Well booklub has been progressing while I've been online elsewhere! Thought it might be a good time to do a summary of recent winter reading. Going on Miss J's theme, of the 'accidental book club' the first three are examples, of books that have just floated to me from saying to people (or them saying to me) can you lend me a book? Whatever you can spare, I'm going to cross the ocean so you might not get it back. You don't get really treasured reads that way, but you get sort of zeitgeist, recent stuff and just randoms too. In this way, we have a kind of informal book club among some greenpeace women. Basically a habit we're getting of circulating whatever books we buy amongst three or four chicks, as all of us are somewhat temporary residents in Europe. Then we sometimes talk about them in the pub.

The Reader (now a film with Kate Winslett in an oscar winning role) -Bernard Schillink. (from Cindy) This is a very quick read, quite engaging, and moves from a kind of risque love story from the first-person perspective of a young German school boy, to something else entirely. I think I'd still like to see the film, and my guess is they might tell the narrative in a different order, using flashback, which would be interesting. I found it very poignant and touching towards the end. It contains a sequence where two people have a connection only through letters for a period of time, which was particularly bitter-sweet for me, having experienced that somewhat.

Elizabeth Costello by JM Coetzee. (from the Christian)
Coetzee is very big in Australia I think, and has won a Nobel for literature. This book is more like a collection of long-ish essays, but put into the mouth of this fictional writer, Costello. I think JM is a man, and I generally like it when writers create a character of the opposite gender. In this book, the protagonist has won prestigious awards, and has an international following. In parts it left me a bit cold and thinking "what?, why has this narrative swerved off onto a long and somewhat scholarly discussion of vegetarianism, and what happened to the son who was just there a minute ago?". It's like Coetzee's using this book more as a clever thought-exercise than to convey a real story, and it is stretched a bit thin in some parts. Also, I didn't understand every reference so I got the feeling you just had to be more well read in the classics to really feel satisfied on all levels its operating. Jade, you might enjoy the exploration of ideas about animals and humans and their place in the world, as stand-along pieces - perhaps in extract!

White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (also from Cindy)
Won the Man booker prize last year. Indian writers who show us western culture against and eastern sensibility have been pretty popular (at least on my bookshelf!) for a few years. Zadie Smith's White teeth is one of my favourites and I've also enjoyed Buddha of Suburbia, Hari Kunzru's Transmission, God of Small things, and more. Actually I'm constantly trying to pick books that aren't actually about a middle class, 20th century, white woman or man in US/ UK or Australia. Can be tough at times. This one hasn't left such a lasting impression for me as those ones that come straight to mind. It's pretty bleak, about a guy raised in rural India and his quest to do better for himself, I think he ends up in Mumbai. Most of it is about the lead up to life-changing situation, I would say you could sum it up as an experience of total corruption, that then sets him on the path to being "successful." There's plenty to think about while you're reading, what is success really, what is it like to feel locked into a pre-determined life of obligations and duty. The main character suffers a whole lot of humiliations and defeats in the first part. He holds himself apart from others around himself, always wanting to be above them, incorruptible in a way. There's plenty of sly humour, and it pushes a couple of boundaries, like all good tales. But it's a fairly straightforward book - not sure if I'd put it in the big super-star awards category. But then I don't have to read and pick from the whole shortlist either!

Current: The Eternal Frontier - Tim Flannery (from the discount shop in Amsterdam)
Reading books like this is a bit 'back to my roots' of straight ecology - hundreds of pages of at times almost boring descriptions of waves of animal and plant evolution across the American continent. Tim has a kind of scientific sub-text though.. the growing weight of evidence that arrival of humans can dramatically alter a continent's fauna and environment, through intense hunting. Weirdly this is quite a controversial proposition amongst some circles, and that may be holding us back from actually recognising that we've (cough) -fucked the climate-! Anyway, this one is more a 'straight' monograph so far, on the creation of the plants, animals and people who inhabited America, up to Columbus's arrival in 1492. But throughout all his writing he wants to add the idea that humans can radically alter their environment, they are not just products of it - not so strange really, but somehow anathema to some branches of technology and science. Loving the geeky stuff about paleo-megafauna, also just getting into the section on evolution of cultures too.

Me talk pretty one day - David Sedaris (from the discount shop in Sydney)
Had high hopes for this one, got it second hand, saved it up for the plane ride home. I found his book "Dress your children in corduroy and denim" hilarious and just so 'out there' as he shared the more ridiculous sides of his own up-bringing. This book was written before that one, and was more self-conscious, less laugh-out-loud funny. Still worth a go while travelling, but I wouldn't bother buying if I were you.

Reading writing about writing

Read an interesting journal article today about the process and experience of writing. Maybe it's my love of blogging, but I really enjoy the emerging auto-ethnographic approach to social research. There seems something honest to me about hearing the voice of the researcher, and I think when it comes to the human condition, self reflection is an interesting 'data source' - as much as grand scale surveys and quant studies. As a form of identifying one of all the possible experiences, and exploring that in some depth. Enough chatter - here is a beautiful passage from that paper:

"Today, in the garden, I killed a snail. As soon as I did it, I vowed in my life never intentionally to kill another creature. But I have just woken up in the middle of the night, thinking about the snail. I only broke its shell, but breaking that shell ended its life.

What is the significance of that snail and its shell? For the snail, its shell was not simply its protection from being killed, or simply its home: It was the snail: Breaking the shell equaled killing the snail. What has that got to do with writing? In my sleepy reverie, I have connected writing with the shell. This is not meant to be a simple figure of speech, which allows me to think that cracking the shell of (my) writing will somehow crack some hidden code and lead me to a profound understanding of self. But there are some parallels. Writing is not simply a shell or a code which protects us or allows us to be identified in certain superficial ways; our writing is us, or to paraphrase Richardson (1997), writing becomes us, we inquire after ourselves through our writing. So finding out about our writing is also finding out about ourselves.

Every snail shell is idiosyncratically unique, allowing us to identify every snail. The snail’s shell is becoming, it grows with, the snail; there is no separation.
So my writing is not there simply to identify me, nor to protect me, nor to give me my home—it is me, its fluid, energetic, emerging shades, it is me becoming. It is identifying me, it is protecting me, it is my home but can only be characterized in these ways through the constant fluid movement of becoming. So between the two, me and my writing, exists a multiplicity of connections, a state of fluidity, an ever-changing nexus of identifications, infinitesimally small but hugely significant moments that give something to my sense, my feeling of knowing, of self."

Source: Ken Gale and Jonathan Wyatt (2006) Inquiring Into Writing: An Interactive Interview Qualitative Inquiry 2006; 12; 1117
Downloaded from http://qix.sagepub.com by on July 15, 2008

Reference cited above:
Richardson, L. (1997). Fields of play (constructing an academic life). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

how to not have a regular job...

Watched "Jennifer Byrne Presents" recently, and she interviewed Peter Carey, Paul Auster, and Ian McEwan. Transcript is via this link.

What struck me is that, on top of feeling compelled to write and being good at it, they became writers to avoid being employed by someone else, and so they could control when they work and not have to work 9 to 5!

They talk about how long it took to get their first novels published, and how they view other authors.