Radio National’s Top 100 Books of the 21st Century vote has concluded. You can read all about it at this link.
I didn’t vote, mainly because I generally think that the book I’m currently reading is the best or worst of all time. I’ve read 36 of the ones that made the cut. Some of them are terrific, some I wouldn’t give the time of day to in the street. Here are the books that I’ve read, with links to my blog post where they were published after about 2004, plus the 13 books I haven’t read but have seen a TV or movie version of, without links. I almost scored 50 percent.
[This was originally posted in my now defunct blog Family Life, on 2 August 2006. I’m retrieving it today because it includes some comments on Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, which recently came in at number 20 in Radio National’s Top 100 Books of the 21st Century.]
Books I bought in July: Robert Charles Wilson, Spin (Tor Books 2005)
Books read: Poppy Z. Brite,Liquor (Three Rivers Press 2004) and Prime (Three Rivers Press 2005) Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (Virago 2006) Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist (Little Brown 2006) Jared Diamond, Collapse (Penguin 2005) (finished) Kate Grenville, The Secret River (Test 2005) Philippe Geluck, Le Chat (Casterman 2002)
As this month has been spent travelling, I’ve laid aside a couple of books only partly finished, and mostly started on a whole new swag
I read Poppy C Brite’s Liquor and most of Gilead on the plane to Europe. It’s hard to think of a greater contrast, one about heavy-drinking chefs in pre-Katrina New Orleans, the other an elegiac look at three generations of austere men of religion. Both of them were infinitely preferable to trying to watch a movie in those circumstances (I gave up when an announcement about duty-free shopping interrupted the opening scene of Candy). Poppy C. Brite’s book strikes me as a thinly disguised love song – love for her city (New Orleans, pronounced with the emphasis on the middle syllable), for the world of restaurant work and I presume for her chef husband, and for lovely bits of the English language. The plot is functional, but that’s not where the interest lies.
Gilead is also a love letter, with a lot less disguise: it’s in the form of a letter written from a dying man to his seven-year-old son, in the expectation that the son will be an adult by the time he reads it. The narrator is deeply in love with his little son; Marilynne Robinson clearly loves her narrator, probably the last of a line of passionate preachers in the US midwest. He is a man of profound faith, saturated in bible-awareness, but also acquainted with other intellectual traditions. He is writing the boy’s ‘begats’ – that is to say, he tells the story of his own grandfather, a wild, pistol-wielding preacher called by a vision to fight slavery, of his father, an equally single-minded man of peace, and of himself, struggling with a world where his kind of faith is more and more under attack – by secularism on the one hand and television evangelism on the other. It’s a book full of grace and wisdom.
In Amsterdam I moved on to The Undercover Economist. I’d heard Tim Harford speak at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, and been taken as much by his Tin-Tin quiff as by his talking sense about economics. I feel as a result of reading this that I now have a basic grasp of classic market economics, and it was more or less fun to read.
Prime is a sequel to Liquor, and like that book it abounds in glorious descriptions of the joys of cooking and eating. The book gained extra piquancy for me from being read in Ireland, where we had some difficulty finding palatable food (we gave a special award to the lightly spiced salmon patties served up in a posh-looking hotel dining-room and called Thai fish cakes).
In London, I finished Collapse. Again, this was appropriate, not because it’s a great escapist holiday read (it’s anything but), but because it cast a sharp light on the experience of London’s hottest summer days ever: this wasn’t just a frivolous news story about Poms not knowing how to build cool houses; it was a harbinger of major things to come for all of us. It was good to read his chapter on Australia in London as well, because he argues that our persistent identification with British traditions is one of the things preventing us from choosing environmentally sound directions. I was struck by his articulation of one of the key challenges facing the world:
the challenge of deciding which of a society’s deeply held core beliefs are compatible with the society’s survival, and which ones instead have to be given up.
Before leaving the brick of a book behind on the train to Gatwick (to avoid excess baggage charges), I copied out this from his final section, where he talks about what anyone can do about the current crisis:
an individual should not expect to make a difference through a single action, or even through a series of actions that will be completed within three weeks. If you do want to make a difference, plan to commit yourself to a consistent policy of actions over the duration of your life.
I moved on to The Secret River with high expectations. But whereas recent readings, Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Trilogy and Seamus Heaney’s ‘District and Circle’, had both evoked London localities so vividly that I was constantly being reminded of moments from that novel and that poem during my stay there, I was disappointed that this book’s London remained pretty bodiless. Once the hero, Will Thornhill, arrived on the Hawkesbury with his family, however, my disappointment disappeared: there the book’s true subject emerged, and at the same time the physical world became powerfully present:
When Thornhill jumped over the bow the mud gripped his feet. He tried to take a step and it sucked him in deeper. With a huge effort he dragged one foot out and looked for a place to set it down between the spiky mango roots. Lurched forward into even deeper mud, pulled his other leg up with a squelch, feeling the foot stretch against the ankle, and floundered towards the bank. He put his head down and butted blindly through a screen of bushes, bursting out at last onto dry land. Beyond the river-oaks the ground opened onto a flat place covered with tender green growth and studded with yellow daisies.
His own. His own, by virtue of his foot standing on it.
Will’s first real encounter with one of the people he is dispossessing in this moment occurs within pages, and the book becomes as gripping as the Hawkesbury mud – in which I have no doubt Kate Grenville has had her feet stuck.
Le chat was my one book in French, a bande dessinée whose measure I found very hard to take. It consists the Steven-Wright-ish monologues of a large, cool, besuited cat. For example:
Le mot ‘long’ est plus court que le mot ‘court’. C’est dingue, non?
And now I return to Romanesque churches and ancient Cathar towers.
Posted on20 Oct 2025|Comments Off on Bookblog #51: Book Club Xmas presents
[This was originally posted in my now defunct blog Family Life, on 14 January 2009. I’m retrieving it today because it includes some comments on Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap, which recently came in at number 37 in Radio National’s Top 100 Books of the 21st Century.]
Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant (Text Publishing 2008) Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap (Allen & Unwin 2008)
These were Penny’s and my presents from the Book Club Secret Santa/Kris Kringle in December. They’re both novels we’d been planning to read, both much praised in the press.
The Lieutenant was mine, and I was delighted to receive it. My interest had been piqued by hearing Kate Grenville talk charmingly – and passionately – about it at Gleebooks and then again on the Book Show. I think, though, that when I came to read it, I suffered from having heard too much, and the story remained for too long something I was being told about rather than something that was happening for me as I read. I was disorientated by the policy of renaming historical characters. I suppose the reason for this was to avoid being taken to task by grumpy old historians. You know, if someone were to say, ‘But the evidence is clear that Arthur Phillip was not an authoritarian, culturally blinkered careerist,’ the novelist could reply, ‘But this is a fictional first Governor of New South Wales called Gilbert, not the historical Phillip at all.’ The trouble is, given that the pithy core of the book is an actual document, which Kate Grenville has been careful to tell us provides every word of the conversation between her lieutenant hero and the young Aboriginal woman who befriends him, the novel is clearly meant to be an imagining of the actual early colony, and such arguments would be so much blown smoke.
The result is a kind of roman à clef effect: is Silk actually Watkin Tench? which of the Aboriginal men is Bennelong? etc. Now that I’m dropping in bits of French, I might as well say that there’s also something of the roman à thèse about the book, in the sense that one feels that the characters are there not so much for their own sake as for what they can show us about the meeting of cultures in Port Jackson in 1788. When I wrote in this blog about Kate Grenville’s previous book, I used the word ‘bodiless’. There’s something un-fleshed about this one too. All the same, it’s about one of the most interesting subjects I can imagine: the meeting of two mutually uncomprehending cultures in the form of two people establishing a delicate intimacy, against the odds and ephemeral. That it is tightly based on Lieutenant Dawes’s actual notebook on the Gadigal language gives it enormous moral force. By the end I was weeping.
As I mentioned earlier, The Slap accounted for exactly half of the books in the Secret Santa/Kris Kringle. Clearly, sight unseen, we’d all decided it was worth a read. It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast to The Lieutenant. While we are told that Kate Grenville’s hero has an active sex life, it happens discreetly offstage. The Slap treats us in great detail to any number of sexual encounters, or perhaps I should say events, since ‘encounter’ implies a meeting of some kind. (Actually the sex in this book reminded me my childhood curiosity about characters in books going to the toilet. It’s as if this book decides it’s going to show the sexual things that are usually glossed over, but the result is mostly unconvincing.)
I read the first third or so aloud to Penny on three longish car trips. At a certain point she refused to have me read any more, not just because of the sex and the tediously undifferentiated obscenity of much of the dialogue, but because she just didn’t want to go where the plot was signalling its intention of taking us. I read on, mostly out of a sense of duty, and it turned out the signals were misleading. I can’t say it was a pleasant read, but in the end it was an impressive one.
In case anyone reading this doesn’t know, the story deals with an interwoven group of family and friends in suburban Melbourne. A man slaps a child at a barbecue: the man is Greek, the child’s parents are ‘Skip’ and embedded in victim identities. Though the back cover blurb says that the book is about ‘the slap and its consequences’, I read it more as using the slap as a device that provided a slender unifying narrative thread to the novel’s eight parts, each of which is told from the point of view of a different person who was at the fateful barbecue. A young girl gets plastered with her friends at an end-of-school party; an old man confronts his own mortality at the funeral of an old friend; several marriages are revealed as built on compromise – variously generous, self-sacrificing, resentful. There are lies about sex, half-truthful confessions of infidelity, a shocking betrayal of trust. For me, perhaps the finest thing is the tender–tough revelation of what drives the neurotic and vicious mother of the child who is slapped, so that we move from loathing and despising her to recognising her tragedy. The writing is pretty rough at times, and I think that people who say it’s wonderful to have a book with such a compelling plot for a change haven’t read much children’s or young adult writing.
I’m not rushing out to find all Christos’ other books, but my sense of what it is to be alive, human and suburban Australian has been expanded.
[This was originally posted in my now defunct blog Family Life, on 1 March 2008. I’m retrieving it today because it includes some comments on Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book, which recently came in at number 89 in Radio National’s Top 100 Books of the 21st Century.]
To the qualities I attributed last month to Raewyn Connell, author of Southern Theory, add humility. At several points in the book, she acknowledges her difficulty in understanding one of the texts under discussion, even her inability to do so. But this humility is a long way from an admission of inadequacy; in fact, it’s kind of exemplary, as in: This important material has been ignored by social scientists of the West/North/centre/metropole (SSWNCM); we need to approach it knowing that our grasp of it will be imperfect.
When I was about halfway through the book, reading while walking the dog, I met Raewyn down at the corner postbox. ‘You’ve been my walking companion for the last couple of days,’ I said, ‘and you’re excellent company. Of course,’ I went on, ‘given how much I know about social science theory ,,,’ She finished my sentence, ‘… I could be telling a big pile of whoppers.’ Well, if that’s what she’s doing, she’s certainly doing it with gravitas and grace. Having described the way the SSWNCM have generally managed to ignore the East/South/periphery as a source of theory in the social sciences, she discusses a small number of the thinkers who have been ignored or marginalised – from Africa, Muslim Iran, Latin America, India, Indigenous Australia; and drawing the threads together beautifully without claiming to arrive at a synthesis, she outlines key places where the North can learn from the South.
She mentions that one prominent social scientist of the North Atlantic referred to an earlier version of the argument as a ‘guilt trip’, but it reads to me much more as a judicious and impassioned call for a broadening of horizons, or more precisely an acknowledgement of horizons and of other features of particular locations: that is, one of her central points is that social theory of the Metropole takes place in terra nullius, and recognition of the importance of place is something that the theory from elsewhere has to offer. (She has some beautiful paragraphs on the sandstone country where she and I both live.) Though I’m a social scientist only in the sense that we all are – I live in a society, think about it and try to live well in it and/or in struggle with it – I found the book not just accessible (even on pages that were full of references familiar to the book’s ideal reader and completely unknown to me), but exhilarating.
I’m pleased to report that, unlike Mr Punch, the collaboration from Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean that I read before this, Signal to Noise isn’t packaged as a children’s book. Perhaps an account of the death of an artist is more obviously adult than tales of the effect on a young boy of witnessing half-understood scenes of sex and violence. It’s a terrific book.
I’m not generally in love with Dave McKean’s art work, except when he’s working for children – The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish and The Wolves in the Walls are both brilliant. His grown-up (as opposed to ‘adult’) work tends to be too fractured, dark and postmodern-incoherent for my taste. I started this book with a sinking feeling, as the first couple of pages are given over to a piece written as well as illustrated by McKean. About this piece the less said by me the better. Then there’s a spread of a series of poems about walls by Gaiman, and suddenly the illustrative style works, as it continues to do for main feature: the moody, hard-to-read images combine with the elegant text to spectacular effect, including a couple of sharply poignant moments (if you’ll excuse the tautology). Neil Gaiman, the new Man in Black, has a lot to say about death.
Penny and I had a long car drive in the middle of the month, and as is our custom I read to her for a good bit of the trip both ways. It’s a fun way to travel and a sociable way to read, which we’ve done with books as diverse as Lillian Hellman’s Pentimento, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, and Clive James’s Falling Towards England. This time we chose People of the Book for our driving entertainment. We made it through the first 110 pages, and it was fun, but I’m not sure I’ll read the rest. When you read a book aloud, you tend to notice things that otherwise you might skim over, and then they start to drag at your attention. For instance, when I reached this bit on page 54 I had to stop to vent a little:
Lola had begun to lead an exhausting double life. Hashomer met two nights a week. On those nights she went to bed early, with her little sister. Sometimes, when she had worked very hard, it took an immense effort of will to keep herself awake, listening to the gentle, even breathing of Dora’s little body next to her. But mostly her anticipation made it easy to feign sleep until her parents’ snores told her it was safe to leave. Then she would creep out, scrambling into her clothes on the landing and hoping no neighbours came out of their doors to notice.
There’s nothing bad about that writing, but did the parents snore in unison? wouldn’t one have started first, and one been louder than the other? (Later in the chapter it turns out that the mother wasn’t asleep at all, so surely she wouldn’t have been snoring?). Why did Lola have to feign sleep when her little sister was already asleep and her parents were in another room? If you walked out at night onto your landing where a young woman was getting dressed, would you ‘notice’ it, with the implication that you might somehow have missed it? These nitpicking questions actually arise, I think, from the passage’s lack of imaginative engagement with the situation. It’s as if the story is being hurried along. And that would be fine, if it was being hurried along to a sharply realised scene. But this kind of thing goes on for page after page: in the debates about Israel among the young Jews of Sarajevo in 1942, you can feel the points being ticked off rather than any kind of life in the disputants (compare, say, the political arguments in that Ken Loach movie about the Spanish Civil War); even in the parts where Hanna the book conservator is going about her business, what fascinates is the wealth of material that Geraldine Brooks has found in her research, and the elegance with which she performs her info dump, rather than any engagement with the characters or the action
I was glad when the sex scene in the first chapter happened during a paragraph break, but then I wondered if the fact that it wasn’t described might be symptomatic of the narration’s failure to engage – to show rather than tell. There are poignant and dramatic moments, and Geraldine Brooks turns a beautiful sentence, but life may be too short for me to read any more of this one. If I’m making a serious mistake, please say so in the comments.
If a book of poetry is like a forest, I often seem to have trouble seeing any given tree for the woods. Some of the individual poems in The Cinnamon Peeler speak to me, and there are any number of memorable lines and images, but generally I feel as if I’m eavesdropping on a discontinuous commentary on things I know nothing about. Ondaatje is originally from Sri Lanka: knowing that, I can tell that the tropical references have childhood resonances. I can guess that he has a son named Skyler (‘Late Movies with Skyler’ is terrific). But for an awful lot of the book I was struggling to make sense of the scraps I was overhearing. Maybe I need to discover poets one poem at a time (with Langston Hughes, for example, it was ‘Mother to Son’; Hopkins, weirdly enough, the sonnet that starts ‘Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, vaulty, voluminous … stupendous’), and I may be getting things barse-ackwards here, wanting to have a sense of a whole book when I should be happy to have a dozen poems that speak to me (which I do) and just allow to pass by those that don’t. For the record, the ones I do get tend to celebrate friendship, and are mostly towards the end of the book.
I don’t understand why the Fair Dinkum Histories haven’t been universally greeted with drum rolls and fanfares. These are the fourth and fifth books in the series, and like their predecessors they are lively and unpatronising accounts of parts of Australian history. They provide what the former Prime Minister demanded of history: a narrative thread. I don’t know what he would make of their attention to the dispossession of Aboriginal people, to class and cultural diversity, to the role of women and children, and so on, but they’ll do me.
Gold, Graves and Glory tells the story from 1850 to 1880, and as you’d expect from the title and the cover, is about goldrushes and bushrangers. There’s also quite a bit about explorers. What you might be surprised by are the account of Chinese miners on the goldfields, including the racism they endured, the attention to Aboriginal dispossession, the detail about underpaid ‘Afghan’ camel handlers who accompanied the explorers, and the expansion of the story beyond the south-east of the mainland, including the beginnings of the sugar industry in Queensland. On an idiosyncratically personal note, it was nice to see Edward John Eyre’s Journals of Expeditions of Discovery in the Recommended Reading list – Eyre’s story doesn’t feature in the narrative, so presumably it’s there because Jackie French recognises it’s a good yarn. My aborted MA thesis in the 1970s was to have made that point at great length.
A Nation of Swaggies & Diggers is harder going than any of the others in the series so far: covering the period 1880–1920, it deals with things I remember as being acutely boring in my primary school days – the importance of gold and wool to the developing economy, the conferences leading up to Federation, the Depression of the 90s – and it doesn’t entirely manage to break that childhood curse. The mandatory thumbnail sketches of the first prime ministers don’t help. And even the account of Australians going to war is somehow flat – perhaps because of the unresolved contradiction between horror at what actually happened and the role the glorifying/sentimentalising myth has played.
But even here Jackie French’s text and Peter Sheehan’s cartoons maintain a light tone (the latter mostly with satisfyingly groan-worthy puns) without resorting to bum jokes. The account of how domestic life was changing, complete with recipes, is particularly delightful. And suddenly in the first years of the last century I was recognising things from my own childhood: the mint at the back steps, the lemon tree in the yard, sponge cake and lamingtons, blocks of ice wrapped in hessian for the ice chest. [Full disclosure: my copies of both these books were given to me by Peter Sheehan, who is a friend of mine; and the series was originally commissioned for Scholastic by Margrete Lamond, also a friend.]
In the Fair Dinkum Histories, the story of the coming of independence and democracy to the Australia colonies is largely a matter of dates, and where the debates can’t be avoided, as in the lead-up to Federation, they are described in a chapter entitled ‘The Great Yack Attack’. And that’s fair enough: compared with exploration, slaughter, discovery of gold, romantic uprisings, and the struggles of Indigenous Australians, Chinese and women, questions of governance don’t obviously rate high on the child-friendly scale. Colonial Ambition was published too late to be useful in Jackie French’s research. Had the timing been different, she might well have found her way to delight child readers with the mid 19th century struggles conducted by a cast of extraordinary characters over the form of government that would prevail in the colonies. Peter Cochrane has certainly achieved that for adult readers.
It’s not bang-bang-kiss-kiss; it’s not bloodshed on a foreign strand; but it’s a great story full of comedy and heroism, big ideas and petty point-scoring, opportunism and integrity, and eloquence, eloquence, eloquence. In those days people didn’t watch sound-bites on the telly after dinner; they wandered up to Macquarie Street to see if here were any good speeches in the Legislative Council. In 1846 more than 3000 people met at Homebush Racecourse to protest against a proposal to reintroduce convict transportation; a year or so later more than 2000 met in the Royal Victoria Theatre in Haymarket to oppose a new constitution being foisted on the colony by Earl Grey. They gathered, they cheered the speakers, they prevailed. In the absence of universal suffrage, the ‘multitude out-of-doors’ did make its voices heard; in the absence of votes for women, a Ladies’ Petition was a significant political event.
The Art Student read this before me, and read great slabs of it aloud. It’s that kind of book: among other characters, it’s got a fiercely eloquent albino dandy, a faux-rustic oligarch with a chip on his shoulder, a dapper Regency blade who is devastated when he kills his wife in a carriage accident, a rocking-horse maker who becomes known as the Father of Federation. The committee advising John w Howard on the inaugural Prime Minister’s History Prize recommended this book for the prize. The then PM only partly accepted the recommendation, and decided the prize should be shared with Les Carlyon’s history of the First World War. One result of this decision is that the two books are placed side by side as alternative foundation narratives: Australia achieved true nationhood when thousands of its young men were slaughtered in a European war (and did some killing of their own), or Australia achieved nationhood through the less glamorous but arduous business of arguing, rallying, orating, lobbying, writing, imagining, organising … thinking. There was very little violence, and though Peter Cochrane uses the metaphor of war and his characters refer frequently to the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, there was no war.
On 30 March 1858 Charles ‘Slippery Charlie’ Cowper introduced a bill to amend the Electoral Law in New South Wales, the bill that was to establish manhood suffrage and make the colony a ‘democracy for men’ (Cochrane’s phrase) and who even remembers that date? ‘The introduction of democracy in New South Wales,’ says Cochrane, ‘ was as matter-of-fact as a handbook for a customs clerk.’ But of course, that quiet moment came as the culmination of years of struggle.
Me fail? I fly! 