The bedside bookstack – September 2023

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this September.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders, Vintage, 2021

What’s the next best thing to being one of the 5 or 6 students every year who nab a spot in George Saunders’ writing class at Syracuse University? Reading this book because it absolutely feels like you’re one of the 5 or 6 students in George Saunders’ nineteenth-century Russian short story in translation class!!

This one is for the readers as well as the writers. He takes 7 short stories from Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol, includes them in the book and then discusses each one. For anyone who misses the close-reading of high school or university English, this is for you. He fossicks around and asks questions and delicately takes the story apart. Then he polishes each part and by the time you finish your reading, it’s been put back together as something better and brighter. I’m loving the meticulousness of this!

Fifty-Two Stories by Anton Chekhov, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021

I mean really, what can you say about Chekhov? That he’s timeless. That he’s nailed it. Nailed us – our dynamics and foibles and joys. He can tell a tale about an aristocrat or a farmer and it can seem like it’s about nothing but then ta-da it reveals itself to be about everything.

I feel like he’s a bit of a Helen Garner where all of life’s small moments somehow turn up on the page to be much more than the sum of their parts. This is a gem to have on the bedside table. Dip in and out. I guess the 52 is neatly suggesting a year of Chekhov. The temptation with good short stories though, is to gobble them all up.

(Incidentally, not inspired by a Swim in a Pond in the Rain. I was already reading this one)

Tell me who I am by Una Mannion, Faber, 2023

Deena Garvey has gone missing. She’s a loving mother to Ruby and a dedicated NICU nurse but a history of mental illness allows people to think that she’s done a runner. Her sister Nessa knows this isn’t the case. She thinks that Lucas, Deena’s ex-partner had something to do with it. When Lucas moves back to his childhood farm in Vermont with Ruby, he creates a new story about what happened.

Narrated over 20 years by Ruby and Nessa, this is a compelling read about family, control, loyalty and lies.

Brutus and Other Heroines by Harriet Walter, Nick Hern Books, 2016

This book was brilliant! Every so often I think it’s time I read some Shakespeare and that I really should read one of his plays I haven’t studied or seen. But time marches on and it seems too much like hard work.

Harriet Walter (who a lot of people will recognise from Succession and Ted Lasso) has appeared in productions for the Royal Shakespear Company for over 30 years. She has played every major female and male Shakespeare character and this book is a fascinating insight into the approach an individual actor and the cast as a collective take with each new production.

It’s also a great way to catch up on your unknown Shakespear’s. Instead of a plot summary, you get the close-reading and analysis of someone who needs to understand the characters well enough to embody them.

For me it was a great three-for-one. It was a refresher on plays I knew, an introduction to those I’d never read or seen and research for my novel.

Getting into Character – 7 Secrets a Novelist Can Learn From Actors by Brandilyn Collins, John Wiley & Sons, 2002

Notice the dramatic flavour that’s turning up on the pile? If you’re not interested in acting or writing, then skip to the next book. I’m doing research for my main character who is an actor and this book was a great two-for-one reading about acting as well as applying it to characterisation in your writing.

The premise is to take the seven characterisation techniques of method acting and suggest how they can be used by writers to create believable characters with depth who are able to create drama and tension.

I’ve never been much of a craft reader. I think I read a few duds early on and was arrogant enough to think there wasn’t much to learn (excuse me while I roll my eyes at youthful ego and a wasted decade or two) but I’ve just joined a Hunter Writer’s Centre Book club which only reads books on the craft of writing. Anyway, this was a crash course in method acting and tips on how to make better characters, so tick and tick.

The Pearl by John Steinbeck, Penguin, 2011

I love Steinbeck. In fact one of the few craft books I have read and loved was his Journal of a Novel.  But this was a DNF for me. It’s set up as a fable and reads as a fable with an exaggerated tone to the characters and events and I’m just expecting something way more detailed and nuanced from him.

Kino finds a pearl which he wants to sell, so his son Coyotito can go to school and have a better life than his father. But having something precious makes you a target and reveals the potential we all have for greed and violence.

For a modern reader, there’s also a white American writing about a peasant Mexican family. There is context. Steinbeck has a lot of lived experience growing up in Southern America and living for a while in Mexico. It was 1947 and he was deliberately writing about people who were invisible to his big city readership but I’m reading it in 2023 and that has context too.

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