Inside the Whale and other essays

I have already read some of these essays but the new stuff and the odd re-read was highly rewarding.

Orwell is an exceptionally lucid writer, expressing insightful thoughts with clarity and imagination. The description of a working coalmine is direct and powerful, and even the lit crit about writers I haven't read comes across as sharp. The peach is "Politics and the English Language", which should be required reading for anyone who uses words, which is to say everybody.

You can read it yourself here - please do.

Joan Makes History – Kate Grenville

Feminist rewritings of history are usually the kind of thing that brings me out in hives, but I gave this a go on the strength of the excellent The Secret River. Joan proves to be an exuberant, senual and engaging narrator, both when she lives the life of a “normal” wife and mother, and when she materialises in various roles at important moments in Australian history.

It was only when she adopts the role of a man for a while that I realised I was reading a take on Woolf’s Orlando.

Good stuff.

Churchill and Australia – Graham Freudenberg

Political and military history is not my usual bag, but this was a gift so I gave it a go. It told me more than I ever knew, and possibly wanted to know, about this important relationship. Freudenberg knows his onions and is obviously a fine writer, but I kept finding myself reacting against his distinctly Australian viewpoint.

The first key point is Gallipoli, of which Churchill was the architect, and which was a famous disaster. It’s role in the psyche of Australia only really came much later, and many modern Aussies would be surprised to know that ANZACs comprised only about 20% of the allied casualties of the campaign. A mighty military failure, but to characterise it as an Antipodean tragedy devalues the sacrifices of the British, French and Indian troops who suffered equally.

The second key point is Churchill’s “Beat Hitler First” strategy in World War 2, and the consequent failure to hold Singapore or set up adequate defences for Australia against the Japanese. Churchill certainly deceived Australia’s leaders over the importance he placed on their security in the great scheme of things, but the Indians were treated far worse, and...well, he was proved right, wasn’t he?

These gripes suggest that Freudenberg is less admiring of Churchill than he actually is. Despite my issues with some of the views expressed here, I found it an interesting primer on all sorts of history which one ought to be aware of but I hadn’t known about hitherto.

Miss Lonelyhearts - Nathanael West

A brief, bleak and brilliant novella from Depression era America about a hack who works on an agony aunt column under the titular pseudonym. His colleagues regard the job as a joke, but the heart-wrenching letters he reads lead the protagonist into a desperate search for meaning.

The Year of Reading Dangerously

Enough already! Despite ploughing through about 100 books a year for the last 3 years, my "to read" shelf is now actually shelves and 2 deep at that. My pledge for 2009 is that I will borrow nothing from the library, nor buy any new books, but confine myself solely to items from this collection.

I allow myself a few exceptions:

1) Gifts gratefully received and added to the collections
2) I can continue any series I have already begun, e.g The Chronicles of Barchester
3) I can cheat if something urgent comes up
4) I can cheat if I'm bored

Books Read in 2008

102 this year, including some very long stuff and some very short stuff so there you go. For me this goes down as the year of A Dance to the Music of Time - sublime stuff and well worth the investment of time and valuable thinkiness.

Best Books: A Dance to the Music of Time, The Moonstone, Arthur and George, I Claudius, The Power and the Glory, On Chesil Beach, Oliver Twist, Brideshead Revisited, The Secret River

Worst Book: The Subterraneans

Longest Book: Les Miserables

Shortest Book: Ruth

Non-Fiction Books: 29

Australian Authors: 5

Female Authors: 15

Resolution for 2009: See the next post. Eek!

1 Barnaby Rudge - Charles Dickens
2 Piccadilly Jim - P.G. Wodehouse
3 The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
4 Park and Ride - Miranda Sawyer
5 Author, Author - David Lodge
6 Continent - Jim Crace
7 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
8 State of the Nation - Michael Billington
9 England Made Me - Graham Greene
10 Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency - Douglas Adams
11 What’s The Matter With America? - Thomas Frank
12 In A Free State - V.S. Naipaul
13 Fireworks - Angela Carter
14 A Buyer’s Market - Anthony Powell
15 Rip It Up And Start Again - Simon Reynolds
16 The Damned United - David Peace
17 The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
18 Miami - Joan Didion
19 The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul - Douglas Adams
20 Arthur and George - Julian Barnes
21 Towards The End Of The Morning - Michael Frayn
22 Jilla and Me - Diane Cameron
23 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner - James Hogg
24 Joshua
25 The Fall of Troy - Peter Ackroyd
26 Hellboy: Seeds of Destruction - Mike Mignola
27 The Demon-Haunted World - Carl Sagan
28 The Second Plane - Martin Amis
29 Hellboy: Wake the Devil - Mike Mignola
30 The Acceptance World - Anthony Powell
31 The Lambs of London - Peter Ackroyd
32 The Missionary Position - Christopher Hitchens
33 Judges
34 Ruth
35 Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham
36 Last Chance To See… - Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine
37 Lost in a Good Book - Jasper Fforde
38 I, Claudius - Robert Graves
39 Frost On My Moustache - Tim Moore
40 Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje
41 Lady Susan - Jane Austen
42 Gentlemen of the Road - Michael Chabon
43 The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene
44 Against Nature - J.K. Huysmans
45 Bone: Out from Boneville - Jeff Smith
46 The Ballad of Peckham Rye - Muriel Spark
47 The Wisdom of Father Brown - G.K. Chesterton
48 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater - Thomas de Quincey
49 On Chesil Beach - Ian McEwan
50 The Beggar’s Opera - John Gay
51 London Voices, London Lives - Peter Hall
52 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
53 At Lady Molly’s - Anthony Powell
54 She - H. Rider Haggard
55 Swearing - Geoffrey Hughes
56 Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant - Anthony Powell
57 From Russia With Love - Ian Fleming
58 The Twelve Caesars - Suetonius
59 Me - Katharine Hepburn
60 The Tin Men - Michael Frayn
61 The Kindly Ones - Anthony Powell
62 Maigret and the Ghost - Georges Simenon
63 The Book of General Ignorance - John Lloyd and John Mitchinson
64 Around the World in 80 Days - Jules Verne
65 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
66 Clear Light of Day - Anita Desai
67 The Gathering - Anne Enright
68 The Porn Report - Alan McKee, Katherine Albury & Catharine Lumby
69 My Friend Maigret - Georges Simenon
70 Mimi and Toutou Go Forth - Giles Foden
71 The Valley of Bones - Anthony Powell
72 Monkey Grip - Helen Garner
73 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
74 House of Meetings - Martin Amis
75 The Well of Lost Plots - Jasper Fforde
76 The Subterraneans - Jack Kerouac
77 The Soldier’s Art - Anthony Powell
78 Bone: The Great Cow Race - Jeff Smith
79 A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
80 The Secret River - Kate Grenville
81 The Military Philosophers - Anthony Powell
82 Under The Volcano - Malcolm Lowry
83 Newton - Peter Ackroyd
84 Books Do Furnish A Room - Anthony Powell
85 Stranger in a Strange Land - Gary Younge
86 Temporary Kings - Anthony Powell
87 Hearing Secret Harmonies - Anthony Powell
88 The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
89 Stranded - Clinton Walker
90 Doctor Thorne - Anthony Trollope
91 Josh Hartnett Definitely Wants To Do This, and Other Lies from a Life in the Screen Trade - Bruce Beresford
92 Thames; Sacred River - Peter Ackroyd
93 The Abbess of Crewe - Muriel Spark
94 Notorious; The Life of Ingrid Bergman - Donald Spoto
95 The Elephant Man and other reminiscences - Frederick Treves
96 Angel - Elizabeth Taylor
97 The Incredulity of Father Brown - G.K. Chesterton
98 Gilgamesh - Joan London
99 Making Movies - Sidney Lumet
100 The Ghost Writer - Philip Roth
101 Classics, a very short introduction - Mary Beard and John Henderson
102 The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow

The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow

I have tried Bellow before and I probably will again, thanks to my respect for his self-professed successors Martin Amis and Philip Roth, but this one lost me a little bit.

There are fine memorable passages here but the lack of over-arching story becomes increasingly frustratinging over its considerable length. There are so many characters that drift in and out to no great effect, and more are being introduced 10 pages from the end. I'll never forget Augie leaving his "idiot" brother in a home, or the section in which he decamps to Mexico to train eagles, or indeed the marvellous opening line (I am an American, Chicago born) - but there's plenty more I've already forgottten amid the narrative miasma.