The discomforts of 2020 were, for me and my family, relatively minor in the scheme of things. Living in regional Victoria as we do, yes we were partially locked down and working and schooling from home, but apart from that we were safe and well (and employed - no small thing right now). Yet for the most of the year I found it hard to retreat into the solace of fiction. Too many times I picked up a book that I thought I should read - because it was a [...]
2020 has been, for me, a year of comfort reading. Lots of books were tossed aside by page 6 or 7, if they couldn't hold my interest. And for a while there, during the deepest part of the COVID-19 lockdown, it seemed like very little could hold my interest. Miles Franklin prize-winners: tossed. New York Times best-sellers: tossed. Quirky little books highly recommended by friends: tossed. In the end, it was commercial mass-market fiction that saw me through and I'll share my thoughts about my fiction reads in another post, [...]
In the approach to Christmas I was in something of a reading slump but these three novels picked me up and had me reading late into the night. Yes, of course I read more than three books over the summer, and of course I read non-fiction too (and I’ll tell you about those another time) but these three books were simply marvellous. The Weekend by Charlotte Wood. There are far fewer literary page turners than one might wish, so thank goodness for The Weekend. It’s smart, beautifully written and thoroughly [...]
The books, old and musty, were stashed at the back of a cupboard for want of shelf space. They’d been there for quite a while. A friend of my mother had owned them once, but had passed them on, suggesting vaguely that “Michelle might like them.” I was in primary school, probably, an avid reader but not much tempted by the heavy, old-fashioned tomes, with no dust jacket or blurb to hint at what lay within. Not tempted until boredom drove me, one weekend, to dig out those books. Reader, [...]
Evocative. Intriguing. Compelling. Flames is a wonderful novel, and Arnott is a terrific new young voice in Australian fiction. In this assured debut, Arnott immerses the reader in the Tasmanian landscape, in weird and often uncanny ways. At a superficial level, we follow the story of twenty-three-year-old Charlotte McAllister. Charlotte's mother has just died and returned (briefly) from the dead, her father is absent, and her brother wants to build her a coffin. In her grief, Charlotte flees southwards to an isolated, and improbable, wombat farm where she discovers more [...]
This year's winner of the Pulitzer Prize for biography was Caroline Fraser, for Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. If, like me, you read the Little House on the Prairie books as a child, then you already know all about Laura Ingalls Wilder. She grew up in the 1800s on the American frontier, with Ma, Pa, blind sister Grace and little sister Carrie. Ma was endlessly patient and good, and jovial Pa was wise and strong and brave. There were blizzards and locusts, danger and drama, all tempered by [...]
Eleanor Limprecht's latest novel is a delight, with compelling characters that kept me sitting up way past lights out. In The Passengers, Hannah and her grandmother Sarah are travelling, on a cruise ship, from San Diego to Sydney. Sarah left Australia at the end of WW2, as a young Australian war bride married to a US serviceman she barely knew, and has never been back since. As their ship moves across the ocean Sarah tells Hannah, a young woman struggling with her own past, how it was that in 1945 she [...]
If you've ever wondered whether Australia actually is a deeply racist nation, then this powerful memoir is for you. It leaves no doubt that answer is yes, all the time, and from almost everyone. From the nasty little girl at Clarke's kindergarten who wouldn't play with the brown girl, to the primary school children who constantly taunted, threatened and mocked, to the teachers and school counselors who told the teenager that it was 'only teasing', Clarke's anger about her treatment lends her prose a searing heat. Maxine Beneba [...]
Hunger is so raw, poignant and compelling that it hurts to read it. At the most superficial level Hunger is a memoir about Roxane Gay's body - specifically her very tall (6'3), very large (200 kgs +) body. Gay details her daily indignities and humiliations as a woman of size moving through a world designed for much smaller people. And if that were all Hunger was about it would probably be enough. But at a deeper level Hunger is really about Gay's mental discomfort. Her shame, her anger, her guilt [...]
What does success look like to an environmental activist? Sometimes success is obvious, like the protests against the Tasmanian Franklin Dam project. The protesters there were directly responsible for preventing the dam from being built and so protected a unique wilderness area. But sometimes success is less obvious. A battle is lost but, in the end, a war is won. Such was the case for the Daintree Blockade of the early 1980s. The Daintree rainforest of far north Queensland is every bit as unique and beautiful as the Tasmanian wilderness. [...]