A proposed date

Having searched for an important event: births, deaths, marriages and divorces; nothing prominent, even vaguely related to my task comes up. So I'm opting for February 11 - this Wednesday. It can become its own Date of Significance.

I am currently flying through A Voyage Long and Strange by Tony Horwitz and really enjoying it although I'm excited about starting my Australian reading so I'm maybe rushing it a bit. Its a brilliant piece of popular history, where he uses the narrative/informative technique of relating the history of early America while paralleling his own journeys along the trails of the conquistadors and settlers by car. Its one of those recent books that falls outside strict categories, a habit that's already formed in the high end examples of popular science and history writing and is now forming in travel narratives, political writing and even mainstream areas like cookbooks and biographies. A literary journal called Creative Non-Fiction has been exploring this idea for some years, and while its probably frustrating to purists, I think that blurring the edges of genres is immensely interesting, and definitely life-giving to tired genres like military history. Read Lee Gutkind's short article What is Creative Nonfiction?

But this less rigid approach is not really new, of course. Orwell did it really well, and its been a stable of journalistic writing ever since; Bruce Chatwin and Robyn Davidson were also masters, and both with an Australian connection, to whit. I guess you could also trace it back to Swift and Defoe if the fancy took you.

However, we are talking about Australian literature here - and what I will be reading for the year starting February 11. Horwitz is a good point to leave off non-Australian writers, betrothed as he is to Geraldine Brooks in possibly the only dual Pulitzer prize-winning marriages in history. So I've decided to start my Australian year with her latest book, The People of the Book, released to mixed reviews but perfect for my intentions.

And what are these intentions? Well, now I have a date and a first book I want to explore some questions I even have of myself!

Firstly, I haven't been 'put up' to this, or dared, or become party to a bet; I'm not sponsored by a publisher or a bookstore(!) or a journal, online or otherwise. I just thought one day (date forgotten) early this year, perhaps in the flush of new years' resolutions, that it would be a good exercise to read a bunch of Australian authors I hadn't got around to. Esoterically, it was like this misty column of titles was lining up in the back of my mind, waiting to be read, and I just wasn't getting to them. They represented years of recommendations, reviews I've read, impressions from reading blurbs, prior knowledge, and of course daily reminders at my workplace. Which is a bookshop, but its unlikely I will be approaching them for sponsorship. And at the bookshop, there regularly are , in fact, misty floating figures that line up in oppressive columns waiting for me to attend to them; but that's reality and no chimera unfortunately.

But why Australian, one may ask, and its true for me like it probably is for you: there are hosts of books lurking in the inner mind, why just Australian? This is a bit harder to answer. Its not like I have a revulsion to Australian authors, I read them regularly and count some Australians as favourites. Its not even like I feel guilty for not reading them lately - I read Richard Flanagan (Wanting), Marcus Zuzak (The Book Thief), Kate Grenville (The Lieutenant) and Andrew Stafford (Pig City) as recently as the second half of last year. I do think that there aren't enough hours in the day to read all the books published in a year so sometimes you have to give yourself a limit in order not to flail around trying to keep up with the latest release. So, my limit is Australian only.

And I do mean this. I'll continue to read newspapers, of course, but otherwise it will be a strictly Australian diet. No short stories, poetry, articles, tracts, or essays not penned by an Australian. I'll choose some Australian poets and short story collections for lighter reading, and even try to eschew non-Australian writers online, however that will be nigh impossible. And that's okay anyway: I'm definitely NOT going to turn into a xenophobe, no rednecked patriot me. I do love Aussie writing, and reading it for a year will be easy for me because of this, but I'm not doing it to prove that Australian writers are better than their Up Above counterparts. I mean, if I really wanted to challenge myself I could have read holocaust survivor stories for a year, or Henry Miller, or strictly only gay African authors from the nations surrounding the Gulf of Guinea.

I am looking forward to it for reasons you may call anthropological, or socio-geographical, or linguo-anatomical. I think it best to set myself some goals for the year - to approach the task with principles and good questions in mind. To take it apart forensically and get something valuable out of it. And to hopefully have something interesting to report here.