Welcome to my reading Blog!

Thanks for attending the launch party for my infamous Blog!!!

I say infamous because some of my potential readers have known about this for a while but I haven't been ready to launch it until it was...just...right. And its not yet! So rather than keeping on writing into the ether I may as well invite others to sample and damn the consequences. My life has become a little calmer lately too so I guess I have the intellectual clarity to start sharing my highly opinionated jottings with whoever drops by. If you like what you read, you may want to become a Follower (it has a faintly Lord of the Flies-like flavour, this thing we call the 'net), which generates an email when I create a new post, I think. The link is at the bottom right of the page.

And remember, blogs are meant to be read in reverse-chronological order, so it'll take some clicking to follow the story from the very start - or you can use the archive function on the right hand column. Whatever you do, I hope you enjoy the party, and your visits here. Tell your friends! Leave comments! Start your own "Stephen's Blog Sucks" blog if you so desire! I'll keep on writing this until the year's up anyway so thanks again for visiting.

Sydney Loch/To Hell and Back

The story of its release and the controversy that surrounded it is an added reason to seek out this excellent first hand account of the horrors of Gallipoli. Iconic, almost nation-defining in the courage shown by Australian soldiers in the face of an impenetrable enemy and strategic ineptitude, the landings at Gallipoli and ensuing months of fighting are the background for this soldier's story, told with honesty by Victorian farmer Sydney Loch. And I mean an unflinching, unsettling honesty that renders accounts of rotting corpses and smoke-filled sunsets with equal detail. It was this honesty that led to the book being banned on it's second release in 1919 - the War Department not keen for Australians to have access to the dark side of the story this close to the end of the Great War.

This modern release of the book re-titles it, and adds a brief biography by the writers Susanna and Jake de Vries, where we learn about the controversy as well as Loch's life and career after the war, primarily as a philanthropist helping the many dispossessed in Europe who took years to recover from the destruction and loss that surrounded them. This post-war selflessness adds an interesting perspective to the person we come to know from the original book, who is humble and loyal and not a little bit brave as he survives one of our most costly battlefield disasters. Loch serves as a runner for an Australian Colonel, putting him in many precarious situations but also making him privy to some of the higher level tactical decisions made at headquarters. He is remarkably supportive of the Colonels and Majors as they toy with men's lives, remaining silent and only allowing himself the briefest flashes of annoyance at the posturing and cowardice he sees.

Of course, the book was gleaned from his diaries, and perhaps the editor's pen has saved some of these commanders from further criticism, some of whom were still serving or remained on the peninsula in cemeteries. Loch doesn't set out to criticise his leaders anyway, his focus is more on the living conditions of the men, the daily grind of battle and survival, the constant reminders of a momentary and violent death. But he is no pedestrian diarist, and the text is littered with tight descriptions and illuminating observations, to the point where the great writer Miles Franklin pronounced it a "literary" work on its release. This is fair, as the different tone to other survivor's accounts is clear - Loch didn't know he would survive yet there is a poetry and a conscious development of anecdotes and even dialogues that is definitely writerly. He is struck by the calm scenes of ships in the harbour by night, the orderly tent cities that spring up on the occupied beaches, the expressions on men's faces as they prepare to attack or contemplate the loss of a mate. Some of these passages are unforgettable.

Less can be said, sadly, about the accompanying biography, which was possibly rushed or consciously underwritten to lend focus to the main part of the book. Whatever the reason, it is clunky writing and unsatisfying in both its detail and execution. The female de Vries is the writer of a series of books on women in Australian history which I had wanted to read - I'm less keen now. If only Loch himself could have written a full autobiography! In fact, he did, but it remains unpublished. War, and war stories are not to everyone's fancy I know but if you have never read a Gallipoli diary or need to have the story of this part of our history revived for you, Sydney Loch's is a most engaging and readable example.

The wrap-up:

Australian themes - Despite our long history of involvement in wars, there aren't all that many full accounts written by participants of these conflicts.

Australian characters - Loch doesn't set out to write a character piece but he manages some very perceptive studies of his comrades and commanders, mostly Australians.

Australian settings - There are some interesting observations of life in pre-war rural Victoria but the majority of the book is set in the Dardanelles, which has become sacred ground to many pilgrims.

Australian voices - Loch has an ear for dialogue and sets down some exchanges verbatim - a great resource for those interested in the lost inflections of a time gone by.

Australian focus - As a soldier, Loch has both a healthy disrespect for his battlefield commanders and a begrudging loyalty. His respect for the fighting Australian soldier, however, is immense and could be seen as the lingering message of his book.

Sam de Brito/The Lost Boys

Coming-of-age stories usually bore the hell out of me. I dutifully read the canon of Australian, UK and American books as a younger fella and could never quite figure out why they didn't seem to speak to me, or echo my own experiences. Not that they had to - other people's lives are always interesting - but they were almost universally promoted as...universal. I found, however, that in most cases fiction writers would mix a youthful naivete of the passing of events with a wry older understanding that smacked of memoir, rather than fiction. I don't know why this annoys me, in fact, it has probably been a factor in my own resistance to writing a novel-length project: I didn't want to sound like one of those self-satisfied narcissists that have decided their own proclivities or immature observations are worthy of a 80,000 word novel. Examples? Many of my favourite novelists have resorted to this tawdry device - and I call it a device because the essential element is this: I am writing this novel about growing up in London/Tallahassee/Bathurst because my upbringing was so unique/depressing/remarkable that everyone who has been a kid/teenager/young adult will find something in it to relate to. Or, they may be writing on the advice of their therapist. Whatever the reason, these books are too often thinly-veiled memoirs of the authors own lives, autobiographies masquerading as fiction. You could play "spot the actual experience" or Google the author's life and work out the person or event the are alluding to in their "novel", if you so desired. But I am being bitter. Perhaps I am jealous of the jetset lifestyles of some of these "characters", or their early sexual experiences (much earlier than mine), or their uncanny foreknowledge that afforded them the capacity to choose the right friends or lovers or job opportunities. I just generally find these sorts of stories lack the observance of the many periods of pure boredom, the powerlessness, the formless playing or watching of TV or eating or going to school or talking on the phone that defined my childhood years - and many others I have shared this idea with. True, these are not engaging topics for modern novels, and when you think back to that time they are not the occasions that first come to mind, but yet they do form the bulk of our coming-of-age, and are most decidedly universal.

You might argue that I would probably be quite content with the new genre of biography that is so successful nowadays - the Difficult or Oprah Childhood Autobiography - with titles such as Shame, Disgrace, Wasted, or my favourite title Ma, He Sold Me For a Few Cigarettes. While worthy, and clearing allowing their authors the chance for closure, these are dire, often badly- or ghost-written pieces that turn my theory of why writers enjoy fictionalising their own coming-of-age on its head - these guys revel in the candour of revealing their painful and masochistic lives. And the books are quite clearly non-fiction.

This brings me, finally, to my latest review: Sam be Brito's The Lost Boys. With obvious knowledge of the current climate (the post-James Frey world) de Brito writes leaving you no doubt that these experiences and events are from his own life. The book charts the experiences of first a teenage boy completing and leaving school, then his older self who hasn't moved much beyond the suburb, friends, and self-abusing habits of his youth. It's a good effort, and I enjoyed it, and I'd like to explain why it got past my memoir radar. I should have put the first two paras of this in brackets so you could choose whether to read it - not wanting to get you offside if you love a good coming-of-age story, or even a Difficult Childhood Autobiography, or if you can forgive James Frey. Firstly, de Brito is not a Great Writer, its his first novel so you are not expected to be familiar with his style or seek out his pithy observations. I'm not sure if he is even a Very Good Writer, maybe that's what I like about him - he doesn't make me feel lowly by comparison. But he is a Good Writer, and I suspect edits have been made to tie the book together more neatly. Its a very warts'n'all, almost Gonzo-style novel, where the self-deprecation of the author successfully removes the need for the reader to judge them.

A style emerges, however. Its a staccato, short chapter construction where time vacillates chaotically between the main character's ages as schoolboy, thirty-something, and the current time, within a few years of the thirty-something chapters. Its a successful technique, particularly since the message of the book is that we keep repeating ourselves and seldom learn from our mistakes. A chapter will often start and its not until a few sentences in that you can tell which time period the characters are in. The technique works a bit like our memory, linked by feelings, faces and symbols more than chronology. De Brito is careful not to bleed the drama out of his novel while doing this, creating a unique sort of tension in that he focuses on characters or events briefly then leaves them suspended in time - to be fleshed out later or never returned to as he desires.

But this is never achieved with cynicism or cleverness. He is almost a writer who doesn't appreciate his own power as the novel avoids pretension and only submits to that one stylistic device. The book reads like the rantings of a literate pub drunk; disconnected, repetitive, at times tender and sometimes brutal. He adopts, or maybe tries to recreate, a hard, masculine language that is replete with expletives: the c-words, cock, cunt, cone and coke appear on almost every page. I thought this would become tiresome but it creates its own authentic harmony in a coarse kind of way. Its forgivable because the men in the story are not gangsters or even particularly hard-nosed, they are average Aussie blokes who, for better or worse, display all of the many foibles of their ilk.

And it was probably this that impressed me the most. Like a noughties Puberty Blues, The Lost Boys documents a sort of Australian youth experience that I can't say is universal, but it is very similar to mine. De Brito's Eastern Suburbs of Sydney is laced with drugs, booze, unsafe sex, and surfing - the sort of peak growing experiences many Aussie kids experienced to varying degrees - just choose your own drug, sport, or unsafe practice. It grates at times, and you howl at the book for the characters' stupid choices, but it is starkly real, and allowed me to view my own choices now and then in a comparative light. This is a refreshing reading experience: safe, yes, because I'm not comparing my youthful surrounds with Soweto or Sao Paulo, but illuminating in that I could actually discover that someone else's world view could be coloured through a similar set of events as mine. 

But is it a memoir? I can't say. I suspect it is; doctored to cut out the boring bits of course, and perhaps teetering towards the moralistic just through the absolute worthlessness of most of the characters while walking the tightrope between championing their actions and damning them. So, a warning: there is a melancholy that suffuses the book, a sense of wasted opportunities that can become depressing, if that sort of stuff has that affect on you. One of the aspects I liked about the book most is the shadowy figure of the writer attempting to produce this book. He only appears in five or six chapters, providing a throughline for the disconnected story as he paces through a day of trying to write, feeling like he cannot, reverting to online porn and trying to stop smoking rather than actually sitting down to write. With this character, who is undeniably de Brito himself trying to write the novel you are now holding, he reveals that his is a writer's soul, and that is always something to champion. I may even have to review my opinion of coming-of-age novels. Got any recommendations?

The Wrap-up:

Australian themes - Don't know, can't say. I only had one childhood and this book often echoes it so there are definitely universal Australian themes here.

Australian characters - Some absolutely classic Aussie characters are impaled by this writer's pen.

Australian settings - Events occur around Sydney's Eastern suburb beaches but it could be any coastal populace - which includes most of us.

Australian voices - This is a very authentic Australian voice, unfettered by style or pomposity, and therefore immensely engaging.

Australian focus - Almost essential reading for anyone trying to understand the Australian male psyche, in the same vein as Luke Davies or Nick Earls or Andrew McGahan.

Max Barry/Syrup

I picked this up for a lightweight read after plowing (happily) through Philip Jones. Kimberley from my old work read and reviewed it a few years ago and she highly recommended it, but with the proviso that she doesn't really read any Australian fiction. This intrigued me as I didn't know anything about Max Barry, and also because Kimberley always has immaculate taste in books. But why not Australian?

It wasn't long before I understood how the book slipped through K's cultural cringe radar. Syrup is possibly the least 'Australian' book I've read this year, choosing instead to locate itself in California, and the cutthroat world of corporate marketing. Barry is a satirist, and chooses his victims well: superficial marketing execs, two-dimensional corporate wage slaves, money-hungry twenty-somethings, vacuous Hollywood stereotypes. It all revolves around the central character, Scat, and his belief that all of us have three million-dollar ideas per year. One of his is to invent a new type of cola, called FUKK, which he intends to market to Coca-Cola. He does this, and sets off a chain of events that allow him to exercise his great ideas in ever-increasingly farcical situations.

So, its a free-flowing and funky anti-establishment romp, with plenty of hip cultural references, an undercurrent of sex and fame, and a spattering of editorial-esque comments on the clandestine tools used by marketers, appearing in different fonts outside the text a la Douglas Coupland. And it was when this dawned on me that the experience started to sour. So much of Syrup has been said before, and better, by the cultural bowerbirds that preceded Max Barry - Bret Easton Ellis, William Gibson, and Coupland. I mention Gibson because Barry is remarkably prescient in some of the novel: written in 1999, it predicts the black Coke can of Coke Zero, the merging of advertising and media we see all around us nowadays, the propensity for celebrities to invent names to make them stand out from the crowd like Beyonce and Fifty Cent. But conversely the book almost feels like a dinosaur already - characters still use payphones and shoot film on 16mm stock - to the point where a member of Gen Y reading it could find some of the references quaint but not cool or clever like Barry tries to be.

This is no fault in itself - writers do not necessarily create for the generation that succeeds them - but it is a danger when the writer starts to riff on their own imagination and loses the reader. Even for a farce, the situations Scat and his partner 6 find themselves in are completely unbelievable, and Barry keeps ramping them up by placing even more unlikely obstacles in their path, and allowing his characters to overcome them, often through a brilliant 11th hour lightbulb moment. For some reason this seems to actually leech out the tension that he is trying to create - you start to expect the clever rebuttal or the cunning stunt - and this becomes boring. I read the book in just a couple of days; easy, because it lacks much in the way of description or analysis of the character's motivations and relies almost entirely on the plot and how it is played out. This smacks of an expected readership with a limited attention span, and this may be exactly who Barry wrote the book for. Funnily enough, his most recent project is a stream-of-consciousness style novel that he is writing then emailing to recipients one page at a time.

I don't know, maybe I'm just getting too old for clever, or just learning to prefer substance over style. I think Barry is a good writer, he can tell an engaging story and his jokes are pretty funny; but for the American market, where this book seems to be aimed, they already have Jonathan Franzen and David Sedaris and Chuck Palahniuk doing this really really well, while also saying some pretty important things. In this book, Max Barry reminds me a bit of Clive James, a writer I have never warmed to, who always seems to be the loudest person laughing at his own jokes.

The wrap-up:
Australian themes - We are all guilty of materialism in the first world, Australians as much as any, but its interesting that Barry didn't choose to set his book here, maybe we just aren't shallow enough?
Australian characters - There is a vague reference to Scat being born in Australia but these are all ultra-American figures, instantly recognisable.
Australian settings - The book is set completely in Los Angeles.
Australian voices - Can a non-American skewer Americans better than a native? The only Australian voice is the author's.
Australian focus - In the world of these characters, nations are just facets of the global market, and nationhood is just another button to be pushed.

I guess that's all fine, but why?

Okay I admit I've probably been avoiding this post - the raison d'etre, the justification, the explanation post - why am I doing this? Or, more precisely, what am I doing this for? Or even more exactly, what am I hoping to learn or gain by blogging my year-long Australian reading saga?

I've been developing answers to this question over the past few months of reading, and I've come up with some. . . questions. Hopefully by the end of the reading year I'll be able to answer them for myself, and provide a suitable reason for all this. Not that its a chore: I've really liked almost everything so far, and it has fulfilled an earlier justification to give some form to my previously chaotic book-choosing method. But I'm now almost three months in, and reaching ten books, so here are some conclusive questions for me (and you, maybe) to consider. I may add to this list later as more questions arise.

In order of questions coming to mind:

1. Is there a distinct Australian writing "voice" that could be discerned even if you didn't know the nationality of the author?

2. Can we read as widely as we like, covering many literary forms and categories, while still staying within one geographical setting?

3. Do Australian writers pay credit to their birth or adopted country in their books? And should they?

4. Are Australian writers as "good" as their international counterparts?

5. What leads some readers to love Australian writers and read them avidly, and others to consciously avoid them?

Now, back to reading!

Philip Jones/Ochre and Rust

Written by a curator and historian from the South Australian Museum, this excellent book was the winner of the Non-fiction category in the 2008 Prime Minister's Literary Awards. Philip Jones obviously has a deep fascination for Aboriginal culture and history, and, married with his comprehensive knowledge of the Museum and its collection, is in a prime position to unearth some of the less well-known episodes in early Aboriginal-European contact.

He does this through the simple but powerful device of starting each of the nine chapters of the book with a photograph of one item from the Museum's collection, and using this item to provide a flashpoint for the historical events surrounding it. There are weapons and artefacts, of course, but also some unexpected items, like an early artistic work by Albert Namatjira and one of the dresses belonging to outback heroine/eccentric Daisy Bates. Jones chooses his items well to present his thesis that objects themselves can become historical examples of the grey area where one culture overlaps another. Each chapter is embellished with many more images of further items, documents, geographical settings, and most evocatively for me, contemporary photos of Aboriginal people peering hauntingly at the camera in some of our most remote locations. Much like the recent photo book First Australians, which accompanied the TV series of the same name, these photos are almost incredible records of that time when the photographers were stealing their subjects' souls while their countrymen were likewise stealing the very ground the people sat on.

Jones writes, however, with great restraint. For this is a scholarly work, despite the user-friendly images reproduced within the text and the helpful maps of the areas discussed, and he refrains from judgements of either side in these often bloody cultural struggles, saving his criticism for professional misconduct like the greed and insincerity of some of the Lutheran missionaries and the questionable map-making methods of some explorers. But while Jones always remains objective and thus humble I could not help but be impressed by his familiarity with so many disciplines. He jumps effortlessly from ethnography to historiography to anthropology to art history to lexicography to cartography and even to pyrography, the process of burning designs on wood or leather, in case you don't know what that is (I didn't). This makes for a fairly focussed reading effort, but as I said it is amply leavened with images and other prompts.

Not that the events he describes need a whole lot of "sexing-up". Every chapter reveals more and more obscure episodes from Australia's early settlement history; all of them fascinating if only for the extreme conditions faced by the Europeans, and the poignancy of what we know to have occurred as a result of European occupation of this country. Its hard to chose a favourite vignette, but the ochre-gathering expeditions that were once a staple annual event for the peoples of the Central desert and eventually warded then killed off by selfish white landowners came close for me. This chapter opens with a photo of a luminous, almost other-worldly lozenge of ochre collected around the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century, and it is that powerful image that keeps intruding on my thoughts, of how dust from a rock can be such a potent symbol of one civilisation's long decline and another's usurpation. The word Jones keeps coming back to is syncretism - the attempted reconciliation or union of different or opposing principles or practices - and the elephant in the room is that it has been always the earlier, less aggressive culture that has had to give way. Like a one-man museum himself, with Ochre and Rust Philip Jones successfully saves some of these items, people, and episodes from oblivion.

The wrap-up:
Australian themes - Covers some of the most important Australian themes - our connection to country, our shared history, our stained future.
Australian characters - Features unforgettable but largely forgotten Australian characters like the doomed Cubadgee, linguist John Bennett, and first curator of the South Australian Museum Edward Stirling.
Australian settings - Here you will find language group maps, photographs, and extensive cultural backgrounds of vast areas of Australia often passed over in popular Australian colonial history writing: the Central Desert, Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia.
Australian voices - Always fascinating, Jones reproduces many letters, scientific articles and journal entries to enhance his book with the weight of primary sources.
Australian focus - It is refreshing to read something so unapologetically focussed on the Australian experience, giving equal importance to the contributions of the colonisers and the first Australians.

Peter Singer/Pushing Time Away

As Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and one of the world's best-known modern philosophers I knew of Peter Singer but didn't actually know he was an Aussie. Pushing Time Away is only one of his many publications - including Practical Ethics, How Are We To Live?, and Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals, published in 1975, regarded as the starting point for the worldwide animal liberation movement. So, this is pretty illustrious company. I love my meat and haven't read anything else by Singer, but very much enjoyed this peculiar little conceit. A conceit because its not really a memoir, or hard history, or even an extended obituary - while being a good example of all three.

Singer's approach is simple enough - he never knew his maternal grandfather and discovers some letters that pique his interest seventy years after his grandfather dies. What he discovers is possibly what many of us wish to discover, that his grandfather was an intriguing, successful individual, revered in his own time. What he also discovers is what most of us can never hope to - his grandfather was similar to his grandson in many ways, was a celebrated writer, thinker and teacher, and was a contemporary and a confidante of Sigmund Freud, no less. Singer is a humble man, though, and seemingly grounded about his own success, so refrains from holding his grandfather in awe, and relates the story of his chequered life with sincerity, strong research, and, at times, comedy. This last quality is noteworthy because his grandfather, David Oppenheim's final years and fate are devastating, and hard to read after the illustrious ears of his youth and early professional life.

Oppenheim was a teacher and intellectual in early 20th century Austria - a period experienced by many as a Golden Age of thought, enlightenment and culture when Vienna was at the forefront of these prospects. We now know that this was a chimera - it took a world war to prove this - and David is one of the many walking casualties of that horrible war. He returns a decorated soldier but distant, chased by memories of carnage and loss. And things get progressively worse. He loses the inspiration to write, is frustrated professionally, and eventually becomes an enemy and ultimately a victim of the Nazi regime. David is a Jew in the darkest period of Jewish history, and all the more pathetic for his inability to see the dangers of the political situation as it steadily declines. Singer is proud of David's intellectual achievements, but he bemoans his scholarly remoteness: "in the hour when he needed it most, David's understanding of his fellow human beings failed him". David Oppenheim dies unheralded in the walled town/camp of Theresienstadt, Poland, one of the many millions.

His wife, Amalie, survives Theresienstadt and emigrates to Australia, bringing with her the many letters written to her by David throughout his life, and thus giving Singer the primary sources for his book. They provide a fascinating insight into he courtship, marriage and life of David and Amalie. In fact, for me they are the strongest part of the book. Singer touches on many historic moments but never belabours the historical detail, allowing the letters to specify one family's experience. He returns to some of the places of his grandparents' life, including, in one memorable passage, the school in Vienna where David taught classical languages and culture. It must have taken great restraint and sensitivity for Singer to relate the circumstances of his grandfather's demise without reverting to bitterness - although it may have just been a resignedness; it being pointless to begrudge the past really.

The most telling factor, that Singer keeps returning to, and which inspired him to write the book, is the closeness in intellectual rigour and even ethical positioning between David Oppenheim and himself. Considering he had never read any of his grandfather's writings or spoken to anyone in his family about his leanings, they arrive at an uncannily similar place. So, this is history, striated with family legend, and informed by a burning desire to understand humanity shared by two practical philosophers who never meet. It is not a light 'read', by any means, but a worthy project by a very confident and informed writer who is unforgivingly human. And if only we all had such a wealth of letters and published material from our own families, we might all be tempted to 'push time away' and find the things that bind us across the generations.

The wrap-up:
Australian themes - As a memoir, this book is written by an Australian emigre who is unconcerned by Australian themes.
Australian characters - Not so relevant in non-fiction, but the apparently tough-minded immigration officials who hinder the Oppenheim's emigration to Australia and thus seal their fate are chillingly real.
Australian settings - The Australia that the family members who do make it out come to is only thinly drawn.
Australian voices - Is there something particularly Australian about trying to delve into one's past?
Australian focus - Singer's focus is clear and Australia is just the end point.

Christos Tsiolkas/The Slap

Having been seriously affected by this novel, I haven't written anything or even read much for a week now. I've also changed jobs in the interim so The Slap will always stand out as the book that bridged two very different careers.

But I'm stalling. What to say about Christos Tsiolkas and The Slap? In a few words, it's one of the best Australian novels this century, possibly one of the greatest novels about contemporary Australian life ever written, and definitely my favourite in this reading year thus far. The book is at once clever and matter-of-fact, Tsiolkas's writing style so familiar, so authentic, that the characters and situations leap off the page and cross your path in the street. The eponymous slap, for instance, is so visceral yet almost expected, longed-for by the reader; but then it puts in train such a devastating series of events that you want it taken back, want the book rewound to the sunny, innocent moments before the slap occurred. Like the first scene of Cloudstreet, the slap scene is frightfully necessary.

It takes place in a suburban backyard in Melbourne, surrounded by a cast of players Tsiolkas allows us to get to know by astutely, and thrillingly, entering the lives of eight of them as he takes on their voice for each of the eight chapters of the novel. Each voice is distinct, and this would be an achievement in itself, but Tsiolkas takes it further by using these personas to pin down modern Australia, our preoccupations and presumptions, as precisely and as triumphantly as a butterfly collector. It must be said, that it is more middle class society that is his concern, but that particular Australian middle class that sags and sways over the definitions of other classes like a bloated belly over a belt. For Tsiolkas knows what makes us tick. His keen ear for our narcissistic speech, and eye for our foibles sometimes shock with the recognition of our own inner lives. is Christos looking over my shoulder right now? How can he see what I'm thinking?

And this is not just me, a middle-class, middle-aged middle Australian: he successfully masquerades as a seventeen-year-old gay boy, a seventy-year-old Greek grandfather, a troubled English immigrant, a thirty-something female Australian-Indian veterinarian. There are no excuses for this conscious multiculturalism either. As he says in his brilliant conversation with Sophie Cunningham on SlowTV he felt that this story was not being told on Australian pages - and he's right, not this way anyway. Our writers tend to either mask their multicultural background, like Alex Miller or Bryce Courtenay, or revel in it, like David Malouf or Nam Le. Authors are celebrated as "gay" writers, or "indigenous" writers, and rightly so, but Christos Tsiolkas takes on a new mantle: he is an Australian author, writing about the Australia he sees, and it is populated with third and fourth generation and new immigrants, gays, lesbians, Muslims, Christians, socialists, capitalists, white people, people of colour, the whole lot. I keep saying brave in these reviews but I do believe he is incredibly brave, or maybe just bold, in looking at Australia with an unflinching vision; he is political without needing to become personal.

This is where this novel succeeds so well compared to Richard Flanagan's dire attempt of a few posts ago. The Australia Tsiolkas presents is not always nice, and Howard's years do loom large over the novel in parts, but it is in the daily passage of ordinary people that politics has its most potent manifestations. There is no need for overblown characterisations: we live and love and fuck and feel in this time we are living, and, for my money, novels that recognise and celebrate this will always stun us, make us speak up at barbeques, remind us to keep a healthy perspective on ourselves, our world, and our immediate milieu. The people in this novel are all flawed, like us, and like us, they have within them the seeds for redemption.

I haven't said too much about the novel this time, sorry, but I urge you to just read it, discuss it with others, watch the SlowTV conversation, and let the issues and the urgent comments on our society pervade your life as I have. Can novels change you? Have I changed? Cover blurbs regularly insist that books will do this for you but I'm seldom convinced. Like the old joke about the social workers and the lightglobe, you have to want to change.

The wrap-up:
Australian themes - There are loads of themes here due mainly to the eight-way conversation with the reader, but also because that's the sort of writer Tsiolkas is - he cares about ideas and wants to toss them up in the air and see how they fall. The Australian way, no?
Australian characters - I challenge you to find more authentic Australian characters, more authentically characterised, in any recent novel.
Australian settings - The action is focussed on Melbourne. I was concerned at the outset that I might be in for another Melbourne-as-the-centre-of-the-universe diatribe but it actually made me miss the place.
Australian voices - The speech and thoughts of the characters in this book are devastatingly familiar. Keep watch for your own semantic demons.
Australian focus - Interesting. This book is certainly about Australia, and could only be set in Australia, but the concerns are deeply Human. Christos Tsiolkas is latter-day a Greek-Australian Homer: his words will cross boundaries.

Will ye be needin' a list there, sir?

Having just finished the fabulous The Slap - watch for the review soon - and not having chosen a successor, I thought it not a bad time to create a working list of books to choose from when next I'm in post-book limbo.

Care to suggest some more? I'm currently reading one book in a week or six days, so I could need 50 for the year. I've already had some suggestions that I'll list below but any more would be grand.

Kindly loaned from Lee for this project :

Sam de Brito/The Lost Boys
Alex Miller/Prochownik's Dream
Bob Ellis/Night Thoughts In Time Of War
Sarah Armstrong/Salt Rain
Anna Maria Dell'oso/Songs of the Suitcase
The Penguin Best Australian Short Stories

Recommended by Kimberley:

Max Barry/Syrup (K. claims this is the only Australian novel she likes)

Recent prize shortlisters and winners:

Steve Toltz/A Fraction of the Whole
DBC Pierre/Vernon God Little (really an Australian writer?)
Steven Carroll/The Time We Have Taken
Michelle de Krester/The Lost Dog
Debra Adelaide/The Household Guide to Dying
Shirley Hazzard/The Great Fire
Don Watson/American Journeys
Tim Winton/Breath
David Malouf/Every Move You Make
Christos Tsiolkas/Dead Europe
Louis Nowra/Ice
Alexis Wright/Carpentaria
David Foster/The Glade Within the Grove
Andrew McGahan/The White Earth
Christopher Koch/The Memory Room
Nam Le/The Boat
J.M. Coetzee/Diary of a Bad Year
Peter Carey/Theft: A Love Story
Malcolm Knox/Jamaica
Germaine Greer/Shakespeare's Wife
Philip Jones/Ochre and Rust
Gregory David Roberts/Shantaram
Philip Dwyer/Napoleon, The Path to Power

More to come...

Genre list collated from my old job at the bookstore:

Popular Science -
Tuniz et. al./The Bone Readers

History -
Eric Richards/Destination Australia
John Birmingham/Leviathan
Thomas Keneally/Commonwealth of Thieves
Gideon Haigh/Asbestos House

Politics & Current Events -
Tony Taylor/Denial
Tsiolkas, Haigh, Wright/Tolerance, Prejudice and Fear
Lisa Pryor/The Pin Striped Prison

Military -
Ernest Brough/Dangerous Days
EPF Lynch/Somme Mud
Peter Brunne/A Bastard of a Place
Michael Caulfield/War Behind the Wire
Graham Frudenberg/Churchill and Australia

Reference -
Don Watson/Weasel Words and Death Sentence

Travel Narrative -
Mark Dapin/Strange Country
Penelope Green/See Naples and Die
Tim Flannery/Throwim Way Leg

Biography -
Robert Dessaix/Arabesques
Hugh Lunn/Spies Like Us
Andrew Reimer/A Family History of Smoking

True Crime -
Lisa Clifford/Death in the Mountains
Chloe Hooper/The Tall Man

And now for some genres I never read, just to mix it up a bit. Wouldn't want to disappear up my own navel, now would I?! And they are all still Australian, Kev bless 'em:

Romance -
Bronwyn Parry/As Darkness Falls

Motivation -
A & B Pearse/Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps

Finance -
Bruce Brammall/Debt Man Walking

Crime -
Kerry Greenwood
Gabrielle Lord
Robert G. Barrett
Shane Maloney

Pulp Fiction(not really a genre but identifiable by author names in gold lettering) -
Judy Nunn
Matthew Reilly
Di Morrisey
Bryce Courtenay
Sydney Bauer
Monica McInerney
Rachael Treasure

Science Fiction -
Kim Westwood/Daughters of Moab
Sara Douglass

Children's -
Marcus Zuzak/The Messenger
Philip Gwynne/Deadly Unna
Melina Marchetta/Finnikin Rock
Sonya Hartnett/Sleeping Dogs
John Marsden/Tomorrow series
James Moloney
Maureen McCarthy/Somebody's Crying

Thanks to Kate, Mallory and the delectable Rachael for the last group, not all of which are children's, of course.

To Claire, who recommended Patrick White's Voss, love to, and thank you, but sorry, can't hack it, not even for this worthy project.

To Michael, who was very helpful, thank you, I am now a lifetime fan of Christos Tsiolkas and will definitely read all the available books - just hope I can find a copy of The Jesus Man!

I count well over 60 books above so making this list was really worthwhile. I also have another working list of all the Australian writers I can find the names of, still adding to this every couple of days. There are many hundreds! But if you know of a book that I really should add just message me here and I'll try to get to it. There are no strict criteria, except the obvious one, however I am finding that recently published works are easier to locate and possibly more to my taste; although Kate G. just loaned me My Brilliant Career and I know I really should read that!

Richard Flanagan/The Unknown Terrorist

I have been a fan of Richard Flanagan for a while, and would rate Gould's Book of Fish as one of my top ten Australian novels. However, I read Wanting, his latest, late last year and started to feel a bit uncomfortable about his writing. Not that I didn't enjoy it, I think it developed into a very solid and almost profound novel, too short to be a masterpiece but definitely a powerful example of speculative historical fiction. It was more that it felt too speculative, with too much of the writer's presence, too didactic. Which is precisely the problem with The Unknown Terrorist, and in this case I would have to say I didn't enjoy it.

Flanagan's intentions are forgivable - he dedicates the book to David Hicks and it is a precise snapshot of metropolitan Australia during Howard's reign of terror - but he manipulates his characters and episodes in an almost Machiavellian way and thus, I had no sympathy for any of them. I suppose the book is really a thriller, so the characters are meant to be cardboard; or any fleshing out is used merely to explain their actions, usually after they have committed them, which doesn't help. The frustration for me came in Flanagan choosing to interlock the lives of his main six or seven characters, in increasingly unlikely circumstances. You just don't believe some of the coincidences and this distracts from the sincerity of the message.

And even the message starts to wear thin. This feeling was weird for me as a fervent opposer to Howard and his post September 11 actions, and particularly as a believer in intellectual freedom. Flanagan does manage to capture the temper of the time: the paranoia, the doublespeak, the teflon-coating of the police and other agencies, and the time deserves to be documented as a part of our history. But did he have to make it so simplistic, so pat? A pole dancer called the Doll with great expectations has a one-night stand with a swarthy man who may or may not be a terrorist and as a result of their tryst she is mercilessly hounded and pilloried by the press. A pole dancer? A dark, handsome lover? An unethical and sensationalised media? Surely Flanagan is kidding if he thinks we haven't moved on from these predictable plots and configurations. It gets worse - there's an adulterous but otherwise incorruptible drug squad detective, a megalomaniacal TV presenter, a Chinese triad big boss, a suspect nightclub owner, even a deluded wheelchair-bound millionaire who collects artefacts from world terrorist hotspots! And they all end up mingling together in one breathy, titillating, and ultimately unbelievable mess.

But even less forgivable is Flanagan's need to flex his God-like muscles, looming over his story with conclusions, judgements, and protestations that may be interesting in a op-ed piece but are tiresome and repetitive and incongruous in a work of fiction. Flanagan even starts and ends the novel with short essays on love, as if we need to have the impossible story located in our own sensibilities if we are to accept the actions of its characters. The novelist intrudes elsewhere also with the frustrating definition of brand names, labels, and corporations used on almost every page. The notion that we are swamped by capitalism, advertising and product placement? Got it Richard! Had it already, didn't need to be reminded of it. And the utter bastardry of the media? Also an admittedly regrettable but cliched complaint about modern society.

So with these familiar three targets - big business, the media, and over-governance - Flanagan assures himself a ready audience, poised to rail at the severe treatment of the Doll, dreading the possibility that they too may fall foul of "them". I agree with this position, but it could have been presented with so much more subtlety, grace and originality. Flanagan is a very good writer, I enjoyed many of his sentences, presented as they are with an old-school instinct for careful construction, but this novel is too conscious, too self-conscious, so easy to read and understand that it almost feels like a "young adult" novel. Perhaps Flanagan's anger at Howard's government and all its correspondent horrors blinded him to the fact that many of his readers didn't need to be convinced of his position, and that others wouldn't be convinced by such an exaggerated storyline.

A great novel about the early years of the twenty-first century in urban Australia needs to be written, and this isn't it.

The wrap-up:
Australian themes - This novel could possibly relate to many other conservatively-governed populaces of the world, especially the UK and the US, as it reads like a film script, albeit a Hollywood-funded one.
Australian characters - Yes, the characters are all Australian, but so am I, and I didn't recognise many of them at all. See above.
Australian settings - The novel is set exclusively in Sydney, but a documentary-style, simplistic Sydney peopled only by bums, erotic dancers, cops and robbers. Its recognisably Sydney but even the social criticism of our true Capital is two-dimensional.
Australian voices - The dialogue in this book is just plain bad. The only believable voice is the author's and that's the one we don't want.
Australian focus - As I've said, this is an Australia that needed to be documented but the situations, characters and settings don't ring true. I hope he sells it to Hollywood and they set it in New Jersey or San Francisco or some other flawed seaside metropolis.

Helen Garner/The Feel of Steel

I managed to miss Helen Garner's early fiction so I came to her brilliant non-fiction via Joe Cinque's Consolation stunned by her intelligence, bravery, and unerring sensitivity to the travails of others. These qualities are also evident in The Feel of Steel but even further pronounced is her personal honesty and fearless self-revelation. This might sound self-indulgent, and there are times that the book strays close to wankery, especially when she berates writing and writers with her back-handed compliments that only a professional writer could get away with. But on the whole, it is a moody, thought-provoking writing exercise that is altogether too brief.

The book is also quite sad for a lot of the time. It roughly charts the breakdown and repercussions of Garner's third marriage - even though she is far too original to bore us with details or wailings of "why me?". Although it goes close at times, and the slow but apparent paring away of her former life in Sydney and return to her home in Melbourne is sometimes extremely moving, but never cloying. She manages to retain an admirable joie de vivre most of the time, ruminating on the motivations of birds and describing her feelings more than once as "unbearably thrilling". It's this optimistic spirit that keeps the reader close to her - no turgid descriptions of days lost bitterly crying or shopping here - this is certainly not chick-lit.

The stories, mostly brief, some longer, take as their studies the emerging experiences of an older woman/person coming to terms with inexorable aging. There are lovely observations about grandmother- and mother- and daughterhood, glittering reminiscences, wry acceptances of lessons learned. I enjoyed them all, as far from my experience as they are, and it was only one story that lost me, the last and one of the longest, which documents a session spent with a friend at a bridal salon. I actually feared, as I bogged down in descriptions of fabrics, tantrums and weeping mothers, that maybe I was the bitter one. Perhaps I was not generous enough to allow her just one story with an unforgivingly female focus. Possibly I had Garner wrong all along and this was chick-lit, just really well-written. To explain, the story cycle that touched me the most was the eponymous The Feel of Steel (in three parts) which explains Garner's return to her childhood sport of fencing: an admittedly masculine venture. But on re-reading it, I realised it was in fact the female perspective that I found most scintillating - this is voyeuristic non-fiction at its very best; the feel of steel is palpable.

So I can allow her the one exclusive story. Helen Garner is one of our premier storytellers, and I can't wait to delve into her fiction, old and new. But I will seek out her other non-fiction first, including the controversial The First Stone. She is a renegade, a shit-stirrer, uncompromisingly original and brutally honest. I think she is very brave and very clever, and we are lucky she's all ours.

The wrap-up:
Australian themes - Garner is way too worldly to become parochial so she invests universal themes with a local flavour - the ennui of Ausralian suburbs could be any developed country.
Australian characters - You will recognise all of the characters that populate her life, but the most dominating character is Garner herself, constantly straining against the fetters of an orthodox existence.
Australian settings - Apart from an hilarious foray into Southeast Asia, the settings are post-war and modern Melbourne and Sydney.
Australian voices - Yep, she's Australian alright. If only all of us were so eloquent!
Australian focus - Garner sets her sights on many of the facets of Australian life - and is sometimes harsh in her criticisms, but her humour and wonderment win through: she is genuinely fascinated by all of us.

The truth

Just wanted to drop in unannounced on the schedule here to tell a few truths about this blog and my reading so far. I've dropped off a bit and am now blogging about a week after than I've finished each book. Work, home, hobbies, habits...

So I'm still doing the reading and loving all the books so far, just not following strict deadlines, keeping it loose. My main crisis with this has been which book to read next - I have a pile of about 25 here, bought, borrowed, loaned and owned - whether to have an established order, or a top 20 to read by the end of the year. I definitely have some favourites that I'm really looking forward to but it would be laborious to mention and explain them all, maybe I'll just do a plain list. I'm taking it fairly "organically" at the moment, picking up the next one that grabs my attention, or seems to beg to be read next, like the chosen card in a magician's deck.

I do have some hope for a semi-method I have been attempting. So far I've read two fiction, then two non-fiction, now my next fiction - I think this sort of thing will keep me alert. Too much fiction can turn your brain to jelly, and a surfeit of non-fiction? Well, my mind liquifies to a different sort of jelly - more of the consistency of brain matter, or the endless unfolding of synapses tryin g toc onne ct. So, a healthy diet of non-fic leavened with plenty of fic, methinks.

I'm also almost ready to promote this blog to the world, or my little cosmos at least, just a few more books and lots more confidence. Enjoying writing this a lot, so far.

Anna Funder/Stasiland

This book has always caught my eye, not just for its provocative cover, but also for its tough title and promise of an investigation of the Stasi and the plight of Eastern Germany during the Cold War. It doesn't disappoint; Funder writes in a tight, terse style and explores her own darker thoughts as she haunts the featureless buildings and lonely byways of the former GDR, meeting and talking with participants in the 40-odd years of the "republic".

The book is driven by their stories, and linked rather beautifully by the sinews of Funder's tentative friendship with Miriam, who suffered horribly at the hands of the Stasi, the GDR's secret police. The relationship between writer and subjects is actually blurred at times, things are left out, withheld, but this fascinated me and left me wanting more by book's end.

Stasiland would be a wonderful first step in anyone's reading about this period, even those who haven't read a lot of non-fiction. It reminded me of why popular non-fiction matters: it is written to explore and reveal and celebrate nothing less than the whole world!

The wrap-up:
Australian themes - None except the universal "stranger in a strange land".
Australian characters - Anna Funder only discusses her nationality briefly.
Australian settings - Much like the character in Geraldine Brooks (and maybe Brooks herself), there is a strong sense of home.
Australian voices - All other voices are "East" or "West" German.
Australian focus - Try the many other books in this style that are related to Australia.

Alex Miller/Journey to the Stone Country

This book came via my old friend Kate - a passionate supporter of Australian literature as well as holding a doctorate in Aboriginal social history - who recommended it to me almost tearfully, having just read it. And I see now where that feeling was coming from. I have read no better exploration penned by a non-Aboriginal person of the Aboriginal link to land and country. In a story that has no real conflict, few major dramatic episodes, and a climax that plays more like an emerging iceberg, Miller breaks almost all the rules of fiction to create a profound achievement that may be one of the few legitimate candidates for the gong of The Great Australian Novel.

In a very gentle narrative style, full of whimsical descriptions of the land and weather, the story leads you further and further from its beginnings in drizzly suburban Melbourne, where the character Annabelle Beck receives a shock, to the dry and starkly beautiful wilds of central Queensland, the stone country of the title. Miller is careful not to make the transition too severe: trappings of city life are remnant throughout the first half of the book but by the second it is all campfires, lonely country roads, and sleeping rough. In this way it mesmerises the reader, and you are taken on the journey also; away from the familiar and the urbane into a new world that lives alongside the coast-hugging concerns of most of us. There is a love story, where family and even colonial history are melded, sometimes uncomfortably, but where the otherness of both lovers is constant, like in real life. It is in this powerful recreation of "real life" that the book spends most of its time, and hooks the reader so successfully. Slow but unlaboured descriptions of meal preparation and eating, the consideration of the movement of insects, and conversations consisting of murmurs and parts of speech left hanging are so common as to create the main refrain of the book.

But this is belying the greater purpose of the novel: this exploration and explanation of what Australia means to the characters, and, by default, us. From ancient cultural links, through colonisation and the arrogant attempts at settlement by Europeans, to the eclectic mix of both that has resulted in our modern outlook on home and Australianness, Miller succeeds in giving all claims equal gravity, despite their unequal status. These feelings are often in the mouths of characters, but the writing never becomes didactic - like the country it seeks to define, it speaks volumes by simply presenting itself and saying what do you make of this? I was by turns moved, horrified, informed and reminded by the facts of white colonisation of this country, and the climax I spoke of earlier had me gulping with despair.

When you read this, however, and you must read this if you're interested in the country you live in, don't expect a strident good talking-to, Mother Greer-style. You will be entranced by the journey and relate to all the characters, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal. It is a love poem to Queensland and to Australia, a sometimes melancholy tribute to what has been, and, in the consummation of the central story, a cry of hope for what could be.

The wrap-up:
Australian themes - Doesn't avoid any of the big issues facing us today. Bravely direct.
Australian characters - A small but select group of Australians from all walks of life.
Australian settings - Expect evocative descriptions of the Queensland outback but also beloved big and small towns: Townsville, Mackay, Brisbane, Melbourne.
Australian voices - Perhaps the best literary representation of how Australians actually speak? A treatise on Aboriginal English?
Australian focus - Alex Miller obviously loves his adopted country and you will love it more too.

Geraldine Brooks/People of the Book

First book down, and what a cracker! I thoroughly enjoyed People of the Book, not all the time, but ultimately: unputdownable! Part-Dan Brown, part-Margaret Atwood, part-Peter Carey, its a surprising and thought-provoking book that really gets under your skin. I was a bit non-plussed by it at first - maybe a bit too Dan Brown at that point - but as I eased into her style and the conceit she employs in the storytelling, the layers and resonances of this book, and the book it describes, started to affect me deeply. Brooks is a recent convert to Judaism, and there is an obvious deferential awe of the
rituals of her religion in many of the episodes in her book, but I found it all really interesting as I don't know a whole lot about Judaism and its practices. Christians, and Muslims to some extent, are presented as the bad guys for the most part in the novel, their religious persecution of the Jews a central feature in the 'historic' chapters.

And about the chapters. Brooks juxtaposes chapters of a modern story detailing the experiences of a manuscript restorer and the centuries-old religious book she is employed to study with a series of backwards-chronological chapters providing the dramatic background for what she discovers. It is an effective approach, and the stories grow in their potency, perhaps by design, or perhaps through the reader becoming more used to the device. By the time of the penultimate story - outlining the original purpose of the book and the imagined circumstances surrounding its creation - I was quite moved by the characters and the emotional, almost hypnotic writing.

This perhaps allowed me to forgive Brooks for the pedestrian nature of the modern story. It is not without its surprises, but the whingings of a thirty-something book nerd seem to fall flat when compared to the lives of her "people of the book". I think this is conscious, the modern tale uses much vernacular and descriptions of trappings a la mode that are seemingly dull when in contrast to turn-of-the-eighteenth-century Vienna or medieval Spain.

Whatever her reasons, and despite some clunkiness in the plotting, this is a very powerful book that amazes and resonates. I particularly liked her use of female protagonists in each time period as well as taking the main character. This is feminist writing without the rhetoric - women are placed firmly in the centre of things, making important decisions, creating and adding to art and culture, making history. In this way People of the Book gives a voice to figures receding from history; like the journey of the Jews themselves, it begs further reading into a history beyond kings and wars.

The wrap-up:
Australian themes - Only a few, main character ends up working on Aboriginal cultural sites.
Australian characters - Main character and her mother are upper-class Aussies.
Australian settings - Some scenes at a beachside suburb, final chapter set in outback.
Australian voice - Some (embarassing) discussions of Australian usage and customs.
Australian focus - Much of the book is centred on European events but Australia is held up as a place of sanctuary and peace: home.

I'm a-ready

Just finished the Horwitz a few minutes ago and now primed to begin my year. It was a really wonderful book - history writing at its finest. With such a lightness of touch, his almost-present presence in the text manages to bring to the fore all the crazy characters he meets in his trips across North and South America. And you get such a vivid picture of the places he visits. My American history isn't great but I feel like I've got a much clearer picture of it now: the triumph of a book like this!

So I think its a perfect book to end my usual reading patterns with. Tomorrow I'm off with People of the Book so now I have to give some thought to the rest of the list. But first I'd like to explain a bit more about the patterns mentioned above. My personality as a reader, if you like.

Having read the requisite Tolkein, Asimov, English lit classics and whatever pulp I could fit inbetween as a young fella, the first real adult connection I had with books was with the style-bending early works of the English 'brat pack' of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Iain Banks and Ian McEwan; along with other emerging po-mo authors like Dennis Potter, Douglas Coupland, Bret Easton Ellis and Donald Bartheleme. I loved the sexiness and violence of this new writing, it sort made me fel tough I guess, like Hip Hop on a car stereo turned up loud.

My next affair was with magic realism, and I was caught up in it like many others, although I eventually read further into Latin American writers like Carlos Fuentes and Jorge Luis Borges. This led me to Salman Rushdie, who I read almost exclusively for a while as I discovered his back catalogue (and because they're all so fucking long!). I next delved into Umberto Eco and even tried to read Foucault and Baudrillard at one point but I think I was finally out of my league.

More recently, as work and family etc. took up some of that free reading time, I had less chances to really explore one author or genre, so basically jumped from novel to novel, choosing mostly celebrated pieces, prize-winners and the like, and relying on recommendations of others. I definitely discovered some cool new authors in that time, while trying to keep up with the output of my faves also. I did feel that maybe Amis and Eco et. al. weren't really cutting it up like they did in their early pieces, although I think McEwan has remained potent the whole time. However, I think i was actually tiring of literature, becoming jaded with what I saw as self-conscious attempts to reinvigorate the scene, do something outrageous, write an epoch-making novel, create a new 'voice'.

So it went that I picked up a copy of Bill Bryson's History of Nearly Everything to read - a copy that had returned to me after being given to my stepfather for a birthday. And from then on, for about four years, up until just few months ago, I stopped reading fiction altogether. It wasn't all thanks to Bill; I would also add my brother who really disliked anything that wasn't backed-up by fact, and had asked me rhetorically a few years earlier "why would you want to read something someone made up when the truth is so amazing?!". I was also influenced by my buddy Wayne, who has a huge collection of military and other history books that he graciously allows me to freely borrow from. After many years of fiction, only reading newspapers and the odd quality magazine for my non-fiction diet, I started to read science, history - ancient and modern, politics and current events, anthropology, mathematics, anything that looked interesting and could be obtained. My crowning achievement, I think, was to lug all 1200 pages of Norman Davies's Europe: A History around Europe as my reading for my holiday there last year. It filled some very long flights, and ended up bent and bedraggled, but what a monster of a book, what a leviathan! Davies brings such a strong and compelling argument to his work and presents what is essentially a revolution in thought pertaining to the true origins and racial underpinning of the great continent.

But it wore me out! I grabbed a copy of an interesting-looking novel at the airport train station in Rome and read almost all of it on the flights home. haven't stopped reading fiction since! I have settled down to a pretty constant rhythm now of a couple of non-fiction (mainly military history) books followed by a few novels, then back as the mood takes me. Until now, that is. I won't be too prescriptive about the order of books - just work out a list and launch into it. I do think that I've had a fairly predictable reading history up until now, even my latter-day foray into non-fiction is supposedly common for folks of a certain age. But I feel that I have tried to keep challenging myself with the densest non-fiction and wildest fiction I could stand, and that this task is an obvious next step. And what to do after the year, I mean, on February 12 2010? Hopefully the subject of a later post. I am writing these without much editing, trying to just gush it all out in this blog, trying not to bore myself or you. I still have some questions I want to consider but not tonight. Tonight I displace dreams of battles between Conquistadors and Indians and prepare myself for tara tara, my Year of Reading Australianally. Or, thanks Tony; Geraldine, here I come!

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.

It starts here

2009 creeps on apace so it is time to begin this task and the blog that goes with it! After much contemplation, consultation, and, admittedly, procrastination, I am finally in the planning phase for my Year of Reading Australianally. I am now on my last non-Australian book (more on this later) before my reading year begins, sometime in February it looks like. I am one for Dates of Significance, so starting my year on a February 14 would be a good one, or February 28, 29, is this a leap year? February 13 was the date I left for my European trip last year so I guess that would be fitting also...

But what to read, you may ask. And other questions. I'll try to address the obvious ones before I begin.