Month: December 2023

Reading highlights for 2023

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With the year’s end, we come to annual highlights posts – my reading highlights post which I like to do on December 31, and my blogging highlights one on January 1. I do my Reading Highlights on the last day of the year, so I will have read (even if not reviewed) all the books I’m going to read in the year. I call it “highlights” because, as many of you will know, I don’t do a list of “best” or even, really, “favourite” books. Instead, I try to capture a picture of what my reading year looked like. I also include literary highlights, that is, reading-related activities which enhance my reading interests and knowledge.

Literary highlights

I got to a few literary events over the year, though by no means all I would have liked to. I was disappointed, though, to not get to any of this year’s Sydney Writers Festival: Live and Local events, partly because of my busy-ness but partly because I didn’t realise until too late that our usual venue had changed this year and I couldn’t seem to make the new multiple venues work in with my commitments.

Reading highlights

As I’ve said before, I don’t have specific reading goals, just some “rules of thumb”. These include reading women writers, reading more First Nations authors, reading some non-anglo literature, and reducing the TBR pile. In recent years, I haven’t made major inroads into any of these but … here’s the thing …

Last year I foreshadowed that this year could be a tricky one with our major downsizing project (along with regular trips to Melbourne) – and so it turned out to be. Decluttering and preparing our house for sale took until July, with our house being sold in mid-August. This was followed by a long settlement which saw us having to maintain the house and garden until early November. It’s been a truly long haul, but we got there. It’s just as well I love short stories because they are ideal for busy, distracted times, and as it turned out, they ended up forming a much larger percentage of my reading diet this year. And, a goodly proportion of that ended up being stories by First Nations authors. Not only did I read more First Nations authors than usual but I read more diversely I read several First Nations American authors, and I read some First Nations Australian speculative fiction – all in short story form.

Each year I present my highlights a bit differently, choosing approaches that I hope will capture the flavour and breadth my reading year. Here are this year’s observations which I hope might entertain, and maybe even enlighten, you. I start by focusing on works/writers/writing, and end with characters (mostly):

  • Great finds: A three-way tie between two (older) American works and one (more contemporary) French novel – African-American writer Gwendolyn Brooks’ wonderfully warm but pointed novella Maud Martha; American writer Susan Glaspell’s short story, “A jury of her peers”; and French Nobel prize-winner Patrick Modiano’s novel, Sundays in August.
  • Dearest to a librarian’s heart: Anthony Doerr’s Cloud cuckoo land made the librarians in my reading group cheer (as would “Special collections” in Rebecca Campbell’s Arboreaility, had they read it. Review to come, but here is Bill’s)
  • Most surprising speculative fiction: A bit of a misnomer because, almost by definition, speculative fiction is surprising, but the first work I read this year, Ambelin Kwaymullina’s short story, “Fifteen days on Mars“, was not only a great read but surprised me by being my most successful post written this year.
  • Most mystifying book: JD Vance’s Hillbilly elegy. How can someone with such a story end up aligning with you-know-who?
  • Truthtellers of the year: Many writers increased my understanding and thinking about First Nations’ issues this year but I’ll share two, First Nations Australian writer Debra Dank in We come with this place, and my (non-Indigenous) brother Ian Terry with his book and exhibition Uninnocent landscapes.
  • Weirdest voices: I love writers who can pull off writing from unusual or surprising perspectives, and I read two experts this year, both through their short story collections – Carmel Bird’s Love letter to Lola, and Chris Flynn’s Here be Leviathans. I love how these writers can use fresh voices to grapple with meaningful-to-me issues, including but not limited to climate change and the ecology.
  • Strongest women: There were many women in my reading diet this year who managed to steer a way through the patriarchal societies they found themselves in, but I’ll name three standouts, Briseis in Pat Barker’s retelling The women of Troy, Lucrezia de’ Medici in Maggie O’Farrell’s The marriage portrait, and Elizabeth Zott in Bonnie Garmus’ Lessons in chemistry.
  • Most challenged mother: Parenting is hard, so who am I to criticise, but patriarchy can make the lives of mothers particularly hard. There were several challenged mothers in my reading this year, such as Frankie’s mother in Rebecca Burton’s Ravenous girls, but the one who struggled most was poor Veda Grey in Edwina Preston’s Bad art mother.
  • Sweetest man: Most men are decent, and Ned in Robbie Arnott’s Limberlost, is one such, but there were some close runners-up, including Will in Eleanor Limprecht’s The coast.
  • Most clueless man: Cathal in Claire Keegan’s short story “So late in the day“.
  • Best neighbours: The quiet women in Susan Glaspell’s above-mentioned story mentioned have to be the winners here, but runners up are the neighbours in Holly Throsby’s Clarke. Gossipy yes, but when the chips are down they are there for you.
  • Most interesting sportspeople: The Tucson basketballers in Jack D. Forbes’ story “Only approved Indians can play made in USA” showed up their northern opponents by being able to speak their own language, but young pedestrian-cum-jockey, Johnny, in Robert Drewe’s Nimblefoot captured my heart.
  • Best trees: There is a beautiful old cottonwood tree in Leslie Marmon Silko’s story “The man to send rain clouds“, which took me back to my days America’s southwest, and Tasmania’s gorgeous huon pine features in Robbie Arnott’s Limberlost, but the trees that brought home humanity’s impact on the land won me over – in Ian Terry’s Uninnocent landscapes (colonialism), and Rebecca Campbell’s Arboreality (climate change)

Each of these books … is a door, a gateway to another place and time. (Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land, p. 216)

These are just some of 2023’s highlights in a very strange but, because of that, quite wonderful year of reading … I’m just sorry I can’t list them all.

Some stats …

I don’t read to achieve specific stats but, as I’ve already mentioned, I do have some reading preferences which I like to track. However, this year was so whacky in terms of those preferences, that I’m not even going to bother sharing them, except to reiterate two big positives to come out of the whackiness:

  • I read more short stories and novellas than usual (and I usually read a good number): over 60% of this year’s reading (as individual stories, collections, anthologies, and linked short stories)
  • I read more First Nations writers than usual (largely because I read several short stories by First Nations American writers): 30%

Sometimes strange years have silver linings.

Tomorrow, I will post my blogging highlights.

Meanwhile, a huge thanks to all of you who read my posts, engage in discussion, recommend more books and, most importantly, keep me on my toes. Our little community is special, to me! I wish you all an excellent 2024, and thank you so much for hanging in this year.

What were your 2023 reading or literary highlights?

William Trevor, The hill bachelors (#Review)

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Well, Kim (Reading Matters) and Cathy’s (746 Books) “A year with William Trevor” project is all but over, and I’ve only done one post – on the titular story in the little The dressmaker’s child collection. The second story, “The hill bachelors” (as in bachelors living in the hills), was first published in his collection titled The hill bachelors.

William Trevor (1928-2016), as most of you will know, is an Irish writer of novels and novellas, short stories and plays. He is particularly good at writing about marginalised people, or those who are loners or outsiders, and writes authentically about them, regardless of their age or gender. “The hill bachelors” is another of these, though perhaps more a variation on the theme. Is the protagonist Paulie marginalised? In a sense perhaps? Is he a loner or outsider? Again, it depends on how you see him, and the choices he makes.

Trevor is one of those writers who lets the reader work out who’s who, what’s what, as we go. The first two paragraphs of this story describe a 68-year-old woman, wearing mourning clothes, waiting for “them” who will decide her future. Very little is overtly explained, but by the end of the second paragraph, we know that she has worked hard and got on with whatever life has thrown at her – and, it seems, she will continue to do so with a calm resignation.

Then, we are introduced to a man we come to realise is her 29-year-old son, Paulie. He is coming for his father’s funeral/wake. He is the youngest of five children, and had not had a good relationship with his “hard” father. It soon becomes apparent that the mother expects the children to work out what will happen to her now – and what will happen to her now, as soon becomes apparent, is that Paulie will return to the family farm. After all, “he was the bachelor of the family”, and his job as a lorry driver “wasn’t much”. However, to do this he will have to give up the woman he loved as she is not interested in a farm life.

While he is working out his notice back in town, his mother is helped by neighbours, the bachelor Hartigan and his sister. It is this sister who introduces the idea of the hill bachelors. She suggests that Paulie would not want to come back because

“It’s bachelors that’s in the hills now. Like himself,” Miss Hartigan added, jerking her bony hand in the direction of the yard, where her brother was up on a ladder, fixing a gutter support.
“Paulie’s not married either, though.”
“That’s what I’m saying to you. What I’m saying is would he want to stop that way?”

Seeing bewilderment in Paulie’s mother’s face, she goes on to explain that “the bachelors of the hills found it difficult to attract a wife to the modest farms they inherited”.

And so Paulie comes back. He “harboured no resentment … it was not the end of the world”. What was “the end of the world”, however, was hearing the woman he loved say that life on a farm did not attract her. He works hard, and he starts dating local women, but Miss Hartigan seems to have known whereof she spoke.

The story is told third person, through the alternating perspectives of the mother and Paulie. We hear what the the rest of the family thinks, or has done, mostly through Paulie’s and his mother’s thoughts and assumptions, through their deep knowledge of how their family works and of the rural traditions within which they live. There is a little dialogue, but not much. Paulie and his mother are both “types” and yet quietly individualised too.

There’s no big drama in this story, just ordinary people making the decisions that seem right at the time. Paulie’s mother is not unkind or demanding. Indeed, she offers to move in with a married daughter, and, in a little revelatory moment, Trevor lets on that she’d shed some private tears in her early days on the farm. She would do her best to make it easy for a new wife, unlike her own experience. However, marriage to a man from the hills has taught her passivity, to do what she’s told, so she resigns herself – as we are led, from the opening paragraphs, to expect she’d do – to see out her lot. Paulie, too, seems resigned, like his mother, to play out the role set for him, even if it means joining the titular hill bachelors.

All this makes it a far more complex story than it might seem on the surface. It means that, as much as we’d like to, it’s hard to see Paulie as a victim, because he does have a choice, difficult though it may be. But the pull of tradition and responsibility is strong, and while Paulie is aware of what is happening to him, he is resigned to it. Ultimately, as he himself realises, “guilt” and “goodness” have nothing to do with it, it just is what it is, “enduring, unchanging” – and he is not going to buck it.

Trevor thus leaves it for us to think about – to think what the different choices might mean for his mother, for Paulie, and, more widely, for the rural way of life that, regardless of their decisions or their own thoughts about it, does seem to be on its way out. It is up to us readers to ponder the bigger picture, to wonder where that will get him, them or the farm. After all, if he doesn’t marry, what will happen? In continuing their rural traditions, will anything be ultimately achieved, or will this be another sad little life?

Cathy (746 Books) has reviewed the collection.

William Trevor
“The hill bachelors”
in William Trevor, The dressmaker’s child
London: Penguin Books, 2005
pp. 21-39
ISBN: 9780141022536
(First published in The hill bachelors, 2000)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Some little recaps

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It’s Christmas Day, so the the question was, do I do a Monday Musings post or not? Will anyone be looking at blogs. If you take part in this holiday season, I hope you are enjoying it in the way you most enjoy – with family, on your own, at the beach or in front of a fire, around a table or with plates on your laps somewhere comfortable. And, if it’s not a holiday season for you, well, then, you just might appreciate things continuing as normal.

But then, the next question was, what to post, because it needed, I felt to be something non-demanding. So, how about a couple of little recaps.

Recap 1: Top Ten Monday Musings posts

I started posting Monday Musings in August 2010, and since then have written 674 of them, making this one no. 675. I love writing them, though at times I leave it a bit late, and they end up being more rushed than I’d like. I can’t promise this will improve as life just seems to keep being busy, but I hope that even the ones that aren’t as comprehensive as I’d like offer some readers something to think about to look into further.

Now, though, I’m sharing the ten posts that have had the most all-time hits. Most of them are older posts – over half are ten plus years old – which is not surprising, I guess. However, in a sense I am surprised to find how many older posts still have a life. I wouldn’t necessarily call these Top Ten my best Monday Musings, and some feel dated to me now, but they are still attracting some attention. Here they are, with their all-time ranking (out of all my posts), and the year they were posted):

Recap 2: Australian Women Writers Challenge

Over the past decade or so, I have devoted my last Monday Musings of the year to the Australian Women Writers Challenge, largely because it was an actual challenge, so I would report on what I had read and on the challenge’s overall stats for that year. However, in January 2022, it changed from being a challenge to a blog/website devoted to promoting often under-recognised or overlooked women writers, from the 19th- and 20th-centuries. We want to bring them back to wider notice.

Barbara Baynton 1892
Baynton 1892 (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

As in 2022, we continued this year to post twice a week: articles or reviews on Wednesdays, and actual writings by women, related where possible to the previous Wednesday’s post, on Fridays. While our change in focus resulted in a drop in stats (that is, in visits to the site) last year, they picked up this year, increasing by nearly 30%. I put this down to the hard work put in by Bill (The Australian Legend), our commissioning editor and writer of monthly posts, and to Challenge founder Elizabeth Lhuede, who prepares all the Friday posts, as well as doing her monthly post. We welcomed a fourth member to our team this year, Stacey Roberts (allforbiblichor), who is doing a PhD in Australian literature. It has been good having another head take part in our discussions and decisionmaking, and she wrote two fascinating posts on female domestic service in colonial women’s fiction, here and here.

Our most visited 2023-published post turned out to be mine on Barbara Baynton’s short story, A dreamer. I don’t take great credit for this, however, because I believe its popularity is due to the story being a set text.

The blog does take a lot of time, and we are currently talking about future plans. We expect to do things a little differently in 2024, but we will be continuing.

Recap 3: Books given for Christmas

This is probably not, technically, a recap, but what better day than this to share the titles of Australian books I gave as Christmas presents this year. They are not necessarily my favourites – indeed, I haven’t read them all – but were chosen to suit the recipients’ likes. (I hope I got it right.) Here they are:

  • Carmel Bird, Love letter to Lola (my review)
  • Rebecca Burton, Ravenous girls (my review)
  • Garry Disher, Consolation
  • Michael Fitzgerald, Late: A novel (Lisa’s review) (on my TBR)
  • Toni Jordan, Dinner with the Schnabels
  • Kim Kelly, Ladies Rest and Writing Room (my review)
  • Mori Ogai, The wild goose (not Australian, but translated to English by the Australian Meredith McKinney) (on my TBR)
  • Tracy Ryan, The queen’s apprenticeship (Lisa’s review) (on my TBR)
  • Benjamin Stevenson, Everyone in my family is a murderer
  • Ian Terry, Uninnocent landscapes (my review)
  • Emma Young, The disorganisation of Celia Stone

And, here I will leave it, as I don’t want to take too much away from my annual Reading and Blogging Highlights posts which are coming soon. In the meantime, I wish all of you reading this, all the best of the season, whether you celebrate it or not. I look forward to seeing you all on the other side, whenever you raise your heads again.

Ian Terry, Uninnocent landscapes (#BookReview)

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This is my third post on my brother’s beautiful book, Uninnocent landscapes: Following George Augustus Robinson’s Big River Mission. My first post announced its publication, and my second was on the book’s launch and the opening of the accompanying exhibition. Finally, I come to my review post. Yes, you could call me biased, but this project has had so many accolades that I don’t feel my bias contradicts the general run of opinion. However, you must decide for yourselves.

Uninnocent landscapes, as I wrote in those previous posts, is the culmination of an idea Ian started thinking about around a decade ago, but that he actively worked on over the last two to three years. It involved his following the journey taken by George Augustus Robinson on his 1831/32 Big River Mission (brief description), which was a poorly conceived attempt to conciliate between settler and Aboriginal Tasmanians. As those versed in Tasmanian history know, it was a disaster, and effectively ended First People’s resistance in lutruwita/Tasmania (back then, anyhow!) For Ian, who has come to call lutruwita home, there is discomfort in reconciling his privileged life as a middle-class white man with the devastating impact of colonialism on Tasmania’s First Peoples. This is his truth-telling project – his questioning, as he describes it, of how non-Indigenous Tasmanians (and, by extension, all non-indigenous Australians) “come to terms with our privilege and its Janus face, the violent and continuing dispossession of palawa” (and, by extension, all First Nations people). And he found a unique way to do it, by combining the three big passions of his life (besides family) – history, photography and the bush – to produce this book. 

Uninnocent landscapes, then, contains a selection of Ian’s photographs accompanied by excerpts from Robinson’s text. It also contains an introduction by Tasmanian art historian, curator, essayist and commentator on identity and place, Greg Lehman (a descendant of the Trawulwuy people of north-east Tasmania), and five essays, the first and last by Ian, and three he commissioned from:

  • Rebecca Digney (manager, Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania and proud pakana woman)
  • Nunami Sculthorpe-Green (activist/artist and proud palawa and Warlpiri woman)  
  • Roderic O’Connor (sixth-generation woolgrower and Connorville custodian)

These essays provide different perspectives on country and on colonialism’s impact on it. Together they work as a dialogue which encourages us to test our own thinking about what has happened in the past and how we might progress into the future.

“battered but still recognisable” (Nunami Sculthorpe-Green)

Ian explains in his first essay that the photographs were taken in a sprit of enquiry:

What memories do the landscapes of lutruwita/Tasmania hold? What stories are embedded in the rocks, the trees and grasses, the waters of rivers and lagoons? What could the landscape tell us about invasion, colonisation and the destruction of First People’s life and culture? What could it tell me about my own life here on this island?

The juxtaposition of Robinson’s text to Ian’s images offers literal, historical, symbolic and/or emotional readings of the photographs. They confront us with a colonial way of thinking about country that we haven’t fully shaken. Robinson’s reflection that “the whole of this country is peculiarly adapted for natives” is jolting, when you think about what this is really saying. Some excerpts reveal a man tired of his mission, while others show a sincere wish to be humane, but most of course are also overlaid with the arrogant confidence of the colonist. There is, though, also some humour, such as this:

I cautioned my natives and said if the whites saw them they would shoot them. They replied that they could see the whites first, and that they could not always shoot straight.

The image accompanying this text depicts a road passing through a fence on which is appended a security notice advising the area is under surveillance. It returns us to the reality that despite their knowledge, skills and confidence, the “natives” lost.

I’d love to share other examples of text and image, not to mention the thoughts of all the essayists, but instead, I’ll just say that this book provides a reading experience that is enlightening, provoking, and sobering.

When Ian first told me the title of the book, I thought it was inspired. He explains its origins in his opening essay. It comes from a conversation between two nature/landscape writers, the British Robert Macfarlane and the American Barry Lopez. Referencing the impact on the Slovenian landscape of war and atrocity, Macfarlane spoke of “a sense of the uninnocence of landscapes”. Nunami Sculthorpe-Green, however, expresses a different idea in her essay. She writes that “it is not the landscape that is uninnocent. It was not a party to the atrocities committed here, but a witness to them, and truly a victim itself”. Just reading these two opposing but sincerely felt ideas shows how important open and honest dialogue is if we are to understand each other. In some ways, the actual words are less important than the conversations they generate and what we learn through them.

It’s a big call, perhaps, to say Ian found a unique way to truth-tell, but I’m not the only one to see this project as original. One of those is Sculthorpe-Green who writes in her essay:

I do see this project as something different from the norm, in that it finally takes this story off the paper and re-centres our land as the storyteller and story keeper.

So yes, I’m hugely proud of what Ian has done. It’s a beautiful book that works aesthetically, intellectually and emotionally – and, more importantly, that moves the conversation forward. It’s a book that explores the depredations of the past, but that also contains hope. As Digney says at the end of her essay, “History resonates. We continue.”

Ian Terry
Uninnocent landscapes
Mt Nelson: OUTSIDE THE BOX / Earth Arts Rights, 2023
136pp.
ISBN: 9780646881058
Price $65, with all proceeds going to the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania’s Giving Land Back fund. You can order here (but supplies are dwindling).

 

Monday musings on Australian literature: Favourite books 2023

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Over recent years, I’ve shared favourite Aussie reads of the year from various sources, with the specific sources varying a little from time to time. This year, a significant source – The Sydney Morning Herald/The Age – is unavailable to me as it is behind a paywall, and at this time of year I just don’t have the time to go to the library to access the paper. I have no problem with paywalling. We should pay for journalism, and I do. Just not these ones. (But, I am disappointed as they invite writers to identify their favourites and I always enjoy seeing their choices. I wish I could just buy an article.)

However, I still have other sources: ABC RN’s panel, Australian Book Review, The Australian Financial Review, The Conversation and Readings bookshop’s Ten Best Australian fiction. The picks range widely, with different “pickers” use different criteria, making this more of a serendipitous than an authoritative list. As always, I’m only including their Aussie choices. Do check the links if you’d like to see complete choices.

Last year, I noted that five of the “favourite” novels and short story collections were on my TBR, and this year I read four of those: Robbie Arnott’s Limberlost, Robert Drewe’s Nimblefoot, Kevin Brophy’s The lion in love, and Chris Flynn’s Here be Leviathans. This must be a record for me.

Novels

  • Graham Akhurst, Borderland (Heidi Norman; Tony Hughes-D’Aeth; Tony Birch )
  • Tony Birch, Women and children (“poignant novel about strong women, family, and the loss of innocence…”, Readings; Claire Nicholls; Kate Evans)
  • Stephanie Bishop, The anniversary (“a tense and superb literary novel”, Readings; “addictive”, Carol Lefevre) (Kimbofo’s review)
  • Shankari Chandran, Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens (Jason Steger) (on my TBR)
  • JM Coetzee, The Pole and other stories (Cassie McCullagh; Geordie Williamson)
  • Trent Dalton, Lola in the mirror (Hannah Wootton)
  • Briohny Doyle, Why we are here (Tony Birch)
  • Nicholas Jose, The idealist (“sophisticated and artfully restrained espionage thriller, Tony Hughes-d’Aeth) (Lisa’s review)
  • Simone Lazaroo, Between water and the night sky (Julienne van Loon)
  • Amanda Lohrey, The conversation (Felicity Plunkett) (Lisa’s review)
  • Melissa Lucashenko, Edenglassie (“a tour de force”, Readings; Kate Evans; Jennifer Mills) (on my TBR – see my conversation post)
  • Laura Jean Mackay, Gunflower (“McKay’s prose both illuminates and psychedelically reimagines our world”, Readings)
  • Angela O’Keeffe, The sitter (“execution and reading experience are second to none”, Readings) (Lisa’s review)
  • Matthew Reilly, Mr Einstein’s secretary (Jason Steger)
  • Sara M Saleh, Songs for the dead and living (Jason Steger)
  • Gretchen Shirm, The crying room (James Bradley) (Lisa’s review)
  • Amy Taylor, Search history (“witty and insightful novel of our times”, Readings) (Kimbofo’s review)
  • Lucy Treloar, Days of innocence and wonder (Kate Evans)
  • Christos Tsiolkas, The in-between (changed her mind about the author, Beejay Silcox; “captivating novel by a writer in top form which has already won over new readers and old fans alike”, Readings; Jason Steger; Kate Evans) (Kimbofo’s review)
  • Pip Williams, The bookbinder of Jericho (Readings; Jason Steger) (Lisa’s review)
  • Charlotte Wood, Stone yard devotional (Kate Evans; “the haunting grammar of its title, the restrained artistry of its structure, and the elusive way that it explores modes of memory, grief, and regret”, Kerryn Goldsworthy; James Bradley) (Lisa’s review)
  • Alexis Wright,  Praiseworthy (Tony Hughes-d’Aeth; “resists political simplifications”, Paul Giles; Philip Mead; “magnificent work of politics and imagination”, Jennifer Mills; “epic, addled, visionary examination of the contemporary implications of those foundational crimes”, Geordie Williamson) (Bill’s second post which includes a link to his first)
  • Jessica Zhan Mei Yu, But the girl (“astute and witty coming-of-age novel”, Readings)

In a little shout out to our friends across the ditch – in new Zealand: Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood was chosen by AFR’s Hannah Wootton and ABC’s Claire Nicholls, and Pip Adams’ Audition by ABR’s Jennifer Mills and Emma Shortis.

Short stories

  • John Morrissey, Firelight (“already widely considered the first instalment in a [First Nations] career to watch”, Readings)

Poetry

  • Dan Hogan, Secret third thing (“a wildly inventive wordsmith whose work is as playful as it is political”, Yves Rees)
  • Kathryn Lomer, AfterLife (Glyn Davis)
  • Alan Wearne, Near believing (John Hawke)

Nonfiction

  • Dean Ashenden, Telling Tennant’s story (Peter Mares)
  • Ryan Cropp, Donald Horne: A life in the lucky country (Patrick Mullins; Glyn Davis; Mark McKenna)
  • Graeme Davison, My Grandfather’s Clock: Four centuries of a British-Australian family (Bain Attwood; Penny Russell)
  • Sarah Firth, Eventually everything connects: Eight essays on uncertainty (Jen Webb)
  • Hannah Forsyth, Virtue capitalists: The rise and fall of the professional class in the Anglophone world, 1870–2008 (Penny Russell; Marilyn Lake)
  • Kate Fullagar, Bennelong & Phillip: A history unravelled (“an inventive structure and humanistic care”, Patrick Mullins; Frank Bongiorno; Mark McKenna)
  • Anna Funder, Wifedom (Jason Steger; Lisa Murray; Frances Wilson) (on my TBR)
  • Richard Flanagan, Question 7 (Claire Nicholls; Jason Steger; Cassie McCullagh; “meditation on the mutability of family, place, the past, is imbued with wistful nostalgia, one that resonates deeply”, Des Cowley) (on my TBR)
  • Richard King, Here Be Monsters: Is technology reducing our humanity? (James Ley)
  • Catherine Lumby, Frank Moorhouse: A life (Glyn Davis; Mark McKenna) (Lisa’s review)
  • Maggie MacKellar, Graft: Motherhood, family and a year on the land (Anna Clark)
  • Kim Mahood, Wandering with intent (Peter Mares)
  • David Marr, Killing for country: A family story (Geordie Williamson; Frank Bongiorno; Glyn Davis; Kieran Pender; Brenda Walker; Mark McKenna)
  • Walter Marsh, Young Rupert: The making of the Murdoch empire (Patrick Mullins)
  • Thomas Mayo, The Voice to Parliament handbook (Glyn Davis)
  • Gemma Nisbet, The things we live with: Essays on uncertainty (Lynette Russell)
  • Brigitta Olubas, Shirley Hazzard: A writing life (“one of the finest literary biographies published in Australia”, Peter Rose)
  • Noah Riseman, Transgender Australia: A history since 1900 (Yves Rees)
  • Alexandra Roginski, Science and power in the nineteenth-century Tasman world: Popular phrenology in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (“rich, enthralling account”, Penny Russell)
  • Heather Rose, Nothing bad ever happens here (Tristan Banck) (on my TBR – see my conversation post)
  • Alecia Simmonds, Courting: An intimate history of love and the law (“uniting zest for narrative with immense research and hard-hitting analysis”, Penny Russell)
  • Ellen van Neerven, Personal score: Sport, culture, identity (“unique, poetic memoir and meditation on gender, sexuality, identity, and sport”, Kieran Pender)
  • Chris Wallace, Political lives (Tom McIlroy)
  • Sally Young, Media monsters: The transformation of Australia’s newspaper empires  (Frank Bongiorno)

Finally …

It’s interesting to see what books feature most. Popularity doesn’t equal quality, but it does provides a guide to the books that attracted the most attention in the year. Last year I noted that one of 2021’s most frequent mentions had won the 2022 Miles Franklin. In 2022, the two most frequently mentioned books were Robbie Arnott’s Limberlost and Jessica Au’s Cold enough for snow. Neither won the Miles Franklin, but both won significant awards during 2023 including the Prime Minister’s (Fiction) Literary Award for Jessica Au.

This year’s most mentioned books are fewer this year because that paywall issue significantly reduced significantly my “haul” but we still have some (and all are well-established authors):

Fiction

  • Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy (5 picks)
  • Christos Tsiolkas’ The in-between (4 picks)
  • Graham Akhurst’s Borderland, Tony Birch’s Women and children, Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie, and Charlotte Wood’s Stone yard devotional (3 picks)

Nonfiction

Did you notice two books in this section were subtitled, “essays on uncertainty”? I’m intrigued.

  • David Marr’s Killing for country (6 picks)
  • Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 (4 picks)
  • Ryan Cropp’s Donald Horne, Kate Fullagar’s Bennelong & Phillip, and Anna Funder’s Wifedom (3 picks)

An advantage of lists like this is discovering new books. I was excited to read about First Nations Kalkadoon writer John Morrissey’s Firelight, because it’s short stories and because the Kalkadoons were the first First Nations people I knew (back in the 1960s). Gemma Nisbet’s The things we live with: Essays on uncertainty has also caught my eye.

Besides the books which are already on my TBR, and hence known to me, there are others I had heard about and that interest me. David Marr’s Killing for country feels a bit close to home, but worth reading, as I too have “skin in the game”, as my brother calls it. The literary biographies I missed this year, including Olubas’s Shirley Hazzard and Lumby’s Frank Moorhouse, are also in my sights. And there are several First Nations books here, besides the Morrissey and Lucashenko, that I am keen to read. Birch and Ellen van Neerven, for example.

I could go on because, you know, readers love talking about books we’d like to read, but I also know when it’s time to stop and pass the baton on …

POSTSCRIPT: The day I posted this The Guardian Australia, as kimbofo shared in the comments, published their Top 25, which more or less reinforces these but adds some books not here, including one I’ve read, Rebecca Burton’s Ravenous girls (my review)!

Thoughts, anyone – on this or lists from your neck of the wood?

Claire Keegan, So late in the day (#BookReview)

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In her final Novellas in November post, Cathy (746 Books) wrote about Claire Keegan’s short story “So late in the day”, and included an online link to the story. Having not read any of Keegan’s writing, to that point, and feeling the lack, I pounced – and was not disappointed.

“So late in the day” is a beautifully observed story told through the eyes of a man named Cathal. In it, he reflects on his relationship with a woman, Sabine, whom we come to realise is no longer around. Why? The story starts by encouraging us to empathise with him. His work colleagues seem worried about him, and his boss encourages him to go home early. The opening paragraph contains hints of things being a little awry or disturbed. It’s gloriously subtle. Every word carries weight, which makes the reading pure pleasure as you ponder just what the straightforward-sounding words and sentences are really signifying.

Life is clearly discombobulated for Cathal. For example, as he makes his way home, we are told:

For no particular reason, a part of him doubted whether the bus would come that day, but it soon came up Westland Row and pulled in, as usual.

The “for no particular reason” is telling, because there is a reason he feels uncertain, albeit we don’t know it yet, and his unawareness of why he feels this way is part of the issue.

So, the bus comes, and he finds himself sitting next to a woman who seems to want to talk. Hmm… he’s not happy. Soon, however, she turns to her book, The woman who walked into doors. Now, it’s a rare writer who inserts books into their stories randomly, but I didn’t know this book, so off I went to the internet and very quickly found that it is by Roddy Doyle. The Guardian quotes him on why he wrote this book which features a pre-existing character of his: “I had to give Paula a chance to explain why: why she married this man in the first place, and why she stayed with him.”

Gradually, then, the penny drops, but oh so slowly, because Keegan’s story is told from a man’s point of view, and this man is so woebegone, so clueless.

This is the sort of writing I like, writing that challenges the reader to work a bit, to read between the lines and not jump to simplistic responses. Cathal is an unreliable narrator. He does not see the whole truth, but Keegan draws out, from his own mouth, exactly what has happened, so that it all becomes clear to us, the reader, while he remains locked in his cluelessness.

There’s another challenge for the reader, though, besides sussing out what has happened, and it’s to do with how we feel. We start by feeling sympathy for him. He’s sad and lonely. But, as he talks about Sabine, a picture builds up. He is the more passive one in the relationship, but more than that, he is the taker. She organises the outings. She cooks, though he does grudgingly clean up, resenting the mess she makes. She’s generous, doesn’t “mind the cost” of nice food, spending “freely” at the markets, while he either tots up costs or, when he’s paying, makes mean choices. When he proposes to her, it’s devoid of romance. Is he emotionally repressed, and should we continue to feel for him, or is something else going on?

Quite late in the story, in a telling flashback, he remembers an occasion from his childhood. His brother had played a nasty trick at the dinner table on their nearly sixty-year-old mother, and instead of remonstrating with him the father joins the laughter. In this anecdote, and his reaction to it, we see the depth of his disconnect in how to relate to a woman, which adds to our growing awareness of an ungenerous, self-centredness in him. He doesn’t know how to give. There are occasional glimmers of awareness, but by the end, when we know exactly why he is so sad, why this day is so hard for him, we are left wondering what to think about him. Can he change? Or, more to the point, does he realise he needs to change? Does he fully comprehend the depth of his failure?

The French-translated title for this story is Misogynie, which makes no bones about its over-riding theme, but I like the subtlety, the multi-layered meanings behind “So late in the day”. To tease that out here, however, really would spoil the story for any of you wanting to read it.

Meanwhile, I’ll share this from early in the story. As Cathal is leaving work, we are told

He would ordinarily have taken out his mobile then, to check his messages, but found that he wasn’t ready—then wondered if anyone ever was ready for what was difficult.

Good question, but it doesn’t augur well for our narrator’s development does it?

An absolute gem of a story.

Claire (Word By Word) also liked it.

Claire Keegan
“So late in the day”
in The New Yorker, 28/2/2022

Available online at The New Yorker.

My reading group’s favourites for 2023

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As I’ve done for a few years now, I am sharing my reading group’s top picks of 2022. This is, after all, the season of lists, but also, I know that some people, besides me, enjoy hearing about other reading groups.

I’ll start, though, by sharing what we read in the order we read them (with links on titles to my reviews):

This year’s schedule was reasonably diverse but with some differences from last year. Our overriding interest is Australian women writers, but not exclusively. And, in fact, this year we read fewer Australian women than is often the case, just Preston, Dank, Au and Throsby. We also, somehow, didn’t read a classic which we try to do each year. However, like last year, we read a translated novel (from France) and a First Nations work. We read five non-Australian books, same as last year; one work of nonfiction (versus two last year); and four by male authors (one more than last year). The status and condition of women’s lives featured particularly strongly in this year’s fiction – with Maggie O’Farrell, Bonnie Gamus, Edwina Preston, Pat Barker and Holly Throsby putting the challenges women face front and centre.

The winners …

This year all of our twelve active members voted, meaning the maximum a book could get was 12 votes, and that there were 36 votes all up. The rules were the same. We had to name our three favourite works, and all were given equal weighting. This year like two of the last three years, we had a runaway winner, with second and third spots being close:

  1. The marriage portrait by Maggie O’Farrell (8 votes)
  2. Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr and Limberlost by Robbie Arnott (5 votes each)
  3. Lessons in chemistry by Bonnie Garmus and We come with this place by Debra Dank (4 votes each)

Very creditable highly commendeds, sharing three votes each were Bad art mother by Edwina Preston and Jessica Au’s Cold enough for snow.

As for my three picks, I’ll start by saying that I found it really tough, though I managed to identify six reasonably easily. Those six were the books by Doerr, Arnott, Preston, Dank, Au and Modiano. No, not O’Farrell, much as I also enjoyed that book. It’s been a very good year. My final three were Robbie Arnott’s Limberlost, Debra Dank’s We come with this place, and Patrick Modiano’s Sundays in August.

At the big reveal last night, some in the group asked me why The marriage portrait wasn’t in my list of tops. I said, off-hand, that it was because it was “just historical fiction”, but that’s not exactly it. As I quickly qualified, I didn’t mean by this that it is typical genre historical fiction, because it’s not, though it does have elements of the historical romance trajectory. No, it’s because it wears its heart on its sleeve. You may not know exactly how it’s going to end, but you know pretty much from the start what it’s about, what the author’s intentions are. I enjoyed it immensely. It’s an engrossing and moving read, but the fiction that earns top billing for me is fiction that has me wondering from the start what it’s all about, fiction that through language, tone, and/or structure challenges my brain to engage with the author and go on a journey with them. Modiano’s and Au’s books, in particular, were like this. This sort of writing can be nerve-wracking because I can worry I’m missing the point. But, it’s the sort of writing that excites me.

[In the end I narrowed my choices down to Arnott because his ability to convey with such brevity a full, complex, oh-so human life was breathtaking; to Dank because among other things her generous truth-telling has helped me better articulate, to myself and to others, my understanding of First Nations connection to country; to Modiano, because, well, I’ve explained that already.]

Selected comments

Not everyone included comments with their picks, and not all books received comments, but here is some of what members said about the top picks:

  • The marriage portrait: Commenters used descriptions like “lush”, “descriptive”, and mentioned the relevance of its themes, particularly regarding the vulnerability of young women.
  • Cloud Cuckoo Land: Comments included “intelligent”, “immersive”, “huge in scope”, “fabulous for its sweep”, “complex”, with a couple enjoying how Doerr created connections between the stories and different eras.
  • Limberlost: Commenters mentioned the quality of its writing, and its evocation of the Tasmanian landscape.
  • Lessons in chemistry: A dog lover in the group loved the dog Six Thirty’s role, and the humour.
  • We come with this place: Commenters loved the generosity of its truth-telling, its explanation of the relationship between story and place to understand country, and found it “deeply moving”.

And, a bonus again

Since 2019, a good friend (from my library school days over 45 years ago (and who lives just outside Canberra) sent me her reading group’s schedule for the year (in the order they read them):

  • Andrew O’Hagan, Mayflies
  • Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Living to tell the tale
  • Tom Kenneally, The Dickens boy
  • Susan Orlean, The library book
  • Andrew McGahan, The rich man’s house
  • Ian McEwan, Machines like me: And people like you
  • Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
  • Claire Thomas, The performance (on my TBR)
  • Maureen Cashman, The Roland Medals
  • Shokoofeh Azar, The enlightenment of the greengage tree

Links on titles (this year, just one) are to my reviews, where I’ve read the book too.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, particularly if you were in a reading group this year. What did your group read and love?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Prime Minister’s Summer Reading List, 2023

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December is when I start my round of regular end-of-year posts, and a new one I’m adding to the fold is the The Grattan Institute’s annual Prime Minister’s Summer Reading List. The institute is an Australian non-aligned, public policy think tank, which produces readable, reasoned reports on significant issues, like, most recently, the role of hyrdrogen in Australia’s green energy goals and an analysis of the keenly awaited review of the NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme).

My focus here, though, is another activity of theirs, their Prime Minister’s Summer Reading List, which they have published annually since 2009. This list, as they wrote on the inaugural 2009 list, comprises “books and articles that the Prime Minister, or any Australian interested in public debate, will find both stimulating and cracking good reads”.

As I wrote in last year’s post, the Institute’s then chief executive, Danielle Wood, said they aimed

to pick books that have something interesting, original, or thought-provoking to say on issues that are relevant to the Australian policy landscape. The books don’t have to be by local writers or about Australia … but they do have to address issues that have relevance in an Australian policy context.

I managed to read, after the event, two of last year’s list, Debra Dank’s We come with this place (my review) and Jessica Au’s Cold enough for snow (my review). Dank’s is an obvious choice, but I love they they also chose something quietly, and perhaps even enigmatically, reflective about life and change in Au’s book.

Here is the 2023 list in their order, with a small excerpt from their reasoning:

  • Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s invisible life (on my reading group’s 2024 schedule, Brona’s review): “People don’t become invisible by accident … a powerful case study of the hidden lives of wives whose contributions are downplayed or entirely disregarded”
  • Ellen van Neerven, Personal score: “highlights the disproportionate impact of a changing climate on Indigenous people, the importance to Aboriginal health of story and being heard, and the complexity of gender and belonging, on and off the field. A new and transformative piece of sports writing … an essential read for anyone wanting to better understand sport, community, and power on sovereign land”.
  • Mark Considine, The careless state: Reforming Australia’s social services: “Australia’s social services are doing a bad job of looking after people … impressively summarises the problems, explains how we got here, and shows that what may seem like separate problems have many shared roots”. 
  • Micheline Lee, Lifeboat: Disability, humanity, and the NDIS (Quarterly Essay 91, September 23): “describes how the NDIS’s disempowering, confusing, and bureaucratic processes have worn out the trust of people with disability and their families … [yet] there is a warming tone of optimism running through Lee’s analysis”.
  • Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why government is failing in the digital age and how we can do better: “Technology is the front door to many government services … But too often, the design of online services is an afterthought, and users are left to grapple with lengthy, confusing, and duplicative processes … [and] bad design can entrench inequalities … “a compelling call to arms for better design and delivery of government services”.
  • Henry Dimbleby and Jemima Lewis, Ravenous: How to get ourselves and our planet into shape: “explores the complex machinations of modern food systems … details how our food choices are influenced by the industries that make our food, and the environment that surrounds us … shows how our decisions about what foods to put in our shopping baskets are subtly but constantly influenced by a vast food system. The consequences are rarely good for us, our health, or our planet”.

So, one biography, one part memoir-history-poetry, an essay, and three specific-issue-focused non-fiction works, with four by Australians, one by an American, and one from the UK. It’s good to see a First Nations author here again, and to see important issues – like disability, the challenges of the digital age, and modern food systems – front and centre in the Institute’s thinking.

I would, of course, love to see a greater recognition of the value of fiction to addressing “issues that have relevance in the Australian policy context”. Fiction has been included in the past, but not often. I wrote a little about some of their choices last year. We don’t know whether the relevant prime minister reads the suggestions, but some thoughtful or provocative fiction might be better summer reading for our poor top politician needing some break?

I could suggest Chris Flynn’s short story collection, Here be Leviathans (my review), and Carmel Bird’s Love letter to Lola (my review), to fill that bill. Short stories are perfect for busy people, and these two collections are entertaining but also offer some real meat in terms of thinking about various issues confronting humanity, including the environment and environmental destruction. Also Tony Burke made a good point about Paddy O’Reilly’s Other houses (Lisa’s review) which was shortlisted for this year’s Prime Minister’s literary awards and which is about a group of people we rarely read about, cleaners. Surely a book about the working life, that is, the battlers, the people whom journalists and politicians this year have constantly pointed out are “doing it tough”. Fiction about such lives would be perfect for our PM.

You can see all the lists, by year, to date at these links: 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022.

If you had the opportunity to make one book recommendation to the leader of your country, what would it be?

Novellas in November 2023: Week 5, New to my TBR

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You will of course have realised that November is somewhat over, but in the blogosphere we are pretty flexible – at least I think we are – so I am going to do this final Novellas in November post more than a week into December.

The final theme for the month is that we talk about the novellas we’ve added to our TBR since the month began. I strongly resist adding any new books to my TBR, but my willpower failed me – partly because I am partial to novellas.

So, here goes, in alphabetical order by title, some of the books that captured my attention around the month:

  • Rebecca Campbell, Arboreality: Bill Holloway (The Australian Legend) posted on this before NovNov but it is a novella, it attracted my attention and I am in fact reading it right now.
  • Michael Fitzgerald, Late: Lisa (ANZLitLovers) posted on this and I also have it in my review pile to read. It sounds right up my alley, and I have bought it as a Christmas gift for a family member too.
  • Natalia Ginzburg’s The dry heart: Claire (Word by Word) posted on this one, describing it as “this brilliant, page turning feminist classic, originally penned in 1947”. How could I not be in?
  • Margo Glantz, The remains: Claire (Word by Word) posted this before NovNov but it is a novella so I am including it here. She commenced her post by describing it as an “incredible literary masterpiece. A lyrical elegy of tempo rubato.” This and the rest of her review captured my attention.
  • Hans Keilson, Comedy in a minor key: Cathy (746 Books) wrote that this is about “citizens risking their lives to harbour Jews in Nazi-occupied Netherlands but deals with this serious theme with a lightness of touch.” I know some readers don’t like a light touch applied to deadly serious subjects like this, but I do. Sometimes a light touch makes a bigger impact, in fact.
  • Elizabeth Lowry, The chosen: Bookish Beck reviewed this, not in the month, but, during the month, she paired Thomas Hardy’s wife Emma’s memoir Some recollections with Lowry’s novella. Lowry’s book, says Beck, “examines Thomas Hardy’s relationship with his first wife, Emma Gifford”. I like Hardy, so this of course caught my attention
  • Janet Malcolm, The journalist and the murderer: Cathy (746 Books) wrote on this before NovNov, but it caught my attention because I have been wanting to read Malcolm ever since I discovered that Helen Garner admires her. Any one Helen Garner admires is of interest to me. In this book Malcolm apparently explores the relationship between journalist and subject, particularly when that subject is a murderer.
  • Joyce Carol Oates, Black water: Lisa (The Short Story Editor) recommended this book on my NovNov week 2 post calling it “the most quintessential novella on my shelf”. I have read an Oates novella, Beasts (my review), but not this one.

Eight books, one of which I am reading now. I’m not sure how many more I will read, but at least I have now got them on my list?

Has Novella November affected your TBR pile this year?

Written for Novellas in November 2023

Monday musings on Australian literature: Henry Mayer Book Prize

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This last week I have become aware, via two different paths, of the Henry Mayer Book Prize. I feel I’ve seen it referenced before, but it hasn’t fully registered. I certainly haven’t written about it before, so, now’s the time.

I’ll start by introducing the person for whom the prize is named, Henry Mayer (1919-1991). He has a well-detailed entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, but in a nutshell, he was – surprise, surprise – a professor of politics. German-born, he moved with his father to Nice, France, in 1934 after Hitler had become Chancellor in 1933. From there he went to Switzerland, and thence England, where, after the war started, he was identified as an “enemy alien”. He was among the group of over 2,500 enemy aliens transported on the infamous Dunera from Liverpool to Australia, became an academic, and was a foundation member of the Australasian Political Studies Association (APSA). ADB characterises him as having “wide reading, love of argument, and disdain for sacred cows”.

Now, to the award. Offered by APSA, the Henry Mayer Book Prize is a biennial prize is for “the best book on Australian politics (including political history) published during the previous two years”. It is funded by income generated by the APSA endowment established, in 2009, by the Henry Mayer Trust. The prize is $1000.

To add a little more detail to the criteria, the current website for the prize (linked above) says that book can be “published by a university or commercial publisher (in Australia or overseas)” and that preference is “given to a monograph that focuses on one or more of Mayer’s special interests: the media, political parties or Indigenous affairs”.

The prize, says the same website, judges by a panel which is chaired by a member of the APSA Executive, and will “consist of at least three judges (including the chair), of which at least one will be a woman”. (Interestingly, there’s no similar qualification that “at least one will be a man”. That rather presumes that male judges are a given?)

The reason this prize came to my attention this week was because:

  • On Tuesday, I attended the second Rod Wallace Memorial Lecture, held by the Friends of the National Film and Sound Archive. Our lecturer was Jenny Hocking, whose book, The Palace letters: The Queen, the Governor-General and the plot to dismiss Whitlam, was highly commended for the 2021 award.
  • On Friday, I attended the announcement of the 2023 ACT Book of the Year Award (my post), and the winning book, Frank Bongiorno’s Dreamers and schemers: A political history of Australia, also won the 2023 Henry Mayer Book Prize.

I love it when serendipity strikes like this.

Henry Mayer Book Prize winners to date

  • 2023: Frank Bongiorno, Dreamers and schemers: A political history of Australia, Black Inc, 2022.
  • 2021: Sally Young, Paper emperors: The rise of Australia’s newspaper empires, UNSW Press, 2019.
  • 2019: Paul Strangio, Paul ‘T Hart & James Walter, The pivot of power: Australian Prime Ministers and political leadership, 1949–2016, Melbourne University Press, 2017.
  • 2017: Sarah Ferguson and Patricia Drum, The killing season uncut, Melbourne University Press, 2016.
  • 2015: Stephen Mills, The professionals: Strategy, money and the rise of the political campaigner in Australia, Black Inc, 2014.
  • 2013: Paul Strangio, Neither power nor glory: 100 years of political Labor in Victoria, 1856 – 1956, Melbourne University Press, 2012.
  • 2011: James Walter, What were they thinking? The politics of ideas in Australia, UNSW Press, 2010.
  • 2009: Sarah Maddison, Black politics: Inside the complexity of Aboriginal political culture, Allen & Unwin, 2008 AND David McKnight, Beyond Right and Left: New politics and the Culture Wars, Allen & Unwin, 2007.

Since 2016, the prize has been alternated with the Crisp Prize, which is offered for a similar topic but with a different qualification -“the best scholarly book on political science by an early or mid-career researcher“, which they define as someone who has graduated with a PhD within the previous 10 years.

How many more specialist book awards are there out there?