The Miles Between by Mary E. Pearson
Henry Holt, 2009
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Friday, September 25, 2009
Book #23:
Veronika decide morir(Veronika Decides to Die)
by Paulo Coelho
(translated by Margaret Jull Costa)
HarperCollins, 2006
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Book #22:
Promby Laurie Halse Anderson
Penguin, 2006
Maybe Speak was a fluke? This is only the second of Anderson's work I've read, and from the outset I struggled to accept that I was reading the same author. Speak is so popular that it appears, the Penguin group has named a YA imprint after it: Speak Books. That book was among those that got me back inot reading YA fiction. It was original, well-constructed, real, affecting. Like the YA books I most favoured as a teen (those Robert Cormier, Robert O'Brien, SE Hinton, Paul Zindel), Speak had that lasting quality, I felt, that meant it would transcend generations. It was just one of those stories, with a lead character finding her voice, something we all realte to as teens straddling the line between wanting to fit in and stand out.
Prom, however, lacks that originality... more to come.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Book #19:
Wake in Frightby Kenneth Cook
Allen & Unwin, 2009
(originally published in 1961)
Grant felt himself exposed in no man’s land. There was no avenue of retreat and the enemy was invisible and unassailable. His supports had been dissipated, his arms were lost. He could not even burrow into the ground to hide.
It’s perhaps a rite of passage for any Australian reader to endure Wake in Fright, the 1961 condemnation by Kenneth Cook of the outback and its inhabitants. It’s harsh, unsettling, a new (at the time) insight into the coastal vs. inland cultural disparities inherent in the so-called Australian way of life.
In the novel, John Grant, a Sydney-sider unhappily teaching primary schoolers in an outback town 1200 miles inland and consisting of little more than a pub and a railway station, is excited to be heading back to the coast for a six-week holiday. His journey home involves a stop-over in Bundanyabba, a small town in the middle of nowhere, yet with pubs, hotels, people, enough to get by. Happy to check out the local scene for his one night in town, Grant hits the pubs – confident, content, ready for his break to begin. And then, on a gambling whim, Grant loses everything. He finds himself trapped in this outback wasteland the locals call the ‘Yabba.
Grant, we learn early on, deplores the outback lifestyle, and the people that, by choice, populate and thrive within it. Soon, though, reliance on those people becomes his only means of survival. But at what cost? Grant’s ‘Yabba stay becomes a trek into his own personal hell – educated and well-to-do, Grant soon finds himself shooting ‘roos, drinking endless slabs of beer, skinning his own wildlife catches for food, and contemplating what to do with the last remaining bullet in his rifle – the gun a gift of the locals.
It’s a wonderful set up – stranger in a strange land goes to extremes to get by, discovers his weaknesses, battles his demons while flailing in hell. And Cook puts Grant through the wringer. It’d be giving too much away to describe exactly what fun amounts to for the local ‘Yabba yobbos who befriend Grant on his second night in town. Grant’s most horrific experiences, though, occur in the company of Doc Tydon, an educated man rather like Grant himself, an incongruity central to the book’s themes of class and culture, freedom and choice. Tydon is aware of Grant’s outback prejudice, and stirs up the snobbery in him whenever he can, cleverly using it to draw Grant into some seriously awful undertakings. Grant endures it all; ultimate desperation, you know, can make us do crazy things.
The book is a rite of passage because it’s a view into a different part of Aussie life, the other, other side of the Sun, Sand, and Surf mystique. Or even the croc-hunter, man on the land ideal. It’s key, though, the distinction Cook makes between those lifestyles, and how so many of us don’t experience those other sides, at least not fully enough to grasp the customs of each. As a rural dweller most of my life, I can’t claim to know the first thing about the surf culture in Sydney or the fun park paradise of coastal Queensland. I’m as lost as Grant in such places. On the other side, too, I’ve smiled to myself at the awkwardness of the city dweller in the sticks.
These distinctions aren’t specific to Australia; everywhere has its Otherness – north and south, east and west, city and country. Cook’s observations of these differences in this country give his book authenticity. He gleaned much as a journo in rural Broken Hill, the town on which Bundanyabba is said to be based. Grant, for instance, is consistently surprised when men offer to buy him beers – this is the ultimate favour in outback Oz, and Grant feels he owes these men who give and give for no reason other than to quench another man’s thirst (one of his first mistakes). And when Grant, drunk or tired or just plain full refuses the offer, his refusal is met with disdain. Country folks, apparently, take a refusal to be bought a beer as the ultimate dismissal. I laughed at this notion because it’s so, so true. But while the book aptly describes the isolation and inwardness of such communities, it is still a dramatization in the extreme. As a rural Australian, it’s difficult not to want to defend the tight-knit-ness of such a community, and the informal approach to, well, everything, as a sign, perhaps, of a freer existence, not a stupid one that knows no better. Or perhaps, I just don’t want to know if the outback indeed has such power to utterly destroy a man and his sensibilities. Everyone’s version of hell is their own, I guess.
Still, the book managed to scare me – I finished it the day before a scheduled flight across that mighty expanse from southern Melbourne up to Darwin, at its tippy-top. With no idea what to expect from that rural city smack bang in its own middle of nowhere, I wondered what I might do if my friends didn’t collect me from the airport, if somehow I left my bag on a bar counter as I once did with my Passport in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. What would I do? Where would I go? I’d figure it out, no doubt, after a beer or two… Someone’d get the tab, that I know for sure.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Book #11:
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: The Murder at Road Hill Houseby Kate Summerscale
Bloomsbury, 2008
I blogged a few months back about this book's taking out of the Samuel Johnson Prize and have been desperate to read it ever since. The handful of bookstores in my region either didn't have it or wanted to charge me $30 for it in times of financial drought. The other day, however, on a giant book-buying road trip for which I saved mucho dollars, I found it, stuffed haphazardly in the true crime section at Bendigo's old fire station-turned-secondhand bookstore.
I believe I may have squealed.
Summerscale's book is exactly what you might call "my thing". It's crime in the Capote style, a rich, true account written in the form of a novel, with revelations plotted throughout to create storytelling over basic retelling. Not only that, as the detective investigating the crime at hand was the inspiration for characters in the works of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and others, it's also a history of English literature. True crime and a lesson in literary history -- what could be more perfect?
And it was just as I suspected -- educational and utterly thrilling. I knew very little about the murder at Road Hill House going in, so the twists and turns gripped me exactly as they should have. I read compulsively, especially the second half as the mystery began to unravel.
It begins, in 1860, with a murder, that of Saville Kent, the four-year-old son of Samuel and Mary Kent of Road, Wiltshire. As Kent is a private man with an unpopular profession, his home and family, including maids, nurses, and the children of his former marriage, are securely locked up at night in their large home. The security assumes the murderer resides within. Celebrated detective Jack Whicher is brought in to find the culprit. Yet with so many suspects and a range of plausible motives and means, Whicher's job is difficult. The call he eventually makes as to the perpetrator of the crime is unpopular and costs him his reputation (in the US, the book is subtitled, A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective).
But Jack Whicher has a reputation for a reason, and he stands by his suspicions as the crime goes unsolved for a number of years. When the answers finally come, most everyone is surprised. I was, too. My keen eye and marked understanding of the personalities involved proved entirely, wholeheartedly wrong. (But I was so sure!)
Summerscale is just a dream to read. She sticks to the fact, digressing into detail only at key moments. Her insight into the players and the era is convincing. And her conclusions are shocking -- Summerscale admits that in her verve to tell her story, she lost sight of its centre -- a dead child. Funny, too, that in my race to read the book and the joy I received while doing so, deep in the shadows of Victorian England, peeping through the keyholes into the lives of this private family, I, too, lost sight of little Saville and the horrors that occurred to create this entertaining, spellbinding read.
I don't really know how to reconcile that thought. Might delve into that another time.
Still, it's a marvellous, historical tale with great insights into the origins of detection and detective novels. It's also the story of upheaval in the lives of the Kent family, and just how they dealt with the everlong aftermath of one horrible event.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Book #10:
Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer's Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty by Scott Turow
Picador, 2004
Sunday, March 15, 2009
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