What I’m reading and what’s gathering dust on the bedside bookstack this month.
Where the crawdads sing by Delia Owens, Corsair, 2018
Long slow exhale of breath.
Now I understand the bestseller status, the brilliant reviews and the fact that it’s under the Popular 2 weeks borrowing category at my local library. This book is absolute immersion into another time and place. Place specifically.
The natural world is all the family and comfort that Kya knows. She lives in an isolated shack on marshland in North Carolina. Slowly abandoned by her mother, siblings and father, she digs mussels and smokes fish to get by. And with all the other lonely hours of the day she observes the life of the marsh; birds, shells, insects, waterways.
How’s this for an opening paragraph?
Swamp water is still and dark, having swallowed the light in its muddy throat. Even night crawlers are diurnal in this lair. There are sounds, of course, but compared to the march, the swamp is quiet because decomposition is cellular work. Life decays and reeks and returns to the rotted duff; a poignant wallow of death begetting life.
In the next paragraph, two local boys discover the body of the town’s young hero footballer. There’s a lot of gossip and Kya is named as a suspect.
I loved, loved, loved this book. Delia Owens is a zoologist so her knowledge of the environment she’s writing about is as detailed as it is poetic.
This was her debut novel which she published when she was 70. There is hope for us all!
Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill, Granta 2015
Imagine Helen Garner’s diaries with their conversational snippets except more specifically about motherhood, mental (un)health and a marriage going south. Then intersperse it with quotes from Rilke and some philosophers, stories of past space quests and odd bits of trivia.
That is the Dept. of Speculation. Easy to read but very hard to explain. If you need continuous linear narrative, maybe not your thing. But if you like to fill in some the gaps, and don’t mind moving on from vignette to vignette, then you’ll enjoy this.
Smokehouse by Melissa Manning, UQP, 2021
Confession – my current work-in-progress is a collection of interconnected short stories, so it’s no surprise that I’m a big fan of…. interconnected short stories. I love the progression and span you get but also the gaps that you can fill in as a reader (see Jenny Offill above). I also love that what’s background in one story can be the focus in the next.
I think this book is divine. It starts with Nora who’s just made a sea/treechange with her husband and two young daughters. They’ve bought a block in a small town south of Hobart and they’re going to build a mud brick house. But the dream is dissolving and so is her marriage. By the end of this collection relationships have come and gone, children have grown up, friendships have developed and health has failed. We know who runs the shop and works at the local school, which neighbours who talk to each other and who is nursing their own quiet grief.
Tassie also offers its own extremities to these narratives, in temperature and location. By the end of it, you’ll feel like a local too.
And if you need to hear more, check out Cass Moriarty’s review.
This Taste for Silence by Amanda O’Callaghan, UQP, 2019
Another collection of short stories. I’ve always got one or two on the go. You’re in such good hands with Amanda O’Callaghan. Just like a good actor doesn’t make you think they are acting, a good writer makes you feel like the stories aren’t ‘written’. These stories feel like you’re reading about lives that just happen to be written down.
You’re in Queensland, then Brooklyn, then London or Adelaide. There’s a mix of flash fiction and longer pieces, so you’re in and then out again, wondering what might come next.
The love that remains by Susan Francis, Allen & Unwin, 2020
Susan Francis’ memoir is testament to the fact that we never know the narrative of our life until we live it. She thinks she is defined by the fact that she’s adopted and doesn’t fit in anywhere but in her 50s, Susan meets Wayne. It’s a spectacular love story that neither of them expected. They get married and decide to sell up and move to Europe for a loved-up year of travel and life at their own pace.
It looks like this is going to be the new story about love and sex and identity and travel. But life is never so linear and neat.
This generous and beautiful book follows some of the biggest questions we ask about our ourselves. Who am I? Who is the person I love? Where do I belong? What is a good life?
Klara and the sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, Faber, 2021
The world here feels similar to his Never Let Me Go – a near future where some people have been genetically modified but not everyone. Klara is an AF (artificial friend). She wants to understand everything about the world and humans.
When human behaviour is observed and analysed by an outsider, you wonder how we think all this shit that we do is actually normal. And how is it that we don’t misunderstand each other more than we do?
Although the initial chapters move monotonously, perhaps as they would for Klara when she’s waiting in a shop for someone to buy her, it’s always a subtle journey with Ishiguro. He’s asking ethical and moral questions about machines and humans. What is it to be human? Is there something limitless inside us that can never be replicated or are we finite and knowable?
The truth about her by Jacqueline Maley, 4th Estate, 2021
This is a fresh one. It only launched mid-May and the ink on my signed-copy has barely dried. I’m a big fan of Jacqui’s column for SMH and the Age and am happy to be happy about her debut novel now too.
Suzy’s husband has left without a forwarding address. She’s holding down a fulltime journalism job, looking after her 4-year-old daughter and sleeping with two different guys. Things really start to unravel though, when a wellness influencer who she exposed, commits suicide.
I like it when characters have jobs, worry about money and still have to pick nits out of pre-school hair while their world is crumbling around them. This will keep you turning the pages and gunning for Suzy to win a trick.
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula le Guin, Ace (Penguin), 2010
Genry Ai has been sent as an Envoy by the Ekumen of Known Worlds, to study the Gethenians on Winter and ask them to join the Ekumen. On the planet Winter there is no gender. The Gethenians can become male or female during their mating cycle.
This book, written in 1969, wasn’t what I expected. I was thinking it would be a more obvious quest and hero’s journey. But the first half of the book is mostly politics, alliances and old lore to make more sense of the world of Winter and its inhabitants.
The second half of the book is a journey with Genry and an exiled advisor, Estraven. The relentlessness of ice, snow and cold conditions is the foe they fight and the journey is that of two beings who are alien to each other but develop a bond and understanding.
It was a slow burn for me. The real accomplishment here is the creation of another world complete with its own calendar, language, customs and history. It’s as rich as any Tolkien kingdom. But if you need character-based action and tension, you’ll be looking for it in a snowstorm.
Silas Marner by George Eliot, 1999, Signet Classics
You’ve got to be match-fit to read a classic or have the patience to give it time and let it be what it is rather than what you’re used to – more on that in my Reading the Classics post.
It feels like visiting somewhere with a rusty knowledge of the language. Everything is familiar but not immediately decipherable but then with a little more exposure it clicks and you’re off.
Silas Marner is an isolated weaver who is robbed, takes in an orphan and finds a reason to live. What you’re reading about is people being people. In this case, people are greedy and proud and lie because they think it’s for the greater good. The love and care of a child makes the world new and the loss of one is felt forever. It’s love and loyalty and families, just like it is now.
And now that I’ve got the classic cogs spinning again, I think I might try one of the Russians.
The Promise Seed by Cass Moriarty, UQP,
An old man and a young boy form an unlikely friendship. They bond over chickens, chess and a need for company.
At 72, the narrator feels like he’s just going through the motions, something that has shaped most of his life. But it’s never too late for life to have meaning and what are we without human connection?
This story is about family and the inheritance of trauma. What happens when you have a family or long for one shapes the life we live and the people we become.
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Nina Cullen 