Hello St Marks

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...