calamity of such long layoff

Its been far too long since I blogged about books, and as a result, I stand no chance of doing any justice to those I've read this year. In brief, then:

• A Farewell To Arms (Ernest Hemingway): It occurs to me that this might be my favourite of the Hemingway books I've thus far read, but that's a woefully inadequate description. This is still a really good book, but whether its because of the autobiographical elements (I think they're autobiographical) or just the less striking setting, this one lacks the sharpness or depth of For Whom The Bell Tolls, which I think is my favourite Hemingway.
• All That I Am (Anna Funder): This won the Miles Franklin last year, and is a pretty solid entry in a genre I wouldn't ordinarily pick up (nazis, for one thing). Book club selection with Nic and company.
• They Call Me Coach (John Wooden): There's just something about this book. The writing is often bland and repetitive, but the love that Wooden had (and still had at writing) for his players just shows through continuously, and I don't mind admitting I felt a bit choked up at times because of it. 
• Oscar and Lucinda (Peter Carey): This book carries such a big reputation with so many people I know, that perhaps I expected more. Its a diverting enough story, I guess, but it never really got to me.
• The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway): For so long I've named Steinbeck as my all-time favourite author, but Hemingway is giving him a good run these days. This is one of those perfectly formed novellas that you read in one sitting then put down and immediately think about nostalgically. I think I still prefer the depth of Tolls, but this one thoroughly deserves its great reputation.
• Starship Troopers (Robert Heinlein): Having been such a fan of the movie, and having enjoyed Stranger in a Strange Land, I was looking forward to this one (another book club book). I have to say that, although I quite enjoyed it, it really wasn't what I expected. Very little "sci" for a scifi book!
• Steppenwolf (Hermann Hesse): Very good tale, and quite unlike what I normally read, with the distinctive and eloquent writing style (albeit translated) of an older author, but the transgressive material of the latter 20th century (though it was first published in 1927). Very good.
• Bleak House (Charles Dickens): I'm still yet to be let down by Dickens, and this book offers many memorable characterisations, none less so than that of the legal profession through the wonderful scenario of Jarndyce and Jarndyce! The characters, especially the women, are a little thin at times, but the story and vividly painted setting make it all OK.
• Carrion Comfort (Dan Simmons): Really good stuff! JMJ and Jacques recommended this to me for years before I actually bought it, and although I don't think its on the level of Hyperion, its a good tale about a really good premise.
• Washington Square (Henry James): I don't think I'd read any Henry James before this novella, but his reputation as a wordsmith is well earned. This story and its characters are a little odd, but his writing is just so lovely that I didn't mind.
• The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History (Free Darko): I bought and started this years ago, but saved it mercilessly for years, like a child hoarding halloween candy in denial that the holiday is actually over. FD may have been the peak of sportswriting for me - whether the writing has gone downhill, or whether a wider remit makes their American homerism more conspicuous, The Classical just isn't the same.
• The Man Who Loved Children (Christina Stead): This was mentioned on an ABC show about the great Australian novels, so I picked up a copy at the tip shop for a couple of dollars. I have to say, though, I don't think it belongs in that list. Its diverting enough, with some good characters and a strong sense of their relationships, but for me it lacked a sense of place, and never really grabbed me from a story point of view.
• Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card): This one grabbed me. Rollicking good page-turner scifi classic, with easy action and just enough psychology and sociology to keep the mind involved. The movie will probably be mindless action, but the book deserves its status in the SF canon.

So there you have it. At times I haven't been reading much this year, and like any year there are some books which read very quickly and easily (Hemingway, James, Ender's Game) and others which take months (Carrion Comfort, though it was no indicator of quality, The Man Who Loved Children). I always hope that the end of the year will see me reading more, but only time will tell. Summers get busier every year, it seems.

Unwriting

Work at present is all about grant writing (tis the season) and paper writing, so my intention this weekend was to spend a little time catching up on some of that, specifically on a paper due this coming Friday. However, as it turns out - and this is hardly surprising given my form - I didn't do any writing, but instead spent most of the weekend reading. Of course, a weekend spent reading can never, ever, be considered to have been completely wasted.

Before I get to this weekend, though, I owe the usual clearinghouse of books I've read but haven't yet mentioned here (note to self: everything since Cry, The Beloved Country). Actually, this corresponds pretty closely to my holiday reading.

My holiday reading began with Tess of the D'Urbervilles. In the end, this book cut through my holiday, as I frequently put it aside, often angrily, and went away to read something else. 2 of those something elses where finished by the time I finally put Tess to bed.

As I've done at times in the past, my holiday reading was fuelled early by a trip to my library, and as usual, the ideas I walked in with bore no resemblance to the books I walked out with. The first of these was The Sense Of An Ending by Julian Barnes. I read one of Barnes' books, A History of the World in 10 1/2 chapters, a few years ago, and although I wasn't overly excited by its at-times-too-clever religious analyses, it has grown on me with time. Its odd sometimes the books that you remember. Unfortunately, I can't see Sense of An Ending being one of them. Its a fairly short book told by an unreliable narrator looking back at his past relationships and friendships, and who becomes less likeable as the book goes on. Oddly enough, one of the things I liked about 10 1/2 chapters was the feeling that I didn't quite understand what was going on, but what I didn't like about Ending was the feeling that I did.

After my first library book, and as my second escape from morbid 19th century rural English moralism, I picked up something close to hand. One of my family discoveries a few years ago was that, against all the odds, we had a world champion as a distant relative. To be fair, pretty distant, though. As it turns out, I have a third cousin (or something equally vague) named Chrissie Wellington, the now-retired four-time world champion in the ironman. Although none of my close family have met her, we picked up a copy of her autobiography last year, and have all been working our way through it. Its actually a pretty good read - certainly interesting in terms of what she has done in her life, but not just in simplistic "I won this, I won this" boasting or "you can be your dreams" motivational ways. The characters - principally Chrissy herself and her coach Brett Sutton - are conflicted characters with flaws and virtues in different measure. In some ways it feels premature as an autobiography - she is only a few months older than me, and one would hope that she has a lot left to achieve in her life (the autobiography was actually written before she retired, although one wonders if it was on her mind). Hopefully our distant connection, principally through her uncle & aunt, will allow us to remain up to date with what happens beyond the last page of the book.

Having whisked through a couple of sidetracks, I finally gritted my teeth and finished off Tess. Reading shouldn't be as hard as this, but this isn't the first time I've found it hard reading from this era. At times I've whinged to people about the female "protagonists" being so passive and the social norms so backwards (as regards women, mainly). I know its not that simple, and I've never been satisfied with the words I use to complain about it, but somehow I don't enjoy reading it, even though I have enjoyed other social commentary literature from back then (Dickens, mainly). Anyway, Tess was morbid, joyless and frustrating to me, and what enjoyment I gained from the descriptions of the landscape did little to counterbalance her.

As a palate cleanser, the morning I finished Tess, I skipped through The Little Prince. Nice book, I suppose, in an early-19th-century-fantastical-childrens-book-with-transparent-social-motivational-analogies kind of way. Mostly I liked the pictures.

That brings me to this weekend (anyone new to this blog and expecting my clearinghouse to be brief would do well to free themselves of these delusions - my sporadic longwindedness is part of this blog's charm, I maintain). After Tess, I decided to go back to my wheelhouse. One of my five favourite books (back when I made the mistake of compiling such a list) is Dan Simmons' Hyperion, which was a marvellous series mixing scifi, fantasy, and literary references. His follow-up series, Ilium/Olympos, wasn't quite in the same class, but was also fascinating in the way it mixed the fantastical and the classical. So, when my browse through the library took me past Simmons' Drood, I picked it up. After a protracted reading over what has been an eventful January, I finally finished it on Saturday morning.

I had always had in my mind an impression of Simmons as two authors, one who wrote scifi/fantasy (neither of those terms fits, in fact), and another who wrote horror. I suspect now that this clear distinction between his outputs only really works until you've read sufficient of his work to realise that the the reality is much more blurred. Drood is essentially historical fiction, with supernatural/psychological elements mixed in. The story is told from the perspective of Wilkie Collins, as an unreliable narrator who is addicted to laudanum and later other opiates, and deals with the last 5 years of Charles Dickens' life following the Staplehurst rail crash. The book is a little uneven, with compelling sections, such as the pair's descent into the Undertown tunnels, but also with a tendency to drag at times. The unreliable narrator element is perhaps the best part of the book - one can never be sure what role Collins' drug use is having on the story that we are told, either in terms of the characterisations or of the events themselves.

The final book in this lengthy spiel was the one I most enjoyed. Discovering Hemingway a couple of years ago, via a chance purchase on a street near Basel (best 2CHF I've ever spent), has been one of my great pleasures of recent years, so A Farewell To Arms was another library encounter which met with no hesitation. The story is of an American working as an ambulance driver in northern Italy during the first world war. He falls in love with a Scottish nurse, then deserts the army during a retreat in which the military structures start to break down, and flees with the nurse to Switzerland. To be honest, the characters are thinly drawn, especially Catherine, who is a ghost of a woman with no discernable traits beyond lovely hair and being submissive. Henry, the protagonist, would be in AA if he existed in today's world - the quantities of vermouth, whiskey, cognac and white wine he gets through are extraordinary. However, there is something about the story that just worked for me. I don't know if its Hemingway's simple writing style, or his beautiful pacing, but I picked the book up on Saturday afternoon, and put it down Sunday evening, and really felt good about it.

My next book will be All That I Am, by Anna Funder, which won the Miles Franklin last year. The lovely Nicole is hosting a book club next week, and for all the talking I've done about books over the years, I've never done so in a more organised setting where people come actually expecting to talk about the book I've just finished reading. So I'm looking forward to it tremendously.

Having loosened my authorial gland through the above braindump, I shall now return to avoiding the writing I really should be doing.

Reading update

Earlier in the year I set myself a goal of reading 25 books this year. At times that has seemed like an easy goal, and at others an impossible one.  One of the forces working against me has been my guilty conscience - when I have marking, or proof-reading, or reviewing on my slate at work, then I take work home. This isn't to say I stop reading because I'm working (although that does sometimes happen), but the presence of the work in my unopened bag makes me guilty enough to stop myself reading for pleasure.

Nonetheless, it hasn't been a bad year thus far for reading. The chief reason for this has been Game of Thrones, which has accounted for 5 of the 18 books I've read thus far, and a much greater proportion of the pages I've read. Last night I finished the 5th of the series, A Dance With Dragons, bringing me up to date and into the large group of people waiting patiently for Martin's final 2 instalments, whenever they should arrive. Its a pretty serviceable series, better written than a lot of fantasy, and less closely drawn to the standard fantasy story archetypes (the hero's quest for symbol of power, blah blah blah). Martin's willingness to kill off significant characters gruesomely, and often suddenly, also helps to make the stories less predictable for the rusted-on reader of the genre, which is nice. Having watched the first season of the excellent TV adaptation before reading book 1, and the second at the same time as I read book 2, I now find myself a long way ahead. To date the adaptation has produced one series per book, but I suspect it will struggle to do so as the stories broaden across Martin's world, and as the source books thicken.

I've also read a couple of other books to break up the flow. I started Murakami's 1Q84 while in London, and finished after I got back, but I can't say I enjoyed it much. It moves at a very slow pace, and a number of things about his writing frustrate me - he's obsessed with women's bodies, more than I found reasonable, and his ambition in his prose style outstrips his ability, I thought, with a lot of strained metaphors and distracting detours from the central plot, mixed with excessive exposition and leaps of logic from his characters. It also desperately wanted a severe editor - a 300 page story in a 1000 page book.

At the Lifeline book fair earlier this year, 3 of the books I bought were Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. Having read Red Mars, the first instalment, its certainly an impressive piece of work. There is a really strong sense of scientific credibility in his writing, and no lack of depth in the way he has thought out the colonisation and terraforming of Mars. However, the narrative does suffer, and its not always a compelling read in terms of its characters or story, so I found it a bit hard going. I will probably dip into the second and third books at some point, but I'm in no hurry.

At my mother's urging, I have managed to squeeze in a local book as well. Very local, in fact - Over the Top With Jim by Hugh Lunn is set only 4 about blocks from where I live, and a number of the settings for the 1950s coming-of-age story are places I frequent every week - the "state school" (as opposed to the catholic school) next door to me, Ekibin Creek at the bottom of my street (even if its really a park-and-drain now), and various others (alas, not the cinemas, which have all closed in the intervening years). The book itself is a decent enough yarn, with enough geographical and historical familiarity to keep me interested even if the cultural and temporal settings didn't resonate particularly with me, not having grown up either catholic, in the fifties, or more importantly in a time when religion was a conspicuous cultural discriminant.

The other book I've read recently was another I picked up at the Lifeline book fair - Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. Its a fairly simple story about a black South-African reverend who comes to Johannesburg to seek people from his village who have run afoul of various of the social issues which burnt South Africa through much of the 20th century. Its a fairly grim tale at times, but Paton writes very well, with what felt to me like strong influences from Steinbeck, in the way he uses individual characters to represent larger social movements, and Hemingway, in the way he uses cross-language dialogue.

lecture away from lecture

I had promised, as recently as earlier today, to return from my travel-induced interregnum from book reviews, to flooding this blog with apologetically late accounts of my reading habits. However, after very little thought (as is my wont for these entries), I've decided against that. Instead, I shall be taking a positive view. I was able, or chose, to devote countless column inches in the last month or two to my activities outside the cover of a book, but this is not so much a reflection of what I have been doing instead of reading, as of what I have been doing as well. Indeed, as has been the case in the past when I've travelled, I've probably read as much or more as I would otherwise have. Anyway, the absence of reviews is a good thing - it indicates that I have things happening in my life that take a higher priority than reading and blogging about reading :)

In fact, though, I must begin my now-traditional catchup with some books read before my departure. Back in January, for the first time in a long time, I visited the library, and came away with an armful of books to read. The last of these, as it turned out, was Cormac McCarthy's The Road. My first foray into McCarthy had been All The Pretty Horses, back in 2009, and enjoyed it, but the Road was a very different book. Not different in that I didn't like it - I think on the balance that I did - but the writing is starkly different, stripped back to a bare minimum, to match the world being described. To be honest, its almost not a book you like so much as appreciate - the story is tough and at times uncompromising, and at times so can be the reading experience, but I thought it was worth it.

Ok, so it wasn't the last book from the library. That honour, dubious though it may be, goes to the wonderful Terry Pratchett, and Unseen Academicals. I was recently trying to sell Pratchett's work to someone who, though a fan of satire, was strongly averse to fantasy writing. My argument was essentially that his writing, that is, his mastery of the English language, takes a back seat to no currently working author I could name, and though I failed to make my case successfully, I hold that to be true. This is in strong evidence in Unseen Academicals, in which he weaves his familiar world of the university with that of the origin/codification of soccer, the story of Romeo and Juliet, and of the acceptance of the outsider. None of the threads ever becomes heavy, but they each come through clearly and coherently, and all with beautiful prose and replete with the anecdotes and wordplay that will be his hallmark when his writing career soon, regrettably, comes to a close (or so I have heard).

Before leaving to go overseas, I found myself in between the end of my lease and settlement on my new abode, and having the pleasure of spending a week with my friends Paul and Juli. Juli is quite the collector of books, and being without one, I took it upon myself to scour her shelves for something recognisable that I could be sure to finish in what was a busy week. My eyes fell upon Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, and it ticked all those boxes, as well as the more important one of being good! Its a scifi classic, I suppose, though its really more dystopian, in the style of 1984 or Brave New World, than hard scifi (the distinction could be argued, obviously). The central character is a fireman in a world in which that role has become one not of putting fires out, but of starting them, in order to destroy books, which are banned. As the story progresses, the fireman first rebels against and then flees the regime.

Having left for my trip, I avoided reading for a little while, knowing that I had a lot of work reading/reviewing/proofreading to do, and knowing my tendency to read voraciously while travelling. I succumbed eventually though, once getting to Rennes, and stayed dystopian, reading Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale. This is another famous dystopia, in which the central character is a handmaid, a woman given over to the sole purpose of bearing children in a society in which women have been stripped of all rights to property, work or self-determination generally. I have to say, though, that it didn't stack up to Fahrenheit or the other dystopian works I've read. The character is thinly and difficult to understand at times, and the worldbuilding is also unconvincing - perhaps it resonates more in societies in which fundamentalist religions - be they Muslim, Christian or otherwise - are more present than in Australia. For these and other reasons, I wasn't particularly moved by it.

For my last in this instalment, I went back to my base. I had watched the TV adaptation last year of George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones with great pleasure, and needed little provocation to grab a copy of the book from which its drawn. This is classic fantasy - great fat 1000-page tomes with lots of characters, taking part in dramatic action in a vividly drawn world undergoing great change. It has maps at the front! What I really like, though, is that its meaty - the characters are as stark (pun not intended) and gritty as the world in which they live, and Martin doesn't let the fantastic elements get in the way of the story - it is typically people and steel that decides characters' fates, not magic or dragons (though that will change at some point). It also avoids stereotypes all over the place - there is no Eddings-style Messiah story here - and he isn't afraid to let characters die when circumstances dictate that they will die. I have a copy of the second, and barring a Wheel-Of-Time style burnout (8000 pages of my life I will never get back!), I anticipate continuing to read the series as it evolves, until I don't enjoy it any more.

Travel Wrap

I had been doing so well with my reports on my trip through Europe, with 6 blog posts directly about it and another which was pretty strongly linked. Today, though, I'm abandoning what hopes I may have had of fully documenting the trip, with a hastily compiled summary of a time period which probably represents almost half of the time I was away.

I've already blogged about my weekend in Rennes and, like the weekend, much of the week that followed was spent in similar vain, in that it was a revisitation of my old life in Rennes.

My days were spent at Beaulieu, working with my old team. I say my old team, but times have moved on since I was there. Jean-Marc has moved up in the world, to be director of the laboratory, and Benoit B has moved into his role as team leader. There are a few more permanent researchers now - Benoit B, Benoit C, Olivier, Arnaud, Johann, Gerson and Noël (off the top of my head) - and it seems like a lot more doctoral students. The project as a whole faces an important year ahead, as the old project comes to an end and they prepare a proposal (or proposals) for new directions.

In the evenings I mostly hung out with M, who came over to visit on Monday. I had really been looking forward to showing her "my town", and some of the things I really like about it, but it was a very vague ambition, and I'm not sure to what extent it was met. We tried a range of crêperies and restaurants, including some that I'd frequented in the past. We met Nono - by chance, actually - for an apero, and had dinner with the Benoits. We tried a few new things too (new to me as well), most noticeably some really delicious macaroons from a chocolatier which I'd often walked past but never walked into. Oddly, we only went for one run, but it was a good one, along the canal

On the Friday we took a train, then a taxi, then a plane, then a bus, in order to get ourselves to Hammersmith, as I made a return to London (the previous visits having been 2003, 2004 and 2007, I think) for the trip's one week of true vacation (on my part - M was back to work).

Saturday was largely given to the Boat Race, the annual rowing 8s competition between Oxford and Cambridge along the Thames, in no small part because the house in which I was graciously hosted was ideally placed to watch the event. Being just a few yards from the river, and with a rooftop view giving both up and down the stretches graced by the boats, had lead to a call - well made if not well heeded - for a barbecue to celebrate. It was impressive to see just how many people turn out to watch, and with what enthusiasm they do so. I was on the light blues for the day, courtesy of my cousin's involvement in a few instalments, many years ago now.

In the end, the race itself was equal parts spectacle and debacle. About 2/3 of the way through the race, with Oxford perhaps ahead by a nose and well placed in light of the remaining bends, a swimmer emerged directly in front of the Oxford boat, and both crews were instructed to stop rowing. The guy, an Australian purportedly demonstrating against elitism, was unharmed, but what followed was a curious half hour in which the boats moved back up the river to eventually restart from just before where the incident had occurred. After the restart, a clash of oars left Oxford one blade down, which allowed Cambridge to cruise ahead to a comfortable win.

What was perhaps more curious about the event, to me at least, was the nature of the crowds. In the evening, hours after the official proceedings had mutely wound down, we headed to a local pub for a pint. What we found was a curious mix of would-be toffs (though I remain unconvinced that they weren't regular punters wearing velvet jackets out of irony) and others who fit to a T the drunken stereotype of the drunken English soccer fan, people who I would never have thought of as being interested in such a historically elitist event.

A week in London would, to someone else, represent an enormous opportunity for tourism, but I made little of it, really. I got to a few attractions - a morning in the national gallery, a lunchtime concert at St Martin-in-the-Field (Piazzola!), an afternoon at the Victoria & Albert - but left rather more unattended. I did manage a very pleasant day travelling out by train to Moreton-in-Marsh to see some family friends - whose acquaintance I was long overdue to make - for what turned out to be a very enjoyable and affable lunch.

What I spent most of the week doing, in reality, was running and reading. I managed 4 runs: one out to Richmond Park and back along the Tow Path, one past Craven Cottage down to Putney Bridge and back, a third down past Barnes and Chiswick Bridges and almost to Kew Bridge, and another short one to Mortlake, for a coffee, before coming back again along the Tow Path. I suspect that over the journey, I played the role of anchor to M&T, who were both in training for much longer (some would say preposterously long) events, and were clearly much fitter than I was.

The other activity for the week was reading. I borrowed up a book on arrival in London, from one of my absent hosts, and an iPad during the week, and alternated during the week of reading the former while at "home base", and the latter while out and about. I have since finished one, and will soon finish the latter, but I will leave a discussion of the merits of these and other books to another post. It is quite likely that, with my return to Australia, this blog will return to its regular programming of apologetically delayed book reviews. Still, hopefully this travel diary has served as an amusing distraction

negligence in reading

It has been months since I blogged about my reading. However, this indicates a negligence of blogging, rather than a negligence of reading. In fact, I've gotten through a pretty decent pile of books since I last wrote, about A Moveable Feast. As I've done in the past following such periods of silence, I'll fall back to a list of brief summaries rather than trying to cover the backlog a post at a time. So, in chronological order ...

• Rabbit, Run (John Updike): Updike tells a nice portrait of the American mid-life crisis, or perhaps really early-life crisis, of a middle-American man struggling with the prospect of an ordinary life with an alcoholic wife and a second baby on the way. He picks up and leaves, but struggles with his sense of duty to his past life, and ends up going home, which has its own problems. I felt like this book had a lot in common with Continental Drift, but with a sharper focus on the protagonist rather than the time, although it certainly does have commentary on the evolving nature of community and the relationship with the church. It won't go on my list of really great books, but its certainly enough to make me go back for the others in the 4-book series at some point in the future.
• His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman): This was an anthology of the 3 books in the trilogy (Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass), which I bought on a whim, having seen it a list of significant books and not having read it during my teenage years, during which this genre was my bread-and-butter (so many years wasted reading David Eddings and Robert Jordan). I'd seen the movie, which was actually pretty good, but unsurprisingly, the books are better. Their extra length lends the opportunity for more depth and breadth of characters, which both expand as the series progresses (although the first book was probably still my favourite). Some of the comments I'd read had lead me to fairly strong atheist/anti-religious themes, but they weren't there, or at least were subtle and strongly focussed on the narrative and not on an external agenda, and I think in this case the books are stronger for it.
• Down Under (Bill Bryson): My mother had given me this book while I was in France, as a gift for someone, but for one reason or another I never gave it. To be honest, I was slightly apprehensive about reading it, and only picked it up because I wanted something light to pass the time on a bus trip. Despite that, I have to confess I quite liked it. I like to think I know a fair bit about Australia already, but I still found lots of things in the book I didn't know about, and I enjoyed it for that. Having said that, it really was the Australian content I liked, and I can't see myself going out of my way to chase more Bryson stuff. There were parts of this book where he made generalisations that really annoyed me, and generally I had a sense that his way of looking at the world would become increasingly annoying. Still, no real regrets.
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn): It has long been on my list to "read some of the Russians". There are some great Russian names in literature: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Nabokov, and many more, and to date I think my only foray into their work had been an aborted attempt at Crime and Punishment (against which I still hold a grudge). I found this novella on my parents' shelves, and like so many of the "big names" in 20th century literature (Steinbeck and Hemingway come to mind), I found it really very easy to read. The story does what it says on the box; Denisovich is a prisoner in a Russian gulag, and the book tells the story of his day from waking up in the cold, through a day spent laying bricks on a power station, to his return to camp. Its very matter-of-fact, and doesn't wallow in his situation, which I suppose is instructive in itself, but it does paint a good picture of Denisovich and various other prisoners, how they came to be in the prison and how they pass their time and interact.
• Eucalyptus (Murray Bail): I had read another Murray Bail book, Holden's Performance, last year, and enjoyed it a lot, but it is Eucalyptus for which he is probably best known, so it had been on my list. To be honest, I probably didn't enjoy it quite as much as the previous one, but it certainly is an interesting read. Bail is a very elegiac writer - his stories kind of float, and at times tread the line between this world and another, more whimsical world, and this is more true in Eucalyptus, which is at times part novel and part fairy tale. I actually bought this book as a present for my mother; like the father in the story, my mother's block is littered with eucalypts, and part of the book's structure is a series of descriptions of different eucalypt varieties. For me, though, without my mother's knowledge of native Australian flora, this was no barrier; as much as these descriptions guide the structure, they in no way dominate the text or affect the story, of a father who promises the hand of his beautiful, cloistered daughter to whoever can name all of the eucalypt varieties on his property. I didn't find the ending 100% satisfying, but it was certainly an interesting read.
• A Room With A View (E.M. Forster): Forster is another of those many names that I've seen on great books/authors lists - typically for this book, or Howard's End, or A Passage To India, but had never read. I had seen him written off in one or two interviews with other authors - possibly Nabokov in his Paris Review interview, although the overwhelming impression from that review is not of Nabokov's opinions, but of his opinionatedness - but I went into this book with a fairly open mind. I wasn't excited by its first half, of Lucy and the other expats and their time in Italy (most Florence). The picture of an expat community living alongside, but apart from, the local Italians, rang false with my expatriate experience. I don't doubt its authenticity, but it represents for me the "wrong" way to go about living in another country. As the story moves back to England, Forster develops more his themes looking at class and propriety, and the English reserve, but although I'm sure at the time these were valid and pointed criticisms, for me it all seems a bit tame and tentative. By the end, as much as Lucy seemed to attain her liberation from these things, I couldn't help but feel like she hadn't really moved that far. I also felt like Cold Comfort Farm, admittedly a very different kind of book, made some of the points better.
• In The Winter Dark (Tim Winton): I've read a few books by Tim Winton, and not yet been disappointed. Even those without the reputation of a Cloudstreet, I've found pretty satisfying, even just as an easy read, so I was pretty comfortable picking this one out from the library. The story is of 4 people living besides one another in the Australian country - not farmers per se, but by no means in a town - and the way they react to the arrival of a beast, never revealed, preying on livestock. Its somewhat darker in tone than Winton's normal fair, but after a slow start - the stuff about seeing other people's dreams never really worked for me - it picks up pace, and reaches a nice climax, before finding an unexpected but not incongruous conclusion.
• Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (John Le Carré): The only other John Le Carré book I have read was The Constant Gardener, back in 2005. In that case I went on to see the movie, which was an interesting experience - an important one, even, in terms of the way I think about movie adaptations. This time was not dissimilar. Although I had heard of this book - along with The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, it is perhaps Le Carré's best-known - and despite an enthusiasm for Le Carré, it was the book's recent adaptation into a feature film which prompted me to pick it up. The story follows the recently, but not voluntarily, retired intelligence officer George Smiley, as he investigates a report of a double-agent inside the British secret service, which leads generally to a retrospective investigation that lead to his retirement. Le Carré does such a nice job of weaving details, and mixing in enough jargon to really immerse the reader in the spy milieu, and the result is a very compelling story, and entirely befitting its reputation.
• Camouflage (Murray Bail): Perhaps it wasn't the size of this book that made me pick it up, but it didn't hurt. At just 85 small-format pages, this is a curious edition of 2 short stories, the first about  a piano-tuner who is drafted to work on camouflaging a WWII air base in the red centre of Australia, and the second about a boy's memory of the development of a relationship between his sister and a neighbour. The latter story, in particular, reinforced my impression of Bail as a fantasy writer, as it manages a lovely little transition from a real-world scene into what feels a dream sequence.

Wow, so there's that. A few years ago I set myself a resolution of reading more, and since then my annual reading has risen from 8 to 12 to last year's 21. The number is not the end-game, obviously, but I feel its been successful because I've really broadened my reading horizons, and I've enjoyed discovering new writers and new styles. Using a number has probably inadvertently pushed me towards shorter forms like novellas, but I'm entirely comfortable with that - it's a format I like, and if it leads me to a broader range of storytellers and stories, then that's a good thing. This year I've set myself a number of 25 over on goodreads, which I don't think will be a barrier numerically (I read 5 in January). Hopefully it will bring me the joy that last year's endeavours did.

A Moveable Feast

I've been sitting on this one for a while. There are many reasons why I sometimes delay in writing up my thoughts on a book. Sometimes I don't know how I feel about a book until it has digested for a while, but that was not the case here. Sometimes I don't feel strongly enough about a book to be moved to write something, but that was not the case here. Here, rather, I suspect I was worried that by writing about the book I might lose some of the marvellous escapism I felt while I was reading it, that somehow in putting my feelings down on paper [sic], I might somehow lose them.

I loved this book. I really did.

Its a funny sort of book when I think about it structurally. Its basically a series of Hemingway's memories about time spent living and writing in Paris with his wife in the 1920s. The stories he tells are short, and are mostly centred about his interactions with other artists, poets and especially authors either living or passing through Paris at the same time: Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others. Much like the other Hemingways I've read, I just felt so at home in his Paris. Its a city far removed from any I've lived in, and he fills it with activities far removed from those I prefer - betting on horses, in particular - and yet I felt such a strong connection.

That this was a book published later in his career shows through in the writing, which carries his trademark simplicity and economy of words, but with more mastery than he had shown in the other of his books I've read this year. What is lovely, too, is that much of what he writes about is his writing; he discusses his philosophy of le mot juste, and many of his practices, exemplified here by their very own description.

Ebert, or some other commentator of film, used to say that "No good film is too long, no bad film is short enough", but after reading a great novella like this one, it is tempting to suggest that a book this good is too short. We shall never know; all we have is what we are given, but like the food of the city it describes, it is a dish whose perfect flavours make any paucity of volume irrelevant. I will forever be indebted to Nicole for recommending it to me.

Next up on deck: continuing with Hitchcock/Truffaut, and starting on Pullman's His Dark Materials. Also, in a moment of weakness at Wellington airport in the early hours of Saturday, I picked up a copy of Updike's Rabbit, Run.

The Ginger Man

Yesterday I finished the Ginger Man, probably the most distinctive book I've read so far this year, and probably the most difficult to review (if these little reflections can be called reviews). This was another book I'd come across via my late uncle Mick, but unlike others, one for which I had absolutely no context, in that neither title nor author were at all familiar to me (although I have since seen it in some lists of prominent books from the 20th century).

This is a striking and divisive book. The story, such as it is in what is very much an impressionist book, is essentially a year (perhaps) in the life of Sebastian Balfe Dangerfield, an alcoholic, womanising, entitled, 20-something law student living, for most of the book, in Dublin. For the most part, he's thoroughly dislikable. The women of the story - Marion, Chris, Miss Frost and Mary - are often fairly insipid characters, and although Sebastian does seem to genuinely love them, he treats them appallingly, leeching and stealing from them, beating them, neglecting his son, charming them into things they either don't want or shouldn't do, and moving on to other pursuits at a moment's notice. The other characters who drift in and out of Sebastian's world - O'Keefe, Percy Clocklan, Tone Malarkey, etc - share many of his reprehensible characteristics, and serve only to reinforce the reader's sense of Sebastian himself.

There is no denying, though, the really vital energy with which Donleavy tells the story. His style of writing reminds me of Joyce, in the pace and perhaps setting, or Thompson, or even Kerouac, in its stream-of-consciousness style, yet its somehow very different. The intensity and consistency of the style throughout the book's 350 pages is admirable - it never lets up, right through to the story's conclusion (inconclusive though it is) in London.

There were times when I wasn't sure whether I was liked the book or hated it, but it is certainly memorable, and at no point did any dislike diminish my eagerness to keep reading. As it moved towards its close, I genuinely didn't know whether it was gravitating towards a tragic but just come-uppance, a repentant redemption, or rescue for Sebastian's sorry soul, and to the author's credit, he steers clear of any archetypal resolution, and stays true to the impressionist style.

A book I won't quickly forget.

Next up: continuing with Hitchcock by Truffaut, and resuming my Hemingway journey with A Moveable Feast.

Continental Drift

I bought Continental Drift on a whim last year when I was starting to get back into reading. A bit over ten years ago, Russell Banks was one of my favourite authors, mainly on the strength of The Sweet Hereafter, which I picked up after loving the film, and Trailerpark, a book of short stories. I tried to read Cloudsplitter, but couldn't get through it. So last year when, in an idle moment, I was looking for something to read, I jumped online and ordered Continental Drift. It took a while for me to get to it (I actually leant it to a friend before I read it, something I've not done before), but it was worth the wait.

The story is written from two ends. The main character is Bob Dubois, who is a heater repair-man in New Hampshire with a wife and two young daughters, who has an existential crisis and picks up everything to move to Miami in pursuit of the American dream. The other end of the story is that of Vanise and Claude, two Haitians, also on a migration, from Haiti north towards Florida in pursuit a different, but more deeply held, American dream.

The story reminded me a little of The Grapes of Wrath - the families picking up everything, driven to migrate across the country (or the sea) in pursuit of prosperity and finding opportunity not as simple as the stories say. The text is at times intermingled, like in TGOW, with more general observations about the time and theme, here that of migration of people around the globe, and its analogy to the inevitability of continental drift.

Bob Dubois as a character is fascinating. He is deeply, deeply flawed, at once childlike in his spontaneity, and weary in his view of the world. He is difficult to love, with his superficially held view of himself as a good husband and father, his short-sightedness in his plans, and his fast temper. At the same time, though, he's difficult not to relate to, with his anxiety about where his childhood dreams have gone, and his restlessness with his life as it is. The Haitians are never as fully developed, which makes more sense as the book goes on - Banks is more concerned in their story with painting the shocking circumstances through which they push north in search of their false promised land of America, and the strange transplanting of culture that they take with them.

Having recently rewatched The Sweet Hereafter, I knew not to expect a happy ending, and the tragic conclusion of that book is true to form. Like The Sweet Hereafter (although perhaps not with quite as much veritas), though, the tragedy doesn't feel forced - Banks establishes the forces acting on the characters, and what befalls them makes sense, not in a shallow karmic way, but as a consequence of the world in which they find themselves. This, too reminded me of Steinbeck's masterpiece - there are no bad guys here, just people doing whatever they can to struggle upwards in the world, or at least keep from sinking below the waterline, and the societal forces that work against them. Like Tom Joad unable to find someone to fight over the loss of his family's farm, Bob Dubois isn't angry at his brother, or at his old friend; he's just angry and confused, all the moreso because there is no easy target for his anger and frustration, and that's what makes this book great. Writing a great villain is hard, but writing a story in which there is no readily identifiable villain, just the conspiracy of circumstances that work against you, is probably more impressive.

Next: The Ginger Man, by J.P. Donleavy, in parallel with Hitchcock by Truffaut.

two of four

 Back in April, when I was preparing for and embarking upon my holiday through Europe, I read the first of the four tomes of Le Comte de Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas. Recently, having read 7 very satisfying English-language books in the interim, I returned to the great task I'd set myself, and yesterday I finished the second tome. Having reached this half-way point (give or take), I though I'd reflect a little on the book, since its likely to be a number of months at least until I reach its conclusion.

Its length is significant not only in the period of time it takes me to read it. The length, and episodic form in which I assume the book was originally written, affords Dumas the luxury of going off on tangents at the slightest provocation. This leads to strange chapters for smoking marijuana in a cave, the life and love of a Roman bandit, ways to build resistances to poison, whose relevance to the main storyline range from minor to dubious to none. I have to say that I really like this as a change from my normal reading. Knowing that a book is a certain length gives the experience pretty reliable indications of how the story is progressing along the normal story arc, and that details that are included are likely to be relevant later on. The gun on the wall in the first act will be fired by the end of the third. This isn't true in a book as long as this. The gun on the wall might actually just be a gun on the wall, and there is something liberating as an experienced reader in not always having a clear idea of how things fit together, of just reading and discovering.

In terms of the language, everything is obviously contingent on the fact that I'm reading in French. I like to think I'm a fluent speaker of the language, but I would never claim to be a fluent reader, and the reading I've been doing has been accompanied by frequent consultation of a dictionary, and sometimes, in order to look up specific terminologies for 19th century French or Italian clothing, or nautical terminology, or consultation of Wikipedia for references to ancient Greeks and contemporary European authors, which might have been relevant to readers when Dumas wrote the book, but aren't to me. I probably check more than I should, on both counts - indeed, I still have raft of highlighted phrases where the dictionary proved insufficient, and which I will go back to at some point to work out what the phrases or references mean. The going is very slow, but I really enjoy learning new turns of phrase, or some obscure Greek reference about an obscure God or philosopher, or the leading authority on physiology from 19th century France.

So I guess that's some of the observations that I've had about the story so far, more meta than most of my reading, and perhaps missing reflection on the characters or story, but that can perhaps wait until I finish the book some time later this year or, more likely, next year. For now, I will return to reading English-language books, beginning with Continental Drift by Russell Banks, an author I got into a decade ago and put aside for absolutely no good reason.

For Whom The Bell Tolls

Following a brief sojourn with David Malouf, I returned to Ernest Hemingway, to read For Whom The Bell Tolls. I bought this book in the airport in Paris, in anticipation of reading it on my Euro-Australian flight, but was, regrettably, seduced by in-flight movies. It was worth the wait.

The Spanish civil war is one of those strange historical events for me that floats indeterminately within my understanding of the 20th century. The Boer war, the two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, are all conflicts with strong dates and context for me. The Spanish war, though, has no date that I could immediately offer, and features in my memory more for impression of the way it attracted people from other parts of the world to fight, on both sides, not at the behest of their governments (with some exceptions - the soviet union, perhaps), but for individual, ideological reasons.

One such person is Robert Jordan, Hemingway's protagonist, an American university teacher who has been in Spain fighting for a year when the book's story takes place. Remarkably for what is a substantial book, the story takes place over the course of perhaps 4 days, with only occasional flashbacks to fighting earlier in the war or to Jordan's time spent in Madrid. Jordan is sent to a small encampment of rebels in the hills to rally them and destroy a bridge in order to support an attack. The action sequences, mostly in the final third of the book, are detailed and compelling, but the reason they work is because Hemingway does such a wonderful job of drawing the characters and their relationships. We get a really strong sense of Jordan, and the small group of rebels with whom he fights - Maria, the damaged girl with whom he falls in love, the worn-out rebel leader and his fiery but protective wife, and the old man who accompanies him the camp. We learn how they each got to where they are in the war, why they are fighting, and when they do what they do in the combat sequences, we know why, and we care what happens.

Like The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway does a remarkable job of conveying a sense of place and the character not just of the individuals, but of the people as a group. He uses simple language, but the reader comes away really sensing the pine forests, the snow as it falls on them, the hills and the bridge. Once again he uses this wonderful device of writing in literal translation from the Spanish. It gives a strange impression at first - the text is littered with thees and thous - but it is distinctive and feels true, and I loved it.

Having read the book, I am no more able than I was before to tell you in what year it was set. I couldn't tell you details about major battles or the significant figures on each side. But I come away with a stronger sense of why some of the "little" people were there, and what the battles, atrocities and losses meant for them.

I'm on a bit of a run of Hemingway at the moment, but I'm trying hard to pace myself. I have A Moveable Feast in my pile, but before getting to it (or the other 5 or 6 books awaiting me), I have returned to Le Comte de Monte Cristo. Because it is such a massive endeavour - because of its length, and because of the extra difficulty of reading it in French - I will probably post some sort of rundown when I finish my current sprint on it. The French version is presented in four tomes, and I will soon come to the end of the second, which hopefully will precipitate a half-time report. It certainly bears discussion.

Johnno

After finishing The Sun Also Rises, I read an Australian book which had been recommended to me by a friend. Johnno is a partly autobiographical novella beautifully written by David Malouf. To be honest, I'm not sure I've read anywhere that its autobiographical, but it has a strong feeling of truth, and a description of Brisbane that came across as very personal. Having said that, although the depiction was very personal, I should stress that the view of Brisbane is quite different from mine. Partly this is because the book is set 30 or 40 years ago (Brisbane has changed fairly dramatically in that time), and partly its because I came to Brisbane for university, rather than growing up here. Its perhaps because of this latter distinction that Malouf, or at least his narrator, seems to have a very conflicted view of the city, sometimes, implicitly, seeming very fond of it, but at other times quite explicitly expressing his disdain of the town and his longing to get out to see the real world. I certainly held that view of the town of my adolescence, Mareeba, for a long time, although in recent years I've softened my view.

So I've spent a long time talking about the way that Brisbane is presented in the book. That isn't by accident - its certainly the strongest opinions I have about it - but there is a plot nonetheless. The story is told by a sometimes passive narrator as he reminisces about his relationship with Johnno, an extroverted character from his school days whom he follows through adolescence and youth, including meetings during travels to Europe. Many of the traits of the characters and their friendship are closely tied to the place and time in which they live - particularly their diversions in Brisbane, and some of the revolutionary things in Europe in the 60s. Others remind me of some of my experiences, meeting college friends in Europe and taking in the different perspectives we have on the world, reflecting on the pilgrimage so many Australians make to live in Europe (usually the UK, much to my disdain), and the paths that we take through our teens and twenties.

The Sun Also Rises

I was walking with Chris and Anjum in a small satellite suburb of Basel, when we came across a small table selling old books and knick-knacks outside a house. On a whim, encouraged perhaps by Anjum's enthusiastic pickup of a cutting board shaped like an apple, I grabbed a copy of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (published in the UK under the title Fiesta), putting 2 euros in a letterbox by way of payment.

I had intended to keep the book for my voyage home from Europe, but in the end I made a start on it as bedtime and bus reading while in Rennes. Still, I reserved the bulk of the book for the train ride between Rennes and Charles de Gaulle airport on Saturday, finishing the last 20 or so pages on a bench in the airport (when I probably should have been queueing for checkin).

Hemingway is one of those 20th century American authors who really should have been on my to-read list a long time ago, given how much I have enjoyed American literature from the period in which Hemingway operated. Its never to late to start, though, and I'm glad that I started with this book. For one thing, it was one of his first successes, and for another, its short; at about 200 pages, it falls under that delightful appellation of a "novella", probably my favourite format.

The story is told from the perspective of Jake Barnes, an American journalist, and moves from Paris down into Spain as the book progresses. The characterisations are quite good - Barnes is left fairly blank (I think deliberately - he's almost certainly a projection of the author), but I really felt a familiarity (albeit not always an empathy) with characters like Cohn, Mike and Brett (who is essentially the antagonist, as well as the love interest of the narrator and of various other characters throughout the book).

The writing is strong and to the point, but not without distinctive style. He uses the trick of translating French and Spanish (I think) very directly, which renders foreign phrases into strange English concoctions that only really make sense when thought of in terms of their original language. "How are you called?" and "a species of woman", strike oddly to the ear in English, but are much more natural in French. It was serendipitous for me, I suppose, that he uses this convention first in French, for which I was able to understand the technique, before using it in Spanish. Had it happened the other way around I would perhaps have simply found the wording strange, rather than appreciating the intent.

Having started the book, it quickly became apparent that it would not last me very long, so I spent some time on Saturday, both in Rennes and in CDG, looking for my next book. As chance would have it, what presented itself was, marooned amongst a sea of Dan Brown airport novels, a copy of For Whom The Bell Tolls, by the same Ernest Hemingway. I made a start on it, and had intended to give it strong attention on the flight from Paris to Dubai to Brisbane, but found myself distracted by films (Paul, 127 Hours, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Player), so have only gotten a little way in.

The other book on my horizon is a promised loan of Johnno, by David Malouf, a prominent entry on the list of Australian authors I should read.

Chasing the White Whale

I managed to slay the lesser of my figurative reading white whales this weekend, and to resume combat with the other.

I had commented to someone during the week that it had been a while since I had finished a novel, and they had pointed out that a three week break (it might have been four) was hardly a drought, especially given that the material in question was far from the easiest.

Anyway, I finished Moby Dick this week. I'm glad to now be able to say I've read it, given its significance in the western canon, but I can't say its one of my favourite books. The first sentence, "Call me Ishmael", is grossly misleading in its simplicity. The writing style thereafter gets quite overwrought. Still, I didn't mind that so much while the narrative was advancing. Unfortunately for me, the book spends quite a significant portion of its length in discourse on the nature and history of the whale and those who hunt it. I can't say I was fascinated by this, and often wished we could get back to the story. Indeed, our protagonists don't actually sight the storied white whale until about 90% into the book, from which point everything happens in a very great rush before finishing. I suspect a contemporary editor would have very stern things to say about Melville's pacing.

Having finished with cetaceans for the time being, I've returned to weightier prey, in the form Le Comte de Monte Cristo (en francais). I made good progress on this before heading overseas, finishing off tome 1 (of 4), and resuming it yesterday reminded me that it isn't nearly as daunting as the first chapters, or its impressive size, would suggest. I'll say this, too: being such a long book, the narrative structure is much less predictable to the reader. With other books I get an idea of how, or at least at what pace, things are going to progress, but I really don't have that feeling with this book. With so many pages left, I really don't have a grasp of where the story arcs will go, and that's kind of pleasant. I don't pretend that this burst of activity will go right through to the end of the book (I had to take a break yesterday when I tired, to read some bush poetry), but I do maintain my hopes of getting through it some time this year.

Holiday Reading

Holidays are the best time to read. Even though this has already been a fairly fruitful year for me for reading, I still think that my recent four-week sejour in Europe saw a bit of an increase. It didn't start with departure, though. A couple of weeks before leaving, emboldened by my reimmersion into francophonie, I started reading Le Comte de Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas Père. This is my second attempt at what is a pretty voluminous work, but my last only managed a couple of chapters, and those with great difficulty. This time around seems much better - I finished off the first of four tomes not long after arriving in Europe, and am a couple of chapters into the second. I hope to continue and perhaps finish the whole thing by the end of the year.

Having finished the first tome, I decided that I needed some diversity, and decided to allow myself the luxury of reading an English-language book in parallel with Le Comte. My first effort was a short one. Some time ago I decided that having read very little poetry represented a gap in my greater education, and grabbed a bunch of "big name" poetical works from project gutenberg. So, looking for something short to fill a gap, I read Lamia, by John Keats. I quite enjoyed it, too - there's something very nice about the carefully chosen words necessary for the form, and I enjoyed the occasional side-quest to fill in context regarding Greek gods or the layout of Corinth.

Satisfied by my expedition into poetry, I next picked up a copy of Animal Farm that Em had lying around. I think I've said in the past how much of a fan I am of the novella as a form, and I wolfed this one down in about a day. I always think of Animal Farm in the context of 1984 (also Orwell), and Brave New World (Huxley), both of which I've read (although 1984 not as an adult), so it was high time that I completed the set. Its a good little analogy, pretty transparent but still a good yarn. I won't pretend I can summarize it better than it has been analyzed elsewhere - just go read it for yourself :)

After Animal Farm, I browsed through my collection and settled on The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde. I'd been vaguely familiar with Wilde's stuff through plays (The Importance of Being Ernest) and general witticisms, but I was keen to see what he did with a more weighty medium. The book starts out fairly lightly, a fairly loosely connected collection of witticisms around a couple of characters which seemed to represent the different aspects of Wilde's character. As the story develops, though, the trite sayings are fewer, and the subject matter gets darker. Wilde never actually reveals much of the depravity that he implies about Dorian (other than opium), but the drama builds nonetheless, and generally the thing works well as a narrative arc.

The last book I finished on the holiday was A Tale of Two Cities, by Dickens. I read my first Dickens, Great Expectations, a little while back, and enjoyed more than I had expected to, and AToTC had been recommended to me as perhaps his best book, so it was next on my list. Like Expectations, Dickens doesn't content himself with a study of a few characters - he makes a quite deliberate effort to paint the period as bigger than the characters of the story, to flesh out what is happening in the place and time in which the story takes place. I felt like he let himself explore his prose style more than Expectations too, with parts being quite ambitious. The story is good too, following the characters as they dodge across the channel between the titular towns, fighting off the threat of Madame Guillotine.

Although Cities was the last book I finished, it wasn't the last I started. I am presently about a third of the way through Moby Dick, by Melville. I'm not enjoying the prose style particularly, but following Orwell, Wilde and Dickens is a tough ask, I suppose.re

back to books

This year is proving to be extremely eventful. The end of March is not yet here, but already the year has brought me floods, a change of jobs, a couple of papers being accepted, the achievement of a long-held goal, a family wedding, a bunch of concerts and just a generally more active social life. Nonetheless, one of the things I enjoyed more and more towards the end of last year was getting back into reading, and I've managed to keep that up pretty well.

Since the start of the year, I've read 7 books, across a nice variety of genres. In a less busy time I probably would have blogged about each individually, but in lieu of that, and with more busy times ahead of me, I'll just summarize them here:

• The Code of the Woosters (Wodehouse): This was the second of three (see below) in an anthology of Wodehouse's Jeeves stories. I hadn't read any Wodehouse before, and they're nice little stories, very well written and very easy to read. They reminded me in time and tone a little of The Importance of Being Ernest, light-hearted and bouncy. To be honest, I can't precisely remember what this one was about - the three I read tended to follow a fairly similar pattern of interwoven personal intrigues - but its the tone and style and movement that matters more than the story.
• A History of the World in 10 and a Half Chapters (Barnes): I didn't know what to expect of this book, although Michael L recommended it, which made me optimistic. I wasn't disappointed. The book is a series of occasionally and very loosely related parables about, well, the world, I guess. Its hard to pull out more specific themes - certainly religion is prominent, and the way that it influences people's outlooks on the world. I got the feeling that there might have been deeper analogies going on than I was understanding, but that didn't adversely affect my appreciation of the book.
• Right Ho, Jeeves (Wodehouse): See above, more Jeeves, reliable and fun.
• The Breaks of the Game (Halberstam): This was an impulse buy based on repeated passing praise of this book by the FreeDarko guys and probably other basketball blogs that I've read over the years. Set around the 1980 Portland Trailblazers, its a really very well written insight into basketball people, from players to coaches and administrators, how they got to where they are and how they relate to the larger changes that were going through basketball, be the implications of race, the role of television, the growing professionalism and salaries, or the onset of injury. I can see why the book has the status it does among basketball pundits.
• Claudius The God (Graves): After finishing I, Claudius a couple of years ago, I had started on the sequel, but for one reason or another, be it needing a change of style, or because my copy was so fragile I wasn't comfortable carrying it around, I kept putting it aside. Finally this year I started again, and read it through within a few weeks. Like the first book, it treads a fine line between sacrificing narrative form for historical detail, but on the whole it manages it pretty well. I can't help but feel that the first instalment was better, just because it had more going on in terms of having 3 emperors (Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, with snippets of Julius at the start and Claudius at the end) rather than one (Claudius). I also felt that Livia, for all that I read she might have been hardly done by, made for a better villain than Messalina. Still, a good book.
• Notes From Old Nanking (Hamilton): This was a nice little book about observations made by an Australian diplomatic aid in China in the years between 1947-1949. This was the time when the communists overthrew the nationalists, but to be honest, most of the book is vignettes about the lifestyle at the time, and the revolution itself gets relatively little treatment. This surprised me, but changed rather than diminished my enjoyment of the book, in that it made for more of a historical portrait rather than a war story.
• Holden's Performance (Bail): Murray Bail is one of those Australian authors who I have been remiss not to have read before now. I can see why. This is the story of Holden Shadbolt, and his life between growing up in Adelaide in the years after WWII, before moving to Manly and Canberra in the 50s and 60s. He falls in with a bunch of delightful and delightfully named characters along the way - his stepfather McBee, his uncle Vern and friends Flies & Wheelright, the eccentric theatre owner Alex Screech, his love affair Harriet, the womanising politician Hoadsley, and the collection of bodyguards like Colonel Light and Irving Polaroid. The book is frequently funny and delightfully written, and when Bail extends himself he can be really quite adventurous with his prose. The characters border on caricatures at times, but all are treated with love and respect, and come across as very real. Its also really nice the way he taunts us with historical fact, references to the PM R.G. Amen, to the "one syllable PM" who follows him, enough to give us some context, but steering well clear of historical fiction.

So there you go, 7 books in 3 months. Last year it took me until at least September to get to that point, and so far I've been really enjoying the books, and their variety.

Reading, 2010

At the beginning of last year I set myself a very vague, non-binding and unambitious target of reading 12 books. I think I'd set the same target the previous year and only achieved it courtesy of a burst of 3 or 4 books in the last 2 weeks of the year (coinciding, not surprisingly, with the only leave I took that year). Not one to break with tradition, I did a similar thing this year, excepting only that the burst period was more like 6 weeks, and coincided instead with some discussions about books.

So, the books I read in 2010 (with links, were appropriate, to what I wrote about them) were:

• The Sound of One Hand Clapping (Flanagan)
• The Big Sleep (Chandler)
• The Quiet American (Greene)
• Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
• Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
• The Beach (Garland)
• Lonesome Traveler (Kerouac)
• Breath (Winton)
• Bike Snob: Systematically and Mercilessly Realigning the World of Cycling (BikeSnobNYC)
• The Tree of Man (White)
• The Mating Season (Wodehouse)
• Cold Comfort Farm (Gibbons)

My favourites were probably two of the Australian entries - Breath and The Tree of Man -although Cold Comfort Farm was also very good.

As to this year, I would like to think I'll read more, and have in my mind a vague, non-binding and unambitious target of 15 books. Last year was better in terms of having more Australian entries than previous years, so I'd quite like to continue that, and I wouldn't mind if I saw a couple of non-fiction entries this year. I haven't finished any books yet this year, but I'm probably 75% of the way through two.

like old times, only better

Its amazing how one conversation, albeit a prolonged one, can have a big impact on how one approaches things. In what has been a very active last week and a half, I've rediscovered a bunch of activities that, at various points in my past, have been very regular parts of my life, but that in recent times have been neglected or entirely absent.

I had been making very little progress on the book I'm reading, Jack Kerouac's Lonesome Traveler (I have neglected to write a little review for The Beach, which I read in between Love in the Time of Cholera, and this one). This past week, though, I made more an effort to make time for it, and as a consequence, I got into it, enjoyed it, and finished it. In my defense, I still think it starts slowly. His style is somewhat stream-of-consciousness throughout, but early on, as he is traveling through Mexico and working on the railway in northern California, it seemed less coherent. As the book and its author moved on, to New York, the Seattle Mountains and Tangiers, I thought the prose got much clearer, and I enjoyed the book a lot more. Its a strange style with which he writes. The narrator is the central, often only, character, but at no point is he developed, which gives the book a certain sense of a travel diary, albeit one that is eloquently and interestingly written and paints a vivid picture of the places through which it travels.

The next book on the pile was Breath, by Tim Winton. There was no slow starting for me on this book. I read a third of it in the first sitting, and I finished in about a day and a half. The story is a kind of coming of age story for a young boy who takes up with a group of surfers during his upbringing in a small town. Winton's prose style is just so familiar and easy to read, and the plot just slides so by very comfortably. Like Cloudstreet (the only other Winton I've read thus far), the book is set in Western Australia, in this case around the late 70s, and like the other, it has a very strong sense of place. I have never been to the town where the book is set, or even spent any meaningful (i.e. as an adult) time in the state, but for some reason the setting and characters feel very true. If I had a criticism, I thought the dénouément was a bit drawn out; the book might have worked better for me had it been topped and tailed and presented as a novella.

In addition to doing a lot more reading, I've also been getting more exercise this week. In addition to my usual Monday night volleyball, I got out for 3 runs, which is a lot more than I have been doing in recent months. My leg is starting to hurt from them, which is worrying - I might have to curb my enthusiasm a little.

I also went for a bike ride. In Rennes, a 20-40km ride out along the canal was a fairly common activity on my weekends, but other than organised charity rides and commutes to work or tennis, and excluding one ride up Mt Coot-tha a while ago, I haven't been doing social rides in Brisbane. Yesterday afternoon, though, I just jumped on the bike and rode out past the city, around the river past Toowong and out along the freeway to where it intersects Moggill Road, and back again. It was a nice little 35km route, and it reminded me of what I used to enjoy about riding out of Rennes (although i would trade Brisbane's Western Freeway for Rennes' Canal St Martin any day of the week).

This afternoon, frustrated by Australia's stagnation in the cricket, I rode down to New Farm park and threw a basketball around for an hour or so. This was something I used to quite often while I was living in St Lucia and Toowong, and it was good to try my hand again, even if I quickly realised that the shortcomings I had as a basketballer before my knee operation were not excised with the torn ligament.

I also found a little time for new activities, going with some friends for a night of pickup ultimate disc. I threw a lot of frisbee as a kid, and realised playing social games of ultimate at college that it was something at which I might be reasonably capable. This proved to be true enough, although after a while I fell into the trap of playing dumb, expending a lot of energy without getting my hands on the disc. This, combined with playing almost non-stop for two hours without substitutes, meant that I was well and truly spent by the time the night was finished. It probably took 3 or 4 days for my hip flexors, groin muscles and quadriceps to stop hurting, but I'll be back for more this week, I think.

I also managed to squeeze in an extremely pleasant night at the movies, seeing Gainsbourg, a biopic about the French chanteur from the 60s and 70s. The performance of the lead, Eric Elmosnino, was very strong, convincing in both likeness and style. Although he came across as a flawed character, especially in his relationship to women (at least, from my perspective he did), it was a very interesting film, and nice too as a means of exercising/refreshing my French language comprehension.

I even got out to a concert. My friend Kylie's band Laïque (the haven't been putting the trema on the 'i', which is a little vexing) had the launch for their album "Cravin' just a little misbehavin'", at the Old Museum last night. There was a good crowd in, which was reassuring for their sakes, and everyone seemed to have a good time.

Its tempting to ask what it was that I sacrificed from my previous routine in order to make room for these things, but to be honest, nothing sprung to mind. I watched less TV, which is a boon rather than a price, as was playing less computer games (I am rapidly losing enthusiasm for the games I have been playing of late). I even squeezed in a visit from my parents, a screening of Cinema Paradiso (it had been too long since I'd seen it), and got plenty done at work. I need to be this aggressive about getting off my bum and doing things more often.

The to-read pile, and the on-hold pile, as at November 22 2010

The to-read pile, and the on-hold pile, as at November 22 2010, originally uploaded by jsteel.

In recent days I've been having a wonderful time talking with various people about books. One of the topics I seem to keep mentioning, along with my poor record in terms of what/whom I've read, has been the pile of books that sit metaphorically and, for the sake of this photo, physically, on my bedside table ready to be read. Unmentioned, so far, is the other pile, on the same bedside table, of books that I have started reading and put aside for one reason or another.

So, here they are, my two piles. First, the to-read pile, starting from the top:

• Lonesome Traveler - Jack Kerouac (currently reading). Kerouac is one of the many conspicuous absences in the list of 20th century authors whose works I have sampled. I found this one in the remaining collection of my late uncle, nominally housed with my grandmother but slowly working its way to other homes in the family.
• Breath - Tim Winton. I've read one Winton - Cloudstreet, probably his most famous book - and enjoyed it a lot. I picked this one up at the Library on my most recent scavenging expedition.
• Bike Snob: Systematically and Mercilessly Realigning the World of Cycling - Bike Snob NYC. I was recommended the blog from whence this book has sprung, and have been enjoying it for a few weeks now. I have yet to read a blog-to-book adaptation that I haven't liked (sample size: 1), so I have high hopes.
• The Tree Of Man - Patrick White. As Australia's only winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, another embarrassing omission from my reading resumé. Also another pickup from my grandmother's library, although I suspect not from my uncle.
• The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History - FreeDarko. The second book to emerge from the FreeDarko collective. Truth be told, I feel like the freedarko blog itself has waned a little in terms of the frequency of its really high-quality contributions, but I suspect this is because Shoals and his co-conspirators have been devoting more of their attention to commercial writing and to this book. Also another blog-to-book adapation, so almost certain to be good. Bought online, with ...
• The Breaks of the Game - David Halberstam. Widely cited as one of the best books yet written on basketball, following the 1979-80 Portland Trailblazers. Bought online.
• Hitchcock/Truffaut - Francois Truffaut. I bought this book years ago on Amazon, on a whim, being super-impressed by the idea of an extended interview of one of the era's great directors, conducted by another of the era's great directors.
• Down Under - Bill Bryson. A 20th century author that I don't feel especially embarrassed about not having read, but nonetheless one who people I trust have said is an entertaining read. I think I picked this book up from my father.
• The Sentimental Bloke - CJ Dennis. To be honest, I'm not sure I'll get to this one anytime soon (the pile has a tendency to grow from the top, or sometimes from the middle, leaving scant chance for entries near the base). I just noticed it on my bookshelf as a nicely presented book, that I don't believe I've read. On the inside cover it has a sticker identifying itself as the 1994 year 11 prize for Chemistry from Mareeba State High School.
• A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters - Julian Barnes. I have no idea what this book is about. I picked it up from my grandmother's library for precisely that reason. There is a high probability it will hold up this pile for a long time.

And the other pile, including some not pictured:

• Claudius the God - Robert Graves. To be honest, I quite enjoyed I, Claudius, and I was enjoying this sequel until I put it aside. The only thing that prompted the interregnum was the somewhat fragile condition of the book itself, which makes it impossible to take it anywhere without fear of losing pages.
• Thus Spake Zarathustra - Friedrich Nietzsche. I was aware before starting this book that it would be challenging, not only in its content, but in its presentation. However, after only a few dozen pages I found the style too much of an impediment to the ideas, and I put it down. I will probably pick it up again at some point, though, when I am feeling brave.
• A Thousand Plateaus - Deleuze & Guattari. A colleague at work is an ardent admirer of Deleuze's work, and recommended this to me. I lasted 5 pages before becoming infuriated by the pretentiousness of the prose style, and the obstacle it represented to understanding whatever ideas the authors were trying to communicate. I will almost certainly return this without reading another page.

Juvenal Urbino's hat

Two things happened at the beginning of last week. First, I visited the library and reacquired two books that I'd borrowed but not finished earlier in the year. Secondly, fresh in the realisation that last week's wedding (which merits its own post) was to be held on a Queensland beach in a Queensland summer, I resolved to buy a hat.

Hats are back, or so the story goes, and I was fortunate to have a friend who I knew had bought a hat not that long ago, so I leant on him to give me a lead on where I might find a hat that could be worn with a suit. He supplied me with such, and on the Wednesday I swung by said vendor, knowing that my unrefined requirements would be insufficient but hoping for the grace of a helpful salesman. I found one, who directed me not towards the trilbies and fedoras that I expected, but towards a bewildering range of panamas. After a lengthy discussion of the why, which and how much of his selection, I walked away with a black-banded white number, which time would paint as either dapper-cool, or gangster-pretentious.

So what on earth does all this have to do with books? Well, one of the neglected-but-revisited borrowings from earlier in the year was Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. The story, vividly painted by presumably both the author and his very adept translator, is set on the Caribbean coast of Colombia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Its three characters are Dr Juvenal Urbino, a very civilised and socially elevated type, Florentino Ariza, a socially awkward romantic who flickers between unrequited love and wild promiscuity, and Fermina Daza, a sketchily drawn parvenue who is pursued by Ariza as a girl, but finds social respectability by marrying Urbino.

As far as the story itself goes, I could take it or leave it. What I did like was the romantic combination of the place and time, which came through so vividly for me. This was most true, I think, in the early part of the book, with Dr Urbino tripping around the city dressed up to the nines with his suits and carriage. And, in my mind anyway, in his hat. My hat. Whenever I get dressed up and wear it, I shall think of myself of Juvenal Urbino. At some point, I may get myself a cane. Of course, he's also a devout catholic who dies falling out of a mango tree, but we get to pick and choose what we like in a character.

Talking with friends, its probable that the book has, in the relationships between its central characters, symbolism for the nature of love in changing times, with Florentino the romantic impractical and Urbino the stable and practical, but I really didn't feel the need to break down the prose to extract drier meaning. I focussed on hats.