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.