Poor Fellow My Country

 I recently bought Xavier Herbert's Capricornia. This book, Poor Fellow My Country is out of print; I picked up this edition from the library yesterday. And according to GW, it is surely the least read of the major Australian novels, in no small part due to it being 1463pp long. That makes it a third longer again than War and Peace! Still, I've made a start. Sure, it's full of "grandiloquent editorials" but the description of place and person is worth the ear-bashing. And it does educate about this time in history. The British Lord Vestey of Paul Kelly's song about Vincent Lingiari (From Little Things, Big Things Grow) comes to life as Lord Alfred Vaisey in this book.

Listen to this description of the landscape: a "vast expanse of treelessness, cut into three or four paddocks, the fences of which ran so far they ended climbing into silvery uplands of mirage where a few trees grew upside down and cattle were grazing in the sky".

Magic. I want to spend some time in that landscape myself.

Also of note, we were in Buderim yesterday and I was trying to show K and DJ the deli that had grown out of the Ginger Shop. But it's now Buderim Rare Books. They stock quite a few intriguing Australian titles and I look forward to going back to find some treasures.

Re-ignited by The Burning Library

So I had been reading The Fortunes of Richard Mahony on the Kindle and quite enjoying it; I think I am up to the third book that is three books in one. But then I have been down a major side-track of reading Big History and that's also been a lot of fun, something I want to keep going with, too.

However, Geordie Williamson, who is a literary critic, has published this book which I simply had to have. And it has helped to sharpen the focus of the wide lens that is the FAN list. Williamson has written essays on 14 Australian novelists, authors whom Williamson admits are linked by the quality of eccentricity. "The Burning Library is an attempt to reconstitute a lost backstory of our literature. It is braided from the lives and works of authors who have been underestimated or discredited by ways of thinking about literature instituted in recent decades". Geordie Williamson is angered by the all but complete extinction (is complete redundant, there?) of OzLit in Australian Universities and the fact that many fine Australian novels are no longer in print.

And sure enough, many of the books in his essays are perhaps to be found in Leura Books, Trove, maybe fishpond or ebay as second hand, some of the mainstream ones are in the local library, but most seem a little tricky to find. (I have yet to check through the 3 discs worth of Kindle titles that I was given a while ago but I am not so hopeful there.) Text Publishing has some titles, maybe Melbourne University Press; Sydney Uni had one title referred to in an essay as 'print on demand'. Some I have read (Jessica Anderson, Christina Stead, Patrick White... but their ouevre is much larger than the list "allows" for and often the best books are not even mentioned).

Perhaps most excitingly, there are authors in The Burning Library who are totally new to me: Dal Stivens, Amy Witting and Olga Masters are the 3 I'd not heard of.

Far and Wide

Talk about a mixed bag. I finally finished reading All That Swagger and quickly zipped through The Bride Stripped Bare and Rohypnol while on a recent trip to Sydney; all on the Kindle. Now reading  The Glass Canoe - an actual book for a change. I have loaded The Fortunes of Richard Mahony onto the Kindle, a bargain at $4.99. This is the book I borrowed from the library recently and didn't have a hope of finishing in a timely fashion. I have to go to Bundaberg later in the week so it will be handy to have lightly-stored reading material to fill in the time.

All Over the Place (still!)

I got a Kindle for Mothers Day! So at the moment I am reading All That Swagger by Miles Franklin  on the Kindle. But then Timothy Radcliffe's book caught my eye at the library yesterday so now I've started reading that. And also yesterday, bought David Ireland's The Glass Canoe which was a very affordable $12.95 courtesy of Text Publishing. They are heeding the call to publish some out of print and hard to get Australian Classics. Brilliant.

Diverting Tales

I've been flip flopping around a bit with books since finishing Eat Lolly, which was a story about an eating disorder. Lolly for Lola, the girl in the book. There was nature v nuture at play in that Lola had an absent but knownto-be mentally odd father and a very much present and food-obsessed but increasingly distant and cold mother. Perhaps not surprising given her own mother and father had banished her to an island to be a single mother at the age of 18 (so as not to shame Daddy, the respectable GP). Anyway, I then dipped into The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, but it was just too dense a read for me to cope with just now (work becoming all consuming again!) being three books in one and it's a library loan. I began reading Illywacker which is hilarious and mine but again, a massive read and then found the Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature in the library. Reading the sections on fiction has been a good way to place into context some of the books from the FAN list and is also a good prompt as to what other things are worth reading. But here I go off the track again: sorting my books out to get the FAN books together on the shelf, I found Ruth Park's Sydney which I haven't read yet but will now - as Keith and I debate the merits of visiting Sydney for a few days in July after I attend  a course!

Why is this picture on its side?

A Bridge Turns 80

Of a Boy was awful; 5 dead children - who needs it. So then it was onto The Great Arch which fitted in nicely with the 80th anniversary of the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge just a few days ago on 19th March. The Great Arch is "A deeply moving novel linking two centuries, two world wars and two generations inspired by the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge - this is an epic story of faith, obsession and love and an ordinary man, an ordinary life, made grand".

Last night started to read Eating Lolly.

Catch Up

So I finished They're a Weird Mob. Such a good book and one that should be read by every new Australian. There is sage advice in this book: learn the lingo and fit in and everyone will be happy to call you mate. I then read the recent Booker prize winner by Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending. There was an horrendous waiting list for this book in the library so I bought myself a copy. It's a slight book and a bit midde aged-geezer-navel gazey to be perfect. But it is a good morality tale that has a knock out ending that ever-so-subtly sneaks up. Kind of cool. It would probably reward a second read.

Now reading Of a Boy, a large print edition, which is always a bit of an odd experience. This book is about 3 children who go missing on their way to buy icecreams and about an 8 year boy who lives with

his grandmother because his mother is sick, an alcoholic I think. He lived with his father for a while but now he's living with his Grandmother (not Granny or even Gran) who is feeling well past her use-by date for bringing up another child. Also at home is Uncle Rory who is housebound ever since he crashed his car and killed the mate who was his passenger. He paints at home and otherwise appears unable to bring himself to leave the house. It's sad and disturbing so far. Too many damaged people and when they are kids, it hurts especially.

Fantasy Free

I finished The Passage yesterday - I was trying hard to concentrate on its ending in a noisy optometrist's waiting room , so the book sort of ended with a whimper rather than a bang. I had thought about reading The Gift next but it's set in the fantastic location of Annar, not Australia. And right now I am not in the mood for fantasy. Not a genre I would ever choose to read and not my ideal Australian novel. The Passage was good, so nice to read of a local area, 50 or 60 years ago, before all the development we have today. Anyway, The Gift is not a gift so it can wait (and wait and wait ...)

Instead I will try a bit of dated (?) humour in they're a weird mob. Much better!

Busy, Reading

Whoops, nearly let a month go past without updating this blog. Tamarisk Row was a sad sort of book, young boy growing up under the cloud of a father caught up in the vicious cycle of gambling. Then embarked on the very good, but chunky The Trout Opera; everything in that book that I like about reading Australian literature - the land, its history and its people. This one set in the Snowy River area, from 100 years and more ago, in Jindabyne, Dalgety as well as modern day Sydney, even Murwillumbah and Mt Warning, where we visited 18 months or so ago, in Northern NSW.

I have now started reading The Passage by Vance Palmer, published in 1959. It's set on a coastal passage about a family who is scraping by living off fishing. The setting is tiny coastal settlements on the brink of subdivision and tourism. Good reading.

Economics?

Maybe not.Three books at the library today, one from The Australian's 2011 Best Books list on Keynes, the economist credited with helping lift Britain out of its financial slump in the 1930s. It looks to be quite well written and important because of its relevance to current financial issues, shall we say. The book is quite a compact, lightweight paperback. Not a big dull Economics sort of text book thing at all. But I am not sure my heart's in it. Have made a start instead on Tamarisk Row by Gerald Murnane, published in 1974.

Mary Poppins

I have just finished The Shiralee - a shiralee is a swag, a burden. Lovely story, some nice images of dusty, tough rural Australia. A bittersweet story about a drifter Dad with his little girl Buster. Made into a movie in 1987.

There are another couple of books to pick up from the library which I will try and do tomorrow. Meantime I have started reading Mary Poppins as an iBook on the iPad. PL Travers was born in Maryborough, just up the road in Queensland. The show Mary Poppins is currently on in Brisbane.

The Shiralee

Finished Dog Rock this morning (yes, I am on a week's break) and got The Shiralee from the library this morning. The Shiralee was published in 1955. Maybe it's about a girl who wears red ribbons at the ends of her plaits?

Project Gutenberg Australia (PGA)

I finished Obernewtyn a couple of days ago, now back to Dog Rock. I am thinking about ways to access some of the more difficult to find, out of print, rare books and found a couple of titles on PGA, including Out of the Silence, by Erle Cox. Cox's book is a very early example of science fiction; Obernewtyn is fantasy. Dog Rock is just plain comical, very funny.

Obernewtyn and Dog Rock

I did finish Cargo the second night of reading it. I started Dog Rock (funny story about very small town Australia in the '60s) but in the meantime, Obernewtyn has become available at the library. It is a fantasy story, not at all my thing I would have thought, but it's quite well written.

Jessica Au - Cargo

I finished Be Near Me so Dominic and I went to the library last night after dinner as this book became available - it's another from The Australian's Best Books of 2011 list. Its author is Australian, the book is most definitely Australian and I am two-thirds of the way through it already. I could have read until I finished it late last night but I am back to work now and thought I had better get some sleep. Hopefully I can finish it tonight!

Jessica Au has a website - click on her name.