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The bedside bookstack – March 2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.

Water by John Boyne, Doubleday, 2023

I’ve never read anything by John Boyne before but plenty of other people obviously have because the list of books he’s published comes in at 23 (including the Boy in the Striped Pyjamas).

You learn a thing or two after writing that many books and most noticeable for me was how well he did a first-person female narration. Vanessa Carvin goes to a remote Irish island to escape her recent past and think about her role in it. Initially all you know is that her husband is in jail and that there was scandal surrounding his trial. She had two daughters but one of them is dead and the other one won’t return her messages.

This is a great read about power, the choices we make and the silence we allow.

North Woods by Daniel Mason, John Murray 2023

You know me. I love short stories, so I love a novel which can stand as it is or be seen as a collection of connected shorts and you can’t deliver four centuries of a single house deep in the woods of New England, Massachusetts without changing characters. This was a lush book. His use of language is exquisite and I always know I’m in the hands of a master when I grieve one story ending but am completely absorbed by the next one within a few pages. How to pick a favourite from the apple-obsessed ex-serviceman, the spinster twins, the fated bohemian lovers or the fake mystic who actually saw ghosts. I loved the variation of the inhabitants and the different styles used for their narratives, a mix of straight first-person, diaries, letters, third-person, newspaper articles and even an imagined speech given to a local historical society. It also includes the most intense insect sex-scene (or perhaps the only) I’ve ever read.

Tin Man by Sarah Winman, Tinder Press, 2017

I love Sarah Winman. I should say that right up front. After reading Still Life I’ve been steadily reading through her back catalogue and listening to interviews. This is great one on The First Time Podcast. Tin Man has been hailed by many people as one of her best. I liked it. A lot. But I didn’t love it as much as the others. It is a story of grief and loss and all the things which never were. Amidst that of course, is life and love and all the things which happen instead but the weight of Ellis and Michael’s recollections as they look back on their lives was too heavy for this reader at this time.

Women & Children by Tony Birch, UQ, 2023

Joe Cluny isn’t looking for trouble. The nuns just don’t appreciate his spirit. He has scars on the palm of his hands from their punishment which he hides from his mum. When Joe’s Aunt turns up at their house bloody and bruised, he sees the violence men are also capable of. His mum and sister are the strongest women he knows, but even they are powerless to stop it happening again. It’s a loss of innocence to realise that it’s it everywhere despite the silence, women and children on the other end of men’s violence.

I’m looking forward to hearing Tony Birch talk about this book at the Newcastle Writers Festival next week.

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell, Tinder Press, 2006

Yep, it’s back-to-back Maggie for me. I think I only have one or two books left on her backlist and one of them is already sitting on the bookstack for next month (The Hand That First Held Mine). If you’re looking for objectivity, don’t read any further. I just love her!

Esme Lennox is what they used to call ‘a handful’. She was an embarrassment to her colonial family in India and on moving to Edinburgh, becomes the cross her grandmother must bear. At 16, she is committed by her father to an institution and remains there for 60 years. When the facility is closed down, she’s released into the care of Iris, her sister’s granddaughter who never even know she existed. Families. Siblings. Secrets. And the dynamics are all pitch perfect. Told you she can’t do any wrong for me. 

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The bedside bookstack – February 2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.

This Must be the Place by Maggie O’Farrell, Tinder Press, 2016

She’s at it again. Maggie O’Farrell just being bloody brilliant! She does family dynamics with such precision and nuance. No one is perfect or a monster, more the composite of traits that come from their life experiences.

What I loved about this one was that each chapter was from the POV of different characters, sometimes really on the sideline but bumping up against our main crew in life somewhere. It could easily be read as a collection of short stories within a novel and as a short story lover, I’m a big fan of that – something Anne Tyler also does quite a bit.

I am. I am. I am. By Maggie O’Farrell, Tinder Press, 2017

Yes, it’s back-to-back Maggie for me! And guess what? She’s just as good with non-fiction as fiction. This is seventeen essays about brushes with death, hers and those close to her. It makes for beautiful reading and is a reminder of our mortality and how slender and unknown our relationship with it is. I loved it.

Days of Innocence and Wonder by Lucy Treloar, Picador, 2023

Till is running. She has been ever since her best friend was taken from their Kindergarten playground by a man. When she finds an abandoned train station in a remote South Australian town, she stops and starts to make a home. But there’s someone looking for her and as serious assaults start to happen in this quiet middle-of-nowhere town, she knows they’re getting closer. I read this book constantly looking over my shoulder.

As in her previous novels, the environment both natural and built plays its own part in the narrative. There’s also an interesting parallel memory narrative when Till spent lockdown with her parents. Lockdown is in novels now and always it’s interesting to read the fictionialised version of something we all lived through.

Eventually Everything Connects by Sarah Firth, Joan, 2023

This graphic novel of eight essays on uncertainty was something completely different in my reading pile. I’ve never experienced stream-of-consciousness in a visual format but this was it, a completely honest, curious, reflective and unpredictable journey along Sarah Firth’s thoughts on everything from the self to desire and joie de vivre. I loved her letting us be in her head!

If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio, Affirm Press, 2017

Did I mention I’m writing something which has an actor as a character? So, anything I’m reading which is also about actors, theatre, film etc, is great because it also counts as research. Tick.

A cross between Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and a complete edition of Shakespeare,

this is set in a prestigious American Arts college where the acting students only do Shakespeare. The seven 4th year students live and study in each other’s pockets. If you’re a Shakespeare fan, you’re going to love how effortlessly they can chat cutting lines from comedy to tragedy. But it’s their final year and while some students want to get out of type, others are finding it harder to distinguish between what’s real and on stage. Things get more tense and build until there’s a real body in the lake. If you don’t love Shakespeare or have much interest in behind-the-curtain details, then you’ll do a lot of skipping, but it was a total page-turner for me.

Harmoney by Whitney Hanson, Penguin Life, 2023

This collection of poetry is by a young TikTok poet. I’ve mentioned before that I don’t like poetry which makes me feels stupid. None of that here. These poems read more like diary entries. Thoughts. Asides to oneself. They are heavy with the grief of losing a best friend, which she did when she was 16. She’s 24 now and so time has passed and though the loss is still there, it shares a space with life, with the sun rising and bare feet on dry soil, with the shade of a favourite tree. The loss was very heavy to read page after page and we’re all just trying to stay afloat, so halfway through, I was happy to flick forwards and read the more hopeful pieces.  

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Sky Chase – The story of a short story

My short story Sky Chase has just been published in the anthology The Heart Will Find a Way. For the process-curious of you who like to know how the sausage is made, here is how it was for this piece.

Do you listen to the Pop Culture Parenting podcast? If you have kids or work with them, then you really should. It’s hosted by Dr Billy Garvey, a developmental paediatrician and Nick McCormack, a ‘developing parent’. These two are such great humans.  They are compassionate and curious and Dr Billy is exactly who you’d want to be your clinician. He’s such an advocate, so measured and thoughtful and reassuring but I digress.

The premise per episode is that they have a topic and pick a clip from a movie, then Billy speaks to it and the deeper dynamics going on. People can send in questions during the following week about the topic, for example resilience in kids, and he answers the questions. They also talk about their own parenting and every week they offer up a ‘Winslow’ for good parenting and a ‘Griswald’ for something they could’ve done better.

My story was inspired by one of Nick’s Winslows. He has two young daughters and one Sunday morning he gets them out of the house early so his partner can sleep. They’re in the car with no real direction and then they see some hot air balloons and just follow them wherever they go. You can listen to him tell it in Episode 25 (you’ll find it at 12 minutes 30 seconds).

My stories often start as an image. I see something and think, I want that in a story. I don’t know the hows or whys but I just need that image. I thought this image was so beautiful, the silent early-morning city, the air balloons floating and a car with three people and no direction suddenly finding one.

I keep a bit of a writing log, of what I’ve been working on, the date, how many words and how many minutes I was at it. I don’t know why. Sometimes it makes me feel good that I’m regularly sitting down. Other times it makes me feel pretty rubbish about how long it’s been since my last entry. I think it was a hangover from freelancing and logging words and minutes and working out where my hourly rate sat. It’s also interesting to see how some pieces are just pure labour and I can only squeeze out a few hundred words in an hour or two and others just flow.

According to the log, I wrote the Sky Chase draft in 3 sittings. 20 minutes – 370 words. Another 50 minutes took me to 1170 words. And 35 more minutes to finish the draft at 1670 words. So, it’s quite a short short story and was quicker to write than usual. And then I edited it in 3 40-minute sessions.

It was a lucky little piece that almost didn’t get submitted to the one call out and was then accepted.

The Heart Will Find a Way anthology is a memoir and fiction collection of 41 stories of heartache, heartbreak and heartbalm edited by Anjenette Fennell, Anne-marie Taplin and Megan Close Zavala.

I had a chat on ABC Breakfast with Jenny and Dan on Valentine’s Day about the book, my story and being a writer. You can hear the episode (pick it up around the 2 hour 4 minute mark) HERE.

If you’re in Newcastle and you’re looking for a copy, try Maclean’s Booksellers on Beaumont St, Betty Loves Books down at the Station or Harry Hartog Kotara.

For those elsewhere, you can order at your local bookstore with the ISBN (978-0-6455648-7-7) or through Amazon and Booktopia.

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The bedside bookstack – Summer 2023 & 2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this Summer.

Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell, Tinder Press, 2013

Wow!!! I already loved Maggie O’Farrell and marvelled at how it is she does what she does in Hamnet. I liked The Marriage Portrait and After You’d Gone but this is one of those books where I just had to keep putting it down for a moment and taking it in. The thought on repeat was Yep, that’s exactly how it is!

She just nails it in this one with her observations of young children, her recreation of parenting, her family dynamics which are that perfect mix of infuriating and endearing and of course how irritated and scratchy everyone gets in the heat. I loved everything about this book and want to reread it again to see if I can pinpoint the alchemy and find how this perfection is possible.

The Body Country by Susie Anderson, Hachette, 2023

This collection of poetry captures all moments great and small, the memory of a mother or riding on the back seat of the school bus. She shares how sacred some of life’s simpler moments can be. There is a strong sense of place, Country and culture throughout the collection and it’s just as good to have on the bedside and read one at a time as it is to just gobble up.  

Complement this with her interview on the First Time Podcast. She has some sage and beautiful words about process which I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about.

Games and Rituals by Katherine Heiny, 4th Estate, 2023

Love short stories. Tick. Big fan of Katherine Heiny. Tick. So, obviously her short story collection was very welcome under the Christmas tree. If you’re not familiar with Heiny from Early Morning Riser or Standard Deviation, let me prepare you. Expect giggles, bad decisions, regrettable sex, characters who walk to the beat of their own drum, plenty of ‘oh no she didn’t’,  the quotidian at its very best and worse and moments of truth so uncomfortable that you just need a moment to let it sink in.

Lioness by Emily Perkins, Bloomsbury, 2023

If you like angry ageing women having a gutful and shedding their usual social niceties, then this cracker of a book is for you. Throw in some wealthy voyeurism and pitch perfect blended family dynamics, personal identity and the ethics of privilege and it still doesn’t do justice to the energy and breadth of this story.

Therese comes from humble beginnings but has married older and into money. When her developer husband is accused of corruption she starts to question blind loyalty. At the same time her neighbour, Claire, is suddenly liberating herself from everything she’s been told to be as a woman – mother, wife, employee. She’s made strong by presence of something primal and innate and proximity to this makes Therese wonder who she is anymore after all these years of adapting and who she might be if she too just dropped the act.

The Sitter by Angela O’Keefe, UQP, 2023

In the early outbreak of COVID, an Australian writer sits in her Paris hotel room trying to write a book about Hortense Cezanne, Paul Cezanne’s wife. She often struggles with it and eventually it is her own story that comes out as a gift for her daughter.

Hortense narrates the story. She’s been released from the past and watches the writer as she moves through the motions. There’s a touch of the Claire Keegan in this story, in the unhurried actions and observations as women’s lives and regrets play out quietly.

Clock Dance by Anne Tyler, Chatto & Windus, 2018

This is only my second Anne Tyler. French Braidwas my first andI love loved how it was put together almost as a set of linked short stories. Clock dance is similar except the stories always follow Willa Drake and the final one is much longer than any of the others. We see the 24 hours her mother goes missing when she’s a teenager, the day she is incidentally proposed to in her twenties, the accident that kills her first husband 20-years later and the phone call she gets to come and look after the daughter of her son’s ex-girlfriend.

It’s hard to describe Anne Tyler but she’s all about the quotidian and relationships and for me that’s where all the gold is!

Salt River Road by Molly Schmidt, Fremantle Press, 2023

The previous three books I’ve read have been set in New York, Baltimore and Paris, so it was brilliant to be back under Southern skies in Molly Schmidt’s debut. It made me realise how important local stories and publishers are.

Set in Noongar country in South Western Australia, this follows the Tetley family and its five children in the immediate aftermath of their mother’s death. Grief, racism, legacy and family all play out under the hot sun and long days of a summer of loss.

Absolutely & Forever by Rose Tremain, Chatto & Windus, 2023

Marianne falls in love with Simon Hurst when she’s still at high school. She loses her virginity to him and they swap letters but then he moves to Paris. It’s 1960s England and her options to ‘make something of herself’ are down to marriage or secretarial work. She’d happily marry Simon but that’s not going to happen.

This is the story of a broken heart and how life does goes on, eventually.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, Vintage 2009

I only knew this as a movie from the mid-noughties. It had Kate and Leo who made it look good like they do with everything. I now know that though they’re good at what they do, a large part was because they had excellent material to work with.

The story is actually pretty depressing, two people who thought that they’d make more of themselves or for themselves desperately trying to revive (Him) and survive (her) their life together in the suburbs with two young kids.

It’s so oppressive and stifling but so magnificently written. With a light touch he scratches the surface and there it all is the gaslighting, power plays, dishonesties and desires that can get normalised in relationships and parade themselves around as love.

Cult Classic by Sloane Crosley, Bloomsbury, 2022

Lola is the chronically cynical, pithy quipping thirty-something we’ve come to expect from New York narrations. She’s engaged but unsure and suddenly starts bumping into ex-boyfriends everywhere.

I didn’t finish this one. It’s clever and funny and there’s plenty of people who love the super-cynic but I was sick in bed and needed a little more wonder and a little less over-everything in my life.

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The bedside bookstack – November 2023

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.

Tom Lake By Ann Patchett, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023

It’s lockdown and Lara’s three daughters have come back home to their cherry farm to help with the harvest. In between the picking they demand that it’s time to hear the full story about their mother’s life as an actress and the summer she spent with Peter Duke who is now a famous actor but was just starting out like the rest of them back then.

This is Ann Patchett. She knows what she’s doing and a dual narrative comes off just fine in her hands. She also knows how to get in there a play around with personal dynamics and ideas about loyalty, love, creative ability, ambition and ageing. I loved the present sibling and family narrative as much as the summer at Tom Lake. This’ll be a great summer read, settle in for some seasonal nostalgia.

The Jaguar by Sarah Holland-Blatt, UQP, 2022

Sometimes poetry makes me feel stupid. I read it and just can’t find a way in. I don’t like feeling stupid, so I don’t read a lot of poetry. But that’s a shame, because it isn’t all like that and I’m so glad that this won the 2023 Stella Prize and was on the radar enough for me to pick it up.

It doesn’t make me feel stupid. It makes me see the world with fresh eyes. It makes me even more curious about words, sounds, rhythm and pace and how I could use it to better effect in my own writing. She has a lovely way of dusting some words off as well, that have been sitting on the shelf for a long time and deserve to find themselves on a page again.

For me, this collection is at its best when she recalls her father and his 20-year deterioration with Parkinson’s Disease and subsequent death. There isn’t anywhere for poets to hide with the omnipresent ‘I’ and she’s so generous with what she shares.

A Year of Marvellous Ways by Sarah Winman, Tinder Press 2015

Sarah Winman is one of my literary heroes. I just love her to bits and pieces for bringing Still Life into the world. She has so much heart and humanity in her writing and that’s present not just in a masterpiece like Still Life but also in a quieter novel like A Year of Marvellous Ways.

Marvellous Ways is a 90-year-old woman who lives in a caravan on the sea. Francis Drake is a 28-year-old soldier who had nothing to come back to in England after the war. When their paths cross Marvellous gets a chance to relive the past and Drake finally looks to the future. If you didn’t like Still Life or you need total realism in your narrative then give this one a miss. Otherwise, savour as it’s another Sarah Winman delight.

For any Winman fangirls like me, this interview she did on The First Time Podcast confirms she’s just as warm and wonderful a human as you’d think she would be.

Amy’s Children by Olga Masters, Text Publishing, 1987

I’m ashamed to say that this is the first Olga Masters I’ve read. I feel like I owe more to an Australian female writer publishing at a time when the scene was so male. Ne’er mind. I’ll be looking up her backlist now.

Amy’s husband leaves her and her three young daughters during the Depression. Living on the family farm in rural NSW, she then leaves her daughters to try and find work in Sydney. Work is scarce but no one will hire a married woman, so she makes herself slightly younger and unmarried on any applications.

This is a fascinating insight into Depression and war-time Australia, especially society’s ideas of women and the paths open to them. It’s also a nuanced offering of a mother leaving her children and atypical mother-daughter relationships. People will come down on all sides about Amy leaving her children and pretending when her eldest daughter arrives in Sydney, that she’s actually her sister. Definitely an Australian classic!

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, Virago, 2009

This book opens post World War One in rural Warwickshire. You’ve got the landed gentry in their slowly crumbling Georgian manor, the two house staff they can afford, a local doctor and a family of new money just moved from London.

This is beautifully written. I feel like I’m in an episode of Downton Abbey and so obviously in good hands. However, I’m 136 pages in (of 500) and it’s starting to get creepy. There are unexplained incidents in the house and a few people are starting to admit to feeling a malevolent presence. And it’s around about now that I think I’m going to put it down. I do most of my reading at night and I still haven’t totally squared myself with the dark. I don’t love scary, so I’ve called time on it. All those who like a bit of Henry James’ spooky house spirit vibe, read on.

Think Like a Monk by Jay Shetty, Thorsons, 2020

Like many of us, I’m on a journey to get a bit more calm in my life and improve the way I deal with stress. I heard Jay Shetty on the Dear Therapist podcast (my version of voyeurism which also happen to have good life advice) and they talked about this book.

After working in finance in London, he ends up moving to India and being a monk for three years. It isn’t out of the blue – he’d been spending his summers in an ashram throughout uni but it was still a huge life change. He shares his experiences of that time and teachings mixed in with modern examples to offer suggestions to ‘train your mind for peace and purpose every day’. If you’re already interested and open to these ideas, you’ll enjoy it.

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The bedside bookstack – October 2023

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this October.

The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright, Jonathan Cape, 2023

Anyone who’s been reading a few recent Bookstacks will notice I’m partial to Irish literature. My grandparents were Irish immigrants. Even transplanted to Australia, there’s a lot that is familiar in the cultural legacy; the Catholicism, the big families, the lack of money and knowing your place in the pecking order. So, no surprises that I’m an Anne Enright fan. Loved the Gathering, the Green Road and Actress and thus headed straight to this one when I saw she had something new out.

Carmel McDaragh’s father is a well-known fictional Irish poet, Phil McDraagh. She grows up in reaction to his dramatic leaving of the family. Her daughter Nell grows up in reaction to Carmel and so a generational pattern is set. The push and pull of love, loyalty and disappointment plays out in a destructive loop.

I wanted to love, love, love this one but it came in at like. There was something that always had me a bit wrong-footed. I don’t know if it was a lack of balance in the narration or frustration with the characters. It just never seemed to settle for me. It’s Anne Enright though, so the writing is still a joy.

The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff, Allen & Unwin, 2023

This absolute page-turner of a book has me wondering how exactly she got me to laugh so much while at the same time covering domestic violence, sexual abuse, caste discrimination and the general all-round subjugation of women.

Geeta is part of a microloan group in rural India. Everyone in her village, and the group, think she murdered her husband because he disappeared one night five years ago. As a single woman, it’s not terrible to have a dangerous reputation but life gets chaotic when she starts to get further job requests.

It’s described as ‘a feminist revenge thriller’ and I think it takes skill to pull that off successfully, which it definitely does.

White Cat Black Cat by Kelly Link, Head of Zeus, 2023

This is a collection of seven modern fairy tales. There is something reminiscent yet foreign in these stories. You think you know where they’re going but you’re wrong. There’s a character you recognise from childhood, heading in a familiar direction but then it all tilts and you’re in a completely different world.

The blurb on the back saying  ‘poised on the edges between magic, modernity and mundanity’ is bang on.

August is a Wicked Month by Edna O’Brien, Faber & Faber, 1965

This is Edna O’Brien (incidentally more Irish literature – though she lived in England for a long time). It’s going to be gorgeously written. It’s going to get into uncomfortable interior territory. She throws her first paragraph down with the ease of someone who has 20 books to her name.

What should be a sexual awakening and liberation for young divorcee Ellen, is something sad and sullied. Wow, to be a woman in the sixties!? The humiliation and shame that was attached to desire, the vulnerability and harassment of being a woman alone. This book was initially banned in several countries.

I’m not going to lie. This book is a downer. It well-written and it’s interesting but unless you like pressing at a bruise, I wouldn’t read it when you’re feeling fragile.

Rain Birds by Harriet McKnight, Black Inc.2017

I borrowed this from the library after reading Remember This a beautiful personal essay on friendship and grief by Susie Thatcher. She and the author Harriet McKnight were friends. They met at Canary Press, bonded over writing and played a big role in the development of each other’s writing. She wrote so lovingly about Harriet and Rain Birds that I had to read it too.

Pina is feeling isolated and over-it as she looks after her husband who has Alzheimer’s. Arianna is taking part in a project reintroducing black cockatoos into the local national park but she’s dubious about their donor organisation. I’m only two chapters in so far but the portent is that their paths will cross and changing things for both of them.

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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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The Bedside Bookstack – August 2023

If You’re Happy by Fiona Robertson, University of Queensland Press, 2022

The wonderful Fiona Robertson has created an equally wonderful collection of stories that take you from regional Australia to Morman America. Divorcees, widowers, war vets and comfy couples find themselves questioning the decisions they’ve made or are forced to make as life changes around them. It doesn’t matter if they find themselves in the middle of a natural disaster or daily domestics, there are human instincts which connect us all. Binge read or savour and set aside.

on a bright hillside in paradise by Annette Higgs, Penguin, 2023

This manuscript was the winner of last year’s Penguin Literary Prize and I can see how it was picked. I was completely absorbed by the sense of character and place as we follow five members of the Hatton family who live on Paradise, a farm in settler Tasmania.

There are births, deaths and marriages, but strangers also arrive during this time, evangelist preachers. Their arrival charts changed paths for each of the characters as ‘life in paradise’ begins to mean something different for each character.

Train lord by Oliver Mol, Penguin, 2022

Oliver Mol gets a 10-month migraine which he can’t shake. He can’t read, write or look at screens but he does need work. Typing ‘Sydney’ and ‘no experience’ into Google he puts in an application to work with Sydney trains.

This memoir is one part observation of his time working on the trains (I would’ve guessed about the vomit and poo but I had no idea there were so many snakes to deal with!!) and many parts the honest reconciling of his journey with severe pain, depression, heartbreak and the creative life.

Foster by Claire Keegan, Faber, 2022

Reading Claire Keegan, I enter a quiet place. There is a stillness to her stories, where small things are given time and attention. Foster follows the summer that our narrator is sent to live on a farm with an older couple who are distant relatives of her mother’s.

She comes from a farm with many children, an exhausted mother and a father who likes to gamble. Just like the narrator, I read at first unable to trust that good could happen but the long days of summer and attention and affection can slowly change all of us. Another quiet beauty from Claire Keegan. Read Small Things Like These for some more Claire Keegan.

Eleven Letters to You by Helen Elliott, Text, 2023

This memoir is a beautiful tribute to some of the people who had a profound influence on Helen Elliott’s life and character, whether they realise it or not. Written exactly as the title suggests, it’s 11 letters to neighbours, teachers and mentors. As we learn about them and their backstories, more of her story emerges too.

I liked the originality of revealing the memories of a life this way and growing up in Melbourne in the 50s, it’s a completely different world which is evoked.

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The bedside bookstack – July 2023

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this July.

Daughters of Sparta by Claire Heywood, Hodder & Stoughton

I love a classical myth retelling, especially those putting sidelined female characters into the centre of their stories – Circe, the Silence of the Girls, the Penelopiad, the Mere Wife. I only found this one by accident, after reading this great lithub article which I book marked (but never read until now) years ago.

Daughters of Sparta follows Helen and her older sister Klytemnestra from childhood through their marriages and the Trojan war. I always love reading the expanded story of those who were just bit players in some of the other retellings I’ve read. Obviously Helen is hardly a bit player, but it was great to see her as more than just ‘the face who launched a thousand ships’ and Klytemnestra as more than a wronged wife. Agamemnon is still a complete tyrant, Menelaos is dutiful but distant and Paris a narcissist, so even though this is the women’s story, you can’t get away from the fact that the men around them still decide how it goes.

As you Were by Elaine Feeney, Harvill Secker, 2020

This is a cancer story. So if you can’t do that right now, then move on because it’s set on a hospital ward and every page is sickness and mortality. But, every page is also the ridiculousness and wonder of life and there’s a brilliant dark humour that carries it all along.

This book absolutely deserves the ‘Thrilling’, ‘Superb’ and ‘Brilliant’ endorsements on its front cover. Elaine Feeney uses Sinead and the four patients who share her room to examine family relationships, human instincts, the state of Ireland’s health system and its recent cultural past. I absolutely loved it.

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, Faber, 2021

Another recent Irish hit, this title gives a clear preview of the story to come. It comes in at a very generously double-spaced 114 pages and it isn’t a big story in that it’s about a handful of people in a small area and the little actions they take. At the same time, these actions can change lives and a lot can be said in 114 pages.

Claire Keegan comes with Irish It-girl status and so it’s no surprise that in the seemingly quiet and compressed prose we have a sober take on the Catholic church’s legacy in everyday Irish lives. A beautiful book.

Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes, Pan Macmillan, 2022

Here are a few things you probably don’t know about Medusa. She was a mortal. Although she was a gorgon, she looked human and her only point of difference was a pair of wings. She is raped by Poseidon in Athena’s temple and she ends up with snakes on her head and a look that turns any living thing to stone because Athena was insulted by the desecration. Certainly no sisterhood there. 

This is Medusa’s story with the age-old question of who the monster really is and as for heroes, it turns out the Perseus is a bit of a prick. If you’re currently on the Greek-myth train like I am, add this to your list.

The Shadow of Perseus by Claire Heywood, Hodder & Stoughton, 2023

It was interesting to read this straight after Stone Blind because it’s the same story of Medusa and Perseus with a lot more focus also given to his mother Danae and wife Andromeda. However, Claire Heywood puts her stories in a realist’s realm. In the endnotes, she says, “I want to reimagine this myth within a historically authentic setting, without the intervention of gods or supernatural forces, and so create a story driven primarily by human decision.”

So, no son of Zeus or winged sandals. No gazes that turn people to stone or rescuing from sea beasts but a fascinating story and a great read. And Perseus, still more of a prick than a hero. Some things don’t change when women are at the centre of this story.

The Long View by Elizabeth Jane Howard, Picador Classic, 2016

Elizabeth Jane Howard (EJH) has only recently come onto my radar and she’s as good as everyone says she is. This edition had a beautiful introduction by Hilary Mantel whose writing about the story matches that of the story.

EJH is so smart and intuitive about human relationships, family dynamics and social expectations. It all comes together in a rich (but seemingly effortless) narrative for the reader. But I had to put this one down. It felt like watching Mad Men where the costumes are amazing and the acting is spot on but everyone is just so repressed and unhappy and nursing their wounds in isolation. I know all of that is saying something very specific about the time and class and especially women’s suffocated place in it but I just needed more kindness to keep me going this month.

Victory by Joseph Conrad, Oxford University Press, 2004

This is one of those editions which comes with a hefty academic introduction and pages and pages on the detail of editorial changes between editions as well as a timeline of Conrad’s life and bibliography charted next to global events from 1857 -1928 (pretty interesting to see in parallel actually).

I say all this because a book that comes with all the trappings, arrives with a bit of status and expectation. It’s a classic. I thought I should give it a go. I haven’t read any of Conrad apart from Heart of Darkness decades ago when I was ploughing through the classics and not really understanding any of what I read.

Victory opens with the story of Axel Heyst, a Swede who drifts through the Asia/Pacific colonies of the early 20th Century. I lived and worked in Dili, Timor-Leste for two years, so it was interesting to see it appear in the opening pages. Heyst is an interesting character and cause for a lot of expat gossip. I stayed with it for 100 pages, diligently reading long after some of the players became more caricature than character. This was a classic, right? It was Joseph Conrad? Well, probably 50 pages later than I should’ve, I decided to ditch it – which I wrote about in Quitting on Conrad. Life’s too short and the TBR pile way too big to soldier on in misery.

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Quitting on Conrad

Sometimes you just gotta put a book down

I recently borrowed Joseph Conrad’s Victory. I read Heart of Darkness years ago when I was making my way through the cannon but didn’t have nearly enough life experience to understand what any of them were saying. So, I thought it was time to read another Conrad. The edition came with a lengthy introduction from an Oxford academic, pages and pages about editorial changes between editions and even a timeline of world events mapped again Conrad’s written work. Thus the book arrived with plenty of status and expectation.

I struggled on for 100 pages before putting it down. I put a call out on Twitter to see I should keep going. Was it going to come good like I hoped it would? John Purcell (The Lessons) said that he always felt the failing was his when he couldn’t finish a classic. It was reassuring to be in good company. Classic or not, personal taste and opinion should still matter. In every other area of life, I would say that you shouldn’t like something just because everyone else does. But it makes me feel vulnerable and stupid to be out of step with a book or author that is perceived as brilliant. How embarrassing, to not see or enjoy the mastery in a book which everyone lauds. ‘The failing is mine’ is the usual line.

Conrad is obviously good at what he does. It got off to a great start and some of the writing was such a joy to read. Here he is on the sounds of a squeaky orchestra playing in a tropical backwater:

 “The Zangiacomo band was not making music; it was simply murdering silence with a vulgar, ferocious energy. One felt as if witnessing a deed of violence; and that impression was so strong that it seemed marvellous to see people sitting so quietly on their chairs, drinking so calmly out of their glasses, and giving no signs of distress, anger or fear. Heyst averted his gaze from the unnatural spectacle of their indifference.”

 I mean really, this is great! But something happened as the story went on and it all turned a bit melodramatic and the character making these observations disappeared and was replaced by a few guys who were closer to caricature.

I thought I’d already picked a position on all this but it seems that if the book is a ‘classic’ it’s not so easy for me to call time on it. In my blog How Heavy is a Half Read Book I decided that life was too short, time too scarce and my TBR pile way too big to just slog on.

But the sunk-costs habit of investing time in a book and hoping that something will eventually come out of it is obviously not so easily ditched. I blame Middlemarch. I struggled on for 400 (of the odd 900) pages and then something changed and I was so glad that I’d stuck with it. So, for years, I applied the same hope to books and movies and kept going with the belief that things could change and all would be worth it. It says startling things about my ability to endure what I don’t enjoy, or my thoughts that I should have to.

I don’t mind a challenging read but who needs it to feel like homework. When I finally put Victory down, it was such a relief and the next book didn’t feel like a chore at all.

In future, I’ll try and remember John Irving’s advice, “Grown-ups shouldn’t finish books they’re not enjoying. When you’re no longer a child, and you no longer live at home, you don’t have to finish everything on your plate. One reward of leaving school is that you don’t have to finish books you don’t like.”

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