Six degrees of separation, FROM The girl with the dragon tattoo TO The natural way of things

January 7, 2017December 4, 2016 / Whispering Gums / 40 Comments

Ok, I admit it, I’m hooked on this meme, not only because it’s a fun intellectual challenge to find links between books, but also because it gives me an opportunity to revisit books I’ve read, which helps keep them fresh in my mind. For those who haven’t caught up with this meme, it’s the Six Degrees of Separation monthly “meme” and it’s currently hosted by Kate (booksaremyfavouriteandbest). Each month, she nominates a book, and then we who play create a chain of seven books, linking one from the other as the spirit moves. Unfortunately, like last month, I haven’t read the starting book, Stieg Larsson’s The girl with the dragon tattoo but I promise I’ve read all the books in my chain!

Now, you might expect me to link Larsson’s The girl with the dragon tattoo to another crime/mystery novel or, perhaps, to another novel by a Swedish author or one set in Sweden, but I’m not going down these paths. This novel, as you may know, was published posthumously – and this is the tack I’m going to take. It has led me straight to Australian poet Dorothy Porter’s collection, The bee hut (my review), which was published after she died from breast cancer. This is one of those books that I don’t need to be reminded of, because its ending is so powerfully generous. She wrote, just two and a half weeks before her death, the following lines: Something in me/despite everything/can’t believe my luck. Now that’s inspiring!

Generosity of spirit – a willingness to view the world positively – is something I prize. If we were all only a little more generous to each other, surely the world would be a better place, or am I naive? Anyhow, one of the most generous books I’ve read since starting this blog was Izzeldin Abuelaish’s memoir I shall not hate (my review). If anyone had a reason to hate, it’s he – he lost three daughters and a niece in an attack on Gaza by the Israeli Defence Forces – and yet he chose the “path of light” over that of “darkness” because he believes in “co-existence, not endless cycles of revenge and retribution”. If he can do it, surely the rest of us can?

Now Izzeldin Abulaish also happens to be a medical doctor, which reminds me of a fictional doctor, Rieux in Albert Camus’ The plague (my review), who, albeit in a different circumstances, evinces generosity of spirit or selflessness. This is a book I’ve read a few times, and will very likely read again, because it’s about people being prepared to take a stand, people who put themselves at risk. Rieux himself talks of people who, by “refusing to bow down to pestilences [whether these be natural or man-made, like, say, Nazism], strive their utmost to be healers.”

And now, to get off this generosity/selflessness bandwagon, albeit it’s a worthy topic to discuss, I’m going to do the more obvious thing and link via the author’s nationality. I haven’t read a lot of French authors on this blog, but one I did read one fairly recently, Pierre Lemaitre’s The great swindle (my review). Its story of France in the aftermath of the First World War is a powerful one, but one of the issues that my reading group discussed when doing this book was its translation. Some felt it was a bit uneven. I didn’t feel that – I felt the author intended an unevenness or jerkiness – but I am always a little bothered about reading translations because there’s a mediator between me and the text.

However, this doesn’t stop me reading translations because they are the only way, given I’m not fluent in multiple languages, that I can read works from non-English writers. Hence, my next link is to another translated work, Sawako Ariyoshi’s The doctor’s wife (my review), which is historical fiction about the Japanese doctor, Hanaoka Seishū (1760-1835) who is purported to be the first to use general anaesthesia to perform surgery. However, as the book’s title suggests, the Ariyoshi’s main concern is not him, but the women in his life, his wife and controlling mother. She explores the competition that occurs between these two women who play a secondary role in the life of the important man.

A recent book which explores the secondary role of women to men is Charlotte Wood’s The natural way of things (my review). It’s a very different book, which takes as its starting point the way women’s sexuality is used against them in the support if not furtherance of male power. But it does have a subtext, that we also see in Ariyoshi, to do with ways in which women can be their own worst enemy.

And so, quite unintentionally as I just followed my nose, I see that I have come almost full circle from a novel set in Sweden which reflects misogynistic behaviour to an Australian novel which confronts such behaviour head on! In between we’ve travelled to Australia, the Middle East, France and Japan, and explored, in some at least, the best in human behaviour! Such is the reader’s lot.

Where would The girl with the dragon tattoo take you – your first step at least?

Louise Mack, The world is round (Review)

January 5, 2017January 3, 2023 / Whispering Gums / 25 Comments

I’ve had Louise Mack’s debut novel, The world is round, on my TBR for about 20 years. Published in 1896, when she was 26 years old, it’s a fairly straightforward tragicomedy about a young well-to-do 21-year-old girl, Jean, who aspires to be a writer, and the two men who love her, the 30-plus-year-old self-confident, successful lawyer-and-writer Musgrave, and the around-25-year-old, shy and financially struggling Harrison. It’s a short work, a novella really, being just 93 pages in my edition.

Now, when I was searching Trove for information about Mack for this week’s Monday Musings, I found a couple of articles about her writing, amongst a myriad about her lecture tours. One was written in 1895, before this novel was published but after some of her verse and short prose pieces started appearing in journals like the Bulletin. The article quotes Mrs Bright, editor of Cosmos:

In these early days it is not possible to predict the place that Miss Mack is destined to fill in Australian literature. At present she shines chiefly in dialogue and a quaint, satirical style; peculiarly noticeable in sketches like “A study in Invitations.” In time she may develope [sic] a faculty for descriptive writing, which will supply the only quality now lacking to ensure her high rank among the popular novelists of the day.

The other was written in 1896, soon after the publication of her novel. The writer says:

Miss Mack has a particularly taking satirical style, but her descriptive writing is hardly up to her ability in the other department. Were she to but slightly improve in that qualification it would enhance the already strong position she has attained in the ranks of popular writers.

So, the praise is qualified. Her niece, the writer Nancy Phelan who wrote the introduction to my edition, discusses her not living up to this early potential. She notes that a common view is that she was “praised too soon, told she was good and encouraged to rush into print” when she needed time to sit back and think, and “be disappointed”. Phelan writes:

She wrote instinctively … but without proper guidance and criticism her work too often became facile. Facility, with a fertile imagination and love of inventing stories, made her a successful romantic novelist but it eroded her talent, and years of formula writing elbowed aside the poet. She never lost her poetic awareness but had little occasion to use it. Haste, lack of reflection, putting words on paper before they were ready robbed them of their true value; it was quicker and easier to write of trivial events than to try to address deep, difficult thoughts and emotions.

Yet in all Louise’s books there are glimpses of the writer she might have been. Even in her most idiotic novels there are occasional patches of true feeling or sensitive descriptions …

Why have I written all this? Well, partly because it might explain why this particular writer from the past has sunk from view. However, I’d argue that The world is round is worth reading – for a couple of reasons. One is that it is a good read, in which you can see why she received early praise. As our 1895 and 1896 writers above say, her dialogue is good and she has a lovely, light, satirical eye. (I’m going to share an excerpt which shows both of these in a Delicious Descriptions next week.) The other is that it is a good example of why “classics” (or older works) are worth reading. I’m going to focus my post on these two points.

a “brilliant little study”

The 1896 writer notes that “the reader’s report” for this novel described it as a “brilliant little study of two men and two women, sparkling and witty, and told in a graphic style”. It is a fun read, still today. It has a light touch, never wallowing in the issues it raises, and not weighed down with long explication or too many adjectives that you sometimes find in debut novelists. There are moments of sadness or pathos – obviously at least one of the would-be lovers is going to be disappointed, for a start – but Mack never becomes sentimental. (You can see this skill in those columns I referred to in my Monday Musings.)

The story is told third person, chronologically, in named chapters – “Musgrave”, “Jean”, “In which a friend is brutal” – and takes place in various interiors, such as James Musgrave’s chambers, Harrison’s classroom, and Jean’s home. Mack draws on the life she knows, presenting a picture of a small group of characters moving around each other in a small environment. This is very reminiscent of Jane Austen, to whom there is a tongue-in-cheek allusion in this conversation between Jean and Musgrave:

“I don’t suppose I will ever be a George Eliot, or a Thackeray, but perhaps I may be a–”
“Miss Austen.”
“Miss Austen! oh, surely I’ll be something b–I mean surely I won’t be like her.”
“She did some good work.”

I mean to say! Anyhow, Mack’s descriptions of her small group of people and their interactions ring true, while also drawing on standard literary tropes, like the well-to-do heroine and her poor friend, the experienced confident suitor and the awkward poor one. The plot plays out, perhaps more through little vignettes than a flowing narrative, but it is enjoyable to read, largely because these vignettes are well-drawn, and confidently mix a light tone with the occasional darker one. I’ll leave the story there.

on reading “classics”

As I was reading this old book or forgotten “classic” (let’s not get into the definitions of “classic” here now), I started thinking about why we read such books. It’s easy to explain those classics that belong to the canon: they address the big universal themes or ideas, their writing is skilled and timeless, and, often, they have innovated or contributed something to literary culture. But, what about what we might call the second rung, books like Mack’s The world is round? Are they really worth reading over contemporary writers? I’d say yes, and one of the justifications is in the first line of Mack’s novel. It starts:

Sydney was revelling in the clear, cold weather of June, the most delicious month of the Australian seasons.

Now, that is not an attitude most Australians would have today, but is clearly how the colonials, those transplants from mild temperate Britain, felt about Australia’s climate. In other words, books written in a different time can provide a fascinating insight into the attitudes and values of that time. They might be fiction, but they can’t help also betraying their era. For students of colonial Australia, Mack’s novella offers some delightful insights into “the life and times”.

I don’t want to bore you with details, but will just share one more example. It concerns the poor friend who tells Jean that she “can’t write about Australia, it doesn’t appeal” to her. She admits she’s a “Colonial” but she knows nothing of bush life. She says, “I’ve never taken my country into my soul, and never will until I get away from it”. However, she’s poor, and is offered a job governessing in the bush on a cattle station. She learns to love the Bushies and to prefer them over “the posturing, pseudo-intellectual Sydney set”. She writes several pages to Jean on the subject. Now, this friend plays a role in the plot in terms of providing a counter assessment of Jean’s literary skills and there’s a plot reason for sending her away, but I can’t see much reason for this little outburst, except for Mack to make some point about colonial society and its values.

So, there you have it. This is less review, more wandering reflections, but I hope I’ve convinced you that Louise Mack is a worthy addition to the list of past writers who should be kept alive.

Louise Mack
The world is round
Pymble: Angus & Robertson, 1993 (orig. pub. 1896)
93pp.
ISBN: 9780207180163

Blogging highlights for 2016

January 4, 2017December 31, 2023 / Whispering Gums / 16 Comments

It seems that I’ve established a bit of an end of year trifecta with my Australian Women Writers’ Challenge wrap-up post, followed by posts on Reading highlights and Blogging highlights. This post, obviously, is the Blogging one. I do it as much for my own record, because I enjoy tracking trends on my blog, so please don’t feel obliged if you’ve had enough!

Random blogging stats

I love sharing some of the searches that find my blog, so here are some of this year’s more interesting ones:

freemasons secret magnify glass: what the?
ginger gits: ditto.
what pages are the best quotes on in red dog: haha, was this someone trying to short-cut writing an essay?
whispering gums means: I’d love them to tell me if they found out!
write a short note on the picturesque: presumably a homework question but I love that s/he seems to have typed in the whole question.

And then there were multiple searches relating to my 8th most popular post this year, What do you say when you order food at a restaurant (posted November 2014). The search terms included what else can i say in place of orderin restaurent, to place order in a restaurant what we say?, fine some expression ordery meal ins the restaurant, and when ordering food restaurant may i have. What a hoot, particularly when, quite coincidentally, the topic of what to say in restaurants became a bit of a family joke over Christmas!

Other stats tell the story of my year. This year was rather frenetic for me with some major family commitments but I managed to write more posts, 164 in fact, than last year’s paltry 133. My blog visitors came from 172 countries, and while Australia, the USA, Britain and Canada filled the top four slots, I love that India, the Philippines and Germany followed them. My most active commenters this year were: Lisa (ANZLitLovers), Stefanie (So Many Books, So Little Time), Ian Darling, Bill (The Australian Legend), and Meg. A big thanks to them, and to everyone who reads and/or comments on my blog. Whether or not you comment, it is a joy to share books and reading with you.

Challenges/Memes

As I wrote in my AWW Challenge wrap up, I will participate in the Challenge again this year. I won’t set a formal goal but expect to read around 30. (See here for the Sign Up page). I will also probably do the AWW Bingo Card challenge again, though, as with this year, I expect to do it more by serendipity than by design. It was fun seeing whether my reading was varied enough to slot into the set categories.

Late last year, I started doing the #sixdegreesofseparation meme, currently run by Kate (booksaremyfavouriteandbest). I enjoyed the way it made me look back at past reading, thereby refreshing my memory, so I plan to join in again when I can this year.

And to wrap up my wrap-ups …

I’ve already said it in my Reading Highlights post, but I’ll reiterate it: thanks to everyone who read, commented on and/or “liked” my blog last year – and thanks to all the other wonderful bloggers out there, even though I don’t always manage to visit everyone as much as I’d like. You prove that cyberspace can be a positive place. I wish you all happy reading in 2017.

And finally, a big thanks to the authors who wrote the books that we love to read and talk about, and to the publishers and booksellers who get the books out there. May 2017 be a great one for you all.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Louise Mack

January 2, 2017January 3, 2017 / Whispering Gums / 15 Comments

I promised in my Reading Highlights post that my first review of the year would be for a book from my TBR pile, and so it will be – hopefully in a couple of days. However, I suspect that the book, and maybe even the author, will be unknown to most of my readers here so I’ve decided to use my first Monday Musings of the year to introduce the author, Louise Mack.

Louise Mack, by Kerry & Co, 1890s (Photo:
National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an23474744, via ADB)

I’ve had Mack’s first novel, The world is round, on my TBR since the mid 1990s when I found it on a remainder table. It had been published under Imprint Classics by Angus & Robertson in 1993, and although it’s only 93 pages, I somehow didn’t read it then, and kept not reading it – until now. But, more on it later this week.

Louise Mack was born in Tasmania in 1870, the seventh child and first daughter of a family which ended up numbering 13! Her father was a Wesleyan minister, and they moved around, ending up in Sydney by the time Mack was in high school. She went to Sydney Girls’ High where she met and became friendly with Ethel Turner (who was also born in 1870). I wrote in my post on Ethel Turner’s juvenilia that Ethel and her sister, Lilian, established a magazine Iris when the school’s newspaper, Gazette, which was edited by Louise Mack, rejected Ethel’s contributions! However, I understand that they were very good friends and, in fact, Turner apparently met her husband at the Mack family home.

Australian author Nancy Phelan, who was Mack’s niece, wrote the entry about her in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB), and also the introduction to the novel I’ve read. I don’t want to reiterate what you can read in the ADB, but here’s a potted history. After school she worked as a governess before being becoming “a regular contributor to the Bulletin in the late 1880s”, with the encouragement of owner-editor J. F. Archibald and editor A. G. Stephens. Phelan suggests that Mack perhaps received too much attention and praise, implying that it impacted the development of her talent. She married, but it failed and she went to England, around 1900, where she wrote novels and serials, travelled, and worked as a journalist, including as a war correspondent. She returned to Australia in 1915 and became a touring speaker or lecturer, something she did right through to the 1930s. During this time back in Australis, she wrote more novels and married a second time (more happily), before dying in 1935, “possessionless”.

“little lady”

They’re the dry facts. She was quite a colourful character, with Phelan describing her as “fair, pretty, extroverted, audacious, unpredictable, a genuine Bohemian who chose a life of adventure and insecurity”. Phelan writes in my novel’s introduction that Mack “grew up in a series of large, shabby, untidy parsonages, with no luxuries but plenty of books … books, as necessary as bread, were constantly discussed”. I found an article in Trove which announces her as a rising literary star. It suggests that:

Miss Mack owes much of her development to her mother’s literary tastes, and the varied training that an intellectual father can bestow on his children. (The Methodist, 23 Nov 1895)

My Trove search retrieved pages and pages of hits on her name, many of them from newspapers all around Australia – from Dubbo to Perth – announcing her lecture tour on her war experience, which included experiencing German occupation and bombardment in Belgium and going behind German lines. In her mid to late 40s at the time of the tour, she is, patronisingly to our modern ears, described in these announcements/reports, as “this charming little lady” or “the pretty and charming little lady”. This is the woman who, one of these articles says, was asked by Scotland Yard to report on a meeting of spies with Germans in Antwerp to which she’d been an eye-witness. This article’s writer also calls her a “little lady” but a bit later describes her more appropriately as “this daring and travelled lady”. S/he reports on an interview with Mack:

“I just love lecturing,” Miss Mack said; “it is the most fascinating work I have ever taken up. Indeed, I may say that I just live for the moment when 8 o’clock strikes, and I and my pictures begin to tell the story of a Woman’s Experience in the Greatest War this world has ever known.” (Western Mail, 17 September 1915)

Mack, you see, went the whole hog and illustrated her talks with moving pictures. Reports suggest that she was an excellent and engaging speaker. Some of these talks were given under the auspices of, and raised money for, the Red Cross. Her book, A woman’s experiences in the Great War, was published in 1915.

I’m not going to discuss her writing in any detail here, because I’ll do that in my review post. Instead I’ll share a couple of columns that she wrote in the 1930s in the Australian Womens Weekly, for whom I’m guessing she must have been a columnist. These columns – Louise Mack’s Diary and Louise Mack Advises – provide some insight into her values and sense of humour.

In a Diary column I found this on Mrs Bradfield, wife of Australian engineer and designer of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, John Bradfield:

I’VE always been wondering what would happen if Dr. Bradfield got his title, and dear Mrs. Bradfield became Lady Bradfield, and somehow, between myself and my diary, I must confess I’m glad that Mrs. Bradfield is still there. Dozens of times coming back from hospital, getting out of the train at Gordon, I would find my suitcase seized, or my parcels grabbed, and there’d be Mrs. Bradfield trotting along besides me, coming out of her way so that she could help carry someone’s burdens.

Could Lady Bradfield have done that? Ah, yes! Title or no title, this little simple, pale, absolutely natural woman, all kindness, with a quite remarkable craze for carrying other people’s parcels, would always have been Mrs. Bradfield. That’s her real title, her many friends think.

I like her focus on kindness, on the unimportance of “titles”, and her light humorous touch.

And, one of the advice columns. It’s called “The gentle art of giving” and asks “Do you give? Or Do you grab? The commonest way of giving is to give what you can spare. But that’s not giving at all, ethically speaking”. Fascinating. It made me think of Australian ethicist Peter Singer and his views on giving. However, let’s not get sidetracked by that now. Mack goes on to suggest that giving is good for your looks! She suggests getting on a tram and looking around:

Can’t you tell at a glance who hoards and who gives? It is written on their faces. It is graven around their lips. It is mirrored in their eyes, giving, or grabbing. The face that gives has a better complexion because the blood flows happily through capillaries kept open by the light-heartedness of generous doings. The face that gives has brighter eyes and sweeter lips. Oh, particularly about the lips does the will to give reveal itself in its full beauty.

She then gives examples of women who give and don’t give, ending with Myrtle who has almost no food left, when in comes her brother. Mack writes:

And there before my eyes took place a metamorphosis. Ovid wasn’t in it. One moment Myrtle was a grey woman with a quarter of a loaf of bread and a cold chop, and now she turned into a gracious creature, all wealth and possessions, that she was handing away to Tom. She whisked a bit of tea into one parcel, a quarter loaf into another, two potatoes and an onion into another, a cold chop out of her safe, two apples for the children, then pressed threepence into poor old Tom’s hand, with, “It’s pouring; take a tram.”

That was giving, indeed.

Giving is when you press your thumb down, down on the indicator of your heart—and, pressing still, and yet again pressing, send your will to give up, up, up, to the very highest storey of your soul.

Louise Mack sounds like a woman worth knowing … and yet is, I believe, unknown to most Australians. Such is life!

Reading highlights for 2016

January 1, 2017January 1, 2017 / Whispering Gums / 40 Comments

And so we finally say goodbye to a year many of us would like to forget, but before we do, I would like to share my 2016 reading highlights. As usual, I won’t be naming top picks, because I’m a wuss. It’s too hard. So, instead, I’ll be sharing highlights which combine best reads with those that were interesting for some reason or another.

First, though, this year’s …

Literary highlights

By literary highlights I primarily mean literary events. I went to a smaller number this year but they were good ones:

Tenth anniversary celebration for regional publisher, Finlay Lloyd. Held at the National Library of Australia, this was a most enjoyable occasion, with several authors, including Carmel Bird, Alan Gould and Paul McDermott, speaking about their FL books.
Canberra Writers Festival on which I wrote four posts (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 and Recap): What a thrill to have a writers festival here again after a very long hiatus. Although my messy year meant I didn’t plan well enough in advance for the event, it was great being part of the buzz. What I attended was excellent, and I understand funding is guaranteed for another couple of years. Woo hoo.
The annual Seymour Biography Lecture, given this year by David Marr. Titled Here I stand, it was a fascinating talk which provided much for me, and commenters on my blog, to ponder on, particularly regarding Marr’s exhortation for the biographer to keep out of the biography.

Reading highlights

As in previous years, I’m going to discuss this year’s reading under categories which reflect this year’s experience.

The reading …

Debut novels: I enjoy including debut works in my reading diet. This year I read around six, of which my two favourites would probably be Josephine Rowe’s A loving faithful animal for tackling the Vietnam War and the devastating impact of PTSD on a family, and Julie Proudfoot’s tight, powerful novella, The neighbour, which still has me thinking months after reading it.
Memoir/Autobiography: This was the surprise trend of the year (as Historical Fiction was last year). It certainly wasn’t planned but I ended up reading 8 memoirs/autobiographies, plus Anna Rosner Blay’s Sister, sister which, while mostly biography, had a touch of memoir about it too. I can’t possibly describe them all here but I do want to mention the three World War 2 mother-daughter stories, Blay’s book, Halina Rubin’s Journeys with my mother, and Susan Varga’s Heddy and me. I liked the way these daughters blended the forms of biography and memoir to produce something substantial yet engagingly personal. Then there were the two essay-collection-memoirs, Fiona Wright’s Small acts of disappearance and Georgia Blain’s Births deaths marriages, which played with the form in a different way. And oh dear, I loved them all, but I’ll name just one more, Gerald Murnane’s Something for the pain. My how I loved the sly way he told us about his wider life through describing his love of the turf.
Indigenous Australian writers: Shamefully, I only read four works by indigenous Australians, but at least I continued my education into indigenous Australian life and culture. I’ll name just two: Ali Cobby Eckermann’s beautiful and generous historical fiction verse novel Ruby Moonlight, and Bruce Pascoe’s more overtly political Dark emu.
Short stories galore: As always, I read a goodly number of short stories this year, though fewer complete collections than in 2015. The standout collection was Elizabeth Harrower’s A few days in the country and other stories. Such a great read, I’d recommend it to anyone. Debut author Cassie Flanagan Willanski’s Here where we live was also an excellent read particularly for telling about life in remoter parts of Australia. My favourite individual short stories included Ted Chiang’s “The story of your life” (adapted to the film Arrival) and the group of stories I read from Christina Stead’s Ocean of story for Lisa’s Christina Stead Reading Week.
From elsewhere: I read only two overseas works this year that weren’t English or American, but both were truly excellent. One was the African classic, Chinua Achebe’s Things fall apart, which I’ve been wanting to read for years. The other was Pierre Lemaitre’s contemporary Prix Goncourt winning novel, The great swindle. Excellent as they were, I must try to do better next year. My other favourite book from elsewhere was American author Anthony Doerr’s All the light we cannot see. Amazing how many stories can still be told, differently, about the Second World War.
Biggest surprise: I hadn’t read Stephen Orr before, but his pastoral novel The hands, which was one of my first reads of the year, is still vividly with me as the year closes. The way he captures the relationship, particularly through dialogue, between father and sons just bowled me over.
Biggest disappointment: This was a surprise for one who loves classics, but I really wouldn’t have been sorry not to have read William Makepeace Thackeray’s The luck of Barry Lyndon.
The ones that got away: As always there were books I wanted to read during the year but just didn’t get to. Prime among them are Jenny Ackland’s The secret son, Larissa Behrendt’s Finding Eliza, Carmel Bird’s Family skeleton, and Kim Mahood’s Position doubtful (another memoir!) Roll on 2017.

Some stats …

For my interest really:

65% of the authors I read were women (2% less than 2015)
32% of the works I read were not by Australian writers (5% more than 2015!)
63% of my reading was fiction (short, long or in-between!) (10% less than 2015)
35% of the works I read were published before 2000 (a whopping 15% more than 2015)

A couple of interesting trends here. There’s the significant reduction in fiction, which is partly due to the big jump in memoirs (about which see above!) And, while I like to read contemporary authors, I also love delving into the past, so I’m pleased to see the increased number of works before 2000. Surprisingly, I managed to read more works overall than last year – a big plus. However, once again, I made woeful inroads into my TBR so, to get me off to a good start, I hereby proclaim that my first 2017 review WILL be for a TBR book. I hope you like it. I’m sure enjoying reading it.

Overall, it was a good reading year, made especially so by you who joined me here. So, a big thankyou for reading my posts, engaging in discussion, recommending more books and, generally, being all-round great people to talk with. I hope 2017 is good to you, and look forward to seeing you here again whenever something takes your fancy.

What were your reading or literary highlights for the year?

👍

Thanks Rose … there sure should be!

Fabulous theme, Sue! I've read the first three books in your chain and have added the last three to my…

Thanks. I try to get a copy. Unfortunately, with the war, flights including postal ones, are pretty precarious, and there's…

I would too Pam … I’ve been told I’d like it!

Whispering Gums

Books, reading and more … with an Australian focus … written on Ngunnawal Country

Month: January 2017