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.