Booklist 2008

This year I've managed to keep a list of the books I've read. Here it is with some annotations about the books and where I obtained them. I've set them out in the order in which I read them.

William Dalyrymple, The Age of Kali. Indian travel/history. Borrowed from a friend. My second reading.
Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky. Novel set in North Africa. Borrowed from a friend. Second reading.
Sarah Paretsky, Writing in an Age of Silence, Essays about writing in America post-9/11. Borrowed from a library.
Murray Bail, Notebooks 1970-2003. Australian writer's notebook. Library copy.
Sarah Hobson, Family Web- A Story of India. Anthropological study of village life in South India. Library copy.
Arthur Miller, Timebends. Autobiography by the great American playwright. Purchased at secondhand book sale.
Hannie Rayson, Inheritance. Play set in rural Australia. Secondhand copy.
Sophie Cunningham, Geography. Novel. From my own collection. Second reading.
Helen Garner, The Spare Room. New Australian novel which I bought this year.
Lawrence Wright, The Looming Towers. History of the background to the 9/11 attacks. Library copy.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden. Classic philosophical memoir. Secondhand.
Sophie Cunningham, Bird. New Australian novel. Free review copy.
TimeLife books, Russia Beseiged. History of Russia in world war two. Library copy.
Michelle de Kretser, The Lost Dog. New Australian novel. Library copy.
Maryanne Robinson, Gilead. Novel. Friend's copy.
Karen Joy Fowler, The Jane Austen Bookclub. Novel. Library copy.
Fiona Capp, Musk and Byrne. New Australian historical novel, set in Daylesford. Library copy.
Murray Bail, The Pages. New Australian novel. Bought new.
Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Nights. Detective novel. Library copy.
Amitav Ghosh, Field of Poppies. New Indian novel. Birthday gift.
Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosone. Novel. Secondhand copy.
Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons. Play. Own collection. Re-reading.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace. Novel/history/philosophical essay. New translation. Friend's copy. Second reading.
Heather Vicenti, Too Many Tears - An Autobiographical Account of Stolen Generations (Meme Media), new copy.
Bob Dylan, Chronicles. Autobiography, Secondhand copy. Second reading.
Joan Baez, And a Voice to Sing With. Autobiography. Secondhand.
William Shakespeare, King Lear. My collection. Re-reading.
Graham Greene, Journey Without Maps. Travel in Africa. Library copy.
Richard Greene (ed.), Graham Greene: A Life in Letters. Writer's letters. Library copy.
Shirley Hazzard, Greene on Capri. Memoir. Library copy.
Henning Mankell, Firewall. Detective novel. Secondhand.

They are the books I have on my list so far this year.

And now - drum roll please Maestro!
I am pleased to announce the inaugural Gold Camel Award for the best book read by me in 2008.
The award goes to -
Count Leo Tolstoy for War and Peace.
Congratulations Count Leo!
Round of applause.

In making this award I would like to thank the sponsors: friends, op shops, garage sales. bookfairs, public libraries, schools etc

What have others been reading in 2008?

Recession poetry

I've been wondering about the poets who sing the songs of the hard times.

The Australian poet, Bruce Dawe, comes to mind. He writes about ordinary people in the context of historical events and the society they live in.

'Sometimes Gladness', the collection of Dawe's poems written between 1954 and 1992, has been studied by thousands of high school students in their senior years at school and it's one of my favourite books of poetry.

The poem, 'Drifters' was written in 1968 when Australia was supposedly in an era of full employment. The people in this poem have very little but there is also a certain richness in their lives in the sense of close family connections and connection with the natural world. How recognisable are Dawe's drifters in Australian society today?

Drifters

One day soon he'll tell her it's time to start packing,
and the kids will yell 'Truly?' and get wildly excited for no reason,
and the brown kelpie pup will start dashing about, tripping everyone up,
and she'll go out to the vegetable-patch and pick all the green tomatoes from the vines,
and notice how the oldest girl is close to tears because she was happy here,
and how the youngest girl is beaming because she wasn't.
And the first thing she'll put on the trailer will be the bottling-set she never unpacked from Grovedale,
and when the loaded ute bumps down the drive past the blackberry-canes with their last shrivelled fruit,
she won't even ask why they're leaving this time, or where they're heading for
- she'll only remember how, when they came here,
she held out her hands bright with berries,
the first of the season, and said,
'Make a wish, Tom, make a wish.'

What's Out There

Going up the Newell Highway towards Queensland one passes through an array of anonymous towns, big and small: Dubbo, Forbes, Parkes, West Wyalong, all highway towns and 'anonymous', or should I say 'homogenous'? That is, they tend to be more or less the same, at least on the surface. It's the chain stores that give them that sameness: the Newspower chain of newsagents, the Targets, the Subways, the MacDonalds. Once past Dubbo the character of old country towns begins to assert itself and the homogeneity starts to fade. Swing back closer to the Blue Mountains, closer to Sydney, and the country town character is retained in places like Mudgee.

There are plenty of stories out there. Country music, Ned Kelly, the surprising string of observatories that start at the huge Parkes radio telescope and stretches into a cottage industry of homebuilt observatories up and around Coonabarabram where the Siding Spring Anglo-Australian Observatory is located inside the Warrumbungle National Park. The skies are wide up there, the nights are dark and there's a sweet quality in the air.

The area around Mudgee is Henry Lawson territory. There's a Lawson Museum in Gulgong, just north of Mudgee and the town has an annual Lawson Festival.

In Mudgee I sat for a while on the Lawson Seat, an old stone seat set into the wall that surrounds St. John's Church of England. A plaque records the date of Lawson's birth, 17 June, 1867, and his death, 2nd September, 1922. It also records a lovely fragment from one of his poems:
'I come with the strength of the living day
And with half the world behind me.'
Further up the road the beautiful Lawson Park is surrounded by a huge stone wall built in 1933, possibly as a Depression-era project. The plaque there reads that the wall was 'built by virtue of a government grant and voluntary labour gangs. The stone was brought from the Mt. Frome quarries by local farmers using their Clydesdales and wagons.'

As we drove along from town to town listening to the sound of falling stock markets on the car radio I wondered who are the poets of this Depression-era? Will we also build walls round parks dedicated to poets?