Hello St Marks

I think I may have reached the end of this blog, a bit over a year after I started. The goal was to track a year of reading, but I underestimated the burden of it. The writing, not the reading. I've missed a few books - not many, I think, but enough to take the shine off the comprehensiveness of the record. And who knew it would supplant my hardcopy diary so completely? A lifetime habit of putting pen to paper has stopped dead, with barely 10 pages since this time last year, and not a sensible word written. My book reading is documented, more or less, but a year of my kids' lives has passed unrecorded. So, to wrap it up, several posts: Recently read: 'Allotted Time' by Robin Shelton. A lovely memoir about two blokes in England taking on a local allotment. Robin's bipolar, a dad, an unemployed once-teacher, in a darkish place. Lightly told with very little detail, it's an oddly shy memoir (that seems odd, written down, but feels perfect for this modest book). Rob...

Nancy Pearl interviewed Michael Perry for Book Lust. It was delightful, very Nancy - her catholic taste, her enquenchable enthusiasm, this poet farmer - so I surfed to Amazon to track down Michael Perry. 11 days later, 'Population: 485' turned up (used, as-new condition US$3.95 plus $19.95 postage). Michael Perry writes personal memoir - 4 or more books to date, with this the first. In this book Michael returns to the town in Wisconsin he grew up in, where his family lives and works, and joins the volunteer fire brigade and emergency response team. His long, slow reunion with his much-loved home town is interleaved with stories from his EMT experiences - some funny, some tragic, all local and intimate. It's all very personal, and reflective, and pragmatic. Michael is smart and thoughtful and has found a place for himself - an educated man, a poet, soft-handed - in this tough, hardscrabble community. He works the fire brigade with his brothers and his mum: "Disagreement...

Assorted reading oddments all completed, some proven substantial, others not. "Northanger Abbey" was lovely. The plot is so slight, the humour bubbles at the surface. I do like Catherine very much but I love the wretched General Tilney most, and this made me laugh out loud: "Never had the general loved his daughter so well in all the hours of companionship, utility and patient endurance as when he first hailed her "Your Ladyship!". My second iPhone reading experience is also completed, leaving me bereft: "Infection" by Scott Sigler (is that his porn star name?). I was so keen to extend my drive time listening each day, I started wearing my earphones in the lift and, twice, to the bathroom. Daft, juvenile novel about alien invasion but it had me hooked from chapter 2, so hats off to Scott. I almost donated some money to him, as prompted by the post-story sales pitch. Iain Banks' publishers are releasing his latest novel, "Transition" as a...

Nothing to report, zip. I'm reading like a 21st century citizen of the digital world, with nothing to show for it. On the go right now: Michael Perry's "Population 485", a memoir about small town Wisconsin and volunteer firefighting. I ordered Perry from Amazon after listening to Nancy Pearl's podcast interview with him. I'm reading "Northanger Abbey" on my iPhone at lunchtimes; saves carting a book around. When I'm in the car I'm listening to "Infection" by Scott Stigler, audiobook edition, on my iPhone. Also reading, in old fashioned hardcopy, a fantasy novel I can't recall in any detail. Plus the usual shiny weekend supplements. I started Donna Tarrt's second novel then took a firm grip on myself and put it back on the beside table, back to finish Perry before I move on.

This is nearly impossible. The simple task was to record everything I read for a year or so, but here it is October and not a word written about September and lord only knows what I read. Most recently I've been sucked into the reading zeitgeist that is Stieg Larsson's 'Girl with a Dragon Tattoo' series - first two books. My neighbour, my book guru (Wayne) and finally Alison all recommended these books, so what could I do? Perfect airport bookshop purchase. A few forests have been written about this series so what can I add: I loved book 1, was pissed off by book 2 but will wrench book 3 from Wayne's hands at the first possible moment. They're gripping thrillers, populated with a very odd heroine - Lisbeth Salander - and a supporting cast of pragmatic Swedes. I especially enjoyed the Swedishness of the books, like an unfamiliar flavour of tea.

And finally, 'Incurable' by John Marsden, continuing the story of Ellie from the 'Tomorrow' series. I loved the first few 'Tomorrow' books; taut, smart writing for teens. A bunch of teens go camping deep in the bush on the weekend Australia is invaded by unnamed, overwhelming forces. The kids have to work out what happened, find their families (dead or captured), look after themselves and, sooner than seems possible, form an ad hoc but very bloody resistance. Ellie is the chronicler and thinker, bright, capable and handy with a gun - approachably heroic. Marsden is very, very good at writing cleanly about teenagers (truthfully, I think, but it's been a while) without preaching. But after 9 books - 'Incurable' is from 'The Ellie Chronicles' which follows the group after the truce - I'm over it.

Oh dear, this is not a post to be proud of. Nothing but fantasy and sci fi on the pile of recently reads and I did vow to diversify my reading body, didn't I? Nothing to do but list 'em and move on. Most recently: Sherri S Tepper's 'The Margarets'. Now this book isn't anything to sniff at. Great, writing, complex structure and concepts, impossible to summarise. Larry Niven's 'Destiny's Road'. Seamless writing by a master of the craft, in blurb-talk. Planet-based sci-fi; a well-paced adventure quest, nicely grounded in the everyday. 'Dragonflight' by Anne McCaffrey. This is still a tender subject. I had to re-read this one for the first time in a decade because I had blithely recommended it to my 10 year-old neighbour. She had just finished 'Twilight' so clearly has open-minded parents and a capacity for teen fiction, but soon after I passed it across the kitchen table I realised I had been thinking of 'Dragonsong', a light...

It took an age for me to finish Guy Gavriel Kay's 'Tigana'; 2 months on and off my reading pile. I'd read something which called this a perfect fantasy novel - just one volume, engaging characters, richly drawn, ripping yarn etc, so I was ready to sink right into it. It's possible my notoriously wretched memory sabotaged me - as I started 'Tigana' I was deflated by a niggling familiarity (have I read this before?). Still don't know, but it came together for me in the end. Great female characters, great everything characters, actually - old, young, men and women, wizardy and not. I recollect where I heard about Guy - on Nancy Pearl's 'Book Lust' podcast - so it must have been Nancy who called it 'perfect'. Nancy has never found a book she didn't like but she's a famous library reviewer goddess, so it's still high praise.

Book 9 of Sookie Stackhouse's vampire saga is now under my belt, and it appears that there are more to come. I had a notion that this was the last book in the series, which added some frisson to the read, but the story ended with Sookie out of one pot of trouble and looking sideways at another, so it's not over yet. With book 9 I proved how fun and forgettable these lovely books are: with two thirds read I left it at M's house, where it was lost under a pile of kids's books.. for 5 weeks. When I recovered it I started right back at the beginning and enjoyed it just as much on the second read as the first, since I'd forgotten almost all of it. Perfect.

Second best book of the year: 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' by Lionel Shriver. Apparently this is a popular book - I picked it off the A&R Top 100 shelf and now find it on reading group lists. I have to say this does not endear me to a book, it takes the gloss of discovering something wonderful, but so be it. This book was a beautiful, distressing journey, a perfectly crafted reveal. I was completely in Shriver's power and just gave myself over to it - which was delicious given the sloppy casual way I've been reading lately. 'Kevin' is written as a collection of letters from the mother of a schoolyard mass murderer. I know another reader would have loathed this mother, but I was on her side. She didn't fall in love with her son as she was sure she should, then couldn't like him. Did he go bad because she couldnt find it in herself to love him, or was guilty detachment a reasonable response to this damaged, sociopathic kid? The mother's voice is s...

Another book written for the movies. There's a flavour to these last two books: very visual, of course, fast-moving, multiple story threads interwoven. 'The Repossession Mambo' is by far the better book, sardonic and cool, but Guillermo del Toro's 'The Strain' is still a cracking read. It's a vampire virus story, wonderfully topical. Written by the creator of 'Pan's Labyrinth', this is a sexy book, bound to get a fair bit of press. It is the first of a trilogy (even that sounds so considered, so marketed), so this book has a great set-up, accelerates to a final confrontation, and ends with a cliff hanger. I don't think it justifies the cover line, "Haunts as much as it terrifies", at all. The first third of the book was teriffic: a jumbo lands at NY airport and immediately shuts down. Every passenger dead, no signs of struggle, very Twilight Zone. Once we meet the vamps it's not as fresh, but still carried me right to the end.

This is a great set-up: when artificial organs become available, people live a very long time. But most people can't afford the organs they need, so they get a mortgage. It's not hard to get a loan when the goods are readily recoverable, which is where the Bio-Repo Man comes in. Defaulting on an artiforg loan has very bloody consequences. Eric Garcia's 'Repossession Mambo' has a gun Repo Man on the run after defaulting on his own body debt. Best part of this very good book: the essay at the end, in which Garcia describes how the book came about. He's written a few books which became movies, and wrote the screenplays. In this case he wrote 'Reposession Mambo' as a longish novella then set it aside, sending it out to a few friends. The friends thought it would be a good movie, so it was optioned, and Garcia wrote the screenplay - 36 or so drafts later, it has been made into a movie coming out later this year. Towards the end of writing the movie, Garcia re...

I read my literary vampire horror novel: 'Let the Right One In' by John Ajvide Lindqvist. It was a cracker. I haven't seen the movie but I can taste it from the novel. Creepy, horrifying writing with not a single sympathetic character to cling to. It was quite wonderful to read a beautifully crafted novel, vampires notwithstanding, and an embarassing contrast to the Sookie Stackhouse series. I'm reading the ninth Sookie right now. Ninth. There's something to be said for the allure of vampire soap opera.

Iain Banks is one of my favourites. I love that he writes in two voices: brilliant sci fi and left-field literature. His sci fi is literary, his literature is often fantastic, but when you choose an Iain Banks you choose one or the other. I had read 'The Business', from the liyterary camp, twice actually, and loved it's wry wit and cynicism. But this one, 'The Bridge', didn't work for me at all. The protagonist is in a coma following an accident. He travels his unconscious to The Bridge, a swarming quasi-Victorian world built on and within a seemingly endless and architecturally eccentric bridge. He's the amnesiac patient of a ambitious Doctor, then falls from his position of privilege and heads off on a journey which maps his return to consciousness. In this clever clever structure I have no clear recollection of the main character, Orr (clever clever name) and Banks doesn't offer any opportunity to connect with the secondary characters of the novel at ...

Boldly invested a share of a book voucher on a punt: the first 'Firebirds' anthology. 'Firebirds' is a fantasy collection, which promised to be interesting and was, in parts. Anthologies are taste tests, samplers of writing styles and story flavours. The problem was that if I liked a story it was over too soon. If I didn't like it, I'd skip it and feel a bit cheated. Overall, a reminder that most fantasy isn't for me. To predictable, too girly. One find: Nancy Farmer. One old favourite: Garth Nix. Queued in my reading list is 'Let the Right One In' by John Ajvide Lindqvist (literary vampire horror, really), Bill Bryson's 'A Short History os Nearly Everything', Iain Banks' 'The Bridge' and one from W: 'The Reposession Mambo' by Eric Garcia.

A fantasy, perfectly forgettable, perfectly good. 'The Spell of Rosette' by Kim Falconer, first in a trilogy I have no urge to pursue. The premise is good: Earth in the near future is decimated by climate catastrophe sped along by human technical 'fixes' applied beyond reason by a power-hungry elite keen to retain a grip on the few remaining resources when the Earth goes to hell. The novel follows two threads: Earth, where a magical resistance bides its time through generations, and Gaela, a classic fantasy pre-tech world of warriors and witches. A sentient super-computer with the power to return Earth to rights is embodied in human form in Gaela, teaming up with the usual suspects to... the usual. To Kim's credit, the book stands alone and is neatly finished. I have just about enough patience for Sookie Stackhouse but can't be bothered with classic fantasy; brain the size of a gnat at the moment.

Only reading junk at the moment. More Sookie Stackhouse: books 5 and 6 now done and dusted and I'm craving more. K has a milder case, sufficient for us to organise a postal service swap of books (my number 5 for her library copy of number 6) and back again. I baulked today at spending $32.99 on book 7, so I've not entirely lost my senses. But how long will I hold out?

This is what has occupied me for the past 2 weeks, to the detriment of all interruptions (work, mothering, vacuuming): Charlaine Harris' "Sookie Stackhouse Vampire Mysteries". It's a humiliating admission, but began innocently enough with K bringing the first 2 books home from the US. P and I have been watching the HBO series "True Blood" on Foxtel, and loving the dirty white trash deep South vibe and nutty vampire plot. Book 1 of this series (9 books strong and still coming) is the plot of the entire first season of True Blood, and it's doubly engaging working out what the TV people decided to change (introducing a sassy black girlfriend and a fabulously camp black chef/drug dealer - recognise a theme, here?). Sookie is a telepathic waitress in a deep South bar, who falls for a vampire for the blessed relief of not being able to hear his thoughts, and his dead-cool sexual magnetism. It's 2 years since vampires came out of the closet (coffin?) and en...

It's odd that a blog read by no-one is still a burdensome responsibility. Here's an odd book read in May: 'The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation', futher subtitled 'Volume I: The Pox Party', by M T Anderson. What a title. The back blurb is enthusiastic but uncommunicative: "A tremendous read" - Nicholas Tucker, TES (what's TES?). I read the first page or so in Kinokuniya and came away with the impression that it was a fantasy borrowing its aesthetics and idiom from the 1800s. It's not. This is a book about slavery in Boston just before the Revolutionary War, human scientific experimentation, about racism and child abuse. A boy and his mother are raised and educated in a bizarre Scientific Society in an extended experiment to resolve the truth or otherwise of Negro intelligence. It was an odd read because for most of the book I was reading it as wonky fantasy with a Gothic tone, not political parable (parable? more a ti...

Here's the joy of second hand bookstores, well proven. I would never have bought Dan Simmon's 'The Terror' in a bookstore - it's a block of a thing, 935 pages, horror title, gory splat of blood on the cover, and I've never heard of him. But in the low-risk world of a second-hand bookstore, I was seduced by two things: it's about the Franklin expedition to find the North-West Passage in the mid 1800s, and Stephen King declares on the cover: "I am in awe of Dan Simmons", which, perhaps oddly, I find persuasive. This is a teriffic book. I was thoroughly engrossed and felt bereft when it was finished. The Franklin expedition was a well-equipped pair of boats, 130 British naval men and marines, the height of seafaring technology of its time. The expedition was lost. Rescue expeditions eventually found traces of the Franklin effort, and it is generally thought that the crew was icebound for 3 winters, savaged by starvation, scurvy, lead poisoning and bot...

Just filling in time with this one, a perfectly amiable and engaging fantasy about a newly trained wizard caught up in royal shenanigans, 'The Accidental Sorcerer' by K E Mills. The conceit is that wizarding is a straightforward profession aquired via correspondence course. Gerald Dunwoody (Wizard, Third Class) is unhappily employed as a probationary compliance offer, Department of Thaumaturgy, with wizarding yet to meet his expectations. He stumbles on a nasty incident in a Staff factory, sorts it out, blows everything up and so discovers greater powers within himself that anyone suspected, etc. The blurb calls it "Harry Potter for grown ups", which is about right. NEXUS declared it "unputdownable", which was very kind.

Bill Bryson's books line up in two rows. The romping travel yarns (I've read all of those) and the smart, tricky books (I've read none). I see a pattern appearing. 'Shakespeare', offered to me by a chap at work, was a lovely surprise. Did you know Shakespeare introduced the words critical, horrid, lonely, eventful and zany into the English language, and about 2030 others? Insultment, bepray and exsufflicate failed to take hold, but it was a very good effort in any case. One fell swoop, the milk of human kindness, cold comfort, foregone conclusion ... all Shakespeare. Or Shakspeare, or Shakspere - the one spelling WS never used himself is the one we now assume is correct. Bill Bryson seems to have a real fondness for the dedicated and often madly obsessed scholars who daily add to the vast weight of reflection about WS, but the theme of Bill's slim volume is how little there is truly known in the details of WS's life. I keep going back to one line: "O...

Three books of fluff, inhaled at speed this month: 'Visible Panty Line' by Gretel Killeen. Thumbs up to Gretel, she wrote a whole book from beginning to end and some of it is very funny. 'Endymion Spring' by Matthew Skelton. Conventional YA fantasy set in 21st and 15th century Oxford; books infused with timeless power, accessible only to children pure of heart, etc. The Oxford setting suggests Philip Pulman but it's nowhere near as dense, beautiful and black. The book-theme is very like Cornelia Funke's 'Inkheart' but the adult characters are flimsy. It's typical of the many fat fantasies populating the bookshelves of childrens's bookstores; perfectly good and entirely predictable, but then, I'm not 12. Stephanie Meyer's 'The Host' was a surprise. I'd read 'Twilight' and set it behind me with some embarassment not intending to read more, then I heard Nancy Pearl's podcast interview with Stephanie Meyer and I was se...

Amanda Lohrey taught writing at UTS; she might even have taught me. The careful construction and extended metaphors I remember from university writing courses are there in 'The Philosophers Doll', beautifully rendered, of course, but even so. I rushed the first quarter of this novel to see if it would relax, and it did. The book is about an unplanned pregnancy, in a marriage between a social worker and a philosopher. There's a painful, slow progression of misunderstandings and foolish decisions and stupid silences with my mental commentary running: 'just tell him now ', 'just explain it properly for heaven's sake'. Then there's a structural flipflop, the narrative voice changes, the time frame shifts, and the last third of the book is teriffic.

It's bloody hard to keep up with this. 'Orbital Resonance' (John Barnes) is a neatly shaped, engaging, tidy sci fi: post Collapse, a generation of spaceborn kids grows super-fast to maturity, socially engineered for coherance and high achievement. It's a closed society, manufactured but rational, calm and appealing. The input of a Earth-born teenager dirties up the social pool, plots are uncovered and untidily resolved. It's a great read, and modestly scaled (scoring high on my current number 1 measure). John Barnes wrote 'Mother of Storms', a personal fave from a decade or so ago, about extreme weather and global catastrophe, which has moved from whimsical to topical in the recent decade.

Lynne Reid Banks has the aura of high school library to me and I loosely link her with the politically correct, earnest novels I didn't want to read when I was at high school. (The power of Google: she wrote 'One More River', which I did read in school, about a friendship across the religious divide in Israel.) 'The L Shaped Room' is slim, modest and beautifully shaped adult novel, but with the economy of scale and ambition which you used to see in young adult novels (but not anymore; today's YA novels are morbidly obese, but that's another story). 'The L Shaped Room' is about a pregnancy out of wedlock when that mattered a great deal; Jane is thrown out of home, finds a bedsit in a hovel and tries to carry on, filled with desperate selfloathing and denial. She reluctantly allows herself to be befriended by her neighbours, carries on working, builds a nest and grows up. It's beautiful to read because there's no high drama to the story, Jane i...

K J Parker wrote 'The Fencer Trilogy' containing, at the end of the second volume, one of the most startlingly unexpected and horribly upsetting plot developments I've read (I won't tell), so it's hard to explain why I read the third volume, let alone this new book. K J writes fantasy, sort of, but with no magic, no elves and dwarves and talking trees, no quests or golden orbs, and almost no women. I picked up The Company' because it said on the blurb that it was 'a stand-alone book' and I can't bring myself to embark on another bulky series. I've just given up on Kevin Anderson's mega series (Saga of the Gods/War of the Endless Saga, something like that) at half way through book 5 because I happened to see book 7 arrive in the bookstore. Book 7, each with the heft of a housebrick, and it's not done yet. Barely forgivable if it was worth it, but Anderson doesn't appear to have an editor and these wretched books are pockmarked with rep...

I've been caught in a bog with this book, stuck fast and exhausted by it. 'The Daughters of Moab' by Kim Westwood, has excellent credentials: Australian science fiction, post-apocalyptic near-future, set in the outback, female protagonists... you'd think it had been written for me. Starts well. Nine years after Tribulation with the climate in turmoil, toxins rising from fissures in the earth and a murderous sun, the nutty Followers of Nathaniel have imprisoned the suspiciously healthy Daughers of Moab to drain them of their remarkable blood. They're not mad, just daft and isolated to distraction in an island of desert. The Daughters are all genetically modified transfects, part human, part dingo, eel, kangaroo, at the beginning of a bizarre evolution. A bold Daughter escapes, a rogue Nathaniel with farmer's blood aids her, and from there on in the story was all but incomprehensible. The language was beautiful, fluid and obscure: "Oliver, endowed with roach-...

Kate Jennings is an Australian living in New York, making a living by writing. I read her second novel, 'Moral Hazard', back in 2003 and loved it. It's about business writing and slow grief, transparently fictionalised from her experience of losing her husband to Alzheimers and sinking into the moral vacuum of business writing for a big NY bank to fund his medical care. It was a slim book, and reminded me of Helen Garner, which is high praise. So this new book, 'Stanley and Sophie', was an unexpected treat, a memoir about recovery and dogs. Kate finds herself the owner of a border terrier, which is a very particular kind of dog, and she falls in love with this sparky pup and sinks into dogworld. Life in NY post 9/11 is filtered through her love for Stanley and the domestic details of a writer's life, with dog. Her story of Stanley is adorable and I loved reading it; then she gets another terrier, Sophie, and life gets doggier and complicated. Kate's life dis...

Amazon is a wonderful thing; as usual, I'm 4 years behind the zeitgeist. Reading Joan Didion's 'A Year of Magical Thinking' last month, I bookmarked a book she mentioned and ordered it on Amazon. Joan used 'Intensive Care, A Doctor's Journal' as her guidebook to navigating intensive care wards during her daughter's illnesses. Oddly, I assumed it must be interesting. John F Murray gives us his notes and reflections on every patient in his care for a month in San Francisco General Hospital's medical ICU. 60 patients, 15 died. We get their names, the barest bones of their story and the narrative of their passage out of the ICU. Ten or so patients into the book and the names and medical procedures are a blur. The medical detail is extraordinary, but because you never meet the patients (they're mute from intubation or medication, almost without exception), it's a very detached kind of voyeurism. Murray is measured, concerned and concise. If you...

I'm tidying up my reading pile. There are 15 or so books in a stack by the bed and they're mostly either books I think I should read or books I started reading and can't bring myself to finish. 'Final Impact World War 2.3' by John Birmingham is neither type; more a book I've been too embarassed to pick up. Yes, I have read 'Weapons of Choice World War 2.1' and 'Designated Targets World War 2.2', and aren't they titles to add texture to a reading blog? I read somewhere that John wrote the first of these alternate history megabooks to make a pot of money and prove he could, and so he did. I'd say this type of thing is not my bag, but as I've now completed all three of them (about 12cm worth) perhaps it is. It's 2021 and a top secret navy science experiment goes wrong and a cluster of high-tech naval vessels and a few thousand crewmembers are transported back to early WW2. The sudden delivery of nuclear warheads and super weapons te...

'Best book of the year' is a poor claim in January, so I'll declare Joan Didion's 'The Year of Magical Thinking' one of the best books I've ever read. This is a slim book about grief, which is a poor advertisement for this moving, intelligent, emotional and pragmatic memoir. Joan's husband dies suddenly while her adult daughter lies near-death in hospital. The minutes and months following John's death are described in a loose narrative but it was the brilliant clarity of her self-awareness, reflecting on her experience of grieving and loss and self-delusion that was so devestating and such a privilege to read. Joan being Joan Didion, she researches and investigates the science of grief, the psychology and literature of death, and reflects and disects with the grace and skill of a brilliant and well-trained mind. She goes mad when John dies, so she says. She writes, much later: "Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.... ...

From brilliant new Australian fiction to blockbuster American girlie pulp: Judy Blume's 'Summer Sisters'. Mildly entertaining chick lit about a rich girl/pool girl friendship across a couple of decades. Judy Blume is a name from my early teenagerhood; I'm sure she wrote 'Are You There God, it's Me, Margaret', which I remember as a dangerous book for 12 year old girls. Moved on to finish John Marsden's 'The Journey'. I have a lot of respect for John Marsden, as a teacher, an advocate for literacy and young people; he wrote the 'Tomorrow' teen series and a stack of books about boys and powerful, thoughtful parenting. But 'The Journey' is wierd; it's a piece of fiction tracing the rite of passage to adulthood of a 15 year old boy who sets out from his home, alone, to travel the country, broaden his horizons and grow into a man. So he discovers his body, comes to respect nature, becomes independent and resiliant, works, meets oddi...

It's hard to write about 'The Slap', by Christos Tsiolkas, because it was gripping and devestating in one. I had read a short review about this book and knew it had a great set-up - a suburban BBQ in Melbourne, where a dad slaps another person's toddler - but I didn't know anything about Tsiolkas. I'm unresolved on this book. I couldn't leave it alone; it was an obsessive read, with the story - told by each of the key characters in sequence - completely absorbing. The moral issue is explored, a sequence of events revealed, all this is clever and credible, but as each voice is introduced and their actions are described and dialogue provided, under it all we hear their inner voice and it's bleak stuff. Racist, self-serving, self-centred, deluded, mediocre, mean-spirited suburban mums and dads and grandparents and teenagers who Tsiolkas submits as regular folk. I still feel affected by it, drained and exhausted by it. Before Tsiolkas I read 'The Best Am...

Forget John Marsden, I'm reading 'Deep Survival' by Laurence Gonzales. It's dazzling. I bought this book for $2 at a garage sale, which is an unprecedented sum given it had no slipcover. With no slipcover I had no cues to follow, no back blurb, no subtle dance of graphics and typeface to lure me in, so the few paragraphs I browsed in the garage were mighty persuasive. Gonzales writes about why some people live through great adversity, and some don't. There is a lot to say about this book, but here's a little bit that gave me pause: "Most people operate in an environment of such low risk that action, inaction, or the vicissitudes of brains have few consequences... Mistakes spend themselves harmlessly and dies out unnoticed instead of growing out of control." And isn't that the decription of a Sydney marketing manager's life mode? Gonzales says most people don't get any practice in pain or crisis, so we have no mental map for it, and conseque...

It may die in the ass, but I'm engaged with the idea of noting down everything I read this year. I restarted reading on 1 Nov, not a moment later, and began immediately with shiny Sunday supplements and nasty junk reading, of course. I have no restraint at all. It took weeks to catch up on all the glossies which had been waiting for me in their bags. It was delicious, and overwhelming. My first post-denial book-reading was Nick Harkaway's 'Gone Away World'. It was a brilliant premise, wildly imaginative. The first half was amazing, delicious, then it fell apart for about a third, then came together again to finish. I may not have done it justice, though; reading it when I was starving, I gulped it up and had no patience. I'll read his next book, when it comes. Nick is John le Carre's son, so it was a literary sensation, much-anticipated, etc, and worth the hoo haa. I finished Barabara Kingsolver next. She's great. She'll stay with me. Oddly, one of the m...