Hope and Despair

I began an interest in the American Civil War a few months ago when my husband bought a copy of Ken Burns' documentary, The Civil War, at our local ABC shop. The Civil War is an amazing documentary series and watching it helped me to fill some of the embarrassingly huge gaps in my knowledge about the war (it is not generally studied in Australian schools). As seems to often happen when you start thinking about something, afterwards the Civil War began coming up in all sorts of places, including in the fiction I read. I started reading Geraldine Brooks' March but found it flat and uninteresting and gave up half way through. Around the same time a friend recommended Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain and I was lucky enough to find it in a second hand book store.

I'm about two thirds of the way through Cold Mountain now. It's the kind of book that you hope will never end, it's so full of beautiful images and intense emotion. The novel alternates between the story of Inman, a soldier who has deserted and is making the long journey back to his mountain home by foot, and Ada, who must survive at home on her father's farm. In an early chapter Frazier beautifully captures the faint but desperate hope that Inman has of ever returning home or of escaping the despair he feels as a result of his war experiences:

He thought on homeland, the big timber, the air thin and chill all year long. Tulip poplars so big through the trunk they put you in mind of locomotives set on end. He thought of getting home and building him a cabin on Cold Mountain so high that not a soul but the nighthawks passing across the clouds in autumn could hear his sad cry. Of living a life so quiet he would not need ears. And if Ada would go with him, there might be hope, so far off in the distance he did not even really see it, that in time his despair might be honed off to a point so fine and thin that it would be nearly the same as vanishing.

But even though he believed truly that you can think on a thing till it comes real, this last thought never shaped up so, no matter how hard he tried. What hope he had was no brighter than if someone had lit a taper at the mountain's top and left him far away to try setting a course by it.

Books Purchased, Books Received

A good present says a something about the giver and something about the receiver. I'll leave you to consider what the following books say about me, and about my husband who gave them to me for a recent birthday:

Let the Right One In John Ajivide Lindqvist
My Latest Grievance Elinor Lipman
The Jane Austen Book Club Karen Joy Fowler
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City Nick Flynn
A Short History of Tractors in the Ukraine Marina Lewycka

The following books were bought at special night for teachers at my local book store in which they used free wine and a 20% discount in order to get us to part with our money:

American Pastoral Philip Roth
Jane Austen: A Life Claire Tomalin

And, somewhat controversially, this is the first free book I have received as a result of this blog:

The Secret Twin Denise Gosliner Orenstein

The ethics of accepting free books have been discussed at length in the litblogosphere, however I do think it is important to let readers know that I will always disclose when I've been supplied with a free book (assuming that it ever happens again). I accepted The Secret Twin for two reasons: firstly, the author contacted me directly after reading my review of her novel Unseen Companion; secondly, this is a book I would have purchased anyway because I loved Orenstein's earlier work.

Much exciting reading awaits!

The Hollow Lands

Strangely enough, one of my favourite parts of Sophie Masson's young adult novel, The Hollow Lands, was the afterword. This is because I was intrigued by the setting of the novel, which although it is fantasy, draws heavily on Breton folklore and history. The Hollow Lands centres on the fate of young twins, Tiphaine and Gromer Raguenel, the children of noble parents in fourteenth century Brittany. The twins are drawn into the dangerous world of the korrigans (fairies) from which they must escape or risk losing their humanity forever.

Brittany is an interesting place to set a fantasy novel. It allows Masson to explore Celtic mythology and tradition, particularly the concept of fairies and their interaction with the world of humans. She has also drawn inspiration from the Arthurian story of Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady and from the real life story of the relationship between a poor hedge-squire who rises to military fame in the Hundred Years' War (Bertrand du Guesclin) and his noble wife, who, legend has it, was part fairy.

The novel begins with great promise. There is some lovely hypnotic prose and the suggestion of wonderful and mysterious events to follow. Early in the novel the twins read from a beautiful manuscript of traditional fables. They fall asleep...

...leaving the book lying open on top of the chest, instead of putting it away, as they usually did. And there it stayed, quietly, in the dark of the night, and the moonlight, until, in the very depths of the night hours, something swift and silent fluttered on to the pages, like a moth, then settled deeper into the book, which received it with a kind of shiver.

Unfortunately this is one of several incidences that seem to lead nowhere and the second half of the novel falls short of its early promise. Whilst the first half is atmospheric and magical, the later scenes, mostly set in fairyland, seem hurried. This is a shame given such a promising scenario and such obvious attention to research.

The Hollow Lands is interesting enough for me to want to read more of Sophie Masson's work (her novel, The Tempestuous Voyage of Hopewell Shakespeare, sounds particularly interesting) but I can't help feeling there is something missing in this novel. Given more length I think this could have been a very good fantasy novel. As it is, it does not distinguish itself enough to stand out from the many other novels in this genre.

A Widow For One Year

John Irving is a guilty pleasure of mine. I find his writing a bit same-y and trashy but it has moments of real beauty and clarity. What he does, he does well. He crafts his writing carefully and explores some themes, such as the sudden loss of loved ones, with insight. When he exercises restraint and avoids gimmicks he can be very good.

Before I read A Widow for One Year, I saw the film based on the novel. The film is called The Door in the Floor and stars Kim Basinger and Jeff Bridges. I really enjoyed the film and was curious when I discovered it was based on only the first third of Irving's novel. Having read the novel, I now understand why the film-makers did this.

The first third of A Widow for One Year is near perfect. It tells the story of a teenage boy, Eddie, who becomes a writer's assistant to Ted Cole, a famous children's author, during a summer on Long Island in 1958. The naive boy Eddie does not realise that he is walking into a volatile situation in which the marriage between Ted and his wife Marion is breaking down. The cause of this breakdown is the uncontrollable grief that has overwhelmed Marion since the accidental death of her and Ted's two teenage boys several years earlier. The birth of another child, Ruth, has failed to help Marion return to her thoughts to the living and Ted has come to believe that she needs some kind of substitute for her boys in the form of Eddie. Eddie finds himself intoxicated by Marion and the intensity of her desire. Before long they begin a sexual relationship, one which will shape the rest of Eddie's life.

This part of the story balances tragedy and comedy beautifully so that it is incredibly moving when we hear about the death of the boys but this sadness is countered by some great slapstick comedy moments involving Ted and his many mistresses. John Irving's skill lies in this tragi-comedy.

He also writes in a very cinematic way in this section of the novel. Scenes are so vivid that it is easy to see why the makers of The Door in the Floor stuck so closely to the novel.

The book comes to a natural close at the end of this first section. If Irving had left it there, I think this would be one of his better works. Unfortunately he pushes on (and on) with the story of Ruth's adult life, a life that becomes increasingly bizarre and unrealistic. There are Dutch prostitutes and murderers, rapes and affairs, suicides and marriages, and somewhere along the way I lost any belief in the characters or the plot. The particularly ridiculous ending was the final straw. Characters such as Eddie, who had been endearing as a young man, become unlikeable and unrealistic as adults.

If only Irving had had the self-discipline to stop at the story's natural end-point. He wouldn't have had one of his famously brick-like novels, but he might have made a name for himself as a more thoughtful and restrained writer.

Moral Disorder

As I may have mentioned once or twice before, I am completely in love with the writing of Margaret Atwood. Her latest work, a collection of short stories entitled Moral Disorder does nothing to dampen my enthusiasm.

Moral Disorder is exactly the kind of writing that I like most. That is, it is domestic and intimate in scale, dealing with complex relationships without needing to concentrate on plot resolution. The more I read, the more I value character development above other aspects of writing, and Margaret Atwood excels at creating believable, interesting characters. Once these characters are established, the stories themselves seem to flow with ease.

Moral Disorder is a collection of short stories that loosely follow a woman's life. The stories switch perspective, from first person to third person, and capture different segments of time, from early childhood to retirement age.

Each of the stories in some way seems emblematic of the period in which it takes place. In the first story 'The Bad News' a couple react in different ways to the depressing news stories of an overseas war. Although it is the first story in the collection, it is the most contemporary. The couple, Nell and Tig, are in their late middle age and the news stories are reminiscent of current events in the middle east.

After the first story, Atwood jumps back in time to Nell's childhood and the stories move roughly chronologically from there. Each story is a snapshot: preparing for the birth of her baby sister, frightening her young sister with tales of monsters, studying a poem for school and the developing relationship with Tig, who is married with children of his own when they meet. Each of the stories are quite different but quite beautiful. One of my favourites was 'My Last Duchess' a story that combines the study of Browning's poem with a depiction of high school relationships. The female protagonist struggles in vain to explain the poem to her lugheaded boyfriend, who just wants to get it 'right' for the exam. All the limitations and the unsuitability of their relationship is revealed through their conversation and we know that it won't be long before the girl, like the speaker of the poem, moves on to the next lover.

I finished Moral Disorder with a feeling of contentment. Margaret Atwood has once again written a moving and beautiful piece of work and all is right in the world.

The Dullness of Mansfield Park

I finished Mansfield Park a week or two ago now, and have to say that my opinions of it did not change much after my initial post on the novel. I don't think I'm giving away too much to those who haven't read Mansfield Park yet to say that, in typical Austen fashion, things worked out in the end. The worthy, morally superior characters (Fanny Price, Edmund) were rewarded with happy marriages. The morally suspect characters (Henry Crawford, Maria Bertram) ended in ruins.

Despite the neatness of the ending I couldn't help from feeling that Fanny and Edmund would be two of the most boring people on earth to spend time with and that I would have chosen the 'cad', Henry Crawford, just because life with him would be so much more fun.

Austen excels at the novel of manners and of course she reflects the strict social codes of the society that she depicts. Usually however her heroines are charismatic as well as worthy. My favourite Austen characters have a feisty aspect to their personalities that prevents them from the interminable dullness of Fanny Price. Without a charismatic heroine such as Emma Woodhouse or Elizabeth Bennet, Mansfield Park seems like a historical curiosity. I can enjoy the plot and be interested in the world that is depicted but I didn't feel emotionally engaged with the characters. Reading this novel has motivated me to go back and re-read those other Austen novels that I love so much.

Book Purchases

After a week on a school camp with a bunch of students, it was time for some seriously selfish activity on the weekend. So we drove to a nearby little town and combed through the second-hand bookshops. I finally found a second-hand copy of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain. I've heard such good things about this book and I can't wait to read it- a good friend claims it as her favourite book ever.

I also picked up a copy of Reinaldo Arenas' autobiographical work, When Night Falls. I saw the film of this and found it interesting enough to want to read the book.

Lastly I found a cheap copy of Jake's Thing by Kingsley Amis. The plot sounds very seventies- college professor with sexual 'issues'- but I like Amis' writing so am willing to give it a go.

Now I just have to get around to writing about some of the books I've finished recently...

The Witch of Exmoor

There is a particular kind of social milieu that Margaret Drabble often explores in her novels. She writes about the British middle-classes, usually intellectuals who have perhaps risen from working class backgrounds to have successful careers, raise families and who, in middle age, are forced to confront issues of family and the past. This is probably an unfair generalisation but having read The Peppered Moth and The Radiant Way last year, and having just recently finished The Witch of Exmoor, these kinds of characters and issues seem central to Drabble's work.

It occurs to me to wonder why I keep coming back to Drabble and why I enjoy her work so much given these preoccupations of hers. I'm not particularly interested in the British upper-middle classes and I'm hoping any mid-life crises are a way off yet. But Drabble's writing still resonates with me.

The first Margaret Drabble book that I read was The Millstone. This is a short, early (1965) novel of hers about a young, single woman who falls pregnant. It is a youthful novel and one to which I could immediately relate. The characters and situations were so vividly drawn that I felt I would follow Drabble wherever she might do after that. And I have, perhaps despite of her choice of subject matter.

The Witch of Exmoor is a wonderfully female novel. By that I mean that Drabble writes such realistic female characters and particularly excels at depicting the relationships between women. At the centre of The Witch of Exmoor is the monstrous mother figure of Frieda, who has retreated to a decrepit mansion on a clifftop overlooking the ocean, from where she continues to terrorise her family of grown up children and grand children. Frieda is a typical Drabble character. She has pulled herself up by the bootstraps from an ordinary beginning in northern Britain to become a successful writer. She weds and has three children but then divorces and begins a life of international travel and exotic affairs. She manages to wipe away nearly every trace of her children's father, leaving them with only her and her enormous personality; a personality that continues to oppress her family, despite Frieda's self-imposed exile.

Frieda manipulates her family from afar, playing favourites with her Guyanese son-in-law and exposing the flaws in her children's lives and relationships. Despite this she is still a likable character- a powerful woman who has chosen the path her life has taken and is essentially guilty of little more than revealing to others the truth about themselves. A softer side of Frieda is revealed when her children discover a friendship of hers with another elderly women which seems utterly normal, even mundane, suggesting that Frieda may not entirely be the monster her children believe her to be. Drabble explores what it means to be a mother- Frieda is certainly not a conventional maternal figure to her children but is this a crime in itself? To what extent can we continue to blame our parents for problems we experience in adulthood? What does a mother owe her children once she has raised them and sent them into the world?

I think these are interesting and probably universal issues. Drabble writes about a very particular demographic but it is her ability to ask big questions and raise issues that have broad implications that will keep me reading her work.

Mansfield Park So Far...

Scanning my list of 'recently read' books last week, I noticed that my recent reading has been heavily waited towards contemporary novels and young adult fiction. Time for a classic! Hence, I am now reading Jane Austen's Mansfield Park.

I've never read this novel before, and it's been a while since I've read anything by Austen, so it has been very nice revisiting her world. I love Austen's writing and particularly her development of character. Can any other writer so deftly paint a character in so few words? There is a dry humour in her observations of human behaviour that makes her novels really enjoyable.

While I'm enjoying the novel, I'm finding myself in the unusual position of not liking the characters that I'm obviously supposed to feel sympathy with. Fanny Price is, frankly, an annoying and insipid character and it's hard to feel she can carry the story. Similarly, Edmund is overly earnest and self-righteous. I'm sure I don't remember other Austen heroes and heroines being quite so wowserish. I suppose this is simply a reflection of the values of the time, and I am trying to suspend my own decadent twentieth century morals, but I still can't really warm to Fanny. Maybe she will improve as the novel goes on, as I can't take much more of her bursting into tears every time someone talks to her. For God's sake, get a backbone woman!

The Magic of Margaret Atwood

I am currently reading Margaret Atwood's collection of short stories, Moral Disorder. Each time I read something by Atwood it only confirms my opinion of her as one of the best contemporary writers. A passage I read today shows her talent for evoking a scene:

On a day like this it was hard to resist dozing off, drifting down into reverie or half-sleep. It was afternoon, it was May, the trees outside were flowering, pollen was eddying everywhere. The classroom was too hot; it was filled with a vibration, the vibration of its newness- the blond wood of its curved, modern metal-framed desks, the greenness of its blackboards, the faint humming of its fluorescent lights, which seemed to hum even when they were turned off. But despite this newness there was an old smell in the room, an ancient fermenting smell: an invisible steam was rising all around, oily, salty, given off by twenty-five adolescent bodies stewing gently in the humid springtime air.

Or maybe it's just because I work in schools that this seems so vivid?

I Capture the Castle

I finished I Capture the Castle last week in a flurry of page turning. It was so fantastic I couldn't put it down. It is clever, funny and truthful in its depiction of life as a teenage girl. Cassandra Mortmain, the novel's narrator, is my new favourite character from literature. She is a passionate writer, determined to 'capture' the world around her, including her eccentric family and the wonderful run-down English castle in which they live. So many of the characters are memorable. One of my favourites is Topaz, Cassandra's bohemian step-mother, a former artist's model who loves nothing more than communing with nature in the nude, frightening many a local villager in the process.

From the beginning I thought I knew how I Capture the Castle would end but, without giving too much away, I am really happy that Smith doesn't fulfill all the reader's expectations and chooses to end in a particularly strong and realistic way. For a moment I was disappointed, but as I thought about it, I came to the conclusion that the ending is perfect for the novel.

I have not seen the film version, but I remember the reviews being dire. Having enjoyed the novel so much I'll think avoid it. Has anyone else seen it?

Falling in Love with Books

One of the reasons that I love reading so much is that feeling of being totally swept up in the world of the novel. My fondest memories of childhood are of reading, and of being so engrossed in a novel that I could read almost anywhere- on the school bus, over breakfast, under the bedsheets with a torch. As an adult reading has sometimes become a more analytical process; reading for university courses, reading as a teacher, and reading novels that I should read but don't necessarily love with a passion.

Lately, though, I've had a couple of wonderful reading experiences that remind me of those adolescent bookish obsessions. The novel I'm reading at the moment, I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, has me totally hooked. I bought this one partly for school (it's a classic YA novel) but am totally won over. The narrator is utterly endearing and the world she creates is vivid and fascinating. Although it was written in 1949, it doesn't seem to have dated much at all and is, in fact, surprisingly open-minded about lots of issues. Plus it had me laughing out loud in public today. And I can't put it down, I had to drag myself away just to write this!

The other book that I have passionately loved recently is very different to I Capture the Castle. JM Coetzee's novel, Disgrace, has an unlikeable middle-aged academic as its central character. It takes place in South Africa and deals with some of the complex problems that that country faces today. It's a confronting read- there is a brutal attack at the core of the novel- but the elegance and power of Coetzee's writing made this compelling reading for me. Coetzee describes family relationships, particularly between the central character and his adult daughter, with genuine insight and originality. I read Disgrace in one sitting and felt completely wrapped up in Coetzee's world.

I am loving this run of great books and hoping it continues. I'll be reading lots of blogs for more good recommendations and would love to hear about anyone else's recent literary love affairs...

Trashy Summer Reading

At the height of summer the long, hot days, the six week break from school and the many alcoholic drinks consumed seem to destroy my brain's ability to comprehend complex and serious literature. Enter Dominick Dunne and the ultimate trashy summer read, An Inconvenient Women.

I try not to read books like this too often. Life is short and there are so many really good books out there that I should be reading. But I find a guilty pleasure in the bitchy, superficial, 'high society' world that Dunne creates in his novels. Vanity Fair readers would be familiar with his monthly diary that appears in that magazine. Dunne is obsessed with wealth, celebrity and scandal and his diary mostly concerns criminal trials involving the rich and famous. His books cover the same ground.

An Inconvenient Women contains some of the least convincing dialogue ever written. Mostly characters speak in order to spell out plot points for the audience. Occasionally they are meant to sound suave and enigmatic, but usually they just end up sounding cliched and dumb. The 'sophisticated' young writer Phillip Quennell is the worst offender, wowing the female characters with such killer lines as 'You're the most fragile tough girl I ever knew', or 'Somehow you don't strike me as the kind of woman who stays away just because someone tells her to stay away'.

Dunne seems to be working on the Dan Brown principle of assuming that your audience is so dumb that they can't retain even the most basic of plot information for more than a few pages. This leads to the most outrageous repetition of whole paragraphs of detail. If I was to read once more about van Gogh's White Roses, a painting that hangs over the fireplace in the wealthy Pauline Mendelson's library, I was going to scream. Each reference to a character has to include catalogue of information about them, a technique that wears very thin, very quickly.

So on all objective scales, An Inconvenient Women is a terrible book. It is predictable, clunky and totally unconvincing. However there is a certain fun to be had with its depiction of outrageous behaviour and gloriously glamorous lives. Thankfully now I can hide it away on a shelf and get back to some decent reading until my next bout of summer madness...

Long Absence

Moving house shares some characteristics with childbirth (or what I'm told of it). It's a painful and traumatic experience at the time, but yet between moves the memory fades enough to convince us that it wasn't so bad, and so we do it all over again. Having just moved to a new city on the hottest day of the year (45 degrees Celsius), from a large house to a tiny flat up three flights of stairs (no lift), I am currently swearing that I'll never move again.

All this moaning is by way of apologising for not blogging recently. Not being able to find my computer under all the boxes is partly to blame, as is the ongoing and very ugly fight we're having with our ISP which means we still don't have the internet connected at home. Sigh. But I have been reading some interesting books which I hope to write about very soon- The Night Watch by Sarah Waters and Disgrace by JM Coetzee.

The chaos here is sure to end soon!

Library Card

Brandon refers to this cute library card generator at his site .

Gertrude and Claudius

The word that springs to mind when I think of how to describe Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike is 'adult'. Maybe this is because I have been reading a lot of YA fiction lately and have become used to teenage protagonists. Whatever the reason, it was a refreshing change to read a proper grown-up book.

Gertrude and Claudius is the story of the royal court of Denmark leading up to the events of Shakespeare's Hamlet. As the title suggests, the central characters are Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, and his uncle, Claudius, who of course famously becomes the king by poisoning Hamlet's father. In John Updike's Denmark, Hamlet is a sulky young man who is whiny and ungrateful, and his father, the king, is boorish and warlike. Gertrude is carefully drawn as a vivacious and well-loved noble women who is forced into a tactical marriage by the powerful men who surround her. By describing in detail Gertrude's unsatisfying marriage and the lack of control she has over her circumstances, Updike transforms her into a sympathetic character. When she embarks on a late-in-life affair with her husband's brother it gives her a glimpse of happiness and I, for one, was cheering her on.

Since the novel forms a kind of prequel to Hamlet, the reader knows what will eventually happen to the characters. Thus the emphasis moves back to the 'how' and not the 'what' of the plot. There is a feeling of suspense as plot unfurls and we wait for the murder that will spark the
events of Hamlet.

Updike writes in a muscular style. He is a writer who knows how to make the words do as he says. It's an interestingly masculine style in which to describe one of the most famous, most discussed and probably most disliked, women in literature. Updike gives Gertrude a life beyond the play and makes her believable. We escape Hamlet's view of the world to see how events might have been interpreted from a different perspective, one in which the dead King Hamlet is not perfect and his uncle not necessarily a total villain.

I loved Gertrude and Claudius. Updike creates a vivid picture of the windswept landscape and harsh life of medieval Denmark. He gives a fresh perspective on a familiar story and ultimately writes a great, tragic love story. A quirky aspect of the novel is that the names of the characters change three times- a reference to the different names given the characters in the various historical versions of the story. I found this slightly annoying, although I suppose it's an effective way to remind readers that the story of Hamlet is much older than Shakespeare.

I'll end with a quote about Shakespeare's Hamlet that Updike refers to in his afterword. It's from G. Wilson Knight's The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy:

Putting aside the murder being covered up, Claudius seems a capable king, Gertrude a noble queen, Ophelia a treasure of sweetness, Polonius a tedious but not evil counsellor, Laertes a generic young man. Hamlet pulls them all into death.

The New Year

Happy New Year to all! The Christmas/ New Year period has not proven to be good for either reading or blogging for me. Too much food, too much alcohol and too much racing around the country to various friends and relatives. While all of these things are wonderful in themselves, they have left little time for anything else.

Anyway, before Christmas I had begun to think, like many other bloggers, about what I would classify as my literary highlights of 2006. I tend to not keep up with current releases, since most of my books are bought second hand (my current read- Sarah Waters' The Night Watch- being a decadent exception) so my highlights wouldn't make any of the newspapers' 'best books' lists.

The absolute discovery of the year for me was Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. I've no idea why I left it so long to read this novel, but I was blown away by it. Nabokov creates a feeling of overwhelming discomfort, luring the reader into a relationship with an abhorrent but charismatic central character. I found myself on some level liking Humbert Humbert at the same time as being repulsed by his motivations and actions. Nabokov's wordplay and joy with language help to balance the confronting material and mean that Lolita is a surprisingly funny novel- certainly not something that I expected.

Other highlights of the past year would include two great female novelists: The Radiant Way by Margaret Drabble, which has made me a great fan of her work, and Kate Grenville's The Secret River. For pure 'eww' value I also have to mention Perfume by Patrick Suskind, probably one of the most disturbing and unforgettable novels I have ever read- ever wondered how to make perfume out of dead people? Patrick Suskind has and is happy to share...

Bad Santa

I find myself only one week away from Christmas and I'm hopelessly behind on my posts for Carl's G.I.F.T. Challenge. I'm not sure I'll manage four posts by next week but I couldn't let the challenge go by without mentioning my favourite Christmas film, Bad Santa.

Bad Santa is the ultimate anti-Christmas Christmas film. It stars Billy-Bob Thornton as a foul-mouthed drunken department store Santa who does a nice line in break and enter on the side. This film possibly has more swearing than any other I can think of. Okay, maybe there are some gangster movies that top it in the cursing stakes, but nobody swears with the same style as Billy-Bob. This Santa manages to offend just about every group in society and still remain endearing. For God's sake, he pisses himself while in the Santa suit and gets away with it.

And just in case you thought it was just too dark and cynical, there is a slightly soppy ending, albeit one that is totally in keeping with the spirit of the film. Watch this one with a glass of whisky, a cigar and a healthy desire to escape the usual Christmas schmaltz.

Doubles

I haven't posted in a while due to a nasty computer virus, so many apologies to those who read this blog and lots of bad vibes to whoever wiped my computer out. Anyway, I'm going to be a bit self-indulgent and make a list this post, so skip it if you don't like that sort of thing!

I'm moving to another city in January, so last weekend I thought I'd see if it is at all possible to streamline my ever-growing book collection (gasp! no!). I really couldn't stand to part with any books, however I thought that I could probably give away any that we had multiple copies of. When I met my husband, we merged our book collections and I found it fascinating to look through and see where our tastes overlapped. It was nice to see that some of my favourite books came up on the list:

1. The Shipping News E. Annie Proulx (the book I most often name as my favourite novel- anything Proulx writes is fantastic)
2. Wuthering Heights
3. The Remains of the Day Kazuo Ishiguro
4. The Bonfire of the Vanities Tom Wolff (embarrassingly we somehow had three copies of this, I've no idea why)
5. The Monkey's Mask Dorothy Porter (an Australian novel in verse, so a fairly obscure book to have two of- I also haven't read it yet, much to my shame. Soon, soon.)
6. Oranges are not the Only Fruit Jeanette Winterson (a brilliant autobiographical novel about her childhood)
7. Oliver Twist
8. The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck (one of my favourite writers, the ending of this novel is unbearably tragic and devastates me every time)
9. Exquisite Corpse Poppy Z. Brite (two copies of this and both were my husbands, me not being big on horror)
10. Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad
11. The Complete Poems of Sylvia Plath
12. Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy (another book that regular makes my list of favourite novels ever)

All books were happily received by people at my work. Of course, I have since bought lots more books, so my collection is really no smaller. Oh well, I think I'll just have to buy more shelves...

It's Not All About YOU, Calma!

It's Not All About YOU, Calma! is Barry Jonsberg's follow up to his successful young adult novel, Kiffo and the Pitbull and is just as entertaining and fun. Jonsberg has a talent for getting inside the head of his young female narrator, Calma Harrison, and it is the strong narrative voice that makes both novels so good. Calma is a self-confessed 'unreliable narrator', a fantastically opinionated girl who is forced in the course of the novel to confront some of her perceptions of the people around her. Calma has grown up a bit since Kiffo and the Pitbull- she now has a love interest and a minimum wage job at the local budget supermarket. She also has her dad to contend with; he's back on the scene after abandoning Calma and her mum several years earlier.

Jonsberg creates a strong sense of place in the novel, at times I could almost feel the steamy heat of Darwin as I read. He also writes very well about school and teachers, particularly English teachers, a result of his own teaching background. I'm not a big fan of comic novels (more on that in a future post), but Jonsberg bases his humour in believable characters and situations and I actually laughed out loud once or twice while reading this. I am looking forward to the next book in the 'Calma' series...