Reading 2012

13. Undercurrents: A Therapist's Reckoning with Her Own Depression by Martha Manning.

12. Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So: A Memoir by Mark Vonnegut.

11. The Rules of Inheritance: A Memoir by Claire Bidwell Smith. (R)

10. Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama by Yayoi Kusama.

9. The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House. (R)

8. Speech Matters: Getting Free Speech Right by Katharine Gelber. (R)

7. How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing by Paul J Silva.

6. Sex Drive: In pursuit of female desire by Dr Bella Ellwood-Clayton. (R)

5. Woolgathering by Patti Smith.

4. Phantom by Jo Nesbo. (R)

3. Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford. (R)

2. A Gift for My Sister by Ann Pearlman. (R)

1. Currawalli Street by Christopher Morgan. (R)
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2011 Reading

77. Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens.

76. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.

75. Mawson's Forgotten Men edited by Heather Rossiter.

74. Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas.

73. Your Voice in My Head by Emma Forrest.

72. Tony Abbott: A Man's Man by Susan Mitchell.

71. If You Want to Write: A book about Art, Independence and Spirit by Brenda Ueland.

70. Making a Literary Life by Carolyn See.

69. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson.

68. All About Love: Anatomy of an unruly emotion by Lisa Appignanesi.

67. The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner.

66. Blue Nights by Joan Didion.

65. Perfect People by Peter James.

64. Understanding Troubled Minds by Sidney Bloch.

63. Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier.

62. Americana by Don DeLillo.

61. Desert Boys by Peter Rees.

60. The Naked Eye by Yoko Tawada.

59. The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman.

58. One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner by Jay Parini.

57. Soldiers' Pay by William Faulkner.

56. Lettah's Gift by Graham Lang.

55. Cambridge by Caryl Phillips.

54. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller.

53. In My Time by Dick Cheney.

52. The Enigma of Arrival by V S Naipaul.

51. The Long Goodbye: a memoir by Meghan O'Rourke.

50. Words by Jean-Paul Sartre.

49. Mountains Belong to the People Who Love Them by Lesley Synge.

48. Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson.

47. Stepping Out by Catherine Rey.

46. India India. Southerly Volume 70, Number 3, 2010.

45. Life with Picasso by Françoise Gilot.

44. Trumpet by Jackie Kay.

43. A Gap in the Records by Jan McKemmish.

42. Split Second by Catherine Coulter.

41. The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.

40. Greene on Capri:A Memoir by Shirley Hazzard.

39. Nine Simple Patterns for Complicated Women: Stories by Mary Rechner.

38. The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennet.

37. Madre: Perilous Journeys with a Spanish Noun by Liza Bakewell.

36. Erasing Iraq: The Human Costs of Carnage by Michael Otterman and Richard Hil with Paul Wilson.

35. Bento's Sketchbook by John Berger

34. A Deniable Death by Gerald Seymour

33. A Man You Can Bank On by Derek Hansen

32. That Paris Year by Joanna Biggar

31. The Map of Time by Félix J Palma

30. By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham

29. Madness: An American History of Mental Illness and Its Treatment by Mary de Young

28. Generation X: Tales for an accelerated culture by Douglas Coupland

27. The Dog Who Came In From the Cold by Alexander McCall Smith

26. Nothing To Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

25. Player One: What is to Become of Us by Douglas Coupland

24. The Chronology of Water: A Memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch

23. The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey

22. Proust was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer

21. A Train of Powder by Rebecca West

20. Obesity: The Biography by Sander L Gilman

19. Where the Bodies are Buried by Chris Brookmyre

18. Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives by Brian Dillon

17. Past the Shallows by Favel Parrett

16. The Redeemed by M R Hall

15. Gatherers and Hunters by Thomas Shapcott

14. Sing You Home by Jodi Picoult

13. True You by Janet Jackson

12. An Exclusive Love by Johanna Adorján

11. Toys by James Patterson

10. Mia Culpa by Mia Freedman

9. The Forgotten Son by Diane Chamberlain

8. Barbara Hanrahan: A Biography by Annette Stewart

7. Silencing the Self Across Cultures: Depression and Gender in the Social World by Dana Crowley Jack and Alisha Ali

6. Hand Me Down World by Lloyd Jones

5. 13, rue Thérèse by Elena Mauli Shapiro

4. Beneath the Shadows by Sara Foster

3. Gone by Jennifer Mills

2. How Fiction Works by James Wood

1. The Secret Lives of Dresses by Erin McKean

Review of Erasing Iraq: The Human Costs of Carnage

In 2010, there was a session at the Brisbane Writers Festival entitled ‘What do Iraqis think?’, with Richard Hil and Paul Wilson. They are two of the three authors (the other being Michael Otterman) of the book, Erasing Iraq: The Human Costs of Carnage, which details what life is like for Iraqis since the invasion in 2003 by US and allied forces. We were all seated in a small but cosy space in the State Library of Queensland, with a view of the river behind the writers, and we were hearing things that were anything but cosy or comfortable.



These discomforting things are described thoroughly and well in the book, leaving no doubt as to the toxic effects of the war. Is this why there has been so little discussion of this volume in the mainstream media? Apart from that session at the festival, I have not read any full reviews or seen any articles or interviews in any Australian newspapers or journals. The website of Michael Otterman lists media attention, and I note some articles published in New Zealand and in New Matilda online. Otherwise, silence.

Continued at M/C Reviews: Culture and the Media.

Review of Madre: Perilous Journeys with a Spanish Noun by Liza Bakewell

First of all, this is a beautifully presented book, with an eye-catching and humorous cover. How a book looks and feels, before the reader even opens it up, is important. The reader’s senses are alive immediately.

Liza Bakewell is a linguistic anthropologist but Madre is not an academic tome; more like a dance through the linguistic history and difficulties of a word in the Spanish language that does not just mean ‘mother’. Madre, it becomes clear, can take on all sorts of meanings depending on the context of its use.


And most of the time Bakewell writes with fun and energy, using interesting phrases and descriptions that catch the attention and hold it. From the first page I liked the way she describes houses as ‘salty white and sandy brown’ with ‘lawns trimmed and polished as fine as I imagined the proprietors themselves’ (11). She introduces her friends and colleagues throughout the book in a way which makes them real on the page, and presents dialogue fluently and naturally.


Continued at The Compulsive Reader.

Review of Obesity: The Biography

The dustcover of Obesity: The Biography shows a painting by Benjamin Marshall of a famously obese Englishman, Daniel Lambert. When he died in 1809, at the age of thirty-nine, he was five foot one inch in height and weighed 739 pounds. Sander L Gilman records that a wall had to be demolished in order to remove him from his room (3). He notes that he 'came to represent the freakish nature of fat'--he was apparently recommended as a sightseeing stop if you were visiting London--but he was also described as a temperate eater and drinker, perhaps as an affectionate rather than accurate observation. The brief story of Mr. Lambert is a human touch and an interesting one in an otherwise frustratingly uneven text that lacks cohesion. Gilman writes in detail about the people through history who wrote on the body and its size, and all the likely influences upon it, and how attitudes and approaches to weight changed. These influences could be both external, such as culture and religion, or internal, such as matters of self-discipline, or mental or physical illness. Some of these writers were obese themselves, and wrote autobiographical accounts of their struggles with weight control, detailing their hypotheses on diet and exercise.   Continued at Metapsychology Online Reviews.

Review of Madness: An American History of Mental Illness and Its Treatment by Mary de Young

…throughout history the line between sanity and madness often has been negotiable, and more often than not has been inscribed by gender, race, socioeconomic class and sexual orientation. (26)

The sociologist Mary de Young has written a lucid, literary, extremely approachable history of mental illness in America, paying close attention, as the above quotation indicates, to the social context as well as the medical. If such a history can be 'enjoyable' then this is it; the reader is taken through the definition of madness, the experience of it through narrations and pathographies, or first person accounts, and how it was viewed, handled and treated through colonial days to the present. She describes and explains asylums, the patients who inhabited them, and the treatments to which they were subjected over the centuries, from the humoural approach of the ancients to electroconvulsive therapy, surgeries (of body and brain), and of course psychopharmacology.

Review continued at Metapsychology Online Reviews.

Review of Gatherers and Hunters by Thomas Shapcott

Thomas Shapcott’s long last story has the innocent title ‘Sunshine Beach’. There’s nothing innocent about it. All of his stories, in fact, have innocuous titles, but inside them are great currents of emotion and difficult truths. But the novella made me realise just how fine his storytelling is, and how much wisdom is contained within.

Charlie Branson is the main character, and I kept reading his name as Charles Bronson, the tough guy actor with the sculptured rock face, as if he keeps trying to ‘tough’ out the change in his life. Charlie is a widower, his wife Miriam having died suddenly while overseas at a conference. Shapcott shows him clearing every physical object out of his life after her death: the house is sold, the furniture disposed of, even the photograph albums thrown away. He clears out a lot of his own clothing and bins paperwork, until there is nothing left.

Ghosts. No, out with them all. Everywhere he looked, even with so much of the household furniture already sent off to children, in line with Miriam’s will, and with all those ‘might come in handy’ bits and pieces (from long pieces of timber to what seemed like every piece of electric gadgetry ever invented) at last bequeathed to the Salvos, in each room of the house Charlie still found himself looking into a mirror, not a tunnel, of remembering. And what made it worse, each memory associated with each stick of furniture or property was as if each moment of the past were still now. Everything lived still in a perpetual present tense. He had not realised that furniture had this power. (124)

And then he goes back to the holiday town of his early adolescence, Caloundra, where he had experienced ‘glorious times’ (125). He buys a unit, furnishes it with any old pieces he can pick up, and reminisces about Beatrice. She was his brother’s friend, a special girl he got to know when he was fifteen, who now seems to glow with the light of nostalgia, lost youth, longing. He has thrown away the memories that pain him, and grasped with both hands the ones he thinks will comfort.

Continued at Transnational Literature, Volume 3, Issue 2, May 2011.

Review of Swimming by Enza Gandolfo

Kate Wilks is a swimmer; she moves far more easily in the water than she does on land, and she has been swimming all her life. The symbol of water is all through this first novel by Enza Gandolfo, and makes for a flowing feel, the words sometimes drifting, sometimes whirlpooling, sometimes rushing, crashing, or still.

But Kate, now near sixty, meets up with her ex-husband, the sculptor Tom, at a photography exhibition. Kate is the subject of one of the photographs, naked and standing in the sea; the photographer is her best friend Lynne’s daughter, Tess, both mother and daughter are very important in Kate’s life. But Tom unexpectedly asks her ‘Do you think…we might have stayed together if we’d had children?’ (11).

And this question becomes the impetus for Kate to go back into her memories of trying to have a baby. She digs out an unfinished manuscript called ‘Writing Sarah’, a collection of fragments and chapters that describes her thoughts and feelings as she fell pregnant, only to miscarry each time. The core of the book is Kate’s exploration of what it means to be childless, to want a baby so badly that you give her a name and imagine her so clearly that she almost becomes real. Almost, but not quite.

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