Jane Rawson's Blog, page 9

My year in books, unnecessarily charted

Right, let’s assume I’m not going to finish any more books between now and the end of the year. What a ridiculous assumption. Anyway, here’s my 2014-in-reading wrap-up (which won’t cover the books I read between now and the end of the year. I promise to update you if any of them are earth-shattering).

This year I started reading 95 books and got to the end of 87 of them. Nineteen of them were published in 2014. For most of the year I was doing the Australian Women Writers Challenge (my wrap-up of that is here), which made a lot of difference to what I read. I was also in a slipstream book club, shortlisted for two prizes which meant I wanted to read the other shortlistees, concerned with climate change and shipwrecks (thanks to books I’m working on), and a few weeks back I signed up to TBR20 (more on that here).

My favourite books of the year were:

Familiar by J Robert Lennon – reality and unreality bundled in together in a masterful bit of genre blurring
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov – as my Goodreads review said, ‘Yes, very good’
Gone by Jennifer Mills – chilling and enigmatic and just bloody great
Anguli Ma by Chi Vu – Australia looked utterly different while I was reading this Vietnamese gothic horror set in Footscray
Beloved by Toni Morrison – I feel like an idiot for not reading this sooner. I had no idea
Sea Hearts (also published as The Brides of Rollrock Island) by Margo Lanagan – a bleak fairytale that eviscerates the relationship between women and men
One foot wrong by Sofie Laguna – horrible, beautiful, bewitching and repulsive (look, sorry if you came here looking for feel-good heartwarmers…)
The sixth extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert – read this book about how humans are killing everything, how in the scheme of things it matters less than you think, and marvel at Kolbert’s light, dry wit
Cold Light by Frank Moorhouse – there’s not much I like better than the Edith Campbell Berry trilogy.


And now to the entirely unnecessary charts…

Not everyone is one or the other

Australian Women Writers Challenge may have skewed my reading…

Most of those ‘real’ books were bought at The Sun or Readings.

There’s no way these stats are right…

My Australian Women Writers Challenge wrap-up

This was the first year I did the Australian Women Writers challenge. I set out to achieve ‘Franklin’ level – 10 books read and six of them reviewed. I ended up reading 39 books and reviewing 30 of them (though most of my reviews are only a paragraph or two: I’m no reviewer). I had no trouble finding interesting books to read, and there were many, many more I would have liked to get through.

The books I read were (in chronological order – asterisks are books I borrowed from the library):

The Watch Tower, by Elizabeth Harrower
The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt, by Tracy Farr
In Her Blood, by Annie Hauxwell*
Tarcutta Wake, by Josephine Rowe
Animal People, by Charlotte Wood*
Rupetta, by Nike Sulway
In-human, by Anna Dusk
The Getting of Wisdom, by Henry Handel Richardson*
One Foot Wrong, by Sofie Laguna
Sea Hearts, by Margo Langan*
Tender Morsels, by Margo Lanagan*
Caution: Contains Small Parts, by Kirstyn McDermott
Holiday in Cambodia by Laura Jean McKay
Cracklescape by Margo Lanagan
My Beautiful Enemy, by Cory Taylor*
Above/Below, by Stephanie Campisi and Ben Peek
Elemental, by Amanda Curtin*
Anguli Ma, by Chi Vu*
The Night Guest, by Fiona McFarlane*
Captives, by Angela Meyer
The Great Unknown, edited by Angela Meyer
Gone, by Jennifer Mills
Pursuing Love and Death, by Heather Taylor Johnson*
When we Have Wings, by Claire Corbett*
After Darkness, by Christine Piper*
The Wonders, by Paddy O’Reilly
The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf, by Ambelin Kwaymullina*
Gilgamesh, by Joan London*
The Ark, by Annabel Smith
Cracking the Spine, edited by Julie Chevalier
The Neighbour, by Julie Proudfoot
Through Splintered Walls, by Kaaron Warren
The Courier’s New Bicycle, by Kim Westwood*
Thief of Lives, by Lucy Sussex
Only the Animals, by Ceridwen Dovey
Holy Bible, by Vanessa Russell*
The Other Shore, by Pham Hoa
Gap, by Rebecca Jessen*
Cherry Bomb, by Jenny Valentish (still reading now…)

Illustration by H Russell Hall

The biggest effect was on my library borrowing – whenever I visited the library, I always borrowed books by Australian women writers in preference over the rest of my to-read list. I really love my local library, and I’m so glad they have such a great range of writers.

The books I wish I’d read and probably still will one day read are:

everything by Madeleine St John (have only read The Women in Black)
Madeleine, by Helen Trinca
Banana Girl, by Michele Lee
Steeplechase, by Krissy Kneen
Madness, by Kate Richards
Boy, Lost, by Kristina Olsson
the rest of Charlotte Wood’s books
the rest of Annabel Smith’s books
the rest of Nike Sulway/NA Bourke’s books
Things I did for Money, by Meg Mundell
Stasiland, by Anna Funder

(seems I kept overlooking non-fiction for fiction…)

The things I learned were:

I prefer dark, enigmatic, beautiful and slightly confusing books, and a lot of Australian women are writing them: see Jennifer Mills, Margo Lanagan, Sofie Laguna, Nike Sulway, Chi Vu and Anna Dusk.
I’m so happy I read Margo Lanagan and dread how long it might have taken to get around to it had I not done AWW Challenge.
I don’t feel confident or comfortable rating or reviewing the books of my peers.

Thanks for having me, Australian Women Writers Challenge.

On being exhausted by the most-loved thing (also, #TBR20)

Sometimes I feel utterly overwhelmed by reading. I remember a time (OK, maybe I imagine it) when I used to run out of books to read, or when friends would lend me a book and I just started reading it right away, not worried about the other important books I was meant to be reading. Now, it seems I may die from a Surfeit of TBR. There are books I need to read because they’re research for the book I’m writing; books I should read because they’re like a book I mean to write; books written by people I know; ‘important’ books. It’s all a bit like a school assignment.

Recently I read this blog by Eva Stalker, and I was struck by this idea she’d developed about why she kept adding to her ‘to-read’ pile when she already had enough books to keep her busy for the rest of her life:

Like all anxieties it had mortality at its root. Aside from the instant gratification of buying something new, what I bought had a certain intent. I was buying what I wanted to have read. I was always looking for the next thing, the next great thing that would mean everything.

I too have that feeling. The next book, the next album: that will be the great thing that will mean everything. The perfect book. The book that shifts me to a different plane of existence (ironically, when I think of the books that have meant the most to me so far, none of them were on my ‘to-read’ list. ‘Gilead’ was given to a work colleague as a gift, and he handed it over to me when he was done because he thought I might like it; I’d never heard of it til then. The Cazalet Chronicles were my dear friend Rose’s mother’s favourite books, and they were pressed upon me by Rose: what a glorious reading experience those books turned out to be. ‘Rings of Saturn’ I picked up off my parents’ bookshelf; ‘Middlemarch’ from an op shop after vaguely remembering someone somewhere thought it was good. Anyway, back to the story, right?)

Eva Stalker decided to set herself a task – no buying new books, no borrowing new books, until she had read 20 of the books she already owned. Of course, there had to be a hashtag: #TBR20.

I’m going to give this a try and see what happens. Of course, I expect miracles; I always do. Here are my 20 unread books:

The Best Australian Stories, 2014
Lost & found by Brooke Davis
This changes everything by Naomi Klein
N by John A Scott
Suddenly a knock at the door by Etgar Keret
The weight of a human heart by Ryan O’Neill
Cold light by Frank Moorhouse
Bury my heart at wounded knee by Dee Brown
Cities are good for you by Leo Hollis
Falling by Elizabeth J Howard
Slow water by Annemarie Jagose
Crandolin by Anna Tambour
Life and fate by Vassily Grossman
A mercy by Toni Morrison
Demons by Wayne Macauley
The asking game by Rose Michael
Ablutions by Patrick de Witt
The necessary rituals of Maren Gripe by Oystein Lonn
Here come the dogs by Omar Musa
The book of strange new things by Michel Faber

There are short books, long books, speculative fiction, non-fiction, hard books, easy books, must-read books, books I have no idea where they came from or what they’re about, books by friends, books by Australians, books by men, books by women and books of short stories. Really, there should be enough here to keep me interested without buying anything new til I’m done.

Sorry, booksellers…

Image by Lindsey Turner/Flickr

Want a free book?

I have a lot of books I’ve read and will never read again, or I thought I was going to read but still haven’t got around to. Would you like one of them? Here’s the deal. If you want one of the books below, let me know in the comments (first in best etc), and I’ll post it to you, no charge. The catch: some time in the next six months you have to buy and read one book published by a small Australian press. When you’ve done it, let me know (if I haven’t heard from you by June 2015, I’m coming around to your postal address for a chat).

The pictures are from websites: I’m too lazy to photograph the covers myself, and they may look different when they show up at your house. Condition is anywhere from well-read to really rather well-read.

1. Lexicon, by Max Barry. Blurb etc is here. SOLD

2. Tipping the velvet, by Sarah Waters. Blurb is here. SOLD

3. Taipei, by Tao Lin (this one is signed and dedicated to me; handy if you need a Christmas present for someone called ‘Jane’). Blurb is here. SOLD

 4. My biggest lie, by Luke Brown. Blurb is here.

 5. Every day is for the thief, by Teju Cole. Blurb is here.

6. The Brooklyn Folllies, by Paul Auster. Blurb is here. SOLD

 7. The stories of John Cheever. Blurb is here.

 8. England and other stories, by Graham Swift. Blurb is here.

 9. The winter vault, by Anne Michaels. Blurb is here. SOLD

 10. A woman of the future, by David Ireland. Blurb is here.

OK, go for it. Whatever’s still left by mid-December is going to the op shop. Oh and if you’re wondering what constitutes a small press, there’s a list here, though I’ll also accept purchases from 12th Planet Press, Ticonderoga, Satalyte and all those other little spec fic presses who aren’t SPN members.

What apocalypse? A Q&A with ‘The Ark’ author Annabel Smith

I love apocalypses. In the ’80s I spent sleepless night after sleepless night worrying about whether the submarine information relay tower near my house would be a Russian nuclear target. I ruined a family holiday to New Zealand with my relentless insistence Mount Tongariro would erupt from dormancy (I was right, but 32 years ahead of my time). I dreaded Christmas visits to my Adelaide grandparents (from safely landlocked Canberra) because of the increased risk of tsunamis. So it’s no wonder I was gripped by Annabel Smith’s post-peak-oil dystopia, The Ark.

The Ark takes place in a seed bank bunker in the Australian Alps, where a few survivors have taken refuge from ‘the Chaos’ tearing apart the world outside. But power struggles and intrigues mean life inside is almost as treacherous as it is outside.

I spoke to Annabel about what inspired her to write this particular apocalypse.

We’ve both written books about an apocalypse in Australia, and I’m currently writing a non-fiction book about the same thing. Because the book I’m writing now is non-fiction, I have to do research and try to extrapolate to a believable future Australia. But how did you decide on the version of apocalypse – one that happens in the 2040s, and has a lot to do with peak oil and with the collapse of forest systems and crops – that you went with in The Ark? 

The Ark was inspired by Adrian Atkinson’s essay ‘Cities After Oil’. Atkinson goes into great detail about the possible outcomes of our unpreparedness for post-peak oil, and proposes some timeframes which seemed more than plausible, so I based my apocalypse and its setting on his predictions.

During your writing did you think about what you’d do in an apocalypse? Would you rather be in a bunker with your workmates and immediate family, cut off from everyone else, or out in the world?

Both scenarios are horrible in their own ways. Given some of the places I’ve worked, the idea of being locked in a bunker with colleagues could be a fate worse than death! But of course, not really. Even the most idiotic and annoying people in the world couldn’t be worse than what would happen outside. When I think about trying to survive in a lawless world, I think of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and I think of the child in that novel as my own son and I can’t imagine anything worse than the horror and anxiety of trying to protect him, both psychologically and physically, from the terrible things he’d be exposed to. So, the bunker wins.

I love that The Ark is set in a workplace – given most of us spend most of our lives in offices, it’s amazing how little fiction happens there. And one of the things I loved most was the level of detail you reached in creating the electronic communications used by Ark employees. How did you come up with these?

Creating the electronic communiques was one of the most enjoyable parts of writing The Ark. The kinds of communiques I created was driven by what I needed to say. Some version of emails and text messages was an obvious choice, because they are the ‘bread-and-butter’ of our communication. The comments thread of blog posts enabled me to give readers a view of the outside world. The difficulty of an epistolary form is that the narrative cannot tell you what people are doing. Certain scenes were impossible to convey through the other written forms I had developed, which is why I decided to include the conversation transcripts. They permitted both action and tone.

Other than On the Beach, very few big-name dystopian novels are set in Australia. Did you have any second thoughts about situating your seed-bank bunker in the Snowy Mountains?

None at all. When you are walking a well-trodden path like post-apocalypse/dystopia, anything that brings new life to the genre is a positive, as I see it, so a fresh setting seemed like a plus to me.

I’m guessing you’d describe yourself as politically progressive. Do you have any hope that The Ark might shift political views at all, might make people more concerned about what we’re doing to the environment and more likely to, say, vote differently next time around? Or is it just fiction for the story’s sake?

I regret to say that I don’t believe fiction will change people’s behaviour, not because it’s not powerful, but because I believe the human race has its head so firmly buried in the sand about this issue that nothing at all will change people’s behaviour. I don’t think people are going to change until they start to be directly impacted by climate change, i.e. continual power outages, water not coming out of their tap etc

And finally, which apocalypse do you spend most of your time worrying about: climate change, nuclear war, peak oil or a deadly pandemic? I’ve provided a chart of my lifelong worries below, for perspective.

Jane’s apocalyptic obsessions

Nuclear war doesn’t really feature in my list of anxieties, though I remember worrying about it as a child. With both post-peak oil, and climate change, the gradual nature of the potential impact means it is more likely to affect my son’s generation and I worry about that. Should I be teaching him to hunt and shoot and build a shelter out of twigs and leaves? However, the apocalypse I fear most is a pandemic, partly because I just finished reading Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven, which explores that very topic, and also because. according to historical precedents, we’re overdue for a pandemic.

Annabel Smith

Annabel Smith is the author of Whisky Charlie Foxtrot, and A New Map of the Universe, which was shortlisted for the WA Premier’s Book Awards. Her short fiction and non-fiction has been published in Southerly, Westerly, Kill Your Darlings, and the Wheeler Centre blog. She holds a PhD in Writing, is an Australia Council Creative Australia Fellow, and is a member of the editorial board of Margaret River Press. Her digital interactive novel/app The Ark has just been released. Connect with her on Facebook and Twitter.

So much underrating

Last week my book, A wrong turn at the Office of Unmade Lists, won Small Press Network’s ‘Most Underrated Book Award’ – you can if such a thing takes your fancy.

It’s a funny award, but also important. Loads of good books are completely overlooked by reviewers and readers, not because they’re not worth reading but because there are millions of books out there and only a few of them have enough marketing money thrown at them for them to be noticed. Books that don’t get marketed generally just disappear. I’m amazed by how much difference even a little thing like this award makes – twice as many people on Goodreads now reckon they want to read my book, for example.

So I thought I’d pass on a little of the love, for that brief second while people are paying attention to me. Here are some books published by Australian small presses over the last few years, each incredibly brilliant, and each largely overlooked. If you want to read something extraordinary, have a go at one of these (blurbs are taken from my sadly incoherent Goodreads reviews):

Gone, by Jennifer Mills, published by UQP.  With his made-up name and a quest for a house that exists only in a photo he found at the bottom of someone else’s backpack, with his ‘memories’ which seem entirely stolen from other people he meets along the way, ‘Frank’ is the ultimate unreliable narrator. Even as he hitchikes his way towards his ‘home’ and as Mills reveals bits and pieces of his mental illness, his fantasies, we never get to a point where we actually know what has happened to him or who he is. Gone is full of bone-chilling dread, and its study of Australia’s people and landscape mean it is a book we should all read to better understand ourselves. Buy it here.

Come Inside, by GL Osborne, published by Clouds of Magellan. This mysterious, elliptical, eerie story of a shipwreck, a museum, an unknown girl, a missing girl is creepy and strange and impossible to figure out. Your brain may have no idea what’s going on, but your subconscious will be deeply satisfied. Buy it here.

Letters to the end of love, by Yvette Walker, published by UQP. Utterly heartbreaking. The most beautiful sustained piece of writing I’ve read in years. A miraculous understanding of the depths of sweet, old, taken-for-granted ground-in love. You’ll cry on the peak-hour train. OK, I did. Buy it here.

Truck Song, by Andrew Macrae, published by Twelfth Planet Press. Trucksong – a dystopian outback tale of AI trucks and a boy who longs to tame them – riffs off Russell Hoban’s ingenious Riddley Walker in a tangily Australian way. The language is brilliant: completely ocker without ever feeling like a smug latte-sipping parody. The descriptions of this dry, desperate and weirdly sexy techy world are grouse. Buy it here.

Tarcutta Wake, by Josephine Rowe, published by UQP. This collection of tiny stories is a brilliant read-out-loud book, and if you’re going to read it i recommend doing it that way, even if just to yourself. Your mouth will thank you; it will feel special and profound as it reads these beautiful, miraculous words and sentences. I adored these stories’ shard-like, unfathomable nature.  Buy it here.

Las Vegas for Vegans, by AS Patric, published by Transit Lounge. Each little piece in this short story collection is pure, clear poetry. Some of it is frightfully sad; some weird in just the way I like, full of people’s imaginings of how things might be, and the way those imaginings take over from the real world. A glorious read. If you don’t like short stories, try Patric’s equally brilliant novella, Bruno Kramzer, published by Finlay Lloyd. Buy it here.

I’m obviously a little fixated on unconventional story lines, strange language and unresolved endings, so if you’d like something a little more traditional, I also recommend:

Who we were, by Lucy Neave, published by Text. This is elegant, clean, professional writing. The story of two biologists confronted with the random cruelty of 1950s anti-Communist America is gripping. Their different responses to it create heartbreaking complications for their marriage. And I loved that Lake George featured: is this the first time it’s ever been in a novel? Buy it here.

Later this week I’ll be interviewing Annabel Smith about her new novel, The Ark: this is a book which deserves to be seriously rated and to never appear on a list like this.

A collection of bits & pieces on the Most Underrated Book award

A couple of weeks ago, A wrong turn at the Office of Unmade Lists was shortlisted for the Small Press Network’s ‘Most Underrated Book‘ award. It was most-delighting news and apparently I pretty much forgot to blog about it. To make up for that, here are some things you can read on other sites about the award (which gets handed over to someone on Thursday next week: you can go to it and I will drink beer with or near you).

First up, my reviews of the two other shortlistees:

Vanessa Russell’s Holy Bible
Robert Kenny’s Gardens of Fire

Lisa at ANZLitLovers collected a few more reviews together, while the Australian Women Writers’ Challenge had a bit of a chat about my and Vanessa’s books.

Nike Sulway was kind enough to let me write a tiny story on her blog, and Annabel Smith has just published an interview with me.

Two hundred tiny stories

Remember when Nike Sulway’s novel Rupetta was shortlisted alongside ‘A wrong turn at the Office of Unmade Lists’ for the Aurealis award? And remember how I read it and thought it was just bloody gorgeous? Yeah you do.

A nice place to wait a thousand years.

Anyway, I’m so utterly delighted all of that happened because it means I’ve been ‘following Nike’s career’ (aka stalking her online) ever since. One of the sterling results has been reading the tiny stories she’s been publishing this year on her blog, Perilous Adventures. She’s committed to writing a 200-word story every day for 200 days: she’s up to number 23. These stories are incredible, and I find it hard to understand how someone can pull such poetic beauty out of their guts and express it so compactly every single day.

Anyway, today I tried to help by writing a story for her: it’s called At the Limbo Cafe. It possesses none of the trademark Sulway gorgeousness, but is a bit funny and a little bleak. So visit Nike’s blog, read her stories, and have a peek at mine while you’re there. Then buy Rupetta.

Enough complaining (for now)

If you’ve spent any time on this blog you’ll know I’ve sometimes felt like chucking the whole authoring thing in: in an industry which publishes 160 books a day (according to Chuck Wendig), what kind of lunatic would I have to be to think that anything I wrote would ever be read?

But hey, it’s been a nice few weeks, so bear with me while I tell you about the lovely things that sometimes tumble ones way in the world of writing.

Have you had a look at If:book’s ‘Open Changes‘? It’s the offshoot of the far more respectable ‘Lost in Track Changes‘, where actual real authors like Krissy Kneen and Ryan O’Neill adapt one another’s work. In Open Changes, anyone who wants can drop by and spin off a story from another author’s story. At the end of each week, a few pieces from those submitted are selected to start the process again. I was pretty pleased one of mine made the cut in the final week (even though everyone’s that week made the cut – because they were all good, right?).

Last week my brain nearly exploded when I was awarded a Varuna flagship fellowship to work on the book I’m currently co-authoring, a practical handbook for surviving climate change. As I’ve said earlier, I really have no idea how to write long-form non-fiction, so it’s pretty freaking reassuring to have someone give me such a big tick of approval. I’ll be heading up in January and I’m really looking forward to trees, birds and of course time to write.

And then this week a certain august progressive journal told me they’re going to publish a short story I wrote. I really love this story, but it’s pretty odd and I wasn’t sure if anyone would want to offer it a home. It’s good to know it will live and breathe for a few months.

On top of all that I went to my first sci-fi convention on the weekend – Conflux 10 in Canberra – which is probably worth a post on it’s own. In summary, literary types, the spec fic types are pretty much the same as you and I, and their panels, launches and awkward conversation-making are much the same too.

This run of good luck must be due to come to an end soon…

Yes, but what if the apocalypse happened in Cooma?

This week, All the Best radio asked what it means for our perception of apocalyptic events that they always happen in world capitals: Godzilla in Tokyo, The Day after Tomorrow in New York, 28 Days Later in London. Does it make it harder or easier to believe that even here in a backwater like Melbourne we could meet our doom?

The lovely Emma Koehn interviewed me about the imaginary dystopian Melbourne in A wrong turn at the Office of Unmade Lists, and also asked me about what I’d learned about Melbourne’s future while researching my new, non-fiction guide to surviving climate change. The show also features actual experts on nuclear terrorism in Melbourne. You can listen to it here.

Sometimes things go wrong in NSW…

Meanwhile, Annabel Smith‘s tremendous new Australian dystopia, The Ark, is coming out later this week. Annabel has set the apocalypse in the Australian alps, which may be a first. I’ll be interviewing Annabel on this blog a bit later on about imagining apocalypses.

Do you think the setting of dystopian novels and apocalyptic films affects our ability to imagine ‘the end of the world’? Or have you read or seen an Australian-set apocalypse that really opened your eyes?