A Work in Progress

A Little Aussie Lit Update: New Reads

After a brief interlude spent with Maisie Dobbs (I finally finished her latest mystery--very enjoyable and am very happy to see the story back on track--more about it next week) I am ready to return to my Australian adventures.  As you can see by the photo above I have added a few more potential reads to the pile.  These are all just possibilities mind you (wishful thinking I could read more than I know I will in reality manage), though I do plan on starting one of these this weekend.  I wonder if you could guess which . . . As I am looking forward to checking out a new book that just arrived at the library where I work (it is in processing at the moment) and it will be the perfect companion read to one of the books in this stack. 

For now, however, I am returning to three books which I have missed picking up every day.  I did make a little progress in Mary-Rose MacColl's Swimming Home.  It would seem there is something of a mystery under the surface that is intriguing me.  Young Catherine is an orphan living with her aunt Louisa.  Her father has recently died of a sudden heart attack, but her mother died under slightly mysterious circumstances.  There is a housekeeper back in Australia (Catherine is now in London) who is a Native Australian, unwed but with a son, who is much loved by Catherine.  She practically helped raise her and she and Michael grew up together--often spending more time in the water than out of it.  They share a special bond and I wonder how things will play out.

I had been reading A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute on my tablet, but it had to be 'returned' as another reader requested it, so I am back in line.  I do have a very old mass market copy (with very small print that is on the hard side to read).  Jean had only just met up with a couple of Aussie soldiers, including Joe Harmon, who has just stolen petrol off the Japanese soldiers to use to barter for medicine for the English ladies.  This perhaps is what he will end up "paying for", which I am not looking forward to reading about.  Perhaps once I get past that bit it will be easier going.  For now, though, the group of women and children is dwindling as they march back and forth realizing that their captors don't really have a place for them to go at all and this seems to be their solution for these foreign ladies.

I had just met "the Authoress" in Kate Morton's The Forgotten Garden when I had to set the book down.  She is the lady who brought Nell to the ship that will ultimately carry her to Australia all by herself.  When I get back to the story it is the Authoress's history that I am going to be filling in.  The story moves back and forth between characters in and time.  There is even stories interlaced into the narrative that the Authoress wrote.  It is this book that was in Nell's suitcase when she was found.  Definitely lots of mystery here to try and piece together.  Nell is certainly a prickly character, but I think I am going to like her granddaughter Cassandra as I get to know her better.

I am hoping to start reading a book that will be lush with descriptions of the country.  Perhaps I will peruse my pile here for something up that alley . . . in addition to my pair of books that should complement each other nicely.  I could happily be on Catherine's island right now.  Sitting on the beach watching her swim!

Dying: A Memoir by Cory Taylor

I came across Cory Taylor's book, Dying: A Memoir, on the Stella Prize longlist (the book also made shortlist).  The Stella Prize is Australia's equivalent to the Baileys Prize for Women's for Fiction, which celebrates women's writing.  In the case of the Stella Prize, however, they also include nonfiction as well as short stories.  After reading last year's remarkable memoir by Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air, a brutal but beautiful book about illness and death, I decided that I really need to pick up books more often about this subject.  The books are not just about illness and mortality but are really as much and even more so about life, something I know I take far too much for granted.  It's curious how a book that might potentially be so sad can ultimately make you see life and happiness differently and remind you how to live a good life.

Cory Taylor passed away in 2016 from a melanoma-related brain tumor.  She was an award winning author and worked in film and television.  Dying is about her illness, but more so, it is about her life.  Is it a gift to know your death is coming (in a more concrete way than the abstract we all face) which enables you to plan and accomplish things?  Maybe but perhaps not, since being ill means not being able to do all those things you meant to do when you were healthy.

When Taylor was diagnosed with her illness she felt she was as under-prepared as anyone could be.  "It was as if I had stumbled out of a land of make-believe into the realm of the real."  She begins her memoir by describing to the reader a euthanasia drug she purchased online from China to have as an option as he illness progressed.  In Australia suicide is not illegal but anyone helping her would be punishable by jail time, so the drug is there to give her a sense of control--a last option if need be.

"That is why I started writing this book.  Things are not as they should be.  For so many of us, death has become the unmentionable thing, a monstrous silence.  But this is no help to the dying, who are probably lonelier now than they have ever been.  At least that is the way it feels to me."

So death becomes the mentionable in Cory's memoir.  The first third of the book is about her experiences being diagnosed, knowing what she has is not curable, and coming to grips with the idea that her time might be short and ultimately how she will face death.  She approaches the subject with eyes wide open and confronts what has been a taboo subject even taking on questions from the public on a program called "you can't ask that", though the questions end up being unsurprising--if she has a bucket list, the possibility of suicide and if she is religious.  The questions become a sort of jumping off place for her to ruminate on what she thinks about these questions that we all wonder about but fear asking someone.

A couple of things (well quite a few but a couple have particularly stuck with me and I want to remember them) that really resonated with me are about "the life not lived".  I often wonder about my choices and would I have been a happier and more fulfilled person if I had chosen differently.  When someone asked about whether she had a 'bucket list':

"A bucket list implies a lack, a store of unfulfilled desires or aspirations, a worry you haven't done enough with your life.  It suggests that more experience is better, whereas the opposite might equally be true.  I don't have a bucket list because it comforts me to remember the things I have done, rather than hanker after the things I haven't done.  Whatever they are, I figure they weren't for me, and that gives me a sense of contentment, a sort of ballast as I set out on my very last trip."

I always wonder about those 'sliding door' moments.  You know, had I caught that train would my life have been very different than the fact that I did not?  It is something I think about now a lot, if I should feel like my life has regrets, 'I wish I would have . . . ', but what she says about those small moments that might change a life is interesting and indeed comforting:

"The problem with reverie is that you always assume you know how the unlived life turns out.  And it is always a better version of the life you've actually lived.  The other life is more significant and more purposeful.  It is impossibly free of setbacks and mishaps.  This split between the dream and the reality can be the cause of intense dissatisfaction at times.  But I am no longer plagued by restlessness.  Now I see the life I've lived as the only life, a singularity, saturated with its own oneness.  To envy the life of the alternative me, the one who stayed in Paris, or the one who became an expert in the constitutional history of New South Wales, seems like the purest folly."

But the book is not only about dying, the latter two sections are about her life growing up, her past history, her family and a reflection on the forces that created and formed her life. 

"You do reflect on your past when you are dying.  You look for patterns and turning points and wonder if any of it is significant.  You have the urge to relate the story of your life for your children so that you can set the record straight, and so they can form some idea of where they came from."

She writes about her childhood, her parent's difficult relationship, her siblings.  She had an interesting life filled with adventure and success as well as challenges and moments of difficulties.  And maybe that is all we can, all of us, ask for in the end.  Cory Taylor's story is not just a story of death and sadness but a reflection on what it means to live, too. 

Teaser Tuesday: Swimming Home

I'm not sure who is going to be the "star" of this story, Mary-Rose MacColl's Swimming Home.  I think the impetus for buying the book was the young woman who wants to swim the English Channel, Catherine Quick, who is a mere fifteen years old at the start of the story.  But now that I am a few chapters in, maybe it is actually her aunt Louisa who is really going to be the one to come into her own. 

The story opens with a phone call to Louisa who is a surgeon in London in 1925, surely an amazing feat for a woman at the time.  Her nurse pulls her from the examining room to take an urgent call asking her to come immediately to an address on the banks of the river Thames.  She expects to find one of her patients in some form of distress but instead discovers her niece performing a perfect crawl across the frigid river.

Flash back to Australia, an island in the Torres Strait known as Thursday Island where Louisa's brother Harry had emigrated to.  Harry is also a doctor and had married an American woman and the two had traveled to Australia to be missionaries, but she died not long after Catherine was born.  A widower with a small daughter, Harry is happy to have Louisa come out to take care of them, but something happens and Catherine is left on her own with no one but her aunt Louisa.  There are lots of details to fill in now, but I know they end up back again in London and then later will go to New York City.

For now, however, let me 'introduce' Catherine to you.  My teaser is from when she was a small, precocious child living with her father on Thursday Island.  This is Louisa's first impression of the girl.

"She was a beautiful child, with long chestnut hair that fell down her back in a wave, green eyes and dark skin, a handful of freckles thrown across her cheeks, and wit, if the speed at which those eyes surveyed Louisa was anything to go by.  She was a Quick, Louisa could see, even in the way she she stood, toes out, ankles together, like Millicent and Louisa both."

Later in London we are introduced to the image of Catherine, the swimmer, as Louisa recalls her when she first met her as a small child.

"Catherine took to the water as if she lived there, running out alone into the sea and then diving under, terrifying Louisa.  In the twilight, she watched her little niece swimming out into the sea and catching the gentle waves back in with her father.  Catherine was not like a person, Louisa thought then.  She was like a sea creature.  That was what she smelt like.  It was the sea, clean and pure and alive.  Wild, that's what Alexander [Louisa and Harry's elder brother] had said before Louisa left England.  That child is growing up wild."

"Watching her in the water now at fifteen, Louisa couldn't help thinking that swimming was what Catherine had been born to."

Torres Strait is a place; it lies north of the tip of Australia, between the continent and New Guinea.  The nice thing about choosing Australia as a destination is stories set near water!  Another favorite setting of mine.  I am going to have to get a map so I can orient myself.  It's just a pity there won't be any actual field trips this summer.  Armchair travel via stories is always the next best thing.   And I think I am going to like Louisa and Catherine equally well and am curious where their adventures will take them.

My Summer 'Wintering' Down Under

My summer 'bookcation' reveal was meant to happen on Friday, but time just got away from me and here we are starting a new week (and yikes mid-May already, why is time going so quickly?).  That's okay, my summer literary travels are meant to be leisurely and enjoyable.  I bet you can guess now where I plan on spending much of my reading time . . .  I am off to Australia.  Actually a few current reads already have taken me there, so it seems very fitting to make it my summer destination.  Besides we are gearing up for the heat of summer (already too warm here), while in Australia they are looking forward to fall and winter, so it sounds especially appealing to me at the moment. 

First a few additions to my reading pile that (in one case was just pure serendipity) have taken me Down Under.  Since Kate Morton's The Forgotten Garden is my May prompt book and is set in part in Brisbane that is where my inspiration came from.  I have loads of books by Australian authors and I always mean to read more of them, so maybe I can get through a few of these this summer. 

When I decided it was going to be Australia as my destination I picked up a book that just came in the mail that I ordered by chance, Mary-Rose MacColl's Swimming Home set in 1920s London and New York but with Australian characters and by an Australian author.  I am hoping that there will be bits set in Australia, too.  The story is about a young woman who sets out to be the first woman to swim the English Channel.

And I am counting this as a modern classic, a novel I have owned for a very long time but been a little afraid to read . . . Nevil Shute's A Town Like Alice.  It is the blurb, which describes the story as a young woman who survives the Japanese "death march" in WWII that has always made me hesitant to read it.  I have to get over this 'fear' of reading about difficult moments in history as I think I am missing out on some very good reads.  I have a mass market paperback of the novel but my library also has it for loan as an ebook, so I loaded it on my tablet, too, for something to read on the go or at the gym.  I have to say I started it last week out of curiosity and I am finding it totally gripping, so that was also a reason I had to pick Australia. 

I have one or two other books by Shute that might be potential reads if I can find them in my piles of books . . . though as you see in the photo I have far more books at the ready than I know I will manage to read.  And a few other books that didn't make the photo, yet have since been added to the reading pile.  In no particular order:

Monkey Grip, Helen Garner -- "Inner-suburban Melbourne in the 1970s- a world of communal living, drugs, music and love. In this acclaimed first novel, Helen Garner captures the fluid relationships of a community of friends who are living and loving in new ways."

Picnic at Hanging Rock, Joan Lindsay -- "It was a cloudless summer day in the year 1900. Everyone at Appleyard College for Young Ladies agreed it was just right for a picnic at Hanging Rock. After lunch, a group of three girls climbed into the blaze of the afternoon sun, pressing on through the scrub into the shadows of the secluded volcanic outcropping. Farther, higher, until at last they disappeared. They never returned. . . ."

A Few Days in the Country & Other Stories, Joan Harrower -- "These finely turned pieces range from caustic  satires to gentler explorations of friendship."

Desert Places, Robyn Davis -- Hmm.  Didn't realize this is about her travels in India, so may have to replace this with Tracks!  "Robyn Davidson's opens the memoir of her perilous journey across 1,700 miles of hostile Australian desert to the sea with only four camels and a dog for company."

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan -- Booker Prize winner in 2014 -- "Moving deftly from a Japanese POW camp to present-day Australia, from the experiences of Dorrigo Evans and his fellow prisoners to that of the Japanese guards, this savagely beautiful novel tells a story of the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost."

The Secret River, Kate Grenville -- Orange Prize winner in 2006.  "In 1806 William Thornhill, an illiterate English bargeman and a man of quick temper but deep compassion, steals a load of wood and, as a part of his lenient sentence, is deported, along with his beloved wife, Sal, to the New South Wales colony in what would become Australia. The Secret River is the tale of William and Sal’s deep love for their small, exotic corner of the new world, and William’s gradual realization that if he wants to make a home for his family, he must forcibly take the land from the people who came before him."

The Natural Way of Things, Charlotte Wood -- Stella Prize winner in 2016.  "Wood’s dystopian tale about a group of young women held prisoner in the Australian desert is a prescient feminist fable for our times."

The Golden Age, Joan London -- Prime Minister's Literary Award winner in 2015.  "Frank Gold’s family, Hungarian jews, flee the perils of World War II for the safety of Australia, but not long after their arrival, thirteen-year-old Frank is diagnosed with polio. He is sent to a sprawling children’s hospital called The Golden Age, where he meets Elsa, the most beautiful girl he has ever seen, a girl who radiates pure light. Frank and Elsa fall in love, fueling one another’s rehabilitation, facing the perils of illness and adolescence hand in hand, and scandalizing the prudish staff of The Golden Age."

My Brilliant Career (omnibus edition) & My Career Goes Bung, Miles Franklin -- "Miles Franklin began the candid, passionate, and contrary My Brilliant Career when she was only sixteen, intending it to be the Australian answer to Jane Eyre. But the book she produced-a thinly veiled autobiographical novel about a young girl hungering for life and love in the outback-so scandalized her country upon its appearance in 1901 that she insisted it not be published again until ten years after her death."

Lantana Lane, Eleanor Dark (VMC) -- "From Aunt Isabelle, part-pioneer, part-Parisienne, to Nelson the one-eyed kookaburra bird, each of the Lane's inhabitants makes their own inimitable contribution to this engaging and witty portrait of community life."

The Little Company, Eleanor Dark (VMC) -- "It is 1941 and the storm clouds of war gather over Australia. In the mountains outside Sydney the Massey family are reunited by their father's death. Gilbert is a successful novelist, struggling with writer's block in middle age. A socialist and intellectual, he shares his political understanding - and fears - with his sister Marty and brother Nick. But he is locked in an unhappy marriage with a woman of little imagination and obsessive respectability, and their daughters, Prue and Virginia, are as incompatible as their parents. With the bombing of Pearl Harbor, war becomes a reality. As Gilbert and his family are overtaken by the forces of history, they must come to terms with their personal and public failures, and watch as the new generation inevitably mirrors the contradictions and turmoil of the old."

A Hank of Hair: An Exquisite Danse Macabre, Charlotte Jay -- "For I prefer beauty always a little soured. When it comes to me as a spoonful of syrup, I spit it out. Gilbert Hand hasn't been the same since his wife died. He's moved to a dull but respectable hotel where silence seems to brood in the hall and stairway. In a secret drawer he discovers a long, thick hank of human hair, and his world narrows down to two people-himself and the murderer."

Who Are You, Linda Condrick, Patricia Carlon -- "The contentious relatives living on the remote Forst sheep station are united against an interloper from Sydney who was hired to nurse old Mrs. Forst in her last illness. Now the heir, Gregory Forst, has become engaged to marry her and the others fear that they will be turned out of the valley. A bushfire rages, threatening all of their homesteads. And then, the charred body of a swagman is found. How did he die? Could he have been murdered? By the outsider, the nurse? Who, really, is Linda Condrick?"

Flying Too High: A Phyrne Fisher Mystery, Kerry Greenwood -- "Walking the wings of a Tiger Moth plane in full flight would be more than enough excitement for most people, but not for Phryne―amateur detective and woman of mystery, as delectable as the finest chocolate and as sharp as razor blades."

Of course I have to ask--are there books that I really shouldn't miss that are not in my pile?  I have a variety, but it is mostly fiction with a couple of nonfiction title thrown in and a very few mysteries/crime novels.   I am very much in a mood to read about WWII and am sure there must be other books (I know the Flanagan as well as the Shute are books I want to read set in that period) that give a view of the war from an Australian perspective.

And anyone who would like to join me on my travels--either a different suggestion or one from my pile that you are also interested to read, do leave me a note below and maybe we can read in tandem.  I am hoping that I can post weekly in some way about my bookish travels--a teaser or review or something else bookish about Australian lit.  I think I have plenty of choices to keep me busy over the summer until fall classes start late in August, though I do plan on continuing with my monthly prompts and hopefully reading the last three books from the Baileys Longlist that I have not yet gotten to.

So, what do you say?  A little surfing in Sydney?  Maybe a visit to the Opera House?  A little foray into the Outback.  I've never tried vegemite.  I'm ready to make some new discoveries!