What are Books For?

Finished Things we Didn't See Coming last night and have begun The Lost Life. It has T.S. Eliot as one of the characters and another, Catherine, tells that literature is her first love and her whole reason for studying at all. So it would seem that this book might be quite a bit about books and writing.

It is Catherine who would say that poems, novels and stories "give people the lives they will never live and fill them with a yearning for something else, something more. A way of living in the world that doesn't exist yet. Doesn't yet exist but dreaming about it just might make it so. And books that speak about these things just might make it so by inspiring people to go out there and create their lives, not have their lives imposed upon them."

Dystopias

Yesterday's library books are Things We Didn't See Coming, by Steven Amsterdam and The Lost Life, Steven Carroll. How funny, two Stevens; that wasn't planned! I chose the former because it's next on the list (alphabetically) and the second one is the library copy of book I spotted in the Sunshine Coast airport bookshop while waiting to go to Sydney (different cover though).

Things We Didn't See is decsribed as "a...trip through a variety of dystopias - " which are defined as imaginary places where everything is as bad as possible. Well, that about sums it up! This book is about a future Australia that I hope we never have to live through. And thankfully, according to the back cover blurb, when I finish the book, I will put it down "feeling something close to hope".

Here's my junior book buddy reading one of the 10 books he picked up at the library - this is one of the "Aussie Nibbles" books which are great little chapter books for early readers. Note the fire in the background - how nice is that to be reading by the fire with my gorgeous little boy!

Another post script: in front of us, returning her books at the library yesterday, was an elderly lady who had a door-stop of a Bryce Courtenay book amongst her returns. I asked her the title but she explained she couldn't remember, her brain feeling a bit knocked around by her first lot of chemotherapy. She went on to say that reading Courtenay's books was "quite addictive" but suggested that I don't start with The Power of One. OK!

Anna's FAN

I forgot to mention yesterday that Anna's recent favourite Australian novel is People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks. I spotted it in Myer recently and had to fight hard to resist the urge to buy it, as I'm sure it's in the library. I'd be quickly broke if I forked out $25 for every one of the books on the list. Thank goodness for the library - I'm off there soon, I've reserved a couple of books.

I've zipped through Snail already. It's all written in lower case and is divided into lots of continuous short sections rather than chapters so there was no natural break in the book and I just kept on reading! The landscape of Snail is the inside of some very grotty Melbourne flats. But even the home of one of the mothers in the book was totally dire, especially the kitchen where all the food was rotten, or nearly so. Weevils in everything, even microwaved flies, some still buzzing, in a bowl of rice. That together with a good dose of crabs, head lice and scabies and I needed a good long shower after reading the book! It is the worst nightmare of every parent who has a 20-something living in a dive of a flat or a squat somewhere - drugs galore and serious mental illness. A sad book because I'd bet the author knows all to well of the despair he writes about. But he writes with such humour - there are some very funny, laugh-out-loud passages in the book and clever word play. The lower case writing is referred to late in the book, where the writer observes that the Melbourne constabulary changed POLICE on the side of their cars to lower case - much less intimidating, apparently!

Anna and Snail

This is my lovely friend Anna - and her equally lovely girls. I have know Anna for 25 years and of about 20 of those years Anna has lived in Australia. Anna is a self-confessed book-hoarder so it's not surprising that Anna has read (and owns) a fair few of the books on the ABR FAN list. Anna is also a very generous person and offered to lend me some of her FANs. But that would involve posting them as she's in Sydney and I'm in Queensland and we don't actually see each other that often. No, instead I will get most of the books from the library, I told Anna, and then quipped "but do you have Snail?"

Well, no she didn't. But now I do! Snail appeared in a perfect brown paper parcel from Victoria Books, I'm pretty sure it was, but silly me threw the brown paper wrapper out with the address label on it, so now after only a glance at the return address, I can't be sure ... But thank you VERY much, Anna.

I can see why Anna has not owned Snail - it certainly is an odd little book , according to its cover blurb being "a darkly comic tale of madness, trust, friendship and gardening". Since I finished Picnic at Hanging Rock last night, I'm about to sample some more of this curious book by Eric Dando.

Book Fight

Spotted in The Australian online yesterday was a quick run-down of a spat between Bryce Courtenay and Peter Carey, appearing in an entry in the Australian Literary Review blog.

Courtenay has responded to Carey bemoaning the decline of serious reading and in doing so, has suggested that Carey is a bit of a literary snob.

A very crude summary would be that this is a debate of sales versus substance. This seems like a good moment to confess that I groaned inwardly at the prospect of reading one, not to mention several, Bryce Courtenay books. I don't believe I've ever read one of his titles, not even The Power of One. But then neither have I read anything by Peter Carey, but I feel like I should have. Yip, hands up who's the literary snob - me! And a totally uninformed one. Shame... but soon to rectify the situation, thanks to this marvellous list and its amazing Minestrone Soup of titles to slurp my way through.

PS on my recent trip to Sydney, one taxi driver who's an avid reader, confessed a strong dislike of Courtenay's writing. And yet meanwhile, some of my ex-pat South African, now-Kiwi friends are currently reading and enjoying some of Bryce Courtenay's books. Definitely need to dip in and taste for myself!

Picnic at Hanging Rock

This is the current read and I'm really enjoying it. It's very eerie, how the bush can just swallow up three girls and one of their teachers. As well as trip and bash senseless a young Englishman out looking for the disappeared girls.

The bush is the main character in this book and it sits in marked and obvious contrast to the presence of a mansion which houses a boarding school for young ladies, in addition to a well-to-do township nearby. It is William Ford's 1875 painting entitled At the Hanging Rock which is said have inspired Joan Lindsay's book. Early on in the book, Miranda (one of the girls who disappears) recalls "a picture of people in old-fashioned dresses having a picnic at the Rock". This painting is now housed in the Ian Potter Gallery at Federation Square in Melbourne.

Sydney

I flew to Sydney Thursday evening, checking out the bookshop at the airport and there were a couple of books on the list for sale there. But you have gotta love a bookshop that has a whole section dedicated to Australian fiction. I ducked in here during a downpour in Sydney and ended up spending an age trying to decided which of Dymock's quite extensive selection I would treat myself too. I think almost all their stock is held in the local libraries,

so in the end it was almost a coin toss. I decided on a book that had been published a while ago - this Patrick White title first being published in 1955.

While in Sydney I finished Dancing on Coral and never really warmed to it. None of the characters ever really endeared themselves to me and most of the book was set in the USA. And I started (and finished on the plane home) Walking to the Moon by Kate Cole-Adams. Just as in One Hand Clapping, this book featured a mother who left - and contemplated completely abandoning via suicide - her small daughter; a horrifying prospect and something that gave Anna, Helen and me some food for thought over dinner on Saturday night in Sydney.