2015: My Year of Reading

Once again I’m a bit slow on the uptake with my end-of-year summaries of my literary life in 2015, but better late than never!

Last year I participated in the Australian Women Writers Challenge and the GoodReads challenge. While I met my goal of reading 20 books and reviewing 10 books for the former (I read 44 and reviewed 10), for the latter I only made it to 76 out of 100 books, which was 5 more books than last year’s.

One of my absolute favourite books for the year was Michael Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, which I read on a dark and wintry New Year’s Day in Newcastle in England, in the house of some lovely friends. It’s a peculiar work about a missionary sent to colonise aliens on another planet. About six months after I read it, I realised the swirling rain on the planet, which came and went like a three-dimensional thing, was a metaphor for grief, and my admiration for the book was renewed.

I also loved Kazuo Ishiguoro’s The Buried Giant, a retelling of the fable of the Green Knight, because I could never quite work out what was happening and I like being unsettled by texts. I also liked the almost child-like way in which it was narrated. While in Rome I finished Peter Watts’ Rifters trilogy which my boyfriend suggested to me as research for my mermaid book. I still think often about that pressurised, underwater world with its attenuated bodies and tough female protagonist.

Closer to home, Fiona Wright’s Small Acts of Disappearance, about her struggle with anorexia, was exquisite. I would have written a review of it except that it was a little too close to home and I couldn’t have been objective. I also enjoyed the clever puzzle of Debra Adelaide’s latest novel, The Women’s Pages.

My reading of Indigenous women writers over the year was woeful – I only managed two books, Ali Cobby Eckermann’s Too Afraid to Cry and Gayle Kennedy’s Me, Antman and Fleabag. I’m aiming to redress this in 2016. I’m also going to try and read and review books of poetry, as I’ll be writing more of this and need to study it.

In terms of international writers, for whom I wasn’t setting myself a target or making myself aware of gender bias, I read 5 more books by male writers (15 books) than female writers (10 books). Last year this was the opposite, with 7 books by male writers and 11 by female writers, so it doesn’t look like there’s a pattern yet.

I’ve set myself the same challenges again this year, and am more hopeful of meeting them, if only because I’ll be forcing myself to have the evenings off to read and rest. Having just come back from a gorgeous holiday in Thailand with plenty of luxurious reading time, I’m already ahead!

The list below is more for my own records than anyone else’s, and because I find the interface at GoodReads to be almost impossible.

Australian Women Writers (reviews have hyperlinks)

1.     Waiting Room: A Memoir, Gabrielle Carey

2.     The World Without Us, Mireille Juchau

4.     Puberty Blues, Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey

5.     Remotely Fashionable: A Story of Subtropical Style, Nadia Buick and Madeleine King

6.     Anchor Point, Alice Robinson

7.     The Women's Pages, Debra Adelaide

8.     The Bone Chime Song and Other Stories, Jo Anderton

9.     The Golden Age, Joan London

10.  Small Acts of Disappearance, Fiona Wright

11.  The Dangerous Bride, Lee Kofman

12. Elemental, Amanda Curtin

13.  Vulture's Gate, Kirsty Murray

14.  Stanley and Sophie, Kate Jennings

15.  Grimsdon, Deborah Abela

16.  Pieces Of A Girl, Charlotte Wood

17.  The Landing, Susan Johnson

18.  The Natural Way of Things, Charlotte Wood

19.  Too afraid to cry, Ali Cobby Eckermann

20.  The Delinquents: Text Classics, Criena Rohan

21.  Salt Creek, Lucy Treloar

22.  In My Mother's Hands, Biff Ward

23.  Georgiana Molloy: The Mind That Shines, Bernice Barry

24.  The Life Of Houses, Lisa Gorton

25.  That Oceanic Feeling, Fiona Capp

26.  The Night Guest, Fiona McFarlane

27.  Me, Antman & Fleabag, Gayle Kennedy

28.  Hopscotch, Jane Messer

29.  My Blood's Country: A Journey Through the Landscape that Inspired Judith Wright's Poetry, Fiona Capp

30.  The Strays, Emily Bitto

31.  The Floating Garden, Emma Ashmere

32.  The Anchoress, Robyn Cadwallader

33.  Snowy River Man, Lizzy Chandler

34.  The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine, Krissy Kneen

35.  Salt Rain, Sarah Armstrong

36.  Deeper Water, Jessie Cole

37.  Razorhurst, Justine Larbalestier

38.  Sustenance, Simone Lazaroo

39.  This House of Grief, Helen Garner

40.  Reefscape: Reflections on the Great Barrier Reef, Rosaleen Love

41.  Only the Animals, Ceridwen Dovey

42.  The Coral Battleground, Judith A. Wright

43.  Piano Lessons, Anna Goldsworthy

44.  The Midnight Dress, Karen Foxlee

Australian Male Writers

45.  Ugly: My Memoir, Robert Hoge

46.  The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan

47.  The Horses, William Lane

48.  A World of Other People, Steven Carroll

49.  The Reef: A Passionate History, Iain McCalman

50.  Clade, JamesBradley

51.  The Element of Need: Murder and Memory in Adelaide, James Bradley

International Women Writers

52.  Allegiant (Divergent, #3), Veronica Roth

53.  Insurgent (Divergent, #2), Veronica Roth

54.  Divergence (Divergence, #1), Veronica Roth

55.  Blue Nights, Joan Didion

56.  Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel

57.  A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, Eimear McBride

58.  Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned", Lena Dunham

59.  Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay

60.  H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald

61.  Reading Victorian Deafness: Signs and Sounds in Victorian Literature and Culture, Jennifer Esmail

International Male Writers

62.  The Dreaming Land, Martin Edmond

63.  Loosed upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction, John Joseph Adams

64.  The Slow Regard of Silent Things, Patrick Rothfuss

65.  All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr

66.  Railsea, China Mieville

67.  The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks

68.  The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro

69.  These Are the Names, Tommy Wieringa

70.  Aquarium, David Vann

71.  The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss, Edmund de Waal

72.  Behemoth (Rifters, #3), Peter Watts

73.  Maelstrom (Rifters, #2), Peter Watts

74.  A History of Silence: a memoir, Lloyd Jones

75.  Starfish (Rifters, #1), Peter Watts

76.  The Book of Strange New Things, Michel Faber

Review of The World Without Us

The opening line of this novel, ‘He’d been climbing for three hours when he saw the odd colour through the tawny trees’, and the evocation of a tryst – the character comes across a naked woman roped with scars, about to take a dip in the chilly river - echoes the opening of Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour so strongly that I expected a flourish of Monarch butterflies in the next few lines. Instead, there were bees, referenced through the figure of Evangeline, the woman whom Jim stumbles across. She sells the family’s honey at the market in the town of Bidgalong and her husband, Stefan, is a beekeeper. The community in which they live, with its broken commune and hippies, is reminiscent of Byron Bay.

Any book about bees, these days, is usually a reference to environmental destruction, with good reason: in the last five years in the US, 30% of the national bee population has disappeared due to colony collapse. There are a number of reasons, including pesticides and climactic extremes such as drought and harsh winters. Australian scientists have suggested that these stressors mean that the next generation matures too quickly, and then they die when they go out to forage for food because it’s such an energy-intensive activity.

In Mireille Juchau's The World Without Us, the characters’ trauma is also intergenerational. Tess and Meg have lost their sister to leukaemia. Tess becomes mute with grief, her mother Evangeline stops painting and wanders the countryside with an umbrella, and her father Stefan takes to drink. Evangeline’s grief is layered onto an older sadness occasioned by the breakdown of the Hive, a commune in which she was raised, and which is stirred up by Stefan’s discovery of bones on their property. Meanwhile, Jim, Tess’s schoolteacher who has relocated from the city, struggles to establish himself after a failed relationship involving children. He is visited by the loss of his mother when he was a boy, while another secondary character, Tommy, looks after his mother, afflicted by dementia, and searches for his absent father.

In less capable hands, this book would have been a disaster. There are so many strands, so many parentless children, that it could easily have spiralled out of control or tipped into melodrama. Instead, Juchau keeps the threads tightly bound and contained. Sometimes this makes the writing affectless, but this is a necessary characteristic when so many internal storms populate the pages, and it is still undeniably beautiful, such as when Tess sees a native hive:

'That sound getting steadily louder, the livid air pocked with busy insects. Closer, inside the dim cavern of that ruined hall, the noise is unmistakeable.

As her eyes adjust Tess sees what’s hanging from the ceiling and jutting like lichen in thick, creamy layers. They protrude from the wall and fan from the corners. They garland the roof beams. Great waxy chandeliers lit with yellow bees’ (161).'

Garland. Creamy. Chandeliers. All adjectives that denote wealthy and luxury.

Throughout the novel, the bees symbolise humans’ attempts to keep functioning when there are internal stressors such as loss and grief, and external stressors such as fracking, which divides the community. By transferring the non-human to the realm of the human, it shows us how difficult it is for anything to survive when too much strain is placed upon it. Perhaps if readers can see how a human ecosystem can fall apart, they might also see how a non-human ecosystem can be similarly impacted, particularly by their own actions.

Within this, the native hive, so luxuriously rendered, could be seen as a symbol of hope. We have one last chance – Paris made that clear to everyone across the world – and if we squander it, we’ll die. This will be no great loss to nature – it will flourish without us – but if we lose each other, as this novel signals, we’ll be decimated by the loss of our environment and of our selves.

This is my 9th review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Review of The Night Guest

I hadn’t intended to review The Night Guest. While I enjoyed reading it, I didn’t like the ending and the book left me with a clammy feeling that I didn’t want to revisit. However, as I’ve been musing about animals and carers for my book When the World Shivered, I thought might be worth thinking about further, as The Night Guest features both.

This is the story of Ruth, an elderly widow who lives on an isolated stretch of coast, and believes herself to be visited by a tiger. After its first foray into the house, in which she hears the noises it makes, ‘loud and wet, with a low, guttural breathing hum punctuated by little cautionary yelps’ (2), she is reminded ‘of something vital – not of youth, exactly, but of the urgency of youth’ (6). Her childhood was spent on Fiji, where her parents were missionaries, and where she fashioned an unrequited romance for a doctor.

Shortly after the tiger’s first manifestation, a woman named Frida arrives to take care of Ruth. Rather than being preyed up on by the tiger, Ruth is gradually, subtly, threatened by this carer, a muscular woman who is also from Fiji. She tends to Ruth so efficiently that Ruth cannot see how she would survive without her, and at the same time she infiltrates Ruth's few relationships and persuades her to sell her car.

McFarlane’s hand is surest when she bleeds reality and fiction into one another through Ruth’s wavering point of view. The reader is uncertain as to whether Frida is friend or foe, or whether Ruth is losing her mind and cannot read the situation clearly. The ending provides answers, but until this point, the reader is held in suspense.

Herein lies the horror of the story. Ruth is physically, intellectually and emotionally isolated, and vulnerable to the depredations of others. A woman who is mean to care for her becomes a predator, like the tiger. And yet the bond between them is close, as it would be when people’s daily rhythms are knotted together. An acquaintance, Ellen, muses ‘She remembered the way Ruth and Frida had run together like lovers, and how embarrassed she’d been by that intimacy, and, later, how unsettled’ (273). The tiger also has multivalent meanings, being at times threatening, and at other times a delight. At the end of the novel, Ruth ‘leaned her head into his soft chest, where his great heart ticked’ (268).

Frida is yoked with the tiger through this thematic similarity and their simultaneous appearance, and through a scene towards the end in which Frida fights the animal. ‘There had been no beginning to Frida and the tiger, and now there would be no end,’ McFarlane writes. ‘They both snarled and bared their teeth, Frida called out the strange syllables of a warlike alphabet’ (224). These similarities can be read as a metaphor for colonialism, for the imposition of power upon vulnerable subjects, and how they fight back. The tiger invokes Ruth’s childhood and her missionary parents, who colonised Fijians through Christianity, and at the same time it reminds us that we are really not so different from animals: we are both prey and predator as we try to survive.

The vivid evocation of Ruth’s childhood also suggests the circularity of our lives – when we are old, we become like children. Our minds, sometimes sharp and sometimes wandering, can be just as fantastical as theirs, but while this is tolerated in young people, it isn’t so much in the elderly.

There is much to plumb in this novel, which won the NSW Premier’s award and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin. I heard McFarlane speak at the Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference last year (ASAL always have at least one session to showcase Australian writers, which I think is great) and thought her intellectually astute. She has a book of short stories coming out soon, The High Places, which will be published by Penguin and, based on this book, well worth a read.

This is my 8th review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Review of Remotely Fashionable

Readers who follow my blog or my feeds might have gathered that I have an addiction to frocks, shoes and handbags. I know it’s an irresponsible addiction for a writer to have, and I’ve lost track of the times I’ve told friends that I’m going to stop buying frocks because I’m so broke. Somehow, I always find the money for it, even if it means I have nothing to eat by the end of the fortnight. On the other hand, I don’t really have any other vices: I don’t eat much, I don’t drink much, I don’t smoke, I don’t have a car, and I don’t have a mortgage (though I should be saving for one). Obviously I can’t be a writer without any vices, so it’s imperative that I buy a frock now and then.

Last year I stumbled upon The Fashion Archives when I was stuck at procrastination station. This is an online publication created by Madeleine King and Nadia Buick that looks at the history of Queensland fashion. In 2013-14 they released a 12-issue online publication, The Fashion Archives, which was followed in 2014-15 by High Street Histories, for which they received a fellowship to do research at the John Oxley Library.

Then I discovered they were putting together a book with crowd funding and that, if one threw in some money, one could get a copy of said book and go to a party at its launch. I could get frocked up! I drew out my overused plastic from my wallet.

Last week, Remotely Fashionable: A Story of Subtropical Style arrived, and what a beauty it is. The book, nestled in a box stamped with blue, is crammed with wonderful photographs and readable essays. I went to the party (at the charming Avid Reader, no less) wearing a Review frock patterned with pink hibiscus and pale green palms. I took my fashionable neighbour along too, and looked at all the other people wearing their interesting clothes. It was yet another gorgeous Brisbane evening of books, balmy weather and lovely people.

Why a book on Queensland fashion? Well, no one’s written one before. Queensland, as the authors write, ‘is typically dismissed by its savvier southern counterparts as betraying a gauche, derivative, superficial, or provincial approach to culture and taste. While its natural beauty, tropical climate, and relaxed attitude are seen as major assets for tourism and lifestyle, these same qualities are often considered anathema to the high-minded pursuits of culture and aesthetics, including style’ (13). And then there’s fashion itself which, being associated with women, has traditionally been devalued, ‘the close relationship between women and their clothing … [has] often been perceived in terms of frivolity and indulgence’ (14).

This book fills this gap in Queensland’s history in an interesting and accessible way, beginning with apt foreword by Easton & Pearson. When they started their label, these designers didn’t mention that they were from Brisbane until they started showing in Paris.

There follows an essay by Associate Professor Margaret Maynard, a dress historian, who discusses how Queensland’s climate and class impacted on the state’s fashion. Although the fashionable upper classes looked to Paris for style, they modified the fabrics to suit the climate, using muslin and light silk in summer, while men wore light-coloured jackets or trousers.

I was impressed with Amanda Hayman’s ‘A Brief Redress of Indigenous Fashion in Australia’. Amanda, who is an Indigenous artist and Digital Exhibitions Program Officer at kuril dhagan at the State Library, describes how ‘clothing and body adornment have a close relationship to Indigenous identity and can be viewed as a reflection of country’ (41) and are made from natural materials such as wood, bark, fur, feathers, grass, twine and seeds. Following colonisation however, Aboriginal cultural identity and expression was suppressed, and it wasn’t until after the 1967 referendum that Indigenous people’s wardrobes began to reflect their increasing opportunities. I thought her closing line neat and apt: ‘Just as fashion often resembles trends from the past, with certain cuts and styles from eras gone by reinvigorated by the designer’s personal touch, contemporary Indigenous fashion is able to connect with social and political events in recent history as well as ancient cultural knowledge’ (46).

I also loved Melissa Bellanta and Alana Piper’s essay on the ‘flashy’ dressing of late 19th and early 20th century prostitutes, especially the description of their finery (including fur, kimonos and smoking caps), tattoos and sass. Under the Contagious Diseases Act of 1868, they were required to undergo fortnightly examinations (Tasmania was the only other state to pass this kind of law – go Queensland! Still conservative 150 years later and still outlawing abortion). The women stuck two fingers up at the law and ‘ordered hansom cabs to take them to the doctor’s and entered them dressed in the showiest of styles’ (51).

The collection of essays closes with one by Nadia Buick, who discusses the huge popularity of exhibitions on fashion, both in Australia and internationally. These shows indicate that there is widespread interest in fashion and that it shouldn’t be dismissed as a trivial topic.

The rest of the book has images of vintage Queensland fashion, and entries on people and places that are significant in Queensland’s fashion history. This is a book that’s interesting to read and lovely to look at – and a great Xmas pressie for all the fashionistas out there.

This is my 7th review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Review of Stanley and Sophie

I picked up this small volume from the library after I’d written my review of Hopscotch, Jane Messer’s account of the impact of the Global Financial Crisis upon a middle-class Sydney family. I dimly remembered having read another review or article about Jennings’ 2003 novel about Wall Street, Moral Hazard, which commented about how few women write about the financial world, or feature in it as characters with agency.

As I searched in vain for that article, I disappeared down the rabbit hole of the internet, and came up with Jennings’ memoir Stanley and Sophie. Having been revising my own memoir, and researching writing about animals for my young adult novel, I thought I might kill two birds with one stone by reading this book.

The factual and fictional blur frequently in Jennings’ writing. Moral Hazard is a novel about a woman who writes speeches for financiers by day, and by night cares for a husband losing his mind to Alzheimer’s. This book, as a memoir, picks up where that left off, with Jennings living in New York and mourning to her husband who also had died from Alzheimer’s.

Jennings had been raised on a farm in Australia and for her, dogs were working animals kept outside, ‘housed in kennels made from corrugated iron that were well away from where we lived, with no concession to the weather, which in winter was cold enough for ice form on puddles and dams and in the summer hot enough to make the lead fall out of pencils’ (11). When the dogs grew old, they ‘were retired under a rainwater tank where it was blessedly shady, sweetly cool’ (11). In her personality, she was avowedly unsentimental. ‘Call me cold,’ she states. ‘Actually, call me vinegary’ (10).

Why, then, does she fall head over heels in love with a dog? She missed her husband and her marriage, but she was also suffering from ‘the prolonged exposure to Alzheimer’s … I hadn’t been released from it. Instead, I was trapped in a place where reluctance leached through the walls, nihilism pooled on the floor. I tried caulking the holes with work and antidepressants, but still the insistent seepage, still the sorrow. Ashes and dishwater’ (20). When she met Stanley, ‘an aristocratic alpha male border terrier’ (4), it’s love at first sight. ‘Stanley had a job’, she writes, ‘to bring me into the sunlight’ (21).

And so he did, by offering structure to her days, walks, companionship and entertainment. However, Stanley was lonely, and when another border terrier, Sophie, was offered up as a companion, Jennings adopted her too. Despite their daily walks, however, the dogs were confined to an apartment, and Jennings was confined ‘by memories of my marriage, by places and possessions that triggered the memories’ (91). She made the heartbreaking decision to give the dogs away.

The second part of the book is set in Bali, where Jennings stays with her brother. The dogs in this place are not reared for companionship, but as offerings. Once despatched, they keep watch on the house as spirits. Jennings comes to know as macaque known as Chico, who becomes tetchy for a mate. They find him a small female known as Cheeky at the bird market in Denpasar, where macaques ‘sat on top of cages, drooping and despondent, their will to live all but extinguished. Some would become pets, while others would be slaughtered for their brains, believed to impart energy. All of them had been poached, their mothers killed’ (125).

It was at this point that the book came alive for me; previously I’d had no connection to it, possibly because Jennings hadn’t been feeling much either. Cheeky, motherless, attaches herself to Jennings and wails when she leaves, ‘a never-ending susurrus of complaint and dispossession’ (128). The sounds and the experience, she writes, ‘tapped directly into the sadness that had accumulated in me. My stiff upper lip, kept as firmly in place as possible since my husband’s death, went slack. I started to cry and couldn’t stop’ (129).

It was also at this point that the book became more intellectually engaging. Is a dog, however cossetted, well-fed, well-walked and groomed, any different to a monkey tied to a chain, or to the endangered baboon and baby Sumatran tiger, kept under the floorboards by a vendor at the bird market for buyers of stature? We keep animals for our pleasure, but what about theirs? Do they want to be our pets, and are we right to make them so even after thousands of years of domestication? And why do we keep doing this: making them our own? Is it because their humanity sometimes exceeds ours?

For against Jennings’ grief and interactions with animals is set the destruction of the World Trade Towers and the Bali bombings. ‘I loved my dogs,’ she writes, ‘and my heart went out to the monkeys. When we cry for our animals, we cross for the whole sodding mess. The whole sodding, sorry mess’ (156).

Perhaps the answer lies in a story written by Sophie’s new owner, who fell for her too and knew she would be hers. He describes how dogs ‘take us out of our brains and down into the street, where we are more real, more vivid; their attention keeps us in place and allows us constant contact with the sensate world in which we live’ (179). Animals, in other words, remind us that we are animals too, and therein lies their joy. For people corralled in houses away from the brush of undergrowth, with tarmac instead of soil underfoot, the sensations of stroking a dog’s head, of feeling a cat’s claws as they knead before settling into your lap, of studying the glossy round of a bird’s eye, all remind us of who we are and where we have come from.

As with many of Jennings’ other works (such as Snake, which I reviewed last year), this is a small book which, like gelato, melts on the tongue, her phrases like dissolving sugar. Stanley slept with her at night, ‘starting the evening curled into a tight comma, by morning monopolising all the pillow like a grand pasha’ (21). The chapters are succinct, their endings often a perfect cadence, as in ‘If I Could Stop the Wind Blowing’. After an altercation with a Republican over Stanley’s marking of his door, Sophie is encouraged to forever after ‘hoist her bottom high in the air and splash her message on the glossy black paint’ (79) and she is subsequently rewarded with the superlative, ‘Best girl in the world’ (79). I could read Jennings’ dogs on the page as well as if I might have in person, and this lent extra charm to the work.

As I’m deaf, I compensate for the things I can’t hear by reading body language, and on I love reading dogs as much as I do people. When my father leaves the house to work on his renovations, his whippet paces delicately, tail between her legs, her eyes like dark saucers. She and my mother’s dog, a tiny, feisty cavadoodle, will sit by the window all day, noses pressed to the glass, until he returns. My sister’s cocker spaniel is Bentley, a dumb blonde of a dog who dug a solid hole in my heart when I lived in her house for a year. A puppy, he sat at my feet as I wrote Entitlement and followed me from room to room. Now an adult, he’ll sit when he’s told to, but quivers with the anticipation of my body loosening and bending down to embrace him, after which point he will jump uncontrollably. As Jennings puts it, ‘What we love most about dogs is that they are transparent, their emotions pure, unmuddied by ambiguity even when torn by conflicting desires. They express themselves with graphic simplicity’ (42). Even I, not demonstrative by nature, am secretly delighted by the way he comes barrelling through the door when he sees me, a 20 kg mass of fur and enthusiasm. When do we ever bowl each over with such love?

This is my 5th review for the 2015 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Just Read Readathon

The last readathon I did was in Boggabri Primary School, when I asked my rellies to sponsor me for each book I read. They nervously nominated 5c per book, knowing how fast I read. I watched their faces as they calculated how much they’d be left out of pocket.  

That at least was a more interesting enterprise than the Multiple Sclerosis Walkathon around the school. I finished the course early, got bored, sat in the grass, then found some catheads to put in the path of stragglers. Someone dobbed me in, so I was made to stand in the circle of shame at lunchtime to be interrogated by Mrs Woodley.

Fortunately I am now an adult and can do adult readathons which don’t involve catheads or burnt grass or heat rashes. I do however, still want some cash.

This is for an initiative organised by author Jane Rawson to raise money for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. The ILF, founded by Suzy Wilson (who runs Riverbend Books in Brisbane), aims to address literacy levels in remote communities.

Many Indigenous kids, particularly in remote communities, cannot get their hands on books. Here are some stats from the Indigenous Literacy Foundation:

·      Indigenous homes, particularly those in remote communities, have fewer books, computers and other educational resources than non-Indigenous homes.

·      The gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students emerges early. Non-Indigenous students far out-perform Indigenous students in benchmark tests for reading, writing and numeracy in Year 3 and Year 5.

·      By the age of 15, more than one-third of Australia’s Indigenous students ‘do not have the adequate skills and knowledge in reading literacy to meet real-life challenges and may well be disadvantaged in their lives beyond school’.

·      In the Northern Territory, only one in five children living in very remote Indigenous communities can read at the accepted minimum standard.

The Indigenous Literacy Foundation gets books for these kids and helps them learn to read.

Books have nourished me all my life, particularly when I was younger & didn’t have the social skills necessary for interacting with people. It would be wonderful if more kids had access to the vivid worlds of literature; they certainly kept me from boredom & loneliness,

The Just Read challenge is on over June & July, and I’m using it to read the swathe of unread books on my shelves, including:

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan

The Island Within, Richard Nelson

Z: a novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, Therese Anne Fowler

The Night Guest, Fiona McFarlane

Not that Kind of Girl Lena Dunham

The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert

Georgiana Molloy, Bernice Barry

As well as the 50 billion literary journals lying in piles around my flat.

If you want to throw money at me for reading (please do!), here’s my fundraising page. At least this way you can pay a flat rate, and avoid my rellies’ nervousness as their hands hovered over their purses.

Review of The Floating Garden

Soooo … it’s June, and it feels like my year is just beginning. After the postdoc application, which nearly killed me, I finished my book proposal for Finding Maud, my memoir about deafness. I’ve also been teaching creative writing at the University of Queensland one day a week (on top of my other job), which has been fantastic, but it requires truckloads of energy, at least for a deaf person. I only have one more batch of marking to do, then presentations at a workshop, symposium and two conferences, and I’ll be a free agent again.

And so, after a blogging hiatus on account of my perpetual exhaustion, I’m penning my first review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge (better late than never!). Emma Ashmere’s very pretty novel, The Floating Garden, has been sitting on my desk awaiting a review all this time. I was approached by Spinifex Press to write a blurb for the book, and my beau & I intended to travel to Mullumbimby for Emma’s launch, but the heavens opened that Friday and it wasn’t safe to travel, so we sadly rainchecked the trip.

With its pellucid prose and descriptions of gardens and early 20th century spiritualists, I loved this novel. It opens in the bedroom of a boarding house run by Ellis Gilbey, in which everything is ‘coated in a chalky sheen’ (3) from the construction of the nearby Sydney Harbour Bridge. Ellis is a quiet, self-contained woman, who shies from the intrusive interest of others. She loves women, writes a gardening column under a nom-de-plume, and is being kicked out of the boarding house to make way for the bridge.

Her story intertwines with that of Rennie, an English artist married to a wealthy, brutal man. While elucidating their painful relationship and Rennie’s hopes of flight, the narrative delves into Ellis’ escape from the country as a girl, and how she fell in with theosophists in Sydney and fell, too, for a fellow performer. I thoroughly enjoyed the descriptions of spiritual chicanery, being familiar with them from my research on Rosa Praed, who was a theosophist (among many other religious persuasions).

When Ellis and Rennie cross paths, the story shifts to Lane Cove and to a beautiful garden: ‘Tufts of nodding russet-coloured grasses were alive with the whirr of insects. Drifts of white flannel flowers brightened an untamed bed of greenery. Beside them waratahs raised their waxy flaming heads. Wattle trees draped across the path. Green and red kangaroo paws raised their slender hands to the sky’ (223). By the end, both women, although not entirely comfortable with one another, still find niches into which they nestle.

This novel is driven by character rather than plot. I like people and so I enjoy these kinds of books, but what I enjoyed even more was the evocation of 1920s Sydney and the wealth of sensory description – not just visual details, but touch and smell as well: ‘The smell of the man's tobacco threaded towards her on the wind. There was another smell, the smell of spring, of working with her mother in the garden before the drought’ (28). These details brought the novel to vividly to life.

The descriptions of women’s clothes was also charming. At a gallery exhibition, Rennie’s friend shrieked ‘amid a frisson of beads swinging wildly from a dress cut so low at the Back Rennie couldn’t help but stare down the slender ravine of Bertha’s derriere’ (19). Fashion is also used to delineate class. On meeting Rennie, Ellis observes how ‘her hat was made of fine pale straw, fashionably moulded to the head. Against the falling darkness of the street, smoke swirled around her in a diaphanous cape. Her silk white stockings glimmered against the cobblestones as if her torso had been set on two pillars of light. Ellis’ eyes went to the woman’s lapel where a yellow rose rested its delicate head against a spray of ivy leaves’ (107). 

Thematically, the novel evokes the marginalisation of lesbians and their stories. It focuses  not on the arches of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, but what happens at its feet. The setting suggests that we should not always focus on dominant, obvious narratives, because what happens in their shadow is equally interesting. Emma spoke about her novel on ABC Radio, and you can listen to it here. 

This sumptuous book was a joy to read, and it’s apt that it has kicked off my reviewing, however belated, for the Australian Women Writers Challenge. I'm really looking forward to seeing what Emma does next.

2014: My Year of Reading

2014 was the year I discovered GoodReads, and now I can’t imagine how I was keeping track of my reading without it. In fact, I don’t think I was at all. Last year’s list of the books I read was compiled from memory, but I don’t think my mind can encompass that this year. According to GoodReads (bless ‘em) I read 71 books, which is 9 more than last year. 

I read and reviewed slightly fewer books for the Australian Women Writers Challenge (read 42 and reviewed 10 in 2014, as opposed to reading 43 and reviewing 14 in 2013), but I also increased the time I gave to the Challenge by organising guests authors, giveaways and interviews (more of this in a soon-to-be posted post on my year of writing). Given my hectic schedule, I’m aiming to read and review roughly the same number this year, but I’m also signing up to the 2015 South Asian Women Writers Challenge. This was prompted by a Twitter conversation with a lady who pointed out that there was only one woman on a list of 10 award-winning books by Asian writers which I had re-posted in my feed, and I realised my own ignorance about our neighbouring women writers.

The standout book for my year was Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists, a story about a woman brutalised in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Malaysia, who, once she’s free, creates a Japanese garden as an act of penance. The writing was crisp and restrained, the story symbolic and suspenseful. The setting, in the Cameron highlands of Malaysia, was familiar, as we holidayed there when I turned 14 (another overseas birthday, this one in a hotel in Malacca with a cake from a bakery), but richly detailed.

Close on the heels of this was Ellen van Neerven’s Heat and Light, which I loved for its sensuality, and also because I’d read nothing like it before. And Kristell Thornell’s Night Street about artist Clarice Beckett (although I read it in 2013, I reviewed it last year), which was a poignant, moving book.

Other fantastic reads (in no order) were Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch for its dense and luscious prose; Diane Cook’s uneasy, dystopian stories in Man V. Nature; Nicola Griffith’s Hild, a lengthy historical fiction novel about a smart and perceptive girl who used her brains for power in a Christianising England; Donna McDonald’s indispensable memoir The Art of Being Deaf; Nike Sulway’s speculative fiction novel Rupetta for its originality and sadness; the quiet, contained and peculiar Traitor by Stephen Daisley, about an old New Zealand soldier; Inga Simpson’s tender Mr Wigg, which had a slow and cumulative power; Barbara Kingsolver’s climate change novel Flight Behaviour which every man, woman & household pet should read; and Andrew McGahan’s novels Wonders of a Godless World and Underground. McGahan is the kind of novelist I aspire to be: he’s not afraid to try new genres, and each time he does so masterfully. 

Below is the complete list of my the books I read, more for my own records than for the assumption that anyone will be interested (!)

Australian Women Writers Challenge – books reviewed

1.    Heat and Light, Ellen Van Neerven 

2.    Ghost Wife: A Memoir of Love and Defiance, Michelle Dicinoski

3.    The First Week, Margaret Merrilees

4.    Snake, Kate Jennings

5.    The Art of Being Deaf: A Memoir, Donna McDonald

6.    Rupetta, Nike Sulway

7.    Thornwood House, Anna Romer

8.    Kayang and Me, Kim Scott    

9.    The Singing Gold, Dorothy Cottrell

10. Night Street, Kristel Thornell (read in 2013)

Australian Women Writers Challenge – books read

11.    The Women in Black, Madeleine St. John

12.    Foreign Soil, Maxine Beneba Clarke

13.    The Etched City, K.J. Bishop

14.    Resurrection, P.A. McDermott

15.    Beams Falling, P.M. Newton

16.    A Kindness Cup, Thea Astley

17.    Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists, Jane Rawson

18.I for Isobel, Amy Witting

19.    Amy's Children, Olga Masters

20.Dancing on Coral, Glenda Adams

21.    The Ark, Annabel Smith

22.Madness: a Memoir, Kate  Richards

23.All the Birds, Singing, Evie Wyld

24.When the Night Comes, Favel Parrett

25.The Good Daughter, Honey Brown

26.Red Queen, Honey Brown

27.Darkness on the Edge of Town, Jessie Cole

28.Nest, Inga Simpson

29.The Seal Woman, Beverley Farmer

30.The Disappearance of Ember Crow, Ambelin Kwaymullina

31. The Great Unknown, Angela Meyer

32.Anguli Ma, a Gothic Tale, Chi Vu

33.The Romance of a Station, Rosa Praed

34.Unpolished Gem, Alice Pung

35.Camera Obscura, Kathryn Lomer

36.The Bride Price, Cat Sparks

37.An Australian Heroine, R Murray Prior

38.The Watch Tower, Elizabeth Harrower

39.The Swan Book, Alexis Wright

40.Mr Wigg, Inga Simpson

41. Policy and Passion, Rosa Praed

42.My Beautiful Enemy, Cory Taylor

43.Red Dirt Talking, Jacqueline Wright

Other Australian books:

44.To Name Those Lost, Rohan Wilson

45.Barracuda, Christos Tsiolkas

46.Traitor, Stephen Daisley

47.The Weaver Fish, Robert Edeson

48.Over the Water, William  Lane

49.The Tribe, Michael Mohammed Ahmad

50.Wonders of a Godless World, Andrew McGahan

51. Underground, Andrew McGahan

52.The Roving Party, Rohan Wilson

53.The Local Wildlife, Robert Drewe

Other international books:

54.We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler

55.The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt

56.Watership Down, Richard Adams

57.Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us about Ourselves, James Nestor

58.The Forever War, Joe Haldeman

59.Man V. Nature: Stories, Diane Cook

60.Hild, Nicola Griffith

61. How to Build a Girl, Caitlin Moran

62.Nora Webster, Colm Toibin

63.Daniel Deronda, George Eliot

64.The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafón

65.Flight Behavior, Barbara Kingsolver

66.Don't Cry, Mary Gaitskill

67.Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson

68.Blue Is the Warmest Colour, Julie Maroh

69.The Lover, Marguerite Duras

70.The Mermaid Chair, Sue Monk Kidd

71.  My Family and Other Animals, Gerald Durrell

72.The Garden of Evening Mists, Twan Eng Tan

2013: My Year of Reading

Having recovered from the excesses of Xmas and New Year (always difficult for someone who can’t hold her alcohol, & who was given the flu by her brother to boot), I’m sitting at my desk to look over what I read in 2013. 

Those who follow this blog might know that I’m a contributing editor to the Australian Women Writers Challenge, an initiative established by Elizabeth Lhuede in 2012 in response to the lack of recognition for women writers in Australia (I have blogged on this previously).  I’m part of a team of volunteers who write monthly round-ups (and will soon be posting our annual round-ups) of different genres and fields, mine being diversity, short stories and poetry.  Over the year I helped organise a spotlight on Indigenous women writers, and women writers of diverse heritage, and this year I’m planning to arrange similar spotlights on lesbian writers and women writers with disabilities.

Through the challenge, I’ve come to know some wonderful readers and bloggers, including Elizabeth herself; Sue of Whispering Gums, a champion of Australian literature; Marilyn Brady of Me, You and Books who runs the Global Women of Colour challenge (of which I’m also a participant); and Annabel Smith, author of the charming novel Whisky Charlie Foxtrot.  For a writer who spend many lonely hours with just a laptop for company, such a community of writers and readers is a saving grace.

Below is the list of the books I read over the past year.  For the AWW challenge, I had planned to read 20 and review 10, and ended up reading 43 and reviewing 14.  I would have liked to have reviewed more, but time was at a premium.  Altogether my reading totalled 62 books, which is a bit disappointing for someone who needs to read to improve her craft.  On the other hand I did have a horrendously busy year, so this coming year I should be able to get through more.  My favourites were Merlinda Bobis’ Fish-Hair Woman (winner of the Most Underrated Book Award), because it was so different and poetic, Kirstel Thornell’s Night Street about the artist Clarice Beckett, and Kris Olsson’s beautiful memoir, Boy, Lost.  Others I really enjoyed were Michelle de Krester’s award-winning Questions of Travelfor its language, characterisation and almost 19thC sensibility, and Venero Armanno’s Black Mountain for being completely out of left-field (as I like being surprised).

This year I’m still aiming to read 20 books and review 10 for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.  I will most likely do more than that, but wanted to leave room as I’d liked to read more international literature this year, and return to my enduring love, nineteenth century fiction.

If you’d like to sign up to the Australian Women Writers Challenge in 2014, you can do so here. 

Books reviewed for AWW Challenge:

1.The Dark Wet, Jess Huon

2.The Romantic, Kate Holden

3.Making a Meal of It, Jui-Shan Chang

4.Purple Threads, Jeanine Leane

5.Nest, Janine Burke

6.Like a House on Fire, Cate Kennedy

7.An Opening, Stephanie Radok

8.The Beloved, Annah Faulkner

9.The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf, Ambelin Kwaymullina

10. Mullumbimby, Melissa Lucashenko

11.Boy, Lost, Kris Olsson

12. Mazin Grace, Dylan Coleman

13. A Beautiful Place to Die, Malla Nunn

14. Letters to the End of Love, Yvette Walker

Books read for AWW Challenge:

15. Matilda is Missing, Caroline Overington

16. The Fine Colour of Rust, Paddy O’Reilly

17. The Old School, P.M. Newton

18. The Scent of Belonging, Rosie Abbott

19. The Light Between Oceans, M.L. Stedman

20. The Railwayman’s Wife, Ashley Hay

21. Domestic Archaeology, Kelly Pilgrim-Byrne

22. Ghost Wife, Michelle Dickinoski

23. Electricity for Beginners, Michelle Dickinoski

24. Steeplechase, Krissy Kneen

25. The Inheritance of Ivorie Hammer, Edwina Preston

26. Whisky Charlie Foxtrot, Annabel Smith

27. Black Juice, Margo Lanagan

28. The Burial, Courtney Collins

29. The Girl with No Hands, Angela Slatter

30. Questions of Travel, Michelle de Krester

31. Siddon Rock, Glenda Guest

32. Carpentaria, Alexis Wright

33. Harmless, Julienne van Loon

34. The Sunlit Zone, Lisa Jacobson

35. The God in the Ink, Kathryn Lomer

36. Silent Valley, Malla Nunn

37. The Idea of Home, Geraldine Brookes

38. Night Games, Anna Krien

39. Stasiland, Anna Funder

40. Having Cried Wolf, Gretchen Shirm

41. The Fish Hair Woman, Merlinda Bobis

42. Moving Among Strangers, Gabrielle Carey

43. Night Street, Kristel Thornell

Others

44. Where Angels Fear to Tread, E.M. Forster

45. Adam Bede, George Eliot

46. We Are Not the Same Anymore, Chris Somerville

47. The Rosie Project, Graeme Simsion

48. Coal Creek, Alex Miller

49. Cairo, Chris Womersley

50. Bereft, Chris Womersley

51. Bel Canto, Ann Patchett

52. The Photograph, Penelope Lively

53. Black Mountain, Venero Armanno

54. Wrack, James Bradley

55. Beauty’s Sister, James Bradley

56. That Deadman Dance, Kim Scott

57. Eyrie, Tim Winton

58. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Rachel Joyce

59. Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood

60. To the Islands, Randolph Stowe

61. Fairyland, Sumner Locke Eliot

62. The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert

Australian Women Writers Challenge 2013

January has been choking with deadlines, and I’m relieved that I had a holiday to recharge my batteries over Christmas and New Year, otherwise I’d be staggering from pillar to post to get them done.  As it is, I’ve written up two conference papers, abstracts for another two conferences, an essay proposal, two wrap-ups for the Australian Women Writers Challenge, and I still have a non-fiction book proposal to do and a short story to tidy up before the month is out.  My sense of humour has somehow remained intact, though I have been on fun rations in order to get everything done.  Bring on February, I say!

Right now, with storms clashing against the old gums outside my flat, and the tennis on mute, I’m also about to start reviewing again for the 2013 Australian Women Writers Challenge.  This challenge was established by Elizabeth Lhuede last year, when she became aware of the bias towards reviewing books written by men in major newspapers.  

The tendency was highlighted by Sophie Cunningham in her essay, ‘A Prize of One’s Own: Flares, Cock-forests and Dreams of a Common Language,’ published in the journal Kill Your Darlings in July 2011.  The essay is crammed with depressing statistics on the predominance of male reviewers, and of reviews of books by men, in major newspapers.  The stats for 2011 can be seen at this VIDA chart.  These are international figures.  In Australia, between 1st January and 22nd May 2011, 41% of books reviewed and 38% of the reviews themselves in The Age were written by women; at the Australian Literary Review, these stats were 18% and 16% respectively, while at The Australian, they were 32% and 30%.  The Australian Book Review fared slightly better: over 2010, 43% of books reviewed were written by women, while the number of reviewers was fairly even (see p. 13, Iss 6. July 2011).

Meanwhile, the shortlist for the Miles Franklin in 2009 and 2011 was completely void of women writers, although this year, thankfully, we fared much better, as noted by Paula Grunseit in her wrap-up of literary awards.  If you feel like you really need an excuse for another glass of Scotch, you can take a look at these stats about the imbalance in other awards around the country. 

Sophie identified two issues which contributed to women’s underrepresentation in reviewing.  One was their lack of confidence, in that women were not as good at vaunting themselves or pushing for commissions.  This is something, Sophie notes, ‘women need to take responsibility for’ (14), although I would also argue that some women writers, especially those with families, are often too busy to promote themselves on top of everything else.  However, it is a problem that, in the larger scheme of things, can be changed with relative ease (as opposed to effecting change at a cultural level, which might take generations, though I certainly hope it doesn’t take that long).  Here is a brilliant talk by Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist, that explains how it might be done.

The other problem Sophie identified was the marketing of men and women’s books, with men’s writing being promoted as more serious, or weightier.  For example, as she writes, ‘when Alex Miller writes a wonderfully romantic novel, such as Conditions of Faith (2000), it’s seen as literary.  But if a woman covers similar territory – longing, forbidden sex, exotic locations – this is called a “romance”’ (15).

Another obvious difficulty is the hostility of suggesting cultural change which, of course, feminists have faced down for centuries.  When Tara Moss highlighted these statistics in her blog, she was accused of ‘privileged whinging’ by The Age arts critic Cameron Woodhead, who, after some heated debate, concluded that ‘Arguing with children is beneath my dignity, and it’s beneath yours to imitate one.’  Well, I thought, that might be construed as the tone of a little boy stamping his foot.

What to do?  Sophie asks.  One extremely positive outcome has been the establishment of the Stella Prize for women writers (on which I have written here), the shortlist of which is to be announced shortly.  Sophie also cites Alison Croggon, writing on The Drum: ‘One thing is certain: passively assuming women are equal and will gradually work their way to equal status doesn’t work.  We need some different tools’ (17).  Sophie makes three suggestions: women need to push themselves out of their comfort zones, publishers need to stop insisting on ‘twee covers’ for women’s books, and literary editors need to review more books by women and publish more reviews written by women (18).

Print media is suffering, with data from the 2011 census showing a loss of 4000 jobs and a contraction of 2% in the publishing industry.  However, there is very strong growth in digital publishing, which grew at a cumulative annual rate of 14% between 2006 and 2011.

Cue, then, Elizabeth Lhuede and the Australian Women Writers Challenge.  Elizabeth, as I mentioned, set up the challenge to counter the obvious bias in reviewing (you can read her motivations for doing so, & the process she followed, here).  While there might be less space in traditional newspapers for reviews (which is NOT an excuse for unfair representation of women, I’m only indicating that as there is less space, the situation for women writers is made even more difficult), online reviews by book bloggers are exploding.  In the 2012 Challenge, there were more than 1500 reviews of books by women.  Over 350 people signed up, and already this year we have 326 people committed to the challenge.   As the project grew so large, Elizabeth also brought on board a group of book-bloggers, and over January we posted round-ups of the books reviewed in our fields.  We’ll also be doing monthly wrap-ups throughout the year.

As our politicians love to remind us, particularly around Australia Day, Australia is the land of the ‘fair go’ (and I will refrain from going into the irony that it was entirely unfair to build a nation on dispossession).  Clearly, given the above statistics, the pollies are straying from the truth.  What is obvious is that Australian women writers are producing an astonishing number and range of books, and they deserve to find their readers, and be reviewed.  So, if you’re stuck for something to read, particularly if you’re housebound in Brisbane due to incessant rain* check out the links below.  You can also sign up to the 2013 Challenge here.

Contemporary Fiction, by Shellyrae

Young-Adult Non-Speculative, by Amanda

Crime, Mystery, Thriller and Suspense, by Bernadette

Speculative Fiction, by Tsana

Historical Fiction, by Marg

Diversity, by myself

Romance, Erotica, and Romantic Suspense, by Kat

Young Adult Speculative Fiction, by Shaheen

Literary Fiction and Non-Fiction, by Sue

Children’s Fiction, by Judith

Short Stories and Poetry, by myself

History, Biography, Memoir, by Yvonne

Literary Award Classics, Part I, by Paula

Literary Award Classics, Part II, by Paula

* And in this instance I’m unable to refrain from elaborating on the irony that, on Twitter, Campbell Newman recommended the following storm strategies: ‘Please stay at home, watch tv [sic], read a book and be prepared.’  This suggestion, that one ought to read, is from the man who, despite being an Ambassador for the National Year of Reading, canned the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards so as to save every Queenslander 20 cents.

This is a review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.