opening lines

I love a great opening line.

You know these classics, but here are the first sentences (sometimes first two) of the books currently on my to-read (or recently read) pile:

I said a silent prayer.
Actually, silent is probably the only type of prayer a guy should attempt when his head's in a toilet.

– Winger, Andrew Smith

Tommy was a talker and didn't much like the other ghosts, so he was forever talking to Kelpie.

– Razorhurst, Justine Larbalestier

 'I think Bill is in love with Mrs Peck,' I confide to an undersized blue swimmer crab that has become all tangled up in my line.

– The Minnow, Diana Sweeney

The ring is small and space is tight, and their circles feel like flying.

– The One and Only Jack Chant, Rosie Borella

The first thing we had to do was catch the Tralfamosaur.

– The Eye of Zoltar, Jasper Fforde

It happened before Jack was born.
When Amrei was six, a spider appeared on her shoulder.

– No Stars to Wish On, Zana Fraillon

The first thing is the smell of blood and coffee.

– Why We Took the Car, Wolfgang Herrndorf

The ground is hard and dry. The dirt yields grudgingly as the gravedigger thrusts his shovel in.

– The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, Clare Wright

 And how about this breath-taker:

It took slightly under eight hours for Melbourne to die.

– Pandora Jones: Admission, Barry Jonsberg

2012 bests

lots of people are making their lists of 2012 best reads and if i made a list it would go on forever, so i've decided to go with just two: a YA best and one grown-up one. as it happens, one is the first book i read this year, the other is the last. this is a kind of symmetry i like. one was first published in australia in 2012, the other is from a couple of years ago, but which i only just got around to reading.

there were many amazing YA titles this year (and A LOT of australian ones), but i'm going with daniel handler's why we broke up, illustrated by maira kalman. i love these guys; loved their collaboration on the picture book 13 words. when i read this i was just about to start work at hardie grant egmont and it made me feel so chuffed that my new workplace had chosen to be the australian home for this book. it made me feel confident that we would get along.

why we broke up

min green and ed slaterton are breaking up, so min is writing ed a letter and giving him a box. inside the box is why they broke up. two bottle caps, a movie ticket, a folded note, a box of matches, a protractor, books, a toy truck, a pair of ugly earrings, a comb from a motel room, and every other item collected over the course of a giddy, intimate, heartbreaking relationship. item after item is illustrated and accounted for, and then the box, like a girlfriend, will be dumped.

beginning to end, all the angst and heartbreak included, this was a delight. all the (made-up) films and movie stars, the references that min made and which baffled ed. the conversations that went around and around, the tangents and segues. why we broke up is a brilliantly written and smart book - plus, so perfectly teenage. min is hyperbolic, feels things so deeply. she's over-dramatic (some might say) and i know there were many adult YA readers who didn't like this one at all. and this, above all, is why i love this book so: a teenager's life should often exclude or baffle an adult and i felt that min and ed and al all had the space to exist as teenagers and as people. they felt real, they spoke their thoughts and got things wrong. they were unlikable, precocious and whimiscal (angsty). and i loved them for it.

***

i don't read a lot of books for grown ups, and even more rarely do i read non-fiction. but i've been coveting patti smith's memoir just kids for a month or so now, drawing it out and savouring it. i finished it this morning; i loved it.

just kids

just kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to new york city during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. a true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists' ascent, a prelude to fame.

smith's prose is dreamy and yet straightforward, it's intimate but not self-exploitative. i knew so little about her life, and littler still about her relationship with robert mapplethorpe. this was such a special book. i loved the way she spoke about all those crazy cats who inhabited manhattan and brooklyn and paris in the 60s and 70s - it was just life, it never felt like she was name-dropping or big-noting. i appreciated the solemn, serious and dedicated way she approached her art. i think this is one i will read again and again.

yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. it had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. perhaps it was an awereness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. sometimes i just wanted to raise my hands and stop. but stop what? maybe just growing up. (p.104)

happy new year!

Discussing post-war US literature...

On my to-read bedside table pile

First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world — a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring — this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.

Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else — but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.

~ The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, Carson McCullers (1953)

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) was the very best book we studied in my undergrad literature subject American Liberals and Moderns - and it was in exalted company of Faulkners and Fitzgeralds and Hemingways and Steinbecks - because Carson McCullers writes simply, beautifully and about such curious people: the outsiders, the misfits, the weirdos. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe tells of what happens to Miss Amelia Evans when her hunchbacked cousin comes to town. This short story is enthralling and unnerving, with such an excellent turn of phrase to place the reader right into this Southern, small-town setting. Pitch-perfect dialogue, the way she writes the characters' mannerisms and the almost confessional feel she's given the narrative. She is a wonderful writer.

I found this one at Barwon Booksellers in Queenscliff, along with McCullers' Member of the Wedding and Monica Dickens' The House at World's End. The Messinger Bird by Rosanna Hawkes I got at The Hill of Content (Melbourne), Town Life in Australia (about colonial life in Australia and published in 1883) by Richard Twopeny snatched up at Red Wheelbarrow Books in Brunswick and Louisa May Alcott's An Old-Fashioned Girl at the Mill Markets, Geelong.

Genre? Not really.

So mad about this article about The Hunger Games.

The following is one of the three things the author identifies as a theme that may not appeal to adults when reading The Hunger Games.

Clunky Pacing and Writing -- this is not quite a "theme" but I've seen this flaw in some YA books. (The first book was beautifully paced, but the other two books -- not as much.) YA authors don't aspire to be David Foster Wallace, but Hunger Games' prose can be a bit choppy at times.

I don't come in defense of HG, specifically, because I only read the first one and don't remember the quality of the writing. It was a fun read and I really enjoyed it. I'm just so mad about the whole YA authors don't aspire to be... comment. It's probably true that many or most don't aspire to be DFW. And that is probably a good thing. He met a pretty horrible end. But rawr! All the YA authors I know work damn hard to write beautifully, and produce absolutely wonderful works of literature.


The problem here is that most people just don't seem to realise that there are genres within YA. It's not a genre all by itself, even though it is usually shelved all together. Whatever the case, there's going to be a difference in writing styles if you compare a fantasy YA with a literary YA, or a chick-lit YA with dystopian-sci-fi YA. Just the same in the adult book world.

The author saying she's read a lot of clunky writing in YA is like saying she's read a lot of clunky writing in all books. Probably true. There's a lot of crap out there, as well as all the gems. I was going to forgive her, but then clicked through and read on her author profile that she is writing YA.

Quoi le fuck?

And perhaps another day I shall address the fact that this is a totally stupid question to ask in the first place - can an adult enjoy a YA book? The answer* is DERRRRRRRR! Read whatever you enjoy.

*(my friend, that's blowin' in the wind)

a novel experience

One Day, David Nicholls (Hodder)

This review is twofold.

First, the story itself. "The international bestseller" One Day by David Nicholls. I did not care for this novel. But I read it through to its end and below there will be spoilers.

Second, I read this book as a Flipback. Tiny book and an amusing, novel experience...an amusing novel experience? Oh for the love of a comma!


Now for the second, first. Printed on 'bible paper' it's pretty much necessary to employ the lick-your-thumb-to-turn-page method and, until your eyes adjust, sometimes being able to see the print on the other side so clearly is distracting.


Flipbacks are so delightfully tiny they fit in most small bags and are perfect for the tram. I think the idea is to just use one hand to hold the book, like an e-reader, but I persisted mostly with the two-handed approach.


Somehow I felt betrayed by this book. I feel like it was marketed as literary fiction, though to be honest and fair I don't believe it was. Somehow I had that perception though. Then all the "celebrities" were reading it in my trashy magazines. I thought - wonderful! Literary fiction to the masses! Then they made a film and I thought I had better read it before seeing the movie. It's definitely well written*, engaging and a good novel. I just think that if it'd had Maeve Binchy's name on the cover I might have gone into it with the appropriate expectations.**

Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew (get used to hearing their full names, Nicholls refers to them thus all the time) meet at college. She's young and idealistic, he's charismatic and arrogantly entitled. They've just graduated from Edinburgh university and drunkenly hook up one night, though they don't sleep together, and eventually decide to be best mates. The book then checks in with each of them on the same date each year, spanning the next twenty years. It's a great concept.

Emma is smart and enigmatic, but she sneers at Dexter's wish to travel the world and then she's relegated to failing regional theatre and a dead end job in a shitty London Mexican restaurant.*** Meanwhile Dexter travels, is charming, and then gets work in television. This apparently entitles him to be condescending to Emma whenever they meet because Emma is a dowdy, writing girl who "wonders why sex, even when so enjoyable, leaves her so ill-tempered."**** The reader's sympathy is nearly always with Dexter as he struggles with the rise of fame, the loss of fame, relationships, family and aging.

The characters are self-centred and on the clichéd (ok, ok "everyman") side. Their problems are annoying. Is this kind of novel designed to make me get myself out of a rut? Am I supposed to identify with the characters and their haplessness? Maybe this is why I enjoy young adult literature so much. Even when the characters wallow it isn't the same; there's the future to look forward to - there tends to be some kind of hope.

And what about the ending of One Day, I hear you ask. SPOILERS: So Dexter the cad finally gets the girl (fortunately Emma has become less dowdy in the intervening years) and, because of Emma's love and all, he gets back on track: becomes a better boyfriend, a better son, a better father, a better human being. So, her job done, David Nicholls kills the girl.



I know.



Let's not talk about it anymore.




At least I could imagine this as I read:

Go and watch him sing I've Just Seen A Face.

*Though, occasionally boring. On page 343 "Emma felt the hot tears of humiliation prick her eyes".
**This is not mean to sound disparaging. Yes, I am a MB fan. You knew that already.
***Don't get me started. This didn't make sense!
****Seriously, I don't want get started. Emma was "so very British" while Dexter was allowed to enjoy love and sex and it made me SO MAD.

expression is the need of my soul

talking about archies the other week put me in the mind to re-read the wonderfully hilarious poems of archy and mehitabel by don marquis. archy is the reincarnated spirit of a free verse poet, now a cockroach living in a new york newspaper office. at night he scurries out and types poems by jumping and slamming his wee cockroach head onto the typewriter keys - hence lack of capitalisation and most punctuation. the idea is that the newspaper men happen upon the poems in the morning and start printing them as a column.

and here's a piece, a selection, from right near the start:

"expression is the need of my soul
i was once a vers libre bard
but i died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach
it has given me a new outlook upon life
i see things from the under side now
thank you for the apple peelings in the wastepaper basket
but your paste is getting so stale i cant eat it
there is a cat here called mehitabel i wish you would have
removed she nearly ate me the other night why dont she
catch rats that is what she is supposed to be fore
there is a rat here she should get without delay"

archy's poems give a beautifully satirical view of life in nyc in the twenties and thirties, the excesses and toughness of those decades. the poem "certain maxims of archy" is particularly memorable and includes stanzas like this:

"don t cuss the climate
it probably doesn t like you
any better
than you like it"

and

"prohibition makes you
want to cry
into your beer and
denies you the beer
to cry into"

and

"boss the other day
i heard an
ant conversing
with a flea
small talk i said
disgustedly
and went away
from there"

and

"the bees got their
governmental system settled
millions of years ago
but the human race is still
groping"

alley cat mehitabel, in her many previous lives, once lived much more grandly than she does now (once she was cleopatra). but she's toujours gai, darlinks, toujours gai even when she's down on her luck and or burdened with kittens. mehitabel never intended a life of matrimony or motherhood:

"the life of a female
artist is continually
hampered what in hell
have i done to deserve
all these kittens"

archy interviews pharaohs in the museum, has a radio interview with mars and one time finds the shift lock (caps lock) key and experiences the JOY OF CAPITAL LETTERS. hilariously funny yet sometimes tragic and cynical, you must get a copy without delay. and what's more, the best of archy and mehitabel is going to be published in october! go, demand your local bookshop order it in! i am placing an order for at least twenty-three as i type this.

go to the don marquis website for more on archy.

review : a confederacy of dunces

A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole

You probably read Joanne Horniman's post yesterday over at her blog Secret Scribbled about this wonderful book. This was one of the books I read during those delightful undergraduate years when my classmates took everything rawther seriously, and I reveled in it.



Ignatius, a college graduate, is entirely convinced of his superiority to pretty much everyone and everything in modern life (and much of history too). He's writing a great tome on big chief tablets in pencil. He knows an awful lot and spends his days philosophising and avoiding much of humanity. But when he and his mother (with whom he lives) need money, a new fate awaits Ignatius: "and what a vicious fate it was to be: now he was faced with the perversion of having to GO TO WORK."

As Jo said in her post:

It's a book that could manage to offend everyone, if they wanted to be offended: homosexuals, heterosexuals, blacks, Jews, overeducated fat white boys from New Orleans, little old ladies, mothers ... except that it is somehow one of those books that is so big and warm-hearted and inclusive that (if you read it right, just as you can't be offended by Mark Twain if you read him right) it is actually the most liberal, progressive and forward-looking of novels.

Yet I delight in Ignatius' self-righteous and almost repugnant observations and comments. You feel for the cretin: "I am forced to function in a century which I loathe." I love it because it's honest, but hyperbolic at the same time - yes, that's just how amazingly well written and clever this book is.


The dialogue is pitch-perfect and the descriptions superb. Toole captured all those little parts of human life and culture that just make the words leap from the page, whacking your funny bone on the way to your heart. The dialogues between Ignatius and his mother Mrs Reilly, in particular, are spectacular examples of characterisation and dialogue. Also, it amuses me how Ignatius holds a particular disdain for Mark Twain. Calls him a "dreary fraud".

Jo posted today about John Kennedy Toole's only other novel, The Neon Bible. We'll just have to wonder what other gems Toole would have given us.

review : one of our thursdays is missing

for your reading pleasure, a very special visitor review:

One of our Thursdays is Missing, Jasper Fforde (Hodder & Stoughton)

If a university literature lecturer and an absurdist personality came together for a night of sweet passion, the resulting baby would be novelist Jasper Fforde. Having established a reputation with The Eyre Affair as a ridiculously talented writer with two Fs beginning his surname, Fforde has given us the sixth book in the Thursday Next series.

Our story is a metafictional adventure set in the Bookworld, where all the written books live in an inverted sphere with flesh and blood characters. This is where we find our heroine, the fictional Thursday Next. Her namesake – the Real Thursday Next – is due to negotiate peace talks preventing a war between genres…however she is nowhere to be found. Fictional Thursday secretly pursues the case with her cocktail-making robot butler.

One of our Thursdays is Missing is peppered with literary references that would make any self-respecting Lit student pat themselves on the back on many pages. The many jokes for the sake of wordplay and literary reference could be found a bit wanky by some, but I couldn’t help but giggle at the jaded conspiracy theories placed in fiction instead of non-fiction, meeting the Great Gatsby’s younger brother Mediocre Gatsby, and when our heroine crash landed into a “mimefield” which was full of, well, men dressed in black slacks, striped shirts, white face paint and large hats who became silently murderous when not applauded.

Impossible to pinpoint one genre for One of Our Thursdays is Missing, I can only describe it as kind of like playing bingo with Dr Who and John Cleese, using a four dimensional piece of paper. Trust in Fforde’s creations as they navigate their world and relish the ride.

Now where’s my robot butler? I need a Tahiti Tingle.

If you like your books metafiction-fantastic this will be your cup of tea.

review by Arlene

vis ink...in stores now

it was quite remarkable to see this:

turn into this:


visible ink is a student-run literary anthology out of the RMIT professional writing and editing diploma. last year we received around 200 submissions for this edition. i wish i had a picture of the piles of submissions to show you, very unruly and wonderful. out of that 200 we had to select a tiny sample for the journal (there were only a few heated discussions). and with such a diverse bunch of editors and readers on the selection committee, we ended up with such a delightful mishmash of pieces: 16 stories. 11 poems. 12 images.

the editing process was probably my favourite part of being on the visible ink team. emailing and talking to the authors about their words and stories - perhaps seeing a little something that they could no longer see, knowing their piece as well as they did. learning a little something about inDesign (being thrown in the deep end a little) was horrible and fantastic at the same time. i felt just a touch proud of me when it was all over. i hope all 'our' authors are happy with the finished product - we are so grateful for their talent.

here's the first piece in the anthology (one of my absolute faves):


The Sniper on the State Library Dome
by Michael Crane

The man with madness
in his eye looked down
and aimed his high-powered rifle
at the many people on the street
below and fired and yelled
‘This is because I read Jewel's
a night without armour and she
did not love me.' He put another
bullet in the chamber and fired and said,
'I read Bukowski and I'm tougher
than him.' He moved his position
to the left of the dome, reloaded
and fired and hit a woman
on her way to work at the library
and he said, ‘This is for the Great Gatsby
because I loved Daisy.' He fired a few
more shots and hit a man reading Playboy
in a newsagency. He decided his killing spree
was too slow so he took out a submachine gun
and fired at the pedestrians on the street.
‘This is because of Hemingway,' he said,
'for running with the bulls and this one
is for James Joyce writing books
I could not understand and this
Is because Gertrude Stein was too fat
and this is because Truman Capote
was gay and take that Homer, Shakespeare
and Chaucer for rhyming with obscure words.'
He ran out of bullets and took out knives
and stared to hurl them down
as the policemen snuck up behind him
and wrestled him down to the ground
and a few weeks after his trial
he was led to the execution chamber
and the priest took out the Bible
and the man said, ‘Not another book!’
And he screamed all the way down
to the electric chair until the very end.

you can buy visible ink at readings bookstores, the sun bookshop in yarraville and by snail mail (contact the committee via the website). if you are of a writerly persuasion, submissions will surely open soon for this year's vis ink. keep your pens poised and your eyes peeled.

waiting...waiting...

Half Brother, Kenneth Oppel (David Fickling)

Ben Tomlin has been an only child for thirteen years. So when his research-scientist parents bring home a baby chimp to raise as a human child, Ben's life is turned upside-down. Teaching a baby chimp how to understand language is not his idea of fun, especially when he's trying to settle in at his new school. But it isn't long before Zan's infectious personality endears him to everyone and he becomes a real member of the family. But just what will happen when he grows up and the experiment comes to an end? Ben must take dramatic steps, and the repercussions ricochet through home and community with devastating results. This phenomenal novel is a thought-provoking story of relationships and family, first love and growing up, ethics and dilemmas.
4th January 2011

Angel Creek, Sally Rippin (Text)

In her new falling-down home, in her new street, in her new suburb, Jelly waits for high school to begin. She can only feel happy up in the branches of the old apricot tree and by the creek at the back of the house. One night, Jelly and her cousins spot something in the creek’s dark waters. At first they think it’s a bird, but it isn’t…it’s a baby angel with a broken wing. And they decide to keep it. But soon things start to go wrong, and Jelly discovers that you can’t just take something from where it belongs and expect that it won’t be missed. Sally Rippin’s Angel Creek is a book about growing up: being brave and selfish and tough and scared. It’s a book about an angel. But not the sweet variety. It’s a book about the things that change and the things that always stay the same.
28th February 2011

More than you can say, Paul Torday (W & N Fiction/Hachette)

The bestselling author of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen returns with a Buchan-esque thriller. A late-night gambling session ends in a bet for Richard Gaunt: can he walk to Oxford by lunchtime the next day? Gaunt sets off and as morning breaks and the dreaming spires near, his evening's winnings look set to double. But when men in a Jeep reverse into him, scooping him off the roadside, Gaunt's life takes a very strange turn. Taken to a country house, he is kept hostage by a man with impeccable manners, Mr Khan who makes him an unusual offer - ten thousand pounds in return for a 'green card' marriage to a woman called Adeena.Traumatised by a tour of duty in Iraq, Gaunt has a cavalier attitude to life and feels he has nothing to lose. His childhood sweetheart won't speak to him, he has lost every job he ever had and he needs cash urgently. He therefore decides to accept Khan's strange proposal - never imagining where this decision will take him. For with his new bride comes a whole lot of trouble...
1st February 2011

and so what were the grownups reading in twentyten?

well i don't know about most grown-ups, but for me it was a little bit scary when i realised these three books were probably the only 2010-release grown-up books i read this year. they were all fabulous, at least.

our tragic universe, scarlett thomas

scarlett thomas' third book was sort of about nothing, but was also a wonderful story all about stories. about writing and ideas, coincidence and relationships, knitting, the beast of dartmoor, taking the dog for a walk, kissing married friends on ferries - this is an absolute must-read for all writers (and readers).

read my review here.

the hopeless life of charlie summers, paul torday

i've relished each paul torday book since his brilliant 2007 salmon fishing in the yemen. you never know what his next book will be about. this one is actually narrated by hector 'eck' chetwode-talbot who is in finance in the city, but it's also about eck's doppleganger charlie summers, whom he meets by chance. eck works with money in the million, the billions, the squillions. charlie sells weird dog food and has lots of hairbrained schemes. eck's about to find out just what makes him so different from charlie. now i don't pretend to know a snit about $ or finance, but this book played on my unease regarding stocksbondsinternetbanking:
'then, somewhere, someone asked a new question. it was: "can i have my money back?" we didn't know it then, but the money that had come out of nowhere was about to return to exactly the same place.' (p8, uncorrected proof)

eleven, mark watson

at once hilarious and tragic, i loved eleven. xavier ireland is a late-night talk back radio dj in london, his sidekick murray a more laconic version of murray from flight of the conchords, but xavier was once chris cotswold and lived in melbourne. this book is about why he left. at first i was concerned this book was mere dick-lit and was hesitant to get on board with the omniscient narrator that told me all about a series of other people whose lives were getting increasingly difficult. but he pulls it off! however, it's marketed as a funny book by "one of britain's best-loved comedians" but THIS BOOK HAS A HARROWING, HARROWING MOMENT. my blood ran cold and i cried. read it, this one is worth it.

here's a photo from the launch at the sun bookshop (actually held in 'the grand' at the sun theatre due to massive attendance):


i did also read some grown-up classics, including (but not limited to):

• keep the aspidistra flying, george orwell
• nausea, jean-paul sartre
• pursuit of love, nancy mitford
• the great gatsby, f scott fitzgerald

but here's to a new years resolution to read more contemporary fiction. anyone read anything amazing this year i should go back and explore??

review : our tragic universe

Our Tragic Universe, Scarlett Thomas

From the author of the brilliant, physics-inspired sci-fi-ish novel The End of Mr Y comes Our Tragic Universe. Looking at it one way, not a lot happens in this book. But if you look at it at a certain angle a whole mess of ideas (some unfinished and others half-realised) come spilling out. The protagonist, Meg, is struggling to write her ‘proper’ novel – instead distracted by the formulaic genre novels she churns out to pay for her rather meagre existence, which amounts to a damp flat in Devon with her unemployed (and quite frankly rather whingy) boyfriend Christopher and her dog B (who is very intelligent) and a cast of brilliantly curious characters (including a mysterious Beast). Lit up in lights, screaming at her for attention is the uncomfortable (but pleasurable oh please let it be pleasurable) truth about the kiss Meg shared with the handsome, older, curator of the local museum (and how she mostly wishes it would happen again). Thomas leads us down one-way streets, to dead ends, leaves one three-page, involved philosophical musing to head off down another. She explores the mechanics and methods of writing – the ‘storyless story’, the death of the author, metafiction – as well as philosophy, Zen Buddhism, poltergeists, magic, ships in bottles, fame and whether or not we’re actually all living in some kind of fictional Second World without ever knowing it.

What happens in Our Tragic Universe is what happens after Meg reads a book she thinks she’s supposed to review and it turns out it hadn’t ever been sent to her to review in the first place.

I think I loved it. It was certainly relevant to my life - it was as though my Novel 1 teacher was reading this at the same pace as me and would bring these very topics up for discussion in class. I definitely liked it a lot. I have to think that everything that Thomas (actually, I'm going to call her Scarlett, because I think we'd be friends) everything that Scarlett did in the novel, she did intentionally, because she's so smart and The End of My Y was just so brilliant and perfect. So when I sit back and think 'Well that ramble was all for nothing (and added nothing to your story) wasn't it Scarlett?' I think again about how she's (perhaps with just a smidge of an echo of intellectual pretention) just letting us know something new, and letting us be open to a different kind of storytelling. One outside of the neat 'beginning-middle-end' Western story tradition.

sometimes i get the urge to read grown up books

if i got to choose four books to take home tonight (if only el cardo credito weren't at the end of its tether and threatening to cut me off and send me to Spenders Anonymous...where i would kick it in the balls with my fancy new 1940s-esque black patent schoolma'am, gal-friday shoes...)

where was i?

oh yes.

under the dome, stephen king (hodder)

who would have thunk i'd ever want to read a stephen king so much? this one looks particularly epic, about a giant dome dropping over a town - cutting birds in half and detroying an aeroplane (killing some of the people inside) as it settles into place. i've just read the first three pages.

the boy next door, irene sabatini (sceptre)

this is a curious one. set in zimbabwe in the 1980s it looks to be the story of a young girl - lindiwe - and the young boy next door who is arrested for setting his stepmother alight. the blurb says "...though eighteeen months later the charges against ian mckenzie are dropped and he returns home, full of charm and swagger." i know very little about africa (and what i do know i only know from spud) and this story, which the blurb says vividly evokes this country's slide into chaos following its independence and it's also a love story.

truth, peter temple (text)

merely because it won the miles franklin. but i'd also have to get the broken shore, cuz i ain't read that yet either.

our tragic universe, scarlett thomas (canongate)

because i LOVED LOVED the end of mr y and have been DYING for another scarlett thomas since. this one's an august release and we'll prob get it in at the shop this week. i don't think i'm going to be able to stop myself buying it, somehow. fingers crossed for a reading copy!
here's the blurb from the text website:
If Kelsey Newman’s theory about the end of the time is true, we are all going to live forever. But for Meg—locked in a dead-end relationship and with a deadline looming for a book that she can’t write—this thought fills her with dread. Stuck in a labyrinth of her own devising, Meg knows that there must be a way out. And a wild beast living on the Devonshire moors, a ship in a bottle, the science of time and a knitting pattern for the shape of the universe all have a crucial part to play in Meg’s release.
Smart, entrancing and buzzing with big ideas, Our Tragic Universe is a book about how relationships are created and destroyed, and how a story might just save your life.

but i'm lucky, because my nana (who is very old - 93 - but very awesome) went to the sydney launch of p.m. newton's debut novel the old school (viking) and she bought me a copy and posted it to me.

but right now i have three books to review for magpies. they're awesome:
i am a genius of unspeakable evil and i want to be your class president, josh lieb (razorbill)
mimi and the blue slave, catherine bateson (woolshed press) - i've read a couple of chapters and cried. as i do whenever i read a bateson. her books are just so beautiful!
and i've also got an aussie chomp, but i can't remember which one.

je vais en vacances

ok so i am only going away for four days (practically five) and i will never get through this many books i am still (as long as they fit in my carry-on) going to take them.

• parisians: an adventure history of paris by graham robb (picador)
• the elegance of the hedgehog by murial barbery (gallic)
• meanjin quarterly vol 69 edited by sophie cunningham (mup)
• this is shyness by leanne hall (text)

however i fear that, as a hardback, the parisians may have to remain behind.

now (well, tomorrow) off to chilly leura. vive les vacances!!!!!

secondhand delight

secondhand books! i do love them! sometimes i just forget when i have such ready access to shiny and new books. but when it comes to the classics, i can't go past a yellow-paged delight.

i bought these at the barwon booksellers in queenscliff while i was down visiting my mama bear and my dadda and farewelling les frogs who are heading (via new zealand and la nouvelle caledonie) back to frogland. bon voyage!!

carson mccullers' clock without hands
gertrude stein's three lives
jean-paul sartre's the reprieve

and les frogs gave me jack kerouac's sur la route - which i have read in english but it could be an interesting read in french too.

they are just so purty. and they smell good. i can't wait to read them.

rich kids have feelings too

when reading salinger i can't help thinking about wes anderson.

i thought i was so clever when i said to my best friend m: "you know? i think owen wilson and wes anderson must have been reading franny and zooey when they wrote the royal tenenbaums" only to find in a quick internet search that most people realise this.



franny and zooey is a collection of two short stories (one called franny, the other called zooey; the zooey bit much longer than the franny) and our two protagonists are part of the glass family. seymour glass, the eldest, is the subject of a perfect day for bananafish, one of salinger's most famous stories. the others appear in stories such as raise high the roof beam, down at the dingy and seymour: an introduction.

the glass family are a riot. upper east siders, childhood stars of a radio show called 'it's a wise child.' now adults and young adults they are smart, caustic, depressive, (often misanthropic) perfectionists. the two youngest siblings, franny and zooey, are suffering from having been practically brainwashed by their older siblings (primarily buddy and seymour) in all aspects of philosophy and religion, particularly eastern mysticism. franny has become obsessed with prayer, and specifically a christian pilgrim's "jesus prayer" which one is mean to pray constantly, every minute of the day with the aim that it soon becomes automatic. she's hardly eating, always thinking away, and it is causing problems with her boyfriend (though i thought he was something of a douche, really) but also with her family. her mother is worried and she enlists zooey to talk to franny about it. zooey is very handsome, but (and this cracks me up) "his face had been just barely saved from too-handsomeness, not to say gorgeousness, by virtue of one ear's protruding slightly more than the other." he is an actor who is sick and tired of other people's pretentiousness and excitement about their own work (be they screenwriters, playwrights or other actors). the siblings talk, they help and hinder each other, in an effort to understand one another.
i simply adore salinger's turn of phrase and intelligence, wit and the brilliant dialogue he gifts to his characters.
and so you can see why i can't totally separate the glass family and the tenenbaum family in my mind (and, curiously, and not unsurprisingly, the eldest glass daughter, boo boo, actually marries a mr tannenbaum). margo, chas and richie tenenbaum are equally disillusioned grown-up child prodigies.

the opposite of coffee

these hot summer days don't lend themselves to drinking coffee anyway... (only 21 days to go)

yesterday, after a civilised 8.30am swim, i stretched out on the faux lawn at the brunswick baths (i love it! it looks great - let's face it, any real grass would be brown and probably dirt by now) and finished paul auster's invisible.

i really liked the way it was written: from different perspectives, sometimes in first person, sometimes in third and sometimes bits of the story missing. the narration somewhat unreliable, but more that it dealt with memories and individual perspectives and ideas. this is the first auster that i've read, but people assure me that this is classic auster, a return to form. one review i read this morning - though glowing - ran through a list of auster's techniques and literary devices almost like a checklist, which i thought was odd.

adam walker is the handsome and enigmatic and smart student living in new york, the events that unfold after he meets the commandeering rudolph born and his enticing girlfriend margot. i felt a bit uncomfortable in some parts, and i'm not too sure about the ending, but i thought it was excellent, moving, gripping, fast-paced...though did tend to spend a few pages ruminating on writing style and author intent. Auster question the role of the author, the role of truth and ... by gee i liked it. the book travels from new york to paris and to little craggy islands in the caribbean and we meet a great cast of intriguing characters.

my worried shoes

i went to see where the wild things are at the nova cinemas last friday (and then again on saturday). it was fantastic - whimsical, scary, moving and funny.

as a child the picture book by maurice sendak frightened me a lot and as a family, we didn't really like it. as an adult and a bookseller i've really come to appreciate it - even though i find the bit that reads "the night max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind (then you turn the page) and another" a bit jarring. and i think the film took the essence of the book and created something more, something really special.

the screenplay, written by spike jonze and dave eggers together was the basis for dave eggers' novel the wild things. it follows the plot of the film for the most part, but with some segues and diversions - all welcome. in the first few pages of the book max rides his bike over to his friends' house a couple of streets away and he goes by himself and i think helmetless. the mother of his friend, when he arrives, is shocked and agitated to the point of almost hysteria at the thought of max riding home again alone. she wants to accompany him back, but he rides off. she runs after him. this scares max and he rides faster - his confusion and fear were marvellously written and it was a brilliant start to the book. i was there, i was max, while reading it.

older children will enjoy this book for its fun and adventure, they might even feel the same way i did. but i think it is the grown-ups who with benefit most! without being cloying, it reminds the reader of being a child - the way children percieve the world and how something that adults accept without question can really frighten kids. in the book, and the film, when max's teacher tells the class that one day the sun with die, and with it take the earth and other planets with it - sets max to thinking and thinking hard. an adult might dismiss this, for some reason need no further explanation or reassurance that it won't happen tomorrow, or to me.

at the cinema: the wild things were magnificent! apparently they had to CGI their faces for the eyes and some expression, but the fact that they were giant puppet-esque/people in wild-thing-suits gave them a quality and realness that has been lacking from movies for a while. it sort of reminded me of classics like the neverending story, or the labyrinth. but the wild things were even better than the weird creatures in those films! other things i loved about the film: the fort they build (anyone seen the book natural architecture by alessandro rocca - wow! and maybe the inspiration?)

the movie's soundtrack by karen o and the kids is also fantastic. i've been listening to it on repeat for a couple of weeks now. it was perfect for the film, creating atmosphere, fun and rumpus! highlights of the album: capsize and worried shoes.

basically i give all wild things two thumbs up.

let the wild rumpus start!

i can't put it down.

dave eggers has written a novelisation of the screenplay of the classic picture book.

his max is a high-energy, imaginative and confused boy whose family life is less than perfect. he escapes in a boat and finds himself on an island with a bunch of beasts as ready for madness hilarious rioting as max himself.

so far it is spectacular! magnificent! it basically just tickles me pink. one brilliant line, max is standing on top of the kitchen counter, howling like a wolf while his mother stands below becoming more and more angry with her out-of-control son. she tells him he's too old to be on the counter. he looks down at her: "you're too old to be so short! and your makeup's smeared!...woman, feed me!" (p.73)

i'm loving it. proper review to follow...

oscar wilde's tomb

i took these photos at the pere lachaise cemetery in paris, 2006. i went back and visited oscar again in 2008. (he hadn't changed)