It’s April and finally the first starting book for 2020’s Six Degrees of Separation that I’ve read. If you are new to blogging and don’t know this meme and how it works, please check out meme host Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.

Now to April’s starting book, the critically acclaimed, multi-translated, award-winning nonfiction book by Australia’s Anna Funder – Stasiland (my review). Have you read it? If you haven’t do consider it because it’s not the sort of book to go out of date.

Stasiland tells the stories of Stasi officers and collaborators and of those who suffered at the hands of the Stasi in the then East Germany. Largely because of this book, Mr Gums and I made a point of going to Leipzig in 2013 and visiting the Stasi’s Runde Ecke headquarters there. Anyhow, in announcing this book, Kate described it as a “classic on tyranny and resistance”. There are so many books that can link from that, so I’ll be interested to see what my co-meme-players do. I’ve decided to choose a related aspect, surveillance, which was fundamental to the Stasi’s tyrannical practices, and link to Janette Turner Hospital’s Orpheus lost (my review).

From here, I could take a cheery turn and link on, music, say, or the classics, but I’m going to stick with serious themes. Orpheus lost is partly about how terrorism leads to fear, surveillance and the loss of freedoms. Hospital was interested, she said, in the trading of civil liberties for safety in the post-9/11 world. However, I don’t want to spend all this post on this issue, so I’m making a cheeky jump to David Brooks’ The grass library (my review). It’s an animal rights focused memoir in which one of the main “characters” is Orpheus the lamb!

From here it’s a very simple jump to another animal rights book, this one about the live export business, Bidda Jones and Julian Davies’ Backlash: Australia’s conflict of values over live exports (my review). I remember that when he sent the book to me, co-author and publisher Julian Davies described it as the most important book they’d published.

So, I’m going to stick now with Julian Davies, or, at least, with his publishing company Finlay Lloyd, and link to the latest book of theirs published, John Clanchy’s In whom we trust (my review). One of the commenters on my post – someone who knows the author – described it as “an origin story” for the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. It is about child abuse, but is also about, as commenter David wrote, “the institutional tension between the Brother’s and Clergy power structure within the Church”. It’s a powerful, but deeply human read.

Trust, as Clanchy shows, is in short supply between powerful institutions and those who have no power and who, by rights, should be able to trust those who are not only able to but who morally should protect and support them. Rebecca Skloot had to work very hard to gain the trust of African-American Henrietta Lacks’ poverty-stricken family to write her scientific biography The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks (my review). This book is both a fascinating story of scientific discovery and a horrifying story of the abuse of people’s trust and, in fact, their rights.

I am going to stay in America for last book, albeit the author is Australian, Elliot Perlman. The street sweeper (my review) is about many things, but the titular character is street sweeper Lamont Williams, an African-American, who has just started work as a janitor at a cancer hospital in a pilot program for ex-convicts. He is innocent of the crime that put him in jail but his colour and poverty meant he didn’t have a chance. This book which links the Holocaust to Civil Rights in America is fundamentally about moral responsibility – which, of course, is not what the Stasi practised at all!

I have stuck with politically charged books this month – and why not given the important role writers play in keeping us honest. So, I am going to conclude with Orwell from his essay, “Why I write”:

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.

PS I wrote and scheduled this before COVID-19 restrictions took hold internationally. I decided not to rethink my post in the light of that but to leave you with what initially inspired me! However, I’ll add that I wonder what writers will make of COVID-19. When will the first COVID-19 novel appear? From where and from whom will it come, and what will be the take?

Anyhow, now the usual: Have you read Stasiland? And, regardless, what would you link to? 

It’s March, so soon? Oh well, at least we have another Six Degrees of Separation to look forward to. As always, for those of you who don’t know this meme and how it works, please check out meme host Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.

Once again, but I’m used to this now, I haven’t read Kate’s starting book, Wolfe Island by Lucy Treloar. I am, I must say, more embarrassed about this than usual, because Treloar is an Australian woman writer and I do like to support them!

But now, crunch-time. Because life has been busy lately, I am going to be lazy. Not only am I going to make this post short and sweet, but all my links will be on words in the title or author’s name, with a little bit of poetic licence taken along the way.

So, we start with Lucy Treloar’s Wolfe Island …

and immediately time-shift back to Tudor England and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (my review).

From here, we return to our times and Rodney Hall’s A stolen season (my review).

Now, I just can’t let “stolen” pass without referencing Carmel Bird’s (ed) The stolen children: Their stories (my review).

Children takes me to Helen Garner’s The children’s Bach (my review) …

at which point I beg your forgiveness, because we are going to Rebekah Clarkson’s Barking dogs (my review).

Dogs! Now there’s an embarrassment of riches. Since blogging, I’ve read several books with “dog” in their title, so which to choose? I thought, in the interest of gender diversity, that I should choose one by a male writer, but in fact most of them have been written by men, so, I’m just going to spin the dice and land on … Andrew O’Hagan’s The life and opinions of Maf the dog and of his friend Marilyn Monroe (my review). I mean how can you resist a title like that!

So, short and sweet as promised. What more can I say, except …

And now, the usual: Have you read Wolfe Island? And, regardless, what would you link to? 

POSTSCRIPT: This went out with last month’s title – that’s what you get for being lazy and copying old posts!

Here we are at our second Six Degrees of Separation meme of 2020. For those of you who don’t know what this meme is and how it works, please check out meme host Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.

Once again, but I’m used to this now, I haven’t read Kate’s starting book, Fleishman is in trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. However, I devised a lovely – well, I think it was – chain for it. Then, as the fires and smoke in my area just got worse and worse this week, I decided to go off script and riff off the title to create my own theme for this post, Australia is in trouble! I’m not going to link my books, but just share six that I’ve read which address, in some way, climate change.

In his 1946 essay, “Why I write”, George Orwell lists four main purposes for writing, the fourth being:

Political purpose: Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

The other purposes, if you want to know, are “sheer egoism”, “aesthetic enthusiasm”, and “historical impulse”. Orwell goes on to say that “in a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.” Of course his times were different, so his issue – totalitarianism – is different to the ones confronting us now (though, then again, perhaps not!) Anyhow, my point is that in this post I’m going to share six works by writers who also write with a political purpose.

Melissa Lucashenko’s “How green is my valley” (2006) (my review): an essay in Griffith Review’s climate-change-focused issue (12), Hot air: How nigh’s the end. Indigenous writer, Lucashenko addresses climate change, recognising that many non-Indigenous Australians also love the land. She suggests that a “bicultural” approach, which spans the chasm “between industrial and indigenous views of the ‘good life’ and what constitutes a proper society”, would be a good place to start.

Jane Rawson’s A wrong turn at the Office of Unmade Lists (2013) (my review): set in a bleak climate-damaged Melbourne of 2030, where it’s very hot, and clean water is harder to come by and more expensive than beer. Its main protagonist, Caddy, is living rough, having lost her husband and home in a heatwave-induced fire a couple of years before the novel opens.

Annabel Smith’s The ark (2014) (my review): set in the 2040s, during, as Smith describes it, “a post-peak oil crisis. The polar ice caps have melted. Crops are failing. People are starving and freezing to death.” Interestingly, given my George Orwell intro, a major theme of this novel is how, in such a world, charismatic-despotic leaders can come to the fore.

Alice Robinson’s Anchor point (2015) (my review): a family drama, but one framed by farming and the land. Climate change hangs over this novel, with its depiction of father Bruce and daughter Laura struggling against drought, bushfires and land degradation to keep their farm going. By 2018 (a little into the future at the time the novel was written), Laura has given up the struggle, because “the climate had long stopped being something she understood”.

Cassie Flanagan Willanski’s Here where we live (2016) (my review): a collection of short stories about the relationships between non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australians, and the relationship both have with the land. Although not specifically a cli-fi book, concern about land, the environment, and climate change suffuses the stories. In the last story, a terrible storm occurs, and a character says:

‘It’s climate change, of course,’ you say knowingly. ‘They say that these one-hundred year storms are occurring so frequently now that the name no longer bears any meaning. But we need to keep the name so that we can understand that this kind of storm is so severe it should only occur once every hundred years. We need the name so we understand that something has gone wrong.’

Catherine McKinnon’s Storyland (2017) (my review): set in the Illawarra region south of Sydney, and tells the story of the Australian continent, post-white settlement, from 1796 to 2717. One of its five time-periods is 2033 in which climate-change has caused utter devastation to the land and a dystopia is playing out.

So, a different Six Degrees post, and one not necessarily featuring all the most obvious Australian climate-related books. Although all mine are by women, men have written some too. It’s just that I haven’t read them. The main point is that writers are addressing this issue, doing their best “to push” all to see that Australia is in trouble. The question is whether the people who need to read them are in fact reading them?

And now, the usual: Have you read Fleishman is in trouble? And, regardless, what would you link to?