Tag: books

The bedside bookstack –Summer 2024/2025

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, Chatto & Windus, 2022

It was impossible for me to not be completely immersed in this and invested in the characters. It’s friendship, creation, loss, collaboration, loyalty and love that isn’t romantic set against the backdrop of late nineties gaming (both the design and playing). A huge surprise to this non-gamer how fascinating it can be. Gave me lots to think about re the creative process and how much of yourself you need to put into art and what that then means for collaborations. So clever. So interesting. A real surprise. Loved it. Loved it. Loved it.

Sidelines by Karen Viggers, Allen & Unwin, 2024

Anyone who has ever stood on the sidelines of a kid’s sports team will find familiar territory here. The junior development league sounds exhausting. As the stakes get higher for this team, what is supposed to be a game, is clearly much more, at least for the adults involved.

We’ve all got a story behind us and with each chapter dedicated to a parent or team member, actions and behaviour make more sense. This looks at kid’s sport as a way for parents to live out unrealised ambition, personal inadequacies, and competitive tendencies. A sobering take on gender, ambition and how we all play a part in turning something fun completely toxic.

Stoneyard Devotional by Charlotte Wood, Allen & Unwin, 2023

I’m always curious about what a writer is trying to nut out for themselves when they write their novels. Some circle around the same themes, some keep core ones and swap others in and out.this novel feels very much like a reckoning with ageing and mortality, looming environmental changes and disaster, regret, forgiveness and grief.

There’s plenty of time for our main character to reflect on all of this after she joins an isolated religious order near her hometown in regional New South Wales. Contemplative, she works over and again areas of her life she hasn’t yet reconciled, rhythmic and reflective just like her days. 

The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller, Viking, 2021

Elle Bishop and her family have summered in Cape Cod for generations. One summer she meets Jonas. The two spend all their time together. In the opening pages we find her with three children and a husband. It’s 20 years after she and Jonas met and the night before she slept with him for the first time.

Get ready, you’ll go forwards, backwards and side-step into her parents’ early life and subsequent marriages. It builds up all the layers of what leads to the night between her and Jonas and what will happen after it. I was totally absorbed by all these characters and didn’t want our time to be over.

I spent Christmas day in bed with food poisoning (I know, it feels like a metaphor for something) and was so happy to have this tome on loan from my sister – the absolute perfect summer read (bed-ridden or otherwise). As an Australian reader, the only thing I wished was that I could read something equally as nostalgic and reminiscent of an Australian summer.

Diving, Falling by Kylie Mirmohamadi, Scribe, 2024

One of the reasons I miss Twitter is because I no longer see Kylie Mirmohamadi’s insightful tweets about writers, writing, Virginia Woolf, nature, food and family among many other things. She’s on Instagram but as anyone who remembers the good times knows, you can’t share in the same way. However, you can still find her Writers on Writing list which is ever expanding and an amazing resource for those who love reading about personal process. So, it was like a peep-behind-the-curtain to see a lot of her loves share space in Diving, Falling, her debut novel.

Leila Whittaker is now the widow of a famous Australian artist. He is almost as large in death as he was in life. Leila also has two adult sons. As they all navigate their grief, Leila decides she’s had enough of the eternal people-pleasing and passive acceptance of the-way-things-are. This covers the thorny territory of a family renegotiating their dynamics as new people come into their lives and old habits are shed.

Good Material by Dolly Alderton, Fig Tree, 2023

Alan and Jen have just broken up. Alan didn’t see it coming and is completely heartbroken. His career as a comedian has also flatlined and he has too much time to wonder where it all went wrong.

This came with a v high-praise back cover (quotes about tears by page 5, endless laughs and stop-you-in-your-tracks-heart-wrenching), so I feel like a bit of an ice queen for getting a bit ho-hum reading about Alan’s misery. Can’t figure it out. Heartbreak is the absolute worst and I usually have a lot more sympathy for it but his neediness was a lot to carry. I guess now we know how Jen felt.

Florida by Lauren Groff, Penguin Random House, 2018

You’re always in good hands with Lauren Groff. These short stories are so rich and dense, maybe because we revisit some of the characters again, so it’s not just a one-off slice of their life. The narrators are not all likeable which makes for an even more interesting read. And Florida is always there with its extremes of weather, its endemic creatures (god, there’s always a snake curling around something which was a lot for this non-snake lover) and its sticky humidity in this already warming world.

Still Life with Bread Crumbs by Anna Quindlen, Random House, 2013

Rebecca Winter moves to a small forest cabin in upstate New York to cut costs and retreat from the uncertainty that comes with waning creative fame. Her iconic photographic series ‘Still Life With Bread Crumbs’ doesn’t bring in royalties or requests to appear any more.

This is a slow burn but a really nice read about making changes, second chances, creativity and unlikely love.

Stories by Helen Garner, Text, 2017

This is a collection of 17 of Helen Garner’s short stories. I’m a big fan of Garner. I love hearing her speak, reading her diaries and essays and articles but here’s something which feels like blasphemy, I didn’t get beyond the fourth story in this collection. I know. And I really tried but at this end of the year when there are so many other things waiting to be read, if you’re not feeling it, you’re not feeling it, regardless of the name behind it. I think I needed more narrative and less lens-on-a-moment for it to be a short story. And if the title wasn’t Stories and I was expecting diary entries, would I have read it differently?

Mad About You by Mhairi McFarlane, Harper Collins, 2022

Just what the summer ordered, a Mhairi McFarlane rom-com with a cad, a catch, a totally capable and sassy protagonist and of course the possibility of a happy ending. There’s flatmate-proximity, coercive control, online trolling, loyalty in friendship and misleading first impressions. Done. Easy comfort read sorted.

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The bedside bookstack – October 2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.

Solider Sailor by Claire Kilroy, faber, 2023

Soldier speaks this story Sailor, to her baby boy. She tells him of his birth and the early months of his life. She advises him on what to be and not to be in this world and she apologises for the backdrop to his first years when she and Sailor’s father fought and she nearly let all of them go.

She speaks like a madwoman telling all our truths and she is mad with the lack of sleep, the exhaustion, the relentless repetition of those early days of motherhood and the sudden gender division of labour. This is such a sucker punch of read – visceral and all-consuming. You feel like you’re drowning with her, so maybe one for when you’re out of the trenches and sleeping through the night again yourself.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey, Random House, 2024

Six astronauts orbit around the earth over a 24 hour period. That’s it. That’s what happens in this book but it is beautiful and poetic and slowed me down until it felt more like a meditation than a narrative.

As they go about their daily tasks, they think about their lives and their loved ones. They look down on the world as life down there wakes up and goes to sleep again. They record the growing fury of a typhoon for meteorological services back on earth and they wonder about the vast space that opens up when they look in any direction other than earth. Grand in content and contained in style, this is like the space version of a Claire Keegan book. Just gorgeous.

Sky Song by C. A. Wright, Pantera Press, 2024

CA Wright was our October Books at the Bowlo guest. It’s always a treat to read a book and then get more insight into it from both a craft and content angle.

Oriane is the Skylark. She sings the sun and a new day into being every morning. To many she is just a myth. Her father has kept her hidden in safety but as she grows so does her curiosity about what is out there beyond their isolated home in the woods. There is another myth. This one is about the Nightingale who sings forth the darkness each evening and if Oriane is real, perhaps the Nightingale is too.

This is based on a Hans Christian Anderson story. I don’t know the original but I’m always curious about what was kept and shed in the rewrite.

The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Maas, Writer’s Digest Books, 2016

Boom!! That was my head exploding into smithereens while reading this book. Donald Maas is New York literary agent and after reading thousands of manuscripts he started to wonder why some brilliantly plotted and/or written books still didn’t make much of an impression on him.

His analysis is that it is the emotional impact and connection with a book which makes it stand out from others. He lays out different methods for achieving emotional engagement and includes excerpts and exercises with each. This book is a brilliant mix of theory and practice and is now in my Top 3 Writing Books. Yep. That’s saying something.

Oh, what are the other 2 you ask. George Saunders’ A Swim in the Pond in the Rain and Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. I just keep going back to them again and again and I can see how this will be the same.

The Writer’s Library by Nancy Pearl & Jeff Schwager, Harper One, 2020

I know, no one needs more to add to their book list but….I’m a big fan of reading about writers and certainly very happy to take their book recommendations. Each chapter is dedicated to a writer and set out in Q and A style from their early reading to reading which made them want to write, reading which influenced certain works of theirs and what they’re reading now. And instead of having to take notes and add books as you’re reading it, there’s a list at the end of each chapter for all the books which were mentioned!

Just as a warning, it’s an American book, thus US writers only which could be limiting for some readers but I picked and chose a bit and loved that my current fiction fan-girl recipient, Jennifer Egan, was featured.

Wall by Jen Craig, Puncher & Wattman, 2023

An artist returns to Australia to clear out her father’s house after his death. She has plans to turn it into an installation but the reality of a hoarder’s house and the history it holds for her make it a much more complicated task. I’ve only just started this. The stream-of-consciousness prose is densely packed, almost like the narrator’s thoughts are mirroring the clutter she stands in. She jumps from art theory to family memories to her current situation in the same way that she notices and moves on from the objects around her. Not a tired bedtime read, methinks.

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The Bedside Bookstack – September 2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, Corsair, 2010

Is it a novel or a collection of linked short stories? It doesn’t matter. I just loved it. You could feel how much she was enjoying setting limits and making up her own rules – no POV twice, show the passing of time, write a short story in as many different styles as possible. I mean, a short story through Powerpoint slides, that’s just genius!

Bennie Salazar and his assistant Sasha work together at Sow’s Ear record label. Forwards, backwards and to the side, each chapter gives us a little more of their story through friends, lovers, colleagues and family. How did I not know about this?? It’s been out for ages and even won a Pulitzer. Ne’er mind. Crisis averted. I know about it now and have the Candy House, her latest book, ready to go.

The Love That Remains by Susan Francis, Allen & Unwin, 2020

I had an author chat with Susan Francis for the September Books at the Bowlo and it was such a pleasure to read this book again in preparation. Full disclosure, Susan is the first writer friend I made when I moved to Newcastle, so I write this as a friend and reader.

Her beautiful memoir is proof that the story isn’t always the story and truth is certainly stranger than fiction. She starts out looking for her birth parents, moves to Granada with her husband and then discovers a secret from his past. There’s a lot I’m not saying so you can read the book without any spoilers but it was humbling to share this intimate story.

The Axeman’s Carnival by Catherine Chidgey, Europa, 2022

This is the first book I’ve ever read which is narrated by a magpie, Tama. It took me a little bit to get used to but then it seemed just as it should be for a magpie to be charting the toxic marriage of his owner and the random fame their magpie-human relationship has brought to the quiet hill-country farm they live on. Tama’s father always warned him about humans. He wasn’t right about all of them but he certainly has a point.

The Bookshop Woman by Nanako Hanada, brazen, 2024

My mistake was thinking that this was a novel, so I struggled and wanted it to be more than it was. Once I realised it was the author’s own story of meeting strangers and giving them book recommendations, it all changed. Then it became a fascinating insight into the rich and diverse world of Japanese books and literature and its own list of suggested reading essays, novels, manga, haiku and so many short story collections! The only disappointment was seeing all the asterisks next to the list of books, meaning they aren’t available in an English version.

I loved that she recommended Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap. I don’t think it was ever published in Australia. I only know about it and have my copy because many moons ago I was an intern at the Berlin International Literature Festival and he was one of the guests. Nice guy. Great book.

Australiana by Yumna Kassab, Ultimo, 2022

Following on from A Visit from the Goon Squad, this is another novel/short story-cycle. When is something a collection of short stories rather than a novel? I guess when there is a continuing narrative. I’m a big fan in any case (another one to check out is Melissa Manning’s Smokehouse).  I love following a character at a point in time, magnifying in on them, then panning back out to follow someone they’ve brushed up against until we put together the bigger picture of a community and its unique characteristics. This is what Yumna Kassab did in her debut The House of Youssef with an urban setting. Australiana comes after she spent 3 years in Tamworth. This feels like a darker collection with heat and drought and desperation driving many of dynamics.

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev, Penguin Classics, 1986

I’ve got a pile of classics sitting at home. Every time I consider reading one, I think of the tiny font and the curly sentences and I’m already tired. But somehow, I made myself pick up Turgenev and give him a go (I loved his short story in the George Saunders collection A Swim in a Pond in the Rain).

The pleasant surprise is that he’s really easy to read. It didn’t feel like the mental effort of some others, like an assigned task to suffer through. Style wise, it was a real pleasure. However, I ditched it more than half way through because I was getting impatient with the long philosophical conversations about nihilism.

I know, I know, the whole point is the generational divide, in this case also showing the new ideas for a new Russia of the sons against the more stuffy traditional and institutional ideas of the fathers but after a while it just felt like men shouting at me and by page 189, I just wanted some peace and quiet.

A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J Maas, Bloomsbury, 2016

Yep, I’m back in the ‘Court of…’ spicy romantasy franchise. I’ve heard things taper off in the next few books, so I might leave it here but what I appreciated was that the deeds Feyre committed in the previous book and her transformation from mortal to immortal have left her with some pretty severe PTSD and rather than move on neatly to the next thing, a good portion of this book is a slow recovery from that trauma…..albeit aided by a new love interest.

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The bedside bookstack – June 2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.

In the Middle of the Fields by Mary Lavin, New Island, 2016

Mary Lavin is known as one of Ireland’s best short story writers. Colm Toibin writes a beautiful introduction in this edition, about how she doesn’t fetishise Ireland for foreign readers (many of her stories appeared in the New Yorker). She writes more about people’s dynamics and inner life than politics or culture. Her Irish women especially, are more than the stereotype of widow, tired mother or spinster. She’s so evocative, conjuring isolation or grief or joy in a few simple sentences and then keeping it there while she moves the story ever onward.

I’m dipping in and out of this collection, having decided that gorging on an anthology like I often do is theft to the individual stories. Consuming them one after the other doesn’t let me savour them or reflect.

The Raptures by Jan Carson, Penguin, 2022

It’s early nineties Northern Ireland and the Troubles are in full swing. Every night on the telly there are stories about bombs and fighting. In the small town of Ballylack a primary school child gets sick and dies. Then another one. And another. These are Hannah’s classmates. Her family aren’t Catholic or Church of England. They’re Evangelical, so she was already an outsider before the dead kids started talking to her.

There’s communities, conflict, faith and magic realism in this book, which sound like much more of an awkward mix than they turn out to be on the page.

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones, Vintage Books 2018

Celestial and Roy have only been married 18 months when he’s accused of a crime he didn’t commit and sentenced to 12 years in prison. They remain married on paper but by the time he’s released early, they haven’t spoken in two years.

This is a big one. Like a Tolstoy tableau, one marriage plays out as a reflection of modern America with race, incarceration, inherited trauma and questions of loyalty and ownership at its heart.

Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson, Viking, 2021

In a South London pub a man and woman meet. Something starts between them, a connection that dodges definition. They’re both creatives, both scholarship kids who tried to fit in with their white peers, both sick of their friends matching the appearance of someone police are looking for.

This reads like stream of consciousness, a rhythmic parallel to the soundtrack of our narrator. It’s a very cerebral read and I picked it up with a flu fogged head and gave it a good go. I stayed the course for more than 100 pages but then abandoned ship. Not for me for right now.

The Grazier’s Son by Cathryn Hein, Harlequin, 2024

As mentioned, it’s been a bit of month, so it was nice that this month’s Books at the Bowlo author was rural romance writer Cathryn Hein. After hearing her talk about daydreaming along country roads, hero helicopter pilots and vintage fashion, I thought this might be just what I needed. Joining Stirling and Darcy on their bumpy road to happiness via embezzlement, infidelity, injuries and a surprise inheritance from an estranged father was just what I needed amidst my sneezing and sniffles.

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, Grove Press, 2015

A communist sleeper agent narrates this story during occupied Vietnam and in America after the fall of Saigon. I haven’t finished it yet but it’s right down there in the details. His voice is so distinct, incredibly dry yet conflicted about the compromises that are made and the moral questions of what he does. The bloody mess of war is not some aerial shot in this book. It’s right up close. The body count keeps climbing but unlike the faceless and expendable lives in an action movie, these people have names and families and lives they were living.

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The bedside bookstack – May2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.

It’s more a small collection than bookstack this month. I need to get onto research for my manuscript and had to put a ban on novels because I just wasn’t getting the research reading done. But one cannot live on obligatory reading alone, so there are also some essays and interviews I’m including.

Beside Myself – An Actor’s Life by Antony Sher, Nick Hern Books, 2001

The main character in my manuscript is an actor, thus the multiple actor autobiographies I’m reading. This one has a lot about Sher’s early life in South Africa, his family dynamics and their formative nature. He had a distant father who never seemed to understand who he was and a mother who always championed him and believed he was destined for greatness.

I’m always curious about people’s emotional excavations into who they are and how they got to be that way but for my purposes, the real gold was in his detail about productions. It’s fascinating the fragile ecosystem that exists within this web of people brought together so intensely for a period of time. I also loved reading about the emotional preparation for his roles, how some of them fit and others never quite worked.

A lot of his work was with the Royal Shakespeare Company, so it was also a refresher on plays I hadn’t read in decades and an insight into others which I’d never read or seen staged.

Shakespeare – The Man who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench, Michael Joseph, 2023

Continuing on with Shakespeare is Judi Dench’s book which is an extended and ongoing interview with actor and director Brendan O’Hea. If Shakespeare doesn’t interest you, then move on because the title gives it away.

This is two people who know and love their stuff asking all the right questions and giving the answers that you can after a professional acting life that has spanned decades. Again, the detail and deconstruction that is needed by the actor when playing a character is incredible to read about and gives me a much deeper understanding of the texts.

Dear Life by Alice Munro, Vintage, 2012

Alice Munro died this month and so in honour of one of the greatest modern short story writers, I had to pull a collection out in memoriam. What is there to say? She’s measured and quiet in tone but there’s nothing empty about her stories. There is always much more going on under the surface and she’s a great witness to life’s contradictions and unpredictability. After this reminder, it’s time to go back to some of her earlier collections which I haven’t read yet.

Paris Review articles on Alice Munro

The Paris Review is famous for its interview series with writers The Art of Fiction. These are extended interviews written out in complete question and answer format. For a limited time the Alice Munro – Art of Fiction 137 interview is available for all to read.

The Paris Review also wrote an obituary for her What a Goddam Writer She Was as well as an essay Inside Alice Munro’s Notebooks.

Jenny Erpenbeck on the Death of her Mother, Granta

I’ve also been thinking about Jenny Erpenbeck’s personal essay in Granta Open Book-keeping ever since I read it.

She writes about her mother’s death and then in detached but loaded detail continues with the bureaucracy you need to deal with after someone dies. It’s a lot of work to finalise someone’s life and though the person isn’t left, their ‘things’ still are.

This resonated with me because my mum has recently gone into residential aged care and I’m going up and down between Newcastle and Sydney slowly clearing her place out with my brother and sister. There’s a lot to discover about a person you only knew as a parent and plenty of decisions about ‘things’ and ‘stuff’, what matters and means something and does that then mean you have to keep it.

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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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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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Do books belong out in the world or on your bookshelf?

For something that is really just printed words on paper, we have some very strong feelings and ideas about our books as possessions. Seeing a full bookshelf calms me and holding a book is always a comfort. But my passion in their power also means that I think they need to be read, so I’m happy to lend out my books.

A book is meant to be read, hopefully by as many people as possible. I love it when someone asks me if I have anything good to read. I have a look on my shelves and pick out what I think is the right pick for them at the time.

I’d like to get the book back eventually but it’s a bit of an honesty system (I am lending to family and friends after all) and not every book comes back to the shelf.

There are a few books which I keep lending out and then rebuying. One is Annie Proulx’s That Old Ace in the Hole and the other is Elizabeth Gilbert’s celebration of creativity, Big Magic. Which reminds me, I don’t have a copy of either of them at the moment. Short story anthologies are something else I’m always lending out too.

Some people use Ex Libris bookplates in the front of their books but anecdotally, they don’t guarantee that a book will ever return.

I always know if someone else’s book is on my shelves though. I’m very aware of possessions that aren’t mine. For me, a borrowed book feels a bit like an unpaid debt until it’s been returned.

Books have sentimental value and financial value. Some are out of print and can’t be replaced. Others I just want on my shelves but any copy will do. My general hope is that I remember both that they’re gone and who they went to. And when it doesn’t work out that way, when I have an inkling that I used to own a book which is no longer there, there is a consolation in thinking of it making its way in the world onto other bookshelves and into other hands.

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