh are a much inferior way to inflame the erotic passions than the lost romantic arts of poetry, song and spiritual celebrations.” Ummmm, no, Rev Tim, I think you’re mistaken (or maybe you’re just pulling the wrong tab of flesh).

I tried to read this with an open mind, and I’m sure as I get older I’ll want to explore my spirituality; but I’m probably never going to want it in a uniform style. I did agree with Tim on this though – “Spirituality is the consistent application of one’s values.” That I can roll with.

Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

Nice one, book. Fricking nice one.

Let me say this - without being in any way callous, or uncaring, or derogatory, or compassionless, or any of those other nasty things I would immediately think if I heard someone say this, let me say this purely from the perspective of narrative and theme - I am kind of bored of Books About The War. You know the ones, about The War? With the Jews? And the Germans? The one in Europe, about 70 years ago? Yeah, that one. The one that, without really knowing anything, everyone knows too much about, and without really understanding everything, everyone has read about 1 million times in a thousand different ways.

Please understand that I am in no way indifferent to the suffering, loss, dehumanizing events, grief, torture, destruction and death related in the Books About The War. I am not 'bored' of The War. I am merely bored of Books About The War. I'm not saying people shouldn't write them, or that people shouldn't read them. I am merely saying that I am bored of reading them. I am bored of reading their blurbs, reviews, award announcements etc.

On reflection though, perhaps what is most boring about Books About The War is that, despite the details of suffering, loss, dehumanizing events, grief, torture, destruction and death these stories tell, we're still fighting wars. We still manage to resort to war as a means to an end, even when we know that that end is suffering, loss, dehumanizing events, grief, torture, destruction and death. Why read countless books on the topic, learn about these things from a multitude of different angles, hear the same stories from different voices, if we refuse to learn anything from them?

This book is about The War. But it is not A Book About The War. This book is incredible. It's a book which, at its heart, is about people, which I suppose is also what war is about: When was the last time ants, or spiders, or trout or emus or pythons or chickens or sheep went to war?

This book asks what it means to love someone, how to love someone, how to know when you love someone, and how to face the questions any answers to these questions raise. This book asks what it is to be a human, and what on earth you can do about it if you find that you are.

It is a wonderful, glorious, magical thing. And I bought it for a pound. Amazing.

Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

Guh. Ugh. Ahhhhhhhh. You know that feeling when you pour yourself off a bus at the end of a really long bus ride, possibly taken overnight, in a bus with no suspension and a tv blaring at you in a foreign tongue? That's kind of how I feel after (finally) finishing this book. Also, during the bus ride the guy across the aisle was snoring and I woke up dribbling on myself.

I first became aware of this book at about 15, when I seem to recall having read the title in the liner notes to a CD / in an interview with someone insufferably cool. Whatever stopped me from reading it then deserted me at some point because recently when I came across it on my mate's bookshelf, I (mistakenly) thought it was time.

It was not time.

I'm not saying it's not interesting: the dude is discussing the whole basis of Western thought, the subject/object divide, the notion of Quality and the God head, and also teenage boys and insanity. It's just that, well, it's not good. The narrative structure and devices are clunky, the prose inelegant and the characters flat. He picked a tough subject. And he failed.

What is really interesting though, is a) how many people rave about this book, and b) the fact that in the edition I read, a 25th anniversary edition, they included excerpts from the correspondence between the author and his editor. It's rare to get these insights into how these relationships work unless you actively seek them out, but I can imagine that in a book of this scope, the working relationship here was crucial. It's nice to see that acknowledged in print, even if in this case, I don't think it produced very readable results. Seems I'm in the minority here though.

I haven't had a great year of it in the reading stakes, on reflection. No pressure, next book, but try not to piss me off.

An Inconvenient Child by Sharyn Killens

The worst autobiography I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading was Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis, lead singer of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Not only was it self-indulgent, boring and full of stories about shagging anything that moved, the ghost writing was so bad that I’m pretty sure a dyslexic ten-year-old could have done a better job. The Inconvenient Child is not as dire as that particular effort, but it didn’t really grip me either. I think it’s a great example of what happens when an ordinary person tells an extraordinary story – the book turns out……a bit ordinary.

So the true story is amazing – white Aussie chick gets banged up by hot American Navy Man in the late 1940’s. Navy Man sails home, leaves woman to have illegitimate coloured child alone during the rollickin’ good times of the White Australia policy. Woman refuses to acknowledge child as daughter, puts her in several horrific girls’ homes throughout the years, gives her presents on intermittent visiting Sundays, won’t tell her what her father’s name is until after he dies and screws her up royally for life.

Author Sharyn Killens is now in her early 60’s, and has come to terms with her past and found a sense of belonging meeting her half siblings in America. There’s a refreshing lack of self-editing of events from her past (which sometimes you feel the subjects of autobiographies must be tempted to do, wiping out mentions of incidents that may depict them in not so flattering light, which is probably what I would do) - it’s all laid out bare here which I thought was pretty brave. There’s not much imagination in the writing itself, but I guess when the truth is so entertaining, she didn’t feel the need to embellish any further. I’m sure writing a book about your shitty childhood works out to be far cheaper than going to see a shrink.

The Spare Room by Helen Garner

Let's just get this out of the way - I loved this book. Loved like it will sit in my middle book shelf, be re-read every couple of years and lent out to friends with a stern look and strict instructions on its safe return.

It’s the kind of book you devour in one sitting, which is pretty easy to do as it’s about 200 pages of size 14 font, almost like the big sister of a short story (by this logic, why aren’t novels just called ‘tall stories?’). If it’s a novel at all is put in question not only by its length and Garner’s more recent forays into non-fiction (which she is also damn good at) but it’s confusing to me that the main character is a 50-something writer called Helen who lives in Melbourne. For Chrissakes, call the woman Kate, Penny – but not after yourself! It’s a mere quibble since the book is a gem.

After the hard slog of my last reading adventure, I really enjoyed not being able to put it down and save some more for later. I was going to give myself book heartburn – quite literally. The Spare Room did what a good book should, which is leave a little imprint on you that makes you smile on the tram a few days later, or has a character that reminds you of someone you love, and it brings that person back to life for you, for a wonderful fleeting moment.

It was my Gran who revisited me as I travelled through main character Nicola’s struggle with terminal cancer, the ever familiar doctor’s appointments, her annoying but understandable grim optimism that her quack Vitamin C treatments are working her avoidance of death. It makes you wonder how you would cope if you were the one diagnosed.

Despite knowing the likely outcome of the book from the off-set, Garner creates this hyper real suburban world, where Nicola’s best friend Helen can only cook and change sweat drenched sheets to help her, helplessly watching as Nicola weakens with the passing weeks. Garner is a brutally honest writer, and some of the emotions are so raw and disarming – Helen’s anger at Nicola for not facing up to the likelihood of death, admitting she’s unable to cope with looking after her as she declines, and Nicola’s admission that no-one has ever asked her how she feels, so she just pretends. The part where Helen squeezes a glass of fresh OJ for Nicola, who drains it and says “That was the best orange juice I think I’ve ever tasted” was so fucking tender it made me want to cry. It summed up what your best friend will do for you when in need, and how sometimes the small things are like gold.

A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon

I don't have a load to say about this, except that I devoured it like a suburban housewife with a fresh Woman's Day. It's not particularly engaging or well written, I wasn't smitten with the characters, but somehow, it had me.

Much like his earlier book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, A Spot of Bother is another 'let's talk about mental illness in a light comic fiction setting' exercise. How The Curious Incident won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award I will never know, but I'm pleased to report that I don't think the bothersome spot has won any such accolades.

The verdict: It's pretty meh. There are better, more engaging and more interesting ways you could spend your time, and there are far more insightful ways you could learn more about or engage further with mental illness. That said, if you were stuck down a well and someone dropped A Spot of Bother down to entertain you while they ran to get a ladder, you'd read it before you wiped your butt with it. Much like a Woman's Day.

Say When by Catherine Deveny

So, first book of the year. A birthday present from you, Nik, which I have been patiently waiting to read. I think that golden time of post-Christmas indulgence come-down is best sated with a good book, and, having devoured two Agatha Christies between Christmas and New Year, I was on a roll.

Having not lived in Melbourne for some years, my relationship with Catherine Deveny’s column has been mostly through you, Nik, sending me links. It’s not like I’m leafing through the Age on a daily basis, after all. And, I guess, for some things, not being in Melbourne means I have no idea what she’s talking about (football or Mayoral related things, for example).

That said, I mostly enjoy her column when I do read it, and I felt much the same about this collection: most of the time I enjoyed it. Highlights were: ‘Jamie Oliver’ - about Jamie selfishly saving us from eating shit food; ‘Weasel Words’ – a topic Don Watson did much better and more fully but which it never hurts to be reminded of and this is a great example of such; ‘Dog Whistling’ – which is a phenomenon I’d never heard called that before but which is hilarious and poignant; and ‘Nigella Lawson’ – on how every girl’s got one: a woman they would lick like a cake bowl.

It so happens that Catherine and I see eye-to-eye on many, many topics, and I often, while reading this found myself wanting to shout things like ‘Yes! I know!’, as though we were actually sat across a table talking to one another. And yet sometimes, I felt like I wanted to kick her in the shins. Sometimes I just think I’m mad at her because she gets paid to think these things and I don’t, but other times I feel like she’s harming the cause. Honestly, going after Sam Newman for being a misogynist cunt, while true, is a cheap shot. There are other, more productive ways to highlight the social crisis of patriarchy surely, than sticking Sam Newman in a mulcher (though that would also be quite rewarding, I don’t disagree).

Her diatribe on about how debutante balls are an outmoded crack fest for boring middle-class idiots, while also possibly true, is completely superficial and fails to seriously ask what it is about these rituals that has ‘sixteen-year-old girls volunteering to be reduced to nothing more than gender stereotypes and sex objects judged on their looks, not their brains, creativity or ability’. Even though I could, in all honesty, write these exact words myself:

‘And no. I didn’t do my deb. At the time I proclaimed to anyone who would listen that it was nothing more than a meat market. Truth be told I didn’t think any bloke would partner me. Thank God for my teenage angst and poor self-confidence.’

I don’t think my mates who did it are dickheads. What is it about these things that young women, and young men, enjoy? That would be a more interesting discussion. This just-add-water feminist angst is a cheap shot. Which I wish I had been clever enough to figure out how to get paid for.

Much like I love Judith Lucy, I love Deveny’s alcoholic, acid tongue approach, and more than once reading this book I laughed out loud. The lady has the skillz. And, it’s nice to be preached to by someone singing from the same song sheet as you, but it’s not challenging or even very useful. And I think Catherine could do more.

Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey

I bet you’re thinking I picked this book as my first blog post to show how fancy my reading tastes are, my bookshelves positively teaming with Booker Prize winning reads. Not true. I recently went to a wedding at Gleniffer Reserve on the NSW North Coast, an absolutely magical spot with a super cute church, and was told by one of the guests that the place takes centre stage in Carey’s 1988 book. Not long after, I spotted it in a second hand bookshop and snapped it up, and settled down pre-Christmas to have a crack.

Fast forward to about a week ago, when I finally finished it. Yes, the church at Gleniffer was the scene for the opening chapters, and I had that warm sense of ‘I’ve been there!’ that always adds an extra dimension to a book (Melbournians will know this feeling from reading ‘The Slap’) but that wore off pretty quickly and I realized I had a sleeping pill in book form. I’ve never been the hugest fan of period literature, so mix that with Carey’s penchant for extreme detail – I don’t really care if the buttons on his cuff are bronze but thanks for sharing – and the religious theme, it was a triple whammy. It was the short chapters that kept me going, holding out hope for something, anything, interesting to happen; next thing you know I’m at the 180 page mark (which is the psychological goalpost where you feel you’ve already invested so much time that you Must.Finish.This.God.Damned.Book). This is where the tried and trusted ‘skimming’ approach I taught myself in uni came in handy. Gambler, glass blowing, goat sacrifice……oops, that last one I might have snuck in there to liven things up.

I should have liked it more, considering that Lucinda is a pretty kick arse female character, but Oscar and his God bothering impotence were so frustrating that she faded into the background for me. The story is epic, and the colonial setting is the scene for one of the book’s truly shocking moments depicting the treatment of the indigenous by Australia’s settlers, but as a whole, it failed to grab my imagination.