Best Books- Carol's list

Louise got me interested when she told me how she'd written out of a list of the best books she had ever read and given it to a neighbour for a birthday present. She'd lost the list and couldn't remember what was on it but it set me thinking that I'd like to contact friends and ask them to set down those 5-10 books, more or less, that had influenced them most, or they most loved, or found most memorable (are all of these categories the same thing?).

Carol has already come good with her list, and with her reasons for loving these books.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. (Published 1866) Carol says: 'This was the first book I read where I was so aware of the subjective voice and thoughts of the protagonist. I liked very much the moral questions and dilemmas raised for Raskolnikov and his inward questioning...'.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. (Published 1939) 'Again I read this when I was very young and it was probably my first introduction to American literature. The theme is daunting- and presented a world that had not been so clearly delineated for me before. The author's voice is both urgent and compassionate. I was very impressed and after 45 years or more can recall the ending of the story with clarity.'

The Outsider by Albert Camus. (Published 1942) 'I identified with the outsider and liked, (although liked is not quite the right word), the detached voice of the narrator and the vivid, yet harsh, description of the landscape. I have read the book three times: I know bits verbatim: When I looked up I was aware of the indifference of the universe.'

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. (Published 1949) 'Again it is the quality of the writing: the description of the Northern African landscape and the theme were close to my sensibilities.'

The Tree of Man by Patrick White. (Published 1955) 'A great theme...and for me it made the rest of Patrick White's novels accessible. It opened up a whole new world of literature.'

World's Fair by E. L. Doctorow. (Published 1985) 'This story is told through the eyes of a young boy. He most passionately wants to visit the World Fair that is on in New York at the time and the story is about how he achieves this and of courses the story includes many aspects of his life experiences as he is growing up. The narration of this story is therefore simple but profoundly rich and satisfying.'

That's a great list. Thank you Carol. I liked all of those books too, but haven't read World's Fair.

I hope Book Camel readers might leave lists either in the comments section or email them to me and I'll make a feature of them. Carol's list came by snailmail and I'm very happy to receive lists that way too and then type them out. Or stop me in the street and tell me your list. I'll make a note of it.

As it happens Carol's list is all novels. But the books that have influenced you most might be poetry, or essays; philosophy, art, how to do things...what are your best books?

A kind of heroine

Biography is one of the most popular genres for readers and book buyers. Most libraries have well-stocked and well-used shelves of life stories about all sorts and varieties of people. Isn't it a great escape to peer into the lives of others, to see what they have done, how they have lived and been shaped by their families, their relationships and the times they have lived through?

I recently picked up a copy of the life of Nancy Cunard (1896-1965). Published in 1979, the biography is entitled simply 'Nancy Cunard' and the author is Anne Chisholm. It is a clearly written work, enhanced by a number of photographs, that tells the story of one woman's remarkable life.

Nancy's great-grandfather on her father's side was Samuel Cunard, founder of the Cunard line of steamships, who was created a baronet by Queen Victoria. Her mother, the famous society hostess and patron of the arts, Lady Emerald Cunard, was from a wealthy Californian family. Thus Nancy, an only child, was born into wealth and its attendant privileges, especially the entry it gave her to a world of fashion, travel and the arts.

These interests dominated Nancy's life. She took to them with a passion in the context of troubled times - World War 1, the 'roaring twenties', the 1930's 'Great Depression', the rise of communism and fascism, the Spanish Civil War and World War 2. She turned out a rebellious, independent woman whose way of life often scandalised both her contemporaries and her elders, including her mother. When Nancy lived and traveled openly with her black lover in the early 1930s, it opened up a split with her mother that was never healed. Mother and daughter were never to speak or meet again. Lady Cunard died in 1948.

While Nancy was briefly married during the First World War, she could not conform to the limitations that marriage threatened to impose on her freedom to love, travel and express herself as she pleased. She was a complex person whose personality and interplay of her many relationships are explored in the biography. Late in her life, after a period of disturbing behaviour, she was certified insane and kept for some time in a mental hospital. Alcohol played a big part in her troubles at this time.

Nancy Cunard deserves attention and respect for her serious work as a poet, publisher and journalist. Virginia and Leonard Woolf published her long poem 'Parallax' at their Hogarth Press in 1925, and she continued to write poetry and sometimes have it published for the rest of her life. In 1928 she established her own 'Hours Press' at her home in Normandy in the French countryside. She learned the whole printing process, setting type and printing herself and turning out some significant publications including one of Samuel Beckett's first published poems, 'Whoroscope'.

Her fascination for African art and decoration led her to collect an enormous number of ivory bracelets and other items. She delved deeply into black culture through relationships with black people including jazz musicians, writers and civil rights' activists. In 1934 her encyclopedic book 'Negro' was published. This was an unwieldy project where she brought together black writers, commentators on aspects of black culture and images of black culture. The volume is now rare (most of the stock was lost in the London blitz in the Second World War), and first editions now sell for more than twenty thousand dollars.

By the late 1930s Nancy was very much involved in the anti-fascist movement in Europe. Like others of her generation, she was a passionate supporter of the republican side in the Spanish Civil War which she also reported from as a journalist.

Nancy Cunard, despite, or possibly because of her privileged inheritance, lived a life that connects her as a kind of heroine to the modern world. She was an enormously eclectic artist who championed poetry, black rights, freedom for women and anti-imperialist movements. She certainly had her blind spots and may have been difficult to know and impossible to live with, but I'm willing to place her in my pantheon of stars from the past whose lives become known to us through the scholarship of modern writers.

Miles Franklin Award

The winner of this year's Miles Franklin Award will be announced on June 18.

The list of five finalists for the Award is mildly controversial because all the writers are men. This is the list:

Breath by Tim Winton
Ice by Louis Nowra
The Pages by Murray Bail
The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas
Wanting by Richard Flanagan

As someone commented, the titles are all very short. All very plain.

My choice for winner is The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas, but as I've only read three of the five books I'm not in a position to judge, so let's say I'm barracking for The Slap. Whether it is judged to be the novel of the year which is 'of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases' (as the Award's web page notes), remains to be seen. I would certainly judge it to be of outstanding literary merit (if a wee bit too long) and definitely presenting Australian life in its contemporary phase among some families living in Melbourne. It's an ambitious realist novel with many different voices that move around questions of modern Australian sexual and family identity.

Life-long learning

I wonder how long it is since the idea of a 'workshop' as a learning setting came into our culture? Did it start up in the 1970s with therapy groups? Whatever the antecedents it is an idea that has gained full currency for learning all sorts of skills from fungi recognition, to crafts, yoga practices, spiritual development, growing or cooking food and writing. You name it and you can probably find a workshop about it.

I've been to a few workshops in my time, most of them connected with teaching and learning or with writing. I thought I'd given them up until I was tempted ('I can resist anything except temptation'), by one in the recent Castlemaine State Festival. It was a poetry workshop, 'Art into Poetry Now', held at the Castlemaine Art Gallery and conducted by poet Sandy Fitts. I was intrigued by the topic, the venue and the presenter, who had won the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize. I also liked the price, a modest $30 (concession).

For that modest price our small group, about eight people, received four hours of professional attention from a poet and teacher who led us through a brief history of ekphrastic poetry and set us to write such a poem in relation to selected art works in the gallery.

Each of the particpants came up with their own special perspective on the paintings we looked at. There was plenty of choice in the subjects and each writer showed how pictures, especially those within our own culture, can set free so many rich and various ideas. Some carefully enunciated the images into words, another spoke of her situation today provoked by a scene in an old picture; someone attempted to draw them all together in an historical perspective, another took us on a journey to hidden depths inside a darkened vessel. We all listened and saw that there were the bones of a decent poem in every piece of writing.

'Life-long, collaborative learning' has been a powerful slogan for learning in adult education settings and also in schools where teachers try to equip their students for a future of learning. With a boom in workshops the time has come when our desire to go on learning, with others, can more easily be met.

Rich and Powerful

I've been loading The Camel with books for sale. I have a regular spot at the Trentham market, just across the road from my home, where I take books, mainly paperbacks, for sale. The next Trentham market is this coming Sunday, March 22, and the market is held every fourth Sunday of the month. Other markets coming up are the Blackwood Easter Woodchop Carnival which will be held at the beautiful Blackwood Sports Ground on Easter Saturday and the Clunes Booktown which will take place on May 2 and 3. At Clunes I will have a stall in the Wesley bluestone church.

As I collect books, I sometimes find ones that particularly interest me and I read them along the way. Recently I read two books about rich and powerful families. The first is The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys by Doris Kearns Goodwin. It's a history of the two big American (Irish American) families who produced John Fitzgerald Kennedy who became President of the United States in 1961 and was assassinated in November 1963 in Dallas, Texas. He was forty-six when he died.

I was amazed to find that Jack Kennedy's father, Joseph Kennedy, 'demanded' that his son take up a political career after the death of the eldest son, Joe Junior, in a spectacular plane crash near the end of the second world war. Joe Junior was to be the one who would fulfil his father's dream of providing America with its first Irish-American, Catholic, president. When that dream crashed Jack stepped into his brother's shoes. He was well fitted out for the job. A war hero, Ivy League education, son of the American Ambassador to London, rich, confident, handsome, given every opportunity to shine despite his poor health that caused him pain most of his adult life. Jack was a member of a rich and powerful family that had arisen from poor Irish immigrants who made their way up and up in American society. Once they reached the top they had the resources to live full, rich and exciting lives, empowered to make contributions to society and to explore and develop their natural talents.

The Fitzgerald Kennedys became part of America's rich and powerful ruling class and they mixed with and married others from similar wealthy backgrounds. In England they attended Ascot, Covent Garden, the brilliant soirees of rich society women. I don't know if Joseph Kennedy Snr. ever met the American Wallis Simpson during his years in London, but her attachment to Edward, Prince of Wales, and briefly King of England before his abdication late in 1936, rocked the British establishment and their aristocratic alliances across the world. When the couple married in 1937 and became the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, they embarked upon a life of exile from the upper, upper crust of the British Royals into the slighly lower echelons of the very rich and very famous, but less powerful elites. Think cruising holidays in fabulous yachts, long visits to the homes of various aristocrats and wealthy business tycoons, days of golf followed by cocktails, opera and glittering dinners, fabulous jewels, furs, hairdressers, manicurists,masseuses and servants attending to their every need.

Wallis: Secret Lives of the Duchess of Windsor suggests Mrs Simpson's liking for the fascist elites of Europe (she impressed Hitler) and the security risk she, and the Duke, presented during the days leading up to the second world war when several rich and powerful British, European and American families were in favour of an alliance with Germany against the dreaded communists in Russia.

Reading about these wealthy families alerts me to the powerful class structures that exist in our world and the enormous benefit (to themselves mainly) that such power affords in terms of the life opportunities given to its members. It's a world away, a parallel universe away, from the daily struggle of most of us. Thanks to our writers and historians, we can glimpse into that world of the rich and powerful.

At the Book Camel, these books are for sale.

Details:
Doris Kearns Goodwin,The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys-An American Saga, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987, Ist Edition, hardback, dustcover, excellent condition. $25, plus postage and packaging.

Charles Higham, Wallis - Secret Lives of the Duchess of Windsor, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1988, 1st Edition, Hardback, dustcover, excellent condition. $16, plus p and p.

Firestorm

Everyone I speak to feels shaken by the terrible firestorms that hit Victoria a few days ago. Those of us who live in forested areas may be feeling more worried and more vulnerable than those who live in the city, but I have the feeling that the whole community, the whole country even, is in mourning. I feel shocked and numbed by the pictures and sounds of destruction and horror that I've read in the newspapers, and seen on TV and heard on the radio. Sometimes I cannot look at another photograph, or hear another report or watch vision of burnt out landscapes. The scale of human suffering is immense. Nor must we forget the suffering of animals, birds and other sentient beings. This tragedy close to home also reminds us of the suffering of others in wars where burning people with bombs is actually intended!

We turn to each other to test our feelings and to put them into words that we exchange. We turn to the poets, writers and artists of all kinds to hear what they can say for us, what visions emerge from the ashes. I remembered this poem by Marie E. J. Pitt, a Victorian woman who was born near Bairnsdale in 1869 and grew up on a farm there.

A Gallop of Fire

When the north wind moans through the blind creek courses
And revels with harsh, hot sand,
I loose the horses, the wild, red horses
I loose the horses, the mad, red horses,
And terror is on the land.

With prophetic murmur the hills are humming,
The forest-kings bend and blow;
With hoofs of brass on the baked earth drumming,
O brave red horses, they hear us coming,
And the legions of Death lean low.

O'er the wooded height, and the sandy hollow
Where the boles to the axe have rung,
Though they fly the foeman as flies the swallow,
The fierce red horses, my horses, follow
With flanks to the faint earth flung.

Or with frenzied hieroglyphs, fear embossing
Night's sable horizon bars,
Through tangled mazes of death-darts crossing,
I swing my leaders and watch them tossing
Their red manes against the stars.

But when South winds sob in the drowned creek courses
And whisper to hard wet sand,
I hold the horses, the spent red horses,
I hold the horses, the tired red horses,
And silence is on the land.

Yea, the South wind sobs 'mong the drowned creek courses
For sorrows no man shall bind-
Ah, God! for the horses, the black plumed horses,
Dear God! for the horses, Death's own pale horses,
That raced in the tracks behind.

Learning more

When I wrote my poem about Benazir Bhutto I read books about her and about Pakistan. There are three books well worth reading that I can recommend.

The first is Benazir Bhutto's autobiography 'Daughter of the East'. It was first published in 1988 and is available in paperback published in 2007, the year Benazir was assassinated. The book ends with an update on Benazir's return to Pakistan in 2007. She acknowledges the dangers that she faces and quotes one of her heroes, Dr. Martin Luther King, as an inspiration for her determination to continue as a political leader:
'Our lives begin to end the day we remain silent on things that matter,'
Benazir was certainly not one who chose to remain silent and the autobiography traces the influences and great events that shaped her.

On the morning of her assassination Benazir finished the final edits of her new book 'Reconciliation- Islam, Democracy, and the West'. (Pub. 2008, Simon & Schuster) In it she defends her faith against politicisation and exploitation by extremists and fanatics. She looks at the history of the Muslim countries as she argues the question is Islam incompatible with democracy? She does not back away from pointing to many faults within Muslim countries but also points out that:
'The so-called incompatibility of Islam and democratic governance is used to divert attention from the sad history of Western political intervention in the Muslim world, which has been a major impediment to the growth of democracy in Islamic nations.'
This 'sad history' is discussed in relation to a number of specific countries across the world. The history of Pakistan is covered at length.

For another view on the history of Pakistan I read 'Frontline Pakistan' by Zahid Hussain, the Pakistan correspondent for 'The Times' of London, the 'Wall Street Journal' and 'Newsweek'. (Pub. 2008, Tauris & Co.) Based on interviews, newspaper reports and agency reports and investigations, the book gives a clear indication of the forces that have made Pakistan into a volatile and dangerous place on the front line of war between the West and al-Qaeda.

Reading these books has made me better informed about the politics and history of Pakistan, a country that will continue to play a major role in the future of our world and the struggle for a peaceful planet. Each of them was available for loan from my local library.