Category Archives: reading

Reading regrets: on realising one has read more Tom Clancy than Charles Dickens

28 Saturday Feb 2015

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It pained me to think of all  those years when I simply devoured whatever fell into my hands, whatever struck my fancy at the local library or on my parents’ bookshelf: best sellers from the 1930s and 1940s, the names on the spines long forgotten; the comedic writers beloved by my father; and all those Agatha Christie and Stephen King novels, all that pulp. There had been good stuff, too, much of it by accident rather than design: Flannery O’Connor, Shakespeare, whose collected works I’d read in both Lamb précis and true form, the Brontës, Chekhov, and contemporary writers pulled from the “New Releases” shelf at the library, purely because I liked the titles or the covers. But when I thought about all the hours I’d spent lying on my bed or my parents’ couch or our lawn or in the backs of cars on family vacations, all those hours that could have allowed me the collected works of Dickens, into which I’d barely delved, or Trollope, or Dostoyevsky. Or Proust. The list went on and on, all that I hadn’t read, all that I didn’t know.
– Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year, p. 112.

This passage resonated with me, because I sometimes feel exactly the same, particularly when I’m confronted with all the great writers I haven’t read. Continue reading →

The best books I read in 2012

07 Monday Jan 2013

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I had a reading drought in 2012. No clear favourite, no book which even blew me away – and yet I still discovered some interesting and worthy ones. I have been scared I’ve been losing my love of reading, but I cured that re-reading an old favourite, Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved, which I finished when I couldn’t sleep on New Year’s Day. She reminded me in that novel of why I read, the pleasures and insights I hope to have, after I was so disheartened at feeling unable to finish three novels in a row.

1. Promised Lands / Jane Rogers (1996)
I wonder how much attention this received when it came out; it deserves to be read, as it is excellent. The frame story is that of a historian, Stephen, a failed idealistic school teacher now writing the story of William Dawes, part of Australia’s First Fleet in 1788. Kate Grenville wrote about Dawes in The Lieutenant, which I haven’t read, but the two books would make an interesting comparison.

2. The Sense of An Ending / Julian Barnes (2011)
I’m not sure it deserved the Man Booker Prize, but it certainly got my attention – a simply written story of a man looking back on his life and failed love that plays with the reader’s mind.

3. The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography / A.J.A. Symons (1934)
This the nonfiction antecedent for the biographical-quest genre I have been writing about and in. Symons goes in search of an obscure writer, ‘Baron Corvo’, a strange man who burned everyone who tried to help him.

4. Winter Journal / Paul Auster (2012)
Perhaps it is just for fans. But he’s my favourite writer, so this memoir certainly captivated me. Auster writes a memoir of his body, detailing his illnesses, scars, memories, and listing the address of every place he has ever lived. (He leaves his current address vague.)

5. Accordion Crimes / Annie Proulx (1996)

6. Too Much Happiness / Alice Munro (2009)

7. 11/22/63 / Stephen King (2011)

8. Ice / Louis Nowra (2008)

 

What was the best book you read in 2012?

[Thursday 3pm #33] Extract from the Library of Babel III

12 Thursday Nov 2009

Posted by in libraries, reading, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

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As he looked for books to reshelve, he would walk amongst the readers bent over their desks and imagine he could hear the murmur of their thoughts. All those words going through people’s heads, making some connection, some act of communication between writer and reader, sometimes across gaps of centuries. It was miraculous. With his thoughts on this, the reading area hummed and shouted with the glory of the silent communion.

All these people embarked on their own quests, their own projects, an aim, a question, a desire to read they kept inside their head. The library did not ask them why they came. They just came, walking in here to take certain books off the shelves and read.

Silent exterior, noisy interior. A beautiful place, the library.

[Thursday 3pm #27] Quotes From The Library At Night

01 Thursday Oct 2009

Posted by in books, libraries, quotes, reading, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

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Library-at-NightAlberto Manguel’s The Library At Night examines books, reading and the library through a series of themes. It’s the sort of book where so much of it feels quotable that one is tempted to give up: the book resists being reduced, highlighted. Still, here’s some quotes I have pulled from it:

A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiplies seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts. (56)

During the day, I write, browse, rearrange books, put away my new acquisitions, reshuffle sections for the sake of space. Newcomers are made welcome after a period of inspection. If the book is second-hand, I leave all its markings intact, the spoor of previous readers, fellow-travellers who have recorded their passage by means of scribbled comments, a name on the fly-leaf, a bus ticket to mark a certain page. Old or new, the only sign I always try to rid my books of (usually with little success) is the price-sticker that malignant booksellers attach to the backs. These evil white scabs rip off with difficulty, leaving leprous wounds and traces of slime to which adhere the dust and fluff of ages, making me wish for a special gummy hell to which the inventor of these stickers would be condemned. (17)

And yet, however careful our reading, remembered texts often undergo curious changes; they fragment, shrivel up or grow unpredictably long. In my mental library, The Tempest is reduced to a few immortal lines, while a brief novel such as Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo occupies my entire Mexican imaginary landscape. A couple of sentences by George Orwell in the essay “Shooting an Elephant” expand in my memory to several pages of description and reflection that I think I can actually see in my mind, printed on the page; of the lengthy medieval romance The Devoured Heart, all I can remember is the title. (197)

[Thursday 3pm #18] American Habits

30 Thursday Jul 2009

Posted by in autobiographical, lists, reading, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

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On Tuesday night, when I should have been doing something productive or relaxing, I created a graph showing how many novels (and other narratives) I had read by country since 1996. The results were predictably homogenous, but even more weighted toward the USA than I imagined.

Novelsbycountry

There you have it – 220 from the USA, 101 from Britain, 68 from Australia, 14 from Canada for the top four places. I don’t have records from 98-00; maybe I was much more cosmpolitan in those years. The figures are also skewed toward the USA because in 96 and 97 when I was a science fiction addict, just about everything I read came from there.

I was thinking of resolving to read more Australian, European, Asian and African texts to broaden my horizons. And maybe I will. But I’m not going to worry too much. There’s too many things in this world to feel guilty about.

But I am curious about why I’m so drawn to American fiction. I have an aversion to consumerism, patriotism, fundamentalism and unchecked capitalism, all those things America is famous for. But I am also fascinated by America, and even to prod and gawk at those things I hate. Many of my favourite authors are American – Auster, DeLillo, Franzen, Moody, McCullers, Updike. I’d like to visit the USA some day; I’ll just have a hard time convincing my wife. (I think I would like to travel by train across its heartland; keep meaning to read Don Watson’s account of this.)

I think its easier to read in tune with our own culture, rather than cross cultural boundaries; and interestingly I don’t feel like I have to cross much of a boundary to read American fiction – or British fiction, I suppose, but I’ve found less authors there whom I love.

Interestingly just about every European novel I have read has been brilliant. This is merely a reflection of how selective I’ve been, but there’s an untapped continent there. In fact, there’s at least four of them.

What are your reading habits like? Regale and shame me with the stories of how you spend your leisure time reading Afghani novels in the original or 13th century Chinese epics. Go on, show me up. 🙂

In defence of Holden

09 Tuesday Jun 2009

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Holden Caulfield that is, star of The Catcher in the Rye. I’m not old enough or mature enough yet to renounce my love of this book. It’s my favourite book. But reading this review of The Catcher in the Rye today disturbed me. He’s not deep, she argues; his version of deep is to dismiss the whole world as phony and have a nervous breakdown. If you think that’s profound you’re still adolescent.

Actually, I’m not going to leap to the defence of Holden. I haven’t the energy. But I think I will be horrified if, like the reviewer Kathy, I ever get to the point of renouncing Holden and everything that book has meant to me over the years.

The last time I re-read it in 2005 I had finally come out of an adolescent posture of defying the whole world, and I still loved it. It’s not just profound, Catcher in the Rye, it’s also beautiful and funny, and that counts even if you think you’ve outgrown Holden’s ‘phony’ insights.

Maybe it’s time to read again. See if I’ve grown up yet.

[Thursday 3pm #2] The marathon is on: reading War and Peace

09 Thursday Apr 2009

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I wasn’t going to tell you about this, because I was afraid you might hold me to it. I think I harboured secret intentions to give up a few hundred pages in. I don’t have a very good record with Big Books. I only made it halfway through Les Miserables, even though I thought it was wonderful. Last time I attempted War and Peace three years ago, my bookmark only made it to page 208.

I don’t even know why I impulsively decided to start last week. I was actually suffering the dreaded False Start disease in my reading: pulling books off my shelf, reading a few chapters and then having no desire to go on. Five books are still sitting discarded by my bed. And so what was my answer to this disease? An incredibly stupid one: pull out the biggest book on my shelf, so big it’s in two volumes. Fourteen hundred pages in total. I’m up to page 142.

If I’m going to finish War and Peace I’m going to have to train my mind. The marathon book requires that I keep my mind immersed in the moment, in the experience. As soon as I start calculating how many pages I’ve got left, I’m a goner, I may as well pull out.

Reading in general and the marathon book in particular require that I don’t treat the book like a marathon. Or a mountain. If the book’s a notch to add to my belt, an achievement to brag about, I’m reading it for the wrong reason.

This is what concerns me: how much of War and Peace am I going to remember? Am I going to carry some remnant, some impression of it in my head for the rest of my days? Or is too huge to leave a trace? Will it be like trying to hold a whole world in my head? Because I only read Anna Karenina six years ago, and all I can remember of that is that she throws herself under a train at the end. (Sorry to spoil it, if you’ve just invested months of your life getting near to that point.) Was reading it a waste, then?

Well, not entirely. Most of the point is in the journey itself, the experience of reading it. It would be wonderful to retain more of the book itself, but I’ll have to face the fact that I may not.

(Which brings to mind another possible approach to reading: I might start re-reading a lot more until more novels have lodged themselves in my mind, until I have absorbed their structure, their feel, their characters. Because the few novels I have read over and over again – the Tripods, The Collector, The Catcher in the Rye, Moon Palace – are the most rewarding, are the ones I can intepret life through. I have this hunch that it would be far better to know a handful of books intimately than to whiz through a hundred in a year. What do you think?)

I’ll finish with Percy Lubbock’s beautiful description of the attempt of the reader to hold the whole book in his or her mind:

To grasp the shadowy and fantasmal form of a book, to hold it fast, to turn it over and survey it at leisure – that is the effort of a critic of books and it is perpetually defeated. Nothing, no power, will keep a book steady and motionless before us, so that we may have time to examine its shape and design. As quickly as we read, it melts and shifts in the memory; even at the moment when the last page is turned, a great part of the book, its finer detail, is already vague and doubtful. A little later, after a few days or months, how much is really left of it? A cluster of impressions, some clear points emerging from a mist of uncertainty, this is all we can hope to possess, generally speaking, in the name of a book. The experience of reading it has left something behind, and these relics we call by the book’s name; but how can they be considered to give us the material for judging and appraising the book?

– The Craft of Fiction, p. 1

Forgive them for they do not know what literary fiction is

21 Tuesday Oct 2008

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A common question people ask when I tell them I write novels is, ‘What genre?’. Okay, so maybe they don’t use the word genre, but that’s often the gist of the second question. (Sometimes people ask what a novel is, but not every time, or even half the time. But way too many times.)

I usually tell them ‘literary fiction’, but I’m beginning to think that hardly anyone knows what I mean. ‘Like fantasy?’ someone said today.

I don’t mind calling literary fiction a genre. When I was a science fiction nut at sixteen and seventeen, I remember reading an impassioned article in Aurealis, perhaps by Van Ikin, about how literary fiction is just as generic as science fiction. The literary stories he analysed had a number of common features – a journey, introspection, the suggestion of illicit sex and some other things I can’t remember. Maybe not true of everything published as ‘literary fiction’, but the argument has validity.

What I can’t do is explain easily to people what literary fiction is without sounding elitist.

‘It’s a type of fiction which pushes boundaries… it could be about anything… but it explores the experience and meaning of life… often… sometimes… it’s read by highbrow people with English degrees… or just people with better taste… oh dear, I didn’t actually mean that…’

Because let’s face it, us literary fiction readers do look down on the rest of you. At least a little. Sorry.

Anyway, I feel this gulf between me and people who have no clue what literary fiction is. I guess it’s the problem everyone faces who has gone deeper into their field. I mean, I’m not going to appreciate the finer points of distinction between different types of motorbike racing or knitting, am I?

Strange memories of 1978

14 Sunday Sep 2008

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I just spent a delightful hour looking through a copy of The Bulletin dated 4 July 1978. More than any book or film can, it gave me a snapshot of the world three years before I was born. I find the familiarity and unfamiliarity of the bearded, big haired strangely coloured photographs and articles and advertisements fascinating.

Cassettes are a running theme. Siemens offers a free cassette explaining the benefits of their PABX telephone system – ‘Get your secretary to mail the coupon now’. Send off for the Len Evans Home Wine Tasting Pack and you receive a FREE How-To Wine Guide Cassette. At a sales conference Zig Ziglar (whose signed book I weeded from a library once) proclaims that if you don’t feed your mind with a cassette player, you’re losing $25 000 a year. (I think of The Assassination of Richard Nixon, set in the same decade, the main character obsessively listening to positive thinking cassettes.)

At the same conference, an aging Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking spoke. He’s dead now, of course. ‘There’s no problems in cemeteries,’ he told the conference. ‘Problems are a sign of life.’

There are ads for Asbestos Cement Pipelines at Port Waratah – ‘helping keep coal dust firmly in its place’. Dunhill on the inside cover – ‘Internationally acknowledged to be the finest cigarette in the world’. Craven Mild on the back cover, a golfer swinging – ‘mild as can be… yet they satisfy’.

There’s an article on the demise of the Democratic Labor Party, a strange footnote to the Cold War years, their existence finally sputtering out with Nixon’s detente with the Soviets and the rise of an exciting new party, the Democrats. I say a footnote, and yet they kept Labor out of power for a couple of decades, terrified as they were of the Communist menace. And now no Democrats either.

An article about Alan Bond selling his share in the Yanchep Sun City project to Japanese investors. I didn’t even know this story from my own city, of Bond (that ubiquitous presence in the news bulletins of my childhood in the late eighties) buying up hectares of land and creating the Yanchep suburb sixty kilometres north of Perth. Back then, WA feared being taken over by the Japanese (if not the Communists); both fears have passed away now, only to be replaced.

The gossip page is instructive, the names now a little faded – the release of ‘aging film star’ Joan Collins’ embarrassingly naked memories; a revisiting of Frank Sinatra’s visit to Australia a few years’ previously when he got on the wrong side of union boss Bob Hawke; actor Hayley Mills’ divorce (was she in Parent Trap or something? I think my mum used to talk about her) and also that of Sylvester Stallone, the one celebrity on the page who has kept his place. In another thirty years?

And then there’s an interview by distinguished British novelist V.S. Pritchett of his colleague Graham Greene, both of them reflecting on life in their seventies. I get so sad about people getting old and dying. Greene was just publishing his twentieth novel, one of his best to my eyes, The Human Factor. He published at least one more novel before dying thirteen years later in 1991. Pritchett was to live on another nineteen years, to the glorious age of ninety-seven, well into the period of my own consciousness. But I was an ignorant sixteen year old. I don’t remember him dying. He didn’t publish any books in those nearly two decades, though.

And as of this year, of course, The Bulletin, that given fact of Australian media, is no longer published.

Guy Salvidge’s blog

03 Tuesday Jun 2008

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Western Australian writer and reader and old friend of mine Guy Salvidge started a great blog this year. It’s got lengthy reviews of several Western Australian novels, including Julienne Van Loon and Bruce Russell (both Curtin creative writing staff) as well as some interesting reflections on Philip K. Dick. I always used to show off about how much of a Dick fan I was till I met Guy, and he has some great reflections on Dick’s work and his own relationship to it.

While I was content having read about twenty-five of Dick’s books, Guy  went and found copies of all thirty-eight, or whatever the number is.