31 Down ....

...259 to go! Maths was never my strong point so I may have this completely wrong .... but I think I have worked out that at my current rate, I might read 48 books per year. Which means it will take me another 5.3 years to read the read the rest of the books on the list! Cool - I'm not going anywhere!!

Jennifer Government

I finished The Fern Tattoo last night. Now for a quick entree into Jennifer Government. The front cover says "It's Catch-22 by way of The Matrix".

Australian Literature Dude

Really enjoying The Fern Tattoo written by David Brooks. The writing is beautiful, althought it contains some very long, multiple-claused sentences that are a bit of a challenge! The book is about outcasts and story-telling - it describes the process of story-telling, the mixing of truths and unreliable memories, grades of truth, half-truths and downright lies. And the stories are mostly about outcast characters.

Mr Brooks is Associate Professor of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney. Quite the dude of Aussie writing, I reckon.

The Fern Tattoo

Ned Kelly was hung last night and so that's the end of his story. The acknowledgements at the end of the book tend to indicate that Carey didn't just write a total flight of fancy. So I guess I just read a very palatable and moving version of history. Loved it.

Went to the Maroochydore Library today and this is the next read. I have no idea what it's about and can't even recall the date it was published. So will launch straight in with a totally open mind!

True History

Really enjoying this History. Nearly finished it and will be sad to put it down. I was thinking about what I could say quickly about this book and can't really put it any better than the back cover blurb. "... the legendary Ned Kelly speaks for himself, scribbling his narrative on errant scraps of paper in semiliterate but magically descriptive prose as he flees from the police." The sentences run together with few full stops but magical the writing is. Every few pages is a passage that just blows me away, the sort of writing that my 3rd form English teacher Mr Cook suggested we write down in a notebook as we came across it in our reading. Like this, for example: in this passage a policeman drunkenly fires a shot through the roof in the presence of baby George, Ned Kelly and others. In that instant, the baby's eyes changed colour from blue to "a yellow brown the colour of a ginger cat. In the heat of a furnace metals change their nature in olden days they could make gold from lead. Wait to see what more there is to hear my dear daughter for in the end we poor uneducated people will all be made noble in the fire."

Don't Pack my Books!

I have kept aside a clutch of books to read if it's possible to stay awake long enough to read in the middle of packing ...

Last night I did finish Come In, Spinner and so I will continue on with True History of the Kelly Gang.

Singapore

Nothing to do with books but this sign in a shop made me laugh. I actually don't like buying shoes. Books make me happy. But I'm still quite superficial. Whatever.

I didn't take the very chunky Come in Spinner with me to Singapore - not a good fit in the hand luggage. Instead, my book companion was Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang. But I didn't read much - we went to bed very early in Singapore (very un-Singaporean, it would seem!).

This food court, called Food Republic was quite eye-catching, decorated as if it were a gigantic library. The decor was quite a bit better than the food we had but we found plenty of nice food elsewhere.

A pathologist I met at the courses I attended in Singapore was quite a reader also. We got chatting about books and she's read Christina Stead. We both agreed that For Love Alone was an appallingly sad book. She'd tried to read The Kelly Gang but couldn't get into it.

I bumped into a old colleague at the course who was carrying around several books - on his phone! He largely reads e-books now but wasn't able to find The Kelly Gang as an e-book. So paperbooks get to live another day. David reckons his family's book consumption has sky-rocketed reading e-books. They still buy the occasional "trophy book" to put on their shelves!

Meantime, for me it's back to finishing off Come In Spinner, although I would say that progress will be slow for the next little while as we gear up to move house in about 9 days!