Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

Oh Dave. Your fiction befuddles me but your non-fiction talks straight to my heart. After sharing the plight of Sudanese Lost Boy Valentino Achak Deng in his earlier work What is the What, this time around its Abdulrahman Zeitoun’s turn. A Syrian Muslim who lives in New Orleans with his American-born Muslim wife Kathy and their kids, he gets caught up in the storm of disorganization and government fallibility in the aftermath of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.

I’m not going to give too much away, but even writing about it now makes my blood boil at the complete ineptitude and cowboy ways of the Bush administration. More about guns and force than compassion and common sense, they made a complete cock-up of the humanitarian effort so sorely needed after the natural disaster and through the plight of this one man, shows how afraid, paranoid and stupid the whole country’s law enforcement and government agencies had become in the wake of September 11.

Read this and weep.

A Death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger

It’s quite funny to look at incidents from your childhood and see how they have subconsciously affected what you become or how you act as an adult (change the word ‘funny’ for ‘sad’ or ‘weird’ depending on said childhood). The cover of this book shows Junger as a baby, being held by his mum, as Al DeSalvo, a man who worked as a labourer on their house, stands behind them. Just a few short years after this picture was taken, DeSalvo was later found to be the infamous Boston Strangler and decades on, Junger is an acclaimed journalist, lauded especially for his work in war-torn Afghanistan and reporting on corruption in Africa.

This book is his retracing of the events of that year in his hometown of Belmont, as DeSalvo waged a terrifying war on the women of Boston. But it’s more than just your every day crime biography, looking at the black men who were incarcerated for DeSalvo’s crimes and the blatant racism and police force errors that led him to staying on the loose.

Junger’s eye for detail, and obvious meticulous research, feeds this book, which feels like an extended newspaper profile. It keeps the pace and keeps you reading, so much so that I devoured it in the space of two nights (take that, Toltz). A disturbing look into dark suburban Americana.

A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

Urrrrgh. I blame this book for the blogging malaise of late. I started this book in mid-June and gave up, halfway through, about six weeks later. I JUST DID NOT CARE. And by halfway, I mean I read 300 pages and still did not persevere. I can’t quite put my finger on why I was so disinterested. Am putting this in the You Win Some, You Lose Some book basket.

The Tax Inspector by Peter Carey

You couldn't argue that it's a catchy title, that's for darn sure. I know you didn't get much out of Oscar & Lucinda, Nik, and this wasn't my favourite Carey (I think that gong goes to My Life as a Fake), but it was a pretty amazing novel for a couple of reasons:

1. It's set in a car yard
2. One main character is a pregnant tax inspector, the other is a frustrated wannabe teenage car salesman
3. It made me homesick with a reference to Dandenong (however, I was listening to Paul Kelly at the time and I do not have a heart of steel)

The characters are so unnerving, and the setting so vile, that it's hard to know how to feel about them from page to page. This novel is about defining your relationship with change and decay - do you cede to it, embrace it, reverse it, create it, wallow in it, become one with it, or rise above it? It's about the country being swallowed by the city, it's about the past being lost to the present. It's about honour.

It's a quick read, which will, somehow, make you long for the smell of rain on cement, the sight of a pile of tyres, the sound of a big chicken wire gate scraping across a driveway, and taste of a burnout in your mouth.