This month’s starter book for #6Degrees hosted by Kate at Books are My Favourite and Best is Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy. It was longlisted for the Women’s Prize and the Stella but didn’t make the cut for the shortlist. I still haven’t read it.  I have advanced to No 11 of 23 reserves at Bayside library…but I shall try not to give in to temptation at Benn’s Bookshop next Tuesday… I have my eye on some very interesting new releases including some new poetry by Subhash Jaireth titled Lamentations; and then there’s Good Boy by Michelle Wright whose 2021 historical novel Small Acts of Defiance was terrific.  Good Boy is about a prisoner in a last-chance rehabilitation program for abandoned dogs.  It sounds irresistible, even if you’re not soppy about dogs like I am.

He’s assigned Nigel—whom he renames Good Boy—an anxious soul with a talent for gnawing his way through walls. Cookie has his work cut out preparing him for the upcoming behavioural assessment that will decide his pass, and Good Boy will be up for adoption and the possibility of finding a loving home for the first time in his life; fail, and he will be put down. When Cookie realises that Good Boy is almost certain to flunk the test, he must decide how far he’ll go in his bid to save him.

But with (the tag #wild coinciding nicely with the title of the starter book) I’m also going to buy Every Wild Soul by Katherine Johnson which won the inaugural The Australian Fiction Prize (which has replaced the Vogel). Can I get out of a bookshop with only three books without sabotaging my heretofore disciplined saving up for an electric car?  We shall see… (Update, 6/5/26.  Four. I also bought Howard Jacobsen’s Howl).

Ok, back to #6Degrees…

Wildlight, (2016 see my review) is by one of my favourite authors, Robyn Munday.  It’s set on remote Maatsuyker Island off the southern coast of Tasmania and it features some very interesting family dynamics, not least when sixteen-year-old protagonist Stephanie discovers that there is no mobile phone coverage there.

Robyn writes intriguing stories set in wild places and she writes with an intimate knowledge of her remote location.  Her more recent novel is Cold Coast (2021, see my review), and — set in the early 20th century in the polar region of Norway — it ‘s about a woman breaking all the conventions for her gender.  When widowhood leaves her near destitute,  she becomes a fur trapper.

The last book I read that was set in Norway was The Night of the Scourge (Hekne #3, 2023, English edition 2025), by Lars Mytting, translated by Deborah Dawkin, see my review. I borrowed it from the library because it looked interesting and it didn’t seem to matter that I hadn’t read the first two books in the trilogy. That was in July last year, and it was after I’d finished it I discovered #Smacks Forehead I actually had Book 1, The Bell in the Lake (2018, English translation 2020), on the TBR.

I’d bought it after enjoying  Mytting’s earlier novel, The Sixteen Trees of the Somme, translated by Paul Russell Garrett, (2014, see my review.) Part of the story takes place in the Shetland Islands, in Aberdeen in Scotland, and also in Authuille by the Somme, as the protagonist Edvard seeks to unravel the story of his four-day disappearance after his parents were killed by gas leaking from unexploded WW1 shells.

Bringing these two settings together is Clear by Carys Davies, (2024, see my review).  It’s set on a remote island between the Shetland Islands and Norway. Plus like the sixteen trees, the sum of sixteen pounds is important to the plot — which features an evangelical minister sent to dispossess the sole remaining inhabitant as part of the infamous clearances in Scotland.

I read Clear for Reading Wales Month, hosted by Karen at Booker Talk, which is how I discovered Gifted by another Welsh author, Nikita Lalwani (2007, see my review). and went on to enjoy another novel called You People (2020), see my review.)

I have discovered some terrific books by participating in themed reading weeks and months so I hope you discover something that interests you from #6Degrees.

©Lisa Hill

Next month (June 6, 2026) starts with a book by Austrian* author Stefan Zweig – The Post-Office Girl.  Kate who is a Eurovision Fan has chosen this in honour of Eurovision being held in Vienna.

This month’s starter book for #6Degrees hosted by Kate at Books are My Favourite and Best is an epistolary novel called The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. (See Kate’s review).  I’ve had it on reserve at the library for ages, uncertain about whether I might like it, because it’s described at Penguin as Charing Cross Road meets A Man Called Ove. 

A Man Called Ove doesn’t appeal but I loved Helene Hanff’s 84, Charing Cross Road (1970).  I read it long before it was made into a film, and I loved it, of course, because it was about booklovers.

But it was not the first novel I’d ever read that was written in the form of letters.  That was Jean Webster’s Daddy Long Legs which I read when I was about twelve, and I still have my very battered copy of it.  It has lost its spine because it was on the bottom shelf of the bookshelf and Amber disgraced herself in puppyhood and chewed it off.

One of the earliest epistolary novels I’ve read is Dostoyevsky’s Poor Folk (1848, English translation 1894). The letter writers are not separated by an ocean… but merely by a road.  To quote from my own review:

The couple whose letters form this epistolary novel, write from their rooms in miserable tenements across the road from each other.  They are cold and hungry and they get sick from their privations.  They can’t even have an in-person relationship because they can’t afford to marry and her reputation would be ruined by gossip if he were to visit her.

A Descant for Gossip (1960, see my review) is a powerful indictment of small town gossip. Again, from my own review…

When Thea Astley (1925-2004) wrote this marvellous book way back in 1960, she would not have dreamed of today’s sordid celebrity culture and its spiteful gossip, justified by its readers as harmless fun because they think its victims are rich, offstage, and ‘asked for it’ anyway by becoming famous.  What Astley did know, and has depicted in her trademark incisive style in A Descant for Gossips, is the viciousness of small-town gossip.

This reminded me of Tell (2024, see my review), by Jonathan Buckley (which won the Novel Prize). It featured narration by a garrulous, gossipy, self-righteous woman and the author withholds the identity of her audience until almost the end of the story. Tell’s narrator reveals more than she intends to because she can’t help herself.

Tell reminds me of the most recent winner of the Novel Prize, Anna (2025) see my review by Angus Gaunt. It’s a story of dogged survival to a fragile re-emergence of self after imprisonment and there’s a universality to the tale because there are people in camps and detention centres all over the world. The Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Publishing Prize is a terrific prize for novella-length works and has brought us some beaut books since its inception.

©Lisa Hill

Next month (May 2, 2026), we start with a book that is longlisted on the Women’s Prize and the Stella – Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy. By then, we’ll know if it’s been shortlisted.

Did you know that there are 11883 editions of Wuthering Heights listed at Goodreads, which Kate at Books are My Favourite and Best. has selected as this month’s starter book for #6Degrees?  I went looking to see if I could find the cover of the edition I read when I was a teenager, and even if I filter the results down to hardcovers there are 113 pages of results. So I tried AbeBooks, and found what might be the right one: the seller’s info doesn’t give the date of publication but my Odhams’ set of Dickens which has the same red boards doesn’t either.  My copy certainly didn’t have the lurid cover of the Abe Books edition!

When it comes to lurid cover art, nobody can match the Elek English translations of Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquet cycle.  If you check out Jonathan’s Lurid, Gaudy or Tasteless Covers page at Reading Zola you can see a slide show that reveals just how ghastly they are.  Their translations weren’t great either: I started with the 1965 Alec Brown translation of The Beast in Man in the Elek edition (cover at right) and promptly abandoned it for the Oxford World’s Classics translation by Roger Pearson.  For me, La Bete Humaine (1890) turned out to be the best of the series, see my review.  Who knows how many readers were turned off by those execrable covers and so never read Zola?

Yes, I know we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but we do, don’t we?

Remember that fad for covers with headless women against a banal landscape? Kate Grenfell’s Sarah Thornhill wasn’t the most egregious but it was such a disappointment after the stunning design for The Secret River, which had all black boards, no writing on the spine or anywhere else, with a moody jacket and historic maps for the endpapers.  The Sarah Thornhill novel was a disappointment too, see my thoughts here. Actually, it’s been a while since Grenville wrote anything I’ve wanted to read, and yet she used to be one of my favourite authors.

Grenville credits the Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) as giving her career a start with her 1991 novel The Idea of Perfection.  It’s not reviewed here on the blog but I really liked its quirky characterisation and a plot revolving around middle-aged love.

The Women’s Prize IMO hasn’t always delivered great fiction, but I enjoyed what I read of last year’s longlist though most of what I really liked didn’t make the shortlist.  I thought The Safekeep was a good but flawed novel (see my review) and I wouldn’t have given it the win.

OTOH I would have been hard pressed to choose between The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, A Little Trickerie by Rosanna Pike, The Artist by Lucy Steeds and  Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis, so I don’t discount the difficulty of picking a winner!

I’ve read three of this year’s longlist and am impressed by Flashlight by Susan Choi, (see my review) and A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar, (see my review) but am leaning towards The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine, (see my review). It was also longlisted for the £10,000 Gordon Burn Prize, which celebrates exceptional writing with an unconventional perspective, style or subject matter.  

Would that there were more of that, eh?

Indeed, that might even be what saves the publishing industry from AI. At Paula’s Winding Up the Week, she posted this snippet:

The Korean Times: 1 year, 1 publisher, 9,000 books: AI-generated titles flood Korean shelves – Kim Se-jeong says the Korean “publishing industry [is warning] of [a] crisis of reader trust” over the recent flood of AI-generated books.

And to think we used to worry about self-publishing!!

Next month (April 4, 2026), we start with Virginia Evans’s epistolary novel, The Correspondent which has just been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

It doesn’t often happen but for once I have read the starter book for #6Degrees, hosted by Kate at Books are My Favourite and Best. Flashlight, by Susan Choi was nominated for the Booker and I reviewed it here.  Flashlight features a father who disappears in mysterious circumstances, so I could start the #6degrees chain with any one of countless books featuring lost family members, though few would have an explanation as strange as in Choi’s novel. However…

Sometimes this trope can be inverted to explore other aspects of modern life, as Gail Jones did in The Name of the Sister, (2025) where a person not known to be missing is found.  As I wrote in my review…

The Unknown Woman given the placeholder name of ‘Jane Doe‘, is found in the Outback, not lost.  Hers is an appearance, not a disappearance.  But she is a mystery because she cannot speak.  She can’t be identified, and authorities don’t know what trauma lies behind her emergence onto the road, where Terry Williams (known as Tezza to his mates), almost ran her down.  Angie, the freelance journalist, is interested in approaching the story from a different angle.  She wants to explore the stories of people who ring Crime Stoppers, people who are convinced that ‘Jane’ is a long-lost loved one.

Philip Salom ventured into this territory with his novel The Fifth Season  (2020). Jack is a writer who has rented a getaway so that he can work on his book, but he’s not keen on the fussy décor put in place by his host Sarah.

Jack’s project is a book about ‘found people’: the Somerton Man, the Gippsland Man, the Isdal Woman, the Piano Man, Cornelia Rau.  All people who are found dead or amnesiac — their identities unknown by accident or design.  But in one of a series of eerie correspondences, Sarah is an activist in search of missing people, and her life is consumed by the absence of her sister.  She paints massive portraits of Alice in public spaces, along with portraits of other people who are missing, in order to raise awareness of the Missing Persons Advocacy Network (MPAN).

As Salom points out in his novel, not everyone who is missing wants to be found, which reminds me of Why Do Horses Run? (2024) by Cameron Stewart.  Ingvar in this novel is so overwhelmed by grief after the death of his daughter that he walks out of his own life and tramps like a modern-day swaggie for three years in the solitude of the Australian bush.  He refuses all engagement with other people, including refusing permission for a kindly policeman to tell his wife that he is, at least, alive.

I was troubled by Why Do Horses Run? because I felt for the missing character in the novel: the wife, bereft of her child and then of a husband who might have consoled her in her grief.  Alicia Mackenzie’s A Million Aunties (2020) offers a different way of transcending profound personal pain.  Her characters are a ‘found’ family, people not related in any way, but who share a loving relationship. This is a novel that asserts that all kinds of grief can be assuaged by the love and affection of others. Successive chapters are narrated by different characters, each of whom has a story to tell.  A story of damage and endurance, and a journey towards healing.

Alicia Mackenzie is a Jamaican author and that reminded me of Siena Brown’s Master of My Fate (2019).  Born in Jamaica, and raised in Canada, Siena Brown is a multi-talented creative who came to Sydney to graduate from the Australian Film Television and Radio School, and wrote her first novel after discovering the story of William Buchanan.  Shortlisted for the 2020 ARA Historical Novel Prize, the novel tells the story of a Jamaican slave who is transported to Australia during the colonial period.  It’s a very good example of an historical novel  being used to bring ‘hidden history’ to light, and it was IMHO unlucky not to win the ARA Prize.

And that brings me to another example of what I call ‘hidden history’, this time the unforgettable story of Chinongwa (2008, Australian edition 2023), by Lucy Mushita. Mushita, from Zimbabwe, is another creative, who made her way to Australia to gain her Master’s in Creative Writing and reissued her debut novel Chinongwa here. It is a powerful reminder that sentimentalising traditional lifestyles risks obscuring the very real harm done to girls and women in patriarchal societies in Africa and elsewhere.

Next month (March 7, 2026), we start with Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.  I know my first link already: books I loved as a teenager but #yawn am underwhelmed by the melodrama as an adult!

This month’s #6Degrees, hosted by Kate at Books are My Favourite and Best, begins with a wildcard: our last book from last month’s #6Degrees.  For me, that begins with The Discarded Image (1964), by C S Lewis.  It’s a brilliant book that introduced me to the non-fiction that C S Lewis wrote for adults.

As readers who’ve been following my project to read Dante’s The Divine Comedy will already know, I read the The Discarded Image as background for understanding the medieval mindset of Dante’s era. I have written two posts about it so far (See the tag The Discarded Image) but have yet to write my thoughts about the concluding chapters.  (BTW I haven’t been reading the beautiful Longfellow translation pictured here.  I dip into it sometimes, but mostly to look at the iconic illustrations by Gustave Doré.  Instead, after a disappointing flirtation with the Clive James translation, I switched to Mark Musa’s three volume translation, and it’s excellent.)

Another book that remains to be concluded with a final post is Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend, Australian Women’s War Fictions (2023) by Donna Coates.  It sparked my interest in discovering Australian war fiction in general, to the extent that I even set up a page for it. I have written posts about Sections 1 & 2, about WW1 and WW2 respectively, but although I’ve read it, I haven’t yet done a post about Section 3.

As you can see from that page, there is a great deal of Australian War Fiction, but it’s swamped by novels about WW1 and WW2.  And there’s only one book that I know of that’s about the East Timorese INTERFET Peace Keeping mission (1999-2000): it’s The Idealist (2023) by Nicholas Jose. It was one of my top three novels for 2023.

Jose has lived and worked in China and has a deep knowledge of its history and culture.  I’ve read and reviewed six of his novels, the most recent being Original Face (2005, but it had been on the TBR for a while).  I’ve had a fair few crime novels spruiked to me as ‘literary crime’, but most are a disappointment and I can’t be bothered with them.  Original Face, however, is a sophisticated novel that explores identity, the masks that people use, and what makes us who we are. As I wrote in my review:

The city of Sydney itself is rendered in all its complexity: its varied landscapes and its rich ethnic diversity, the old and the new rubbing along beside one another.  The Chinese expats are a microcosm of a Sydney sub-culture, its networks and hierarchies and its distorted Confucian values of fidelity and family.

One of the reasons I enjoy Australian fiction is that I like to see my city used in settings.  Ages ago I wrote a post about settings in Melbourne, but the number of novels with a Melbourne setting now reviewed here has reached 150.  One of the most recent was The Buried Life (2025), by Andrea Goldsmith — who is sheer genius at rendering Melbourne as the city I know and love.

Just recently I read an introduction to Annie Magdalene (1985, reissued 2025) by Barbara Hanrahan, in which the writer enthused about reading a book set in Adelaide as if it were a rarity. Well, I’ve reviewed 30 novels with a setting in Adelaide, and that means there must be more because I’m only one reader who can’t possibly cover everything.  Writers SA have compiled a Goodreads list of 100 books set in Adelaide and South Australia, and there I recognise these writers who’ve used Adelaide for their setting: Jane Rawson, Peter Goldsworthy, Richard Flanagan, Rachel Mead, Margaret Merrilees, Tracy Crisp, Jared Thomas, J M Coetzee and Stephen Orr. And there are others like Jennifer Mills who writes Speccy-Fic that might be set in an Adelaide of the future.

So, that’s my #6Degrees for this month, from a book about the medieval mindset to a roll call of authors who’ve written novels set in Adelaide.

Next month (February 2026) starts with a book that topped many 2025 ‘best of’ lists – and for once, I’ve read it! See my review of Flashlight by Susan Choi.

This month’s #6Degrees, hosted by Kate from Books Are My Favourite and Best, begins with the starter book Seascraper by Benjamin Wood.  I have it on reserve at the library, but it hasn’t come in yet.

But there are umpteen books on my shelves with ‘sea’ in the title. As a shout out to Kim’s Year of Reading Iris Murdoch, I’m choosing The Sea, The Sea, which I read back in 2003.  I read it with one of those Yahoo reading groups that flourished about 20 years ago, and I remember really liking it but disagreeing about what Murdoch was on about, with people much more erudite than me.  FWIW you can read my thoughts at Goodreads.

That was before I got the idea of publishing ‘Reviews from the Archive’, harvested from my journals. It’s been an interesting thing to do, revisiting my often naïve thoughts about a book or having to prune pages and pages of ramblings into something coherent.  Sometimes I do this when I’ve read a previous book by an author but don’t remember much about it, and then decide to share the reviews.  I did this with Miss Chopsticks (2007), by Xinran, translated by Esther Tyldesley and The Good Women of China (2002), by Xinran, translated by Esther Tyldesley.

And sometimes I do it to round out my reviews of Booker winners: The Blind Assassin (2020), by Margaret Atwood, winner of the Booker Prize in 2000. I never did get round to reading The Testaments which won the Booker in 2019 and I’ve got the co-winner Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other on the TBR too.

No prizes for guessing the author who figures most in my Reviews from the Archive featuring Nobel Prize winners: it’s Patrick White, of course, and I began with A Fringe of Leaves (1976), by Patrick White, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1973. It’s a good example of how much my ideas about certain books has changed over time.  

The book that most influenced my current view of A Fringe of Leaves is Larissa Behrendt’s Finding Eliza, Power and Colonial Storytelling, which interrogates the novel from an Indigenous point-of-view.  This is one of those rare books that I think all Australians should read, especially if they are interested in books and writing.

And, as readers who’ve been following my project to read Dante’s The Divine Comedy might have guessed, the book that has changed my ideas about C S Lewis is The Discarded Image from 1964.  Since I don’t review children’s books here, I am unlikely to write a review of the Chronicles of Narnia, but I intend to re-read them.  I’ll have to borrow them from the library because I donated all my children’s novels to my last school when I retired.  I expect they all went to the skip when they ditched the library program not long afterwards. (The sports program is still intact, of course.)

So, that’s my #6Degrees for this month, from a moody book about a man who dreams of being an artist, to a book by one of the greatest intellectuals of my lifetime.

Next month (December, 2025), the starter book is a wildcard to begin the year. Kate says we should start with the book we finished this month’s chain with. That will be a pleasure!

This month’s #6Degrees, hosted by Kate from Books Are My Favourite and Best, begins with the starter book We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (of The Lottery fame).  I have used the cover of an Italian edition because it’s the best of what I could see of multiple gothic editions of the novel.

So, ok, The Avenue has survived another year of Halloween and no doubt we will be harvesting sweet wrappers and other detritus for weeks to come, and the birds and bees will stop dying in the fake cobwebs strung across fences and trees, and the surfeit of Halloween themed ads will gradually morph into Christmas marketing any time now…  So no, I am not going to segue to anything gothic.

Instead, here’s another Shirley, used as the title of a novel published in 1849: it’s Shirley, A Tale, Charlotte Brontë’s second novel, also published under the pseudonym Currer Bell.  It’s a social novel set in a Yorkshire industrial town during the Depression that followed the Napoleonic Wars.  The Luddites make an appearance when a mill owner tries to overcome his financial difficulties by introducing new machinery which makes many of his staff redundant.  The titular Shirley is an heiress and thus the obvious solution for his money troubles, but he loves Caroline instead.  Yes, it seems a bit melodramatic until you learn that Charlotte wrote this novel in the same year that all three of her siblings died: Branwell from drink and Emily and Anne from TB.   That too would seem melodramatic in a novel, but it was real life for Charlotte.

I owe my discovery of Shirley to Wordsworth Classics, which landed on our shores in the 1990s, offering the novels we hadn’t heard of that were written by famous authors we loved.  Wordsworth are still publishing them and it’s worth taking a look at their current cover designs which range from excruciatingly bad to banal to rather good in the case of the Orwell novels. I read Anne Brontë’s ‘scandalous’ The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in a Wordsworth edition too, but alas I read it before keeping a reading journal so this, from Wikipedia, is all I can offer to tempt you:

Most critics now consider The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to be one of the first feminist novels. Writer and suffragist May Sinclair, in 1913, said that “the slamming of [Helen’s] bedroom door against her husband reverberated throughout Victorian England”. In leaving her husband and taking away their child, Helen violates not only social conventions but also early 19th-century English law.

I’ve used an Italian edition rather than the Wordsworth cover, because it looks like most of the other cover designers couldn’t decide whether to depict Helen Graham as guilty or brazen or ashamed,  while the Italian edition shows her confident in herself, which is how Anne Brontë intended her to be.

Thinking of Charlotte Brontë so suddenly writing alone at the dining table in the parsonage, makes me think of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.  An extended essay based on lectures she gave at Cambridge, its message was simple: women need to have their own money and a space of their own so that they can work uninterrupted.  When I think of the countless girls I’ve taught who loved to draw and paint or read and write, I wonder if the homes they have now include a space of their own.  It’s common for The Man of the House to have a ‘den’, and I’ve seen a display house which offered ‘mum’s sewing room’ — but a light-filled painting studio or a library with shelves like mine? Nope.

Version 1.0.0

This brings to mind a lovely book I have, called A Room of Her Own, Women’s Personal Spaces by Chris Casson Madden with photography by Jennifer Lévy.  It showcases 38 personal spaces, in chapters that cover ‘Celebrating Colour’; ‘Sacred Places’; ‘Working Sanctuaries’; ‘Natural Retreats’; ‘Serene Spaces’; ‘Evoking Memories’; and ‘Garden Rooms’.  It’s an American book featuring women (with the exception of Oprah Winfrey, Maya Angelou and Ali McGraw ) that I’ve never heard of, and there’s a level of showy wealth and excess that takes away from a sense of peace IMO — and not all of the featured spaces are true to the sense of what Woolf meant in her essay, but still, I love this book for the way it asserts the importance of having somewhere that’s not a shared space.

The chapter on Garden Rooms reminds me of a favourite book called Remembered Gardens by Holly Kerr Forsyth.  I know, I know, I’ve referenced this book before in #6Degrees, but pioneer women and the gardens they created as a form of solace in their loneliness and grief and as a creative and intellectual activity are a part of Australian history that should not be overlooked.  My friends and I are regular visitors to stunning gardens through Victoria’s Open Gardens scheme and it has been a joy to see the way my dear neighbour Gloreea has landscaped her back garden using ideas from some of those we’ve visited together.

One of the very best Australian writers who wrote lyrical descriptions of domestic gardens was the late Marion Halligan (1940-2024).  (See my obituary here) Starting with Spider Cup (1990, the first novel I read but not her first novel, that was Self-Possession, 1987), I became entranced by her scene setting with artworks, fabrics, design, porcelain and glassware — and gardens and flowers. Halligan made me wish I’d studied Fine Arts at University, and for a while I was a regular at NGV talks about their collections.  Lately the NGV has been promoting its #yawn fashion collections but I’m always going to love the beautiful craftsmanship in the Decorative Arts collections. 

So, that’s my #6Degrees for this month, from a book about exclusion, otherness and killing off most of your family, to taking pleasure in the beauty around you.  

Next month (December, 2025), the starter book is Seascraper by Benjamin Wood.

This month’s #6Degrees, hosted by Kate from Books are my Favourite and Best, starts with I Want Everything by Dominic Amerena.  I’ve chosen the UK cover, different to the US one on Kate’s post, because the book is apparently about books and publishing, and the UK cover alludes to writing…

At first, I thought that my #6Degrees would start with the idea that books about books and writing and publishing are *yawn* such a well-worn path.  But that idea vanished when I saw the book description at Goodreads:

A delightful literary puzzle, posed to the reader in vibrant and clear-cut prose… It’s rare for a writer to be this good both at crafting a sentence and at making you want to read the next one.’ Naoise Dolan, author of Exciting Times and The Happy Couple.

Now, I’ve never heard of Naoise Dolan or her books, but I am astonished to see that she thinks it is rare for an author to be good both at crafting a sentence and at making you want to read the next one. What on earth has this poor woman been reading, that she has formed such an opinion???

So, let me suggest some contemporary Australian authors of fiction, reviewed by me over the last year or so, who are good both at crafting a sentence and at making you want to read the next one. I was spoiled for choice, so I’ve chosen some that tackled less well-worn paths than Dominic Amerena’s topic.  (This meant that I left out some of my favourite authors, solely on the basis of the topic they last explored.  For example, truth and memory is a well-worn path in our post-Truth world, so I didn’t list Michelle Johnston’s The Revisionists even though it has such an unusual setting realised in exquisite prose. I didn’t list Andrea Goldsmith’s This Buried Life because its topic of coercive control is not unusual these days, though rarely has it been explored with such wisdom and finesse.

Shift (2025), by Irma Gold raises the question of redemption in a country like South Africa. Can the children of the oppressors atone for the privilege their parents had? Should they feel they ought to?  Is it possible to have a relationship of equals across the racial divide?

The Village is Quiet (2021), by Patrick Hartigan explores a different kind of relationship… a relationship within a traditional community, a place where the villagers are sustained by communal bonds which are beginning to fracture as the winds of change bring modernity.  How does a loving husband visiting with his wife from Australia, make himself useful and earn a little respect, when he is so unskilled in the time-honoured ways that are valued in that society?

A Cold Season (2024), by Matthew Hooper depicts the hard choices that must be made on an isolated farm terrorised by the local thugs.  How does a woman protect her children from a vicious outlaw, and how does her relationship with her husband and children withstand the pressure of her decisions?

As in A Cold Season, The Name of the Sister (2025), by Gail Jones features a missing person, but in doing so it celebrates the modest work of people quietly dedicated to the service of others.  The novel asks how do we have a meaningful life in a world that values shiny new things, and what happens to relationships when partners don’t share the same values?

Shining Like the Sun (2024), by Stephen Orr brings us a generous and kind-hearted man confronting a profound shift in the values that bound his small-town community together.  As the population shrinks and services are withdrawn, he has taken on more and more of the necessary tasks such as delivering the mail.  But he’s getting old, and no one will ease his burdens.  What happens to a small community that has no heir-apparent to keep it patched together?

Little World (2025), by Josephine Rowe features a man driven by duty too.  Somewhere in the remote bush, Orrin Bird has taken on the bizarre task of caring for a saint.  He doesn’t share the values and belief system of his predecessor who’s been working toward the beatification of the woman. He’s not a Catholic, not even a believer.

And while in all the reviews I’ve linked you can see examples of writing that is this good both at crafting a sentence and at making you want to read the next one, here is one from Rowe’s novel.

Orrin—not devout, or not in a Catholic sense—is conflicted about the nature of this legacy.  He has no notion of how to care for a saint.  Even a small one. Does not even believe.  Not in any one God, attended by angels and casting his divine judgement down from On High.  If he has gods, they are many, and they themselves tend—are the kind who get their hands dirty and wet, who are the Dirt and the Wet.  And yes, the Dry.  Terrible Dry, who doubtless has no comprehension nor will towards terror.  Just is.  As are the gods Salt and Reef and Ant Mound.  The birds who tell him whether he is or isn’t home.

Still.  Catholic or not.  You don’t turn away a saint. (p.5)

So, that’s my #6Degrees for this month, from a book about books and publishing, to a topic you’re not likely to read about in the bestseller lists!

Next month (2nd November, 2025), the starter book is We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson.

This month’s #6Degrees, hosted by Kate from Books are my Favourite and Best, starts with Ghost Cities by Siang Lu.  It won this year’s Miles Franklin Award, but I can’t tell from the book description if I might like it, or not:

Ghost Cities – inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China – follows multiple narratives, including one in which a young man named Xiang is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney’s Chinese Consulate after it is discovered he doesn’t speak a word of Chinese and has been relying entirely on Google Translate for his work. How is his relocation to one such ghost city connected to a parallel odyssey in which an ancient Emperor creates a thousand doubles of Himself? Or where a horny mountain gains sentience? Where a chess-playing automaton hides a deadly secret? Or a tale in which every book in the known Empire is destroyed – then re-created, page by page and book by book, all in the name of love and art? Allegorical and imaginative, Ghost Cities will appeal to readers of Haruki Murakami and Italo Calvino. [Underlining mine.]

I’ve only ever read one book by Haruki Murakami: 1Q84 (2009-2010, translated by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel).  It was nominated for the (now defunct) Man Asian Literary prize when I was on a Shadow Jury, but I wasn’t all that enthused by it. Looking back at my review, I can see that tried hard to reconcile my lack of interest with an effort to learn more about magic realism, but what I remember of the book now is that it was long and tedious.

Italo Calvino, OTOH, is a legend and I love his mesmerising books.  The first one I read (and was enchanted by) was If on a Winter’s Night A Traveller (1979, translated by William Weaver).  I remember that I bought it at Readings in Carlton and I started reading it in a café before the author talk that was due to start in about half an hour, and despite the hustle and bustle in the café I became completely absorbed by it and almost missed the start of the event.  As you can see in my review, I felt as if Calvino was channelling me even though he had died in 1985.

I read lots more in his anniversary year 2023, including Invisible Cities (1972), which is a nice segue back to our starter book! As you can see from my efforts to write a coherent review, it’s a complex book and all credit goes to its translator William Weaver who was the translator of most of Calvino’s books that I’ve read…

Archibald Colquhoun, however, was Calvino’s first English translator in 1957 with The Path to the Spiders’ Nests (a decade after its first publication in 1947). It’s utterly unlike his fantastical works: it was Calvino’s first published novel and it’s a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel based on his real-life experience during WW2.

I read the edition revised in 1964 by Martin McLaughlin, who also translated  the essay collection titled The Narrative of Trajan’s Column (2020).  As you can see if you read my review, although Calvino may not appeal to all readers, I find him endlessly  fascinating because of the way he makes me think about things in an entirely different way.

Revisiting that review, I see that I had good intentions of re-reading Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory (1996).  I have actually taken it down off the shelf a couple of times to check something, but alas, I have not yet tackled re-reading it properly.  I remember that it took me all the summer holidays to read it in 1998.  We were not yet planning our first trip to Europe together at that time, so I read it without any expectation of actually seeing the places Schama was referencing, but as soon as I set eyes on The Belvederes in Vienna, I understood exactly what he was talking about in discussing how landscapes were manipulated to demonstrate power and prestige.

To my delight, when I did a quick search to find a description of Schama’s book, I found something better.  The BBC made a series, and You Tube has a video of Schama talking about making the series…

And here is the whole series!

• Episode I; Forests
• Episode 2: Rivers
• Episode 3: Mountains
• Episode 4: Seas
• Episode 5: Arcadia

So, that’s my #6Degrees for this month, from a book about contemporary cityscapes, to a magnificent book about landscapes.

Next month (October 4, 2025), the starter book is Dominic Amerena’s novel about authors and publishing, I Want Everything.

Yes, I’m a day late with #6Degrees.  I forgot!

This month’s #6Degrees, hosted by Kate from Books are my Favourite and Best, starts with the 2025 winner of the Women’s Prize, Yael van de Wouden’s The Safekeep (2024), which (yay!) I have read and reviewed here.  It is, as the Prize website says, an unsettling, tightly-plotted debut novel which explores repressed desire and historical amnesia set against the backdrop of the Netherlands post-WWII.

Which offers a perfect segue to the book I’ve just read and reviewed, The Remembered Soldier by Dutch author Anjet Dannje, translated by the inimitable David McKay and also set in the Netherlands, but after WW1.  The central character is suffering postwar amnesia, overwhelmed by confusion when a woman who says she is his wife takes him home to a world that makes no sense to him.

And as you know if you followed my #fangirl conversation with David, there is a new book by the same author due out soon.  It’s to be called The Song of Stork and Dromedary and David says, it explores the same territory: how quickly the mind responds to that intolerable situation by making up new stories and adjusting old ones, until it arrives at stories that work (at least for a while).  (Let’s hope the English translation to be published by Scribe has a more enticing cover design!)

David kindly also responded to my query about Stefan Hertmans The Convert (2019), which he translated too, and which I reviewed here. It seemed to me that both books were interested in narrative authority in a way that was different to the now commonplace unreliable narrator because the narrator did not trust himself.  As I replied in my comment, no one knows the mind of an author like his translator does, and David says that in the Hertmans novels that he’s translated, ‘he’s especially interested in how we tell stories about the past, and how much we necessarily have to invent based on our own experience for lack of evidence. That’s especially true in The Convert because he’s writing about such a distant era’ i.e. at the turn of the first millennium.

That reminded me of Emily Maguire’s most recent book, Rapture (2024) which I reviewed here. It’s a feminist reimagining of the apocryphal story of the medieval Pope Joan (Ioannes Anglicus, 855–857) who was, according to legend, a woman who reigned as pope for two years during the Middle Ages.  It takes remarkable skill (and probably an enormous amount of research) to create a convincing portrait of life so long ago, and it’s especially difficult IMO to get the feisty girl trope right.

Nope, I’m not going to be mean and give anachronistic examples, though you’ll find a few if you trawl through all of my 271 reviews of historical fiction. (They tend to lurk in commercial fiction rather than LitFic). Instead, I’ll remind you of an author writing successfully about even longer ago: Elizabeth Storrs, whose Tales of Ancient Rome trilogy features a Roman woman traded off into marriage with an Etruscan. The series comprises:

• The Wedding Shroud (2010)
• The Golden Dice (2013) and
• Call to Juno (2016)

It’s been too long since Elisabeth published a novel, but I guess that as the founder of the Historical Novel Society of Australasia, she’s been incredibly busy!

If you check out the program for the HNSA 2025 conference (held, alas, in Sydney) what is immediately obvious is that women authors dominate the field. I haven’t read any of the very few chaps who feature in a session, so I’ve consulted my historical fiction category only to discover that there are not many Australian men listed there either!  Thomas (Tom) Keneally is a standout with 10+ listings but fortunately there is also Matthew Hooton, whose excellent novel Typhoon Kingdom (2019), I reviewed here but I can’t include The Idealist by Nicholas Jose, (set in 1999) because the HNSA definition of HistFic is that it’s set 50+ years ago.  (Which is a pity because The Idealist would surely have been shortlisted for the HistFic prize, see my review.)

So that’s my #6 degrees for this month, from an historical novel set in 1961 in the Netherlands, to one with a dual timeframe, set in 1653 in Korea, and almost 300 years later during the occupation of Korea by the Japanese during WW2.

Next month (September 2025) starts with start with the the winner of the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Ghost Cities by Siang Lu.  I’ve reserved it at the library but I don’t fancy my chances of it coming way in time!

This month’s #6Degrees, hosted by Kate from Books are my Favourite and Best, starts with Theory and Practice by Michelle de Kretser which I expected to like but promptly abandoned for reasons I briefly noted at Goodreads.  I did, however, enjoy Kris McKracken’s review at Goodreads which begins with her summation that it’s ambitious, form-bending, conceptually rich, and about as much fun as marking undergraduate essays on post-structuralism in a windowless room.

So, moving on…

Brian Castro also has a book shortlisted for the Miles Franklin.  It’s Chinese Postman, and you can read my somewhat baffled thoughts here.  The MF doesn’t have a good track record with choosing challenging books as winners so I’ll be surprised if Castro wins, but acknowledgement of this fine writer is long, long overdue.  I’ve got five reviews of his fiction here on the blog and I’ve read The Garden Book (2005) too and have more on the TBR.  I’d really like to be wrong in my pessimistic prediction!

The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards is generally braver than the MF at celebrating books that will outlast the prevailing bandwagon offerings of ‘relatability’, identity politics and political agendas.* For example,  in 2018, the PMLA chose Castro’s Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria for the poetry prize (although as you can see from my review it is more of a verse novel than poetry per se.)

And they chose Gerald Murnane’s Border Districts for the fiction prize! Our most intellectually challenging author Murnane describes himself as a conceptual writer, and he is unabashed about not being marketable but he has legions of enthusiasts all around the world and should have won the Nobel by now.  I’m still hoping that Last Letter to a Reader (2021, see my review and others that I’ve reviewed here), isn’t his last…

If you browse the winners and shortlists for fiction in the early years of the PM’s Award, you are in for a feast of reading.  I’ve read and reviewed all the winners to 2022, and have good memories of many of the nominees too, but am hard pressed to pick a favourite, except to say that in 2014 they chose as co-winner with A World of Other People by Steven Carroll, Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013, see my review). Flanagan’s novel also won the Booker, but was passed over for the Miles Franklin.  It’s strange indeed that Flanagan has never won the Miles Franklin, but that could also be said of too many of our very best writers.

Andrea Goldsmith, for example, is the author of eight outstanding novels, (most of which I’ve reviewed, see here) and won the 2015 Melbourne Prize for Best Writing for The Memory Trap (2013, see my review). But great as she is, she has only ever been shortlisted for the MF once, in 2003 for The Prosperous Thief. Her latest novel is brilliant.  It’s The Buried Life, (2025, see my review here.)

Gail Jones is another of our most prominent authors who has never won the MF but she won the PM’s award for The Death of Noah Glass in 2019. (See my review here). Her latest novel is The Name of the Sister, (2025) which I reviewed here.

It would be daft, of course, to suggest that every great Australian writer could be acknowledged as a winner of the Miles Franklin award or any other award.  But there are novels that ought to be in the pantheon of great Australian writers — not just as acknowledgement for them and their publishers, but also to form a distinctive canon of Australian literature.

I wish that as a nation we were better at celebrating our authors… with literary trails, statuary, naming of public buildings and places and so on.

Next month (August 2025) starts with start with the 2025 Women’s Prize winner, The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden.  I read it when I was bingeing on the Women’s Prize longlist and you can see my review here.

*If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time you know that I have read many books along those trails and I think I have read the best of them already but am always open to recommendations from readers I trust.

PS BTW This is an opportunity to give a shoutout to Perry Middlemiss who has made an enormous contribution to keeping the Australian literary presence at Wikipedia up to date.  I have lost count of the number of times I’ve noticed his contributions when I’ve looked at the editing history of a page.  Perry was a pioneer in using the web as a resource for OzLit, and though he retired the Literature site and his blog Matilda a while ago, they’re still accessible. We all owe a debt to Perry for what must be hours of work at WP.

This month’s #6Degrees, hosted by Kate from Books are my Favourite and Best starts with All Fours by Miranda July, shortlisted for the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction. As I predicted in last month’s #6Degrees — based on Kate’s 5-star review at Goodreads which says it’s about peri-menopause, mothering, grief, ageing and how we manage life transitions — when my reserve finally came in from the library it was a DNF.  I returned it promptly because there were hordes of people waiting for it.  Once again I am out of step with the zeitgeist…

I could continue with a link to some other wildly popular novel that failed to engage my interest, but that would be (a) mean, (b) depressing and (c) possibly interpreted as insulting to those who liked it.  Readers are as different as the books they love, and what a dull world it would be if we all liked the same things.  Instead, I’ll link to a Women’s Prize book that didn’t make the shortlist — but that I really liked.  A Little Trickerie by Rosanna Pike is a fine example of historical fiction being used to explore injustices of the past. The ‘trickerie’ was audacious, and necessary, in a medieval world where people who were different were ostracised and exploited and were always vulnerable to extreme violence because of superstition and religious zealotry.  I am keen to see what this author writes next.

Another author who is on my watchlist is Raeden Richardson, whose first novel The Degenerates is longlisted for the 2025 Miles Franklin.  As I wrote in my review: Nothing pleases an avid reader more than the discovery of an author writing an exciting book that isn’t like anything else around.

With a voluptuous narrative where words and images tumble over each other to bedazzle the reader, Richardson has somehow realised a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today in the pragmatic city of Melbourne.  My city.  And not the city visitors and its inner-city residents might recognise: not the ‘destination’ Degraves Street where you might party but rather Degraves Street the way I remember it from the 1970s, a dingy, deserted place where a solo woman taking a shortcut might did feel vulnerable.  It’s not far from Flinders Street Station and its iconic clocks where the novel’s characters bound across space and time to catch a train into the suburbs.

It is nearly ten years since a man won the MF, and brilliant though his novel is, Richardson is up against Big Names Brian Castro and Tim Winton. But back in 2016 newcomer Alec Patric won it for Black Rock White City — also set in the suburbs of Melbourne — so perhaps Richardson has a chance.  Patric is an ‘edgy’ author, and his venture into the longer form of the novel was praised by a critic Owen Richardson at The Age who described him as a writer who continues Patrick White’s mission to bring European modernism to the Australian suburbs. Formally rigorous and emotionally powerful, his new novel can only add to his stature as one of the most fascinating writers in this part of the world. But publishers are less adventurous than they were: we haven’t had anything new from Alex since Atlantic Black in 2017.

I can’t help but note that some remarkably good books by male writers haven’t even been longlisted for major prizes.  Patrick Holland’s Oblivion was one of my Books of the Year last year, but it hasn’t had the attention it deserves.  The reviews I’ve seen make the inane mistake of complaining about what it’s not.  Not an updated version of Graham Green’s The Quiet American.  Some nonsense about catching the reviewer in ‘the wrong decade’. Ok, I’m a proponent of the honest review because my loyalty is always to the reader not the author or publisher, but comments like that say more about the reviewer than they do about the book.  I read a lot of books, and I read them quickly, so it’s significant when a book stays vividly in my memory the way Oblivion has…

Of course sometimes I too can ramble off-piste in a review…

When I look at my own reviews of Patrick Holland’s work, I see that I have been reading his novels since 2011, starting with Riding the Trains in Japan.  But my absolute favourite has the curious title One, which led me to speculate about it in my review… which led to Patrick kindly writing a Guest Post about how the book came to have that enigmatic title.  It’s cleverer than I had imagined.

Talking of Guest Posts, here’s a reminder that the most generous contributor of guest posts to this blog has been author Karenlee Thompson, and I am offering a giveaway of her new book written as KD Aldyn,  Sister, Butcher, Sister. The giveaway closes next weekend, so if you haven’t got your entry in, visit Cass Moriarty’s review to see why you’d want to win a copy, and then visit the giveaway post and add your name to the comments.

Next month (July 2025) starts with Michelle de Kretser’s work of autofiction, Theory & Practice.  

This month’s #6Degrees, hosted by Kate from Books are my Favourite and Best starts with Rapture by Emily Maguire.  Longlisted for the Stella Prize, Rapture is a departure in theme and preoccupations for Maguire, but a novel about a female pope has turned out to be surprisingly relevant in the wake of the death of Pope Francis.

*Scowl* I bet I’m not the only reader of Rapture who is thinking, how come here we are in the 21st century and there isn’t even a female cardinal to be seen among those fetching scarlet frocks, much less a female pope.

Anyway…

Pope Francis was from Argentina, so it’s an easy segue to Argentina’s most famous author, Jorge Luis Borges. He was a short story writer, an essayist, a poet and a translator, whose work had international influence.  I read his best known work Ficciones [Fictions] at university but though I dutifully noted his preoccupation with dreams and labyrinths and so on, I was intimidated by it and did not really appreciate Borges until, much later, I read Labyrinths.

• ‘Partial Magic in the Quixote’, from Labyrinths (1962), by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by James E. Irby
• ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ (1940), from Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by James E. Irby

I had limbered up by reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, to which I owe the realisation that readers do not have to understand everything that’s going on in a challenging work of fiction.  That’s what James Joyce said about his work, after all.  Whatever the author’s intention, novels are what we make of them, and if our understandings are simplistic or naïve, well, that’s a starting point, not an ending.  Conversely, if the reader perceives that an author has revealed something of themselves unintentionally, that can be something for that author to think about.  I once noted something about the characterisation of some Black characters in a novel, and made the author angry.  But hey, if you’re an author venturing into a culture not your own, the onus is on you to make sure that you’re not perpetuating stereotypes.

Another author who is upfront about his work being challenging but not intimidating is Brian Castro, winner of the 2014 Patrick White Award.  I’ve reviewed five of his novels here on this blog, (and I ‘ve got his (whole?) backlist on the TBR, but my favourite is The Bath Fugues.   It’s one of those books that makes you smile each time you come across it, with its promise of further pleasures when finally the time comes for a re-read.

Totally different in style and preoccupations, yet also challenging is Death Fugues (2014) by Sheng Keyi, translated by Shelley Bryant. It too plays on the idea of a fugue state, but in this novel it’s to expose the way the 1989 horror of Tiananmen Square can’t quite be erased from public memory.   I’ve also read Mountain Girls (2004) by this author, who is a rarity in my reading because there seems to be so little available in translation of women’s writing from China.

Actually, it seems like a long time since Giramondo has published anything from China, and I don’t think Text Publishing has brought us anything since Hard Like Water (2021) by Yan Lianke (on my TBR).  I’ve read all his novels that have come my way in translation since he came to international attention with Dream of Ding Village, (2011) when it was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary prize and the International Foreign Fiction Prize (now the Booker International).  Exposing the tragedy of contaminated blood supply during the HIV/AIDS crisis in China, Dream of Ding Village is like The Plague by Albert Camus because it shows how quickly a society can degenerate under pressure.

These days, most of us live in cities, by preference, but we tend to make little villages of the places we live in.  It’s partly because  being out and about in the traffic is such a bore, but despite the rise in online shopping, the pandemic lockdowns brought us closer to our neighbours while also encouraging local shopping for necessities and the use of local facilities.  But it is not the same as life in the microcosm of a real village, as shown so vividly in The Village is Quiet (2021) by Patrick Hartigan.  An artist who created an exhibition of paintings from his visit to his wife’s family village in Slovakia, Hartigan doesn’t speak the language and so it is when his narrator is drawing that he is most in control of being able to express himself.  In this village society he is out of his depth and the skills he has in his other life don’t have value there.  So drawing is not only solace, it is also an assertion of a universal skill. It is a beautiful book that deserves more attention.

Anyway, that’s my #6Degrees for this month!

Next month (June 2025), starts with  the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction, All Fours by Miranda July. Just my luck, I’ve read nine of the longlist but haven’t been able to get my hands on that one yet!  (No, I’m not going to buy it because I suspect I’m not going to like it. Kate’s review at Goodreads says it’s about peri-menopause, mothering, grief, ageing and how we manage life transitions which are not high on my list of priorities to read about.  Whatever, it’s on reserve at the library and I’m currently 7th in the queue.)

This month’s #6Degrees, hosted by Kate from Books are my Favourite and Best starts with Knife, by Salman Rushdie.  And I’m on a roll here, because this is the second month in a row that I’ve read the starter book. I had Knife on my TBR and now I’m glad my purchase added a little to the Rushdie coffers because the dental treatment he needed after the attack wasn’t covered by his US health insurance and it cost $18,000.

Anyway, the obvious link for me is to the book that came out while Rushdie was still recovering from the attack.  That book was Victory City (see my review) and I was pleased to see that it was well received:

In the week before our Valentine’s Day Celebration, Victory City was published, and its reception gladdened my heart. I have had good publications and less good ones, but this one was special, partly for obvious reasons—that I was still around to witness it—but mostly for what may sound less obvious: that the reviews and commentary about the book were not driven by sympathy or pity, not “Poor Salman, let’s be nice to him” pieces, but serious engagements with the book as a work of art. (Knife, p.171)

I don’t often get feedback on my reviews from authors, but since I do always try to do what Rushdie expects, that is to make a serious engagement with the book as a work of art, I was pleased when I heard via the publisher of With Sappho in the Antipathies that the author James Harpur thought my review showed that I had read it carefully and fully engaged.  

Kalpis painting of Sappho by the Sappho Painter (c. 510 BC)

The name of the cat he was pet-sitting while in Melbourne reminded me of a major literary event I was lucky to attend.  10 years ago or so, I signed up for a course called Great Books at the University of Melbourne, and Germaine Greer gave a lecture about the lyric Greek poet Sappho. (c.630 – c.570 BC).  It was such a thrill to see Greer in the flesh, doing what she is best at, delivering an academic discourse with wit, professionalism and an ocean of expertise in her subject matter.  I have never forgotten her saying that while it is true that women were denied all kinds of opportunities because of their gender, the current trend for resurrecting ‘forgotten women’ too often results in affirming the belief that they have been forgotten because they weren’t very good.  (Only Germaine could say that, eh?) She exhorted us to celebrate the few who were great, and to move on with ensuring that there is equal access to opportunities now in our own time.

While many of us credit Greer’s ground-breaking The Female Eunuch (1970) with many of the changes that feminism brought us, it’s her academic books that I like best.  Shakespeare’s Wife (2007) (see my review) is a gem of a book, debunking a lot of ridiculous scholarship about Ann Hathaway while painlessly teaching her readers about some very interesting aspects of social life in Shakespeare’s era.

One of the reasons we enjoy historical fiction so much is because if it’s well-researched and well-written, we learn something of past lives in different eras.  Of those that I’ve read so far, three of this year’s longlist for the Women’s Prize are historical fiction: The Safekeep, A Little Trickerie and The Artist.  While I enjoyed all three, I thought A Little Trickerie was the most authentic-seeming in realising its era, taking me into a boisterous medieval world with an audacious heroine who did not seem anachronistic (as so many ”feisty’ women are in historical novels).

Recent reports of an assault at an Antarctic base reminded me of an historical novel which portrayed the claustrophobia and suspicion that can arise in ‘closed communities.’ There was a murder, not an assault in  Victim of the Aurora (1977), by Thomas Keneally but that was just a catalyst for Keneally to explore the dynamics of the situation in such a place where people are confined by the weather to stay despite the loss of trust and camaraderie that is essential for survival. I gather from the BBC report about this that there is mediation going on, with a rescue team on standby, but it will be interesting to see what is revealed when the team gets back to South Africa and can speak freely about what happened!

Next month (May 2025), starts with Rapture by Emily Maguire… and guess what! I’ve read that one too. (See my review here.)

Image credit: Sappho: By Sappho Painter – https://cyfrowe.mnw.art.pl/en/catalog/607805, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=160815648

This month’s #6Degrees, hosted by Kate from Books are my Favourite and Best starts with Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, listed in 1001 Books You Must Read etc so it’s on my TBR.  I was delighted to find it reviewed — back in 2010— by Kim from Reading Matters. How did I miss such an entertaining review? Pressure of first days back at work, I suspect.  

Anyway, Kim’s review explains her doubts about French classics in general, so that’s a springboard for me to choose my favourite Zola, which she mentions in passing in the comments.  The Ladies Paradise (1883) was the novel that started my Zola Project.  I’d read Germinal years beforehand and not loved it enough to follow through, but the BBC TV series led me to Brian Nelson’s translation and then I was hooked. You can find my reviews of all 20 of the Rougon-Macquet cycle here.

I am not super keen on reading series, but I chanced upon the novels of Elizabeth Jane Howard, and enjoyed The Cazalet Chronicles.  I’ve read four of them, but enjoyed The Light Years (1990) most for the perceptive way Howard traced the fortunes of young people during WW2.  I know there’s a bit of a fad for reading WW2 fiction, but I’ve always been interested in learning more about the world my parents lived in.

One of the best of those was another book I chanced upon.  Doreen (1946) by Barbara Noble was about the evacuation of children out of London during the war, seen through the lens of one child whose mother was determined not to part with her, and then had to, because of the danger of the Blitz.  It is brilliantly authentic because Noble lived and worked in London throughout the six years of the war. Writing this #6Degrees has reminded me that I have The House Opposite also by Noble on the Kindle, where #SmacksForehead it waits, forgotten, as so many TBR titles do on that digital platform.

However, the Kindle does have its uses.  My cataract operation has been a complete disaster as far as improving my eyesight goes, and one of the worst after-effects is a total intolerance for bright lights.  Sunglasses even on a cloudy day. (I nearly had to put them on in the cinema yesterday when watching ‘The Brutalist’ but I was vain enough not to want to look like a poseur so I just shut my eyes instead.)  If I forget to put my reading glasses in my bag, I can’t read anything printed, but the Kindle can be hauled out of the bag and read with an enlarged font.  So when I had occasion to kill some time this week when I was out and about, I began reading Oliver VII by Antal Szerb (translated by Len Rix). I can’t remember whose review prompted me to buy Oliver VII but I am grateful because it is entertaining.  This is the blurb.

The restless ruler of an obscure Central European state plots a coup against himself and escapes to Venice in search of ‘real’ experience. There he falls in with a team of con-men and ends up, to his own surprise, impersonating himself. His journey through successive levels of illusion and reality teaches him much about the world, about his own nature and the paradoxes of the human condition.

Szerb — who was beaten to death in a Nazi forced labour camp in Balf, Hungary in 1945 — also wrote The Third Tower — Journeys in Italy (1936). Travelling in 1936, Szerb was acutely aware that unwelcome change was on its way, and my Pushkin Press edition emphasises the sites Szerb visits with sombre B&W reproductions of photos from that era, contrasting these images with the colourful memories we have if we’ve travelled to Italy.  The book is a reminder to pay attention to current affairs, even when we just don’t want to.

Revisiting The Third Tower via my own review, I am reminded of another memorable ‘travel’ book.  Subhash Jaireth’s Spinoza’s Overcoat, Travels with Writers and Poets (2020) is a collection of essays from travels that trace — literally or in the imagination — the places that were central to the lives and literary pursuits of Franz Kafka, Marina Tsvetaeva, Mikhail Bulgakov, Paul Celan, Hiromi Ito, and the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza.  I loved that book…

So from a French classic to a collection of essays that we might characterise as literary pilgrimage,  that’s my #6Degrees for this month!

Next month (March 1, 2025), starts with  the 2023 Booker Prize winner, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch.

This month’s #6Degrees, hosted by Kate from Books are my Favourite and Best starts with Orbital by Samantha Harvey — which has been reviewed everywhere because it won the Booker.

Oh, the Booker.  *sigh*.  It’s basically a prize for US and UK authors, with token representation from other countries. So if you’re looking for something interesting to read about other cultures, it’s the long- and the shortlists that are most useful. I try not to sulk when my choice doesn’t win a prize, but I would have been so pleased if Charlotte Wood’s shortlisted Stone Yard Devotional had won the Booker.  It’s such a beautiful, thoughtful book with a powerful message about living simply instead of chasing off in pursuit of things that ultimately really don’t matter. (See my review here.)

It has been ten years since an Australian won the Booker.  Richard Flanagan won it for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, an homage to Flanagan’s father who was a POW on the Burma railway and an unforgettable book about the importance of acknowledging wrongdoing so that reconciliation can take place.  (See my review here.)

I had thought that Flanagan could not surpass the writing in that novel, but I was wrong.

I was very pleased to be wrong when Question 7 was published. (See my review here.) The book became internationally famous when it won the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction but that award doesn’t even begin to hint at the overwhelming experience of reading it.  I know of no other author, Australian or otherwise, who can have this visceral effect on me.  Flanagan’s books take possession of the reader, and are the catalyst for thoughts flying off in all directions.  It’s as if he can see into our souls and prods them into giving up their secrets.  I hope it isn’t true that he might not write another novel…

Another book with ‘question’ in the title is Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser which won the Miles Franklin in 2012. It’s a novel that explores philosophical issues that arise from travel and tourism; work and leisure; travel for escape for fun and travel to escape to a more secure life. (See my review here.)

De Kretser has a new novel called Theory and Practice which is waiting its turn on the TBR.  (See Kim’s review at Reading Matters here.

Kim says that the publisher describes the book as a blend of fiction, essay and memoir., but Kim thinks it’s autofiction — where the author blends personal experience with fiction, creating a blurred line between reality and imagination.  Well, we shall see what I think in due course.  The book description is intriguing, if only for the curious mention of a character coming to Melbourne to research Virginia Woolf’s novels.  As far as I know Woolf  never foot here…

It’s 1986, and ‘beautiful, radical ideas’ are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda she meets artists, activists, students—and Kit. He claims to be in a ‘deconstructed’ relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, her work on the Woolfmother falls into disarray.

Theory & Practice is a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame. It makes and unmakes fiction as we read, expanding our notion of what a novel can contain.

I have to say, however, that the title is not exactly enticing. It sounds like a university text book to me.  But titles can be misleading…

With one of the least appealing titles I’ve ever come across and the sort of cover that sets my teeth on edge, Elise Esther Hearst’s debut novel One Day We’re All Going to Die was not a book I ever felt tempted to read — until the librarian at Book Chat raved about and I took a risk.  That book made it into my shortlist for 2024 Best Books of the Year, which speaks for itself, I think.  See my review here.

So from an internationally famous book that won a major book prize, to a homegrown debut novel that pokes fun at taboos, that’s my #6Degrees for this month!

Next month (February 1, 2025), starts with a classic – Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. I have it on the TBR, but I’ll make no promises to have read it in time!

This month’s #6Degrees, hosted by Kate from Books are my Favourite and Best, starts with Sandwich by Catherine Newman, which Kate describes as a beach read. (It’s even got a picture of a beach scene on the cover.) Apparently it’s about the *yawn* secrets revealed when a family has its annual summer reunion at Cape Cod.

So the segue is obvious. Since it’s set in a British Winter, it’s definitely not a beach read, but have I not just read Ali Smith’s darkly humorous Winter, (2017) featuring a ‘family’ get-together for Christmas? ‘Family’ because Smith reinvented the family for her novel.  Truth be told so many of us have such very, very small families and/or mangled families that it can be difficult for an author to muster enough characters for a cast list in a novel.

When John Banville wanted to do a ‘family gathering’ novel, he augmented his cast with a collection of anarchic Greek gods, who livened things up considerably.  The Infinities (2009) was potentially a sad story about the impending death of the patriarch old Adam Godley, but the household reunion is watched over by the ancient Greek gods.  They watch the vigil with cynical amusement and mild jealousy; they interfere out of malice and selfishness.  They are petty and vindictive; they are sensual and spiteful.  Humans are their playthings, an amusing diversion…

A clever way to muster a large cast for a novel is The Hotel Novel or The Country House Novel.  This is usually much more interesting than the family gathering because the characters don’t usually know each other.  My favourite Hotel Novel is In a German Pension (1911) by Katherine Mansfield, a collection of satirical vignettes that she wrote with a barbed pen, fiercely satirising the German bourgeoise when she was just nineteen.  I have read that she disliked it when she was older, but, well, there’s a place for adolescent anger in fiction, and it is very amusing.

Agatha Christie, who pioneered the intuitive amateur detective (Poirot, Miss Marple) gazumping the hapless police, often used The Country House Novel for her mysteries.  They were peopled by upper class types who’ve joined the host for a weekend or so, and the plentiful red herrings are supplied by one or more characters who ‘don’t fit in’, plus a suspicious servant or two as well.  Christie’s settings make excellent BBC TV series, and since the house is large, there is always a sitting room large enough for the denouement.  Plus, with a house that’s large enough, ‘exotic’ locations can be had, such as The Body in the Library [1942].  I know I’ve read it, because I’ve read all her mysteries, and re-read them when The Spouse’s paperback collection merged with mine, but I can’t remember a thing about any of them.

Reverting to a (very) cold weather scenario for my next book, Victim of the Aurora is a psychological mystery by Thomas Keneally, and it’s much more satisfying reading than anything Agatha Christie wrote.  It involves a murder on an Antarctic expedition in 1910, and as Keneally deftly reveals, the psychological impact on the remaining men who must wait out the remaining 18 months without knowing who did it, is tragic.  I am about half way through and still trying to decide if the narrator is unreliable or not… (My review is coming.)

Another book set in Antarctica that involves a deliberately confusing narrative is Jon McGregor’s Lean Fall Stand (2021).  A man is injured and the narrative that could clarify who is responsible, might be confusing because the narrator has hypothermia, or he might be lying.  The story then progresses to the narrative of his wife who has to abandon her own life to become his carer, and then the third part is narrated by the injured man who is learning to communicate again.  It’s a brilliant book, as is everything I’ve read by McGregor.

From a book that is a beach read in every meaning that we readers assign to that category, to a deeply disquieting narrative about three men in Antarctica …. that’s my Six Degrees for this month.

Next month’s book (January 2025) is the 2024 Booker winner, Orbital by Samantha Harvey.

Thanks as always to Jennifer at Tasmanian Bibliophile at Large for the reminder.

Image Credit:

• The Body in the Library: By https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=31064919335, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15533829

This month’s #6Degrees, hosted by Kate from Books are my Favourite and Best starts with Intermezzo by Sally Rooney, and (you knew this already) of course I haven’t read it and have no plans to.

However, that chess board on the cover provides an easy segue to a book from a while ago that I really, really liked.  The Queen’s Play by Aashish Kaul is a wonderfully inventive twist on the story of the invention of chess. As you can read in my review…

There’s not much argument about who invented chess: most people think it originated in India.  India’s great epic, the Ramayana, after all, mentions the game, and the Ramayana is so ancient that it’s thought to have been created in the 5th century BCE, maybe earlier.  But what Aashish Kaul has done is to tuck a new myth into the fabric of the Ramayana, with the story of how chess came to be in its present form, and he has given that honour to Mandodari, queen of the demon king Ravana.

Like The Queen’s Play at 142 pages, Chess by Stefan Zweig (116 pages) could be a great choice for #NovNov (Novellas in November).  It is just amazing how Zweig manages to combine dualities into what is, on the surface, a story about a battle between chessmasters while they are en route to exile in Buenos Aires.  For me, sophisticated characterisation is what makes the difference between a short story and a novella.  Character development IMO does need that extra few pages that a novella can provide.

Another possibility for #NovNov is another short book translated by the late great Anthea Bell: After Midnight (1937), by Irmgard Keun, is only 170 pages long.  Superficially the narrative of a ditzy young woman in 1930s Frankfurt,  it’s actually a courageous and cunningly disguised critique of Nazism. Irmgard Keun (1905 – 1982) was a German novelist, noted for her portrayals of the life of women in the Weimar Republic as well as the early years of the Nazi Germany era. Her books were eventually banned by Nazi authorities but she gained recognition during the final years of her life.

Here we are in the 21st century and still books are being banned, most notably in the US (but that’s only because we never hear about the ones banned in the Middle East). However, a recent purchase of mine is about whole nations being banned by That Dreadful Man in America. It’s Banthology: Stories from Unwanted Nations, edited by Sarah Cleave. I discovered it via Somali Bookaholic whose poignant review tells us that he had just finished his degree and expected the world to be before him, only to learn that he was unwanted because Somalia is a failed state on the Banned Countries list.  I need hardly tell you that I take a very dim view of judging people on the basis of anything other than their own personal character so I bought the book there and then.

I’ve only read the first story in the anthology, so here is the book description from Goodreads:

In January 2017, President Trump signed an executive order banning people from seven Muslim-majority countries – Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen – from entering the United States, effectively slamming the door on refugees seeking safety and tearing families apart. Mass protests followed, and although the order has since been blocked, amended and challenged by judges, it still stands as one of the most discriminatory laws to be passed in the US in modern times. Banthology brings together specially commissioned stories from the original seven ‘banned nations’. Covering a range of approaches – from satire, to allegory, to literary realism – it explores the emotional and personal impact of all restrictions on movement, and offers a platform to voices the White House would rather remained silent.

I’ve haven’t read much from Somalia, and nothing actually by an author who is resident there. I read Desert Flower by Waris Dirie when everybody else did (see Goodreads), and one by a Somalian refugee here in Australia. I rarely read self-published books, but A Resilient Life (2012), by Mariam Issa was a remarkable insight into conditions of life in Somalia, especially for women.  I have Black Mamba Boy by Somali-born Nadifa Mohamed on the TBR , but she is based in London.

#Digression: However, in the course of exploring Wikipedia’s list of Somali writers, I came across the intriguing story of Shire Jama Ahmed who created and developed the modern Latin script for transcribing the Somali language (which had never had a written form).  His work thus enabled the newly independent country to embark on a program for mass literacy and achieve a 41.03% literacy rate for 2022.  (Which is remarkable considering Somalia’s post-colonial instability, its wars and insurgencies, and its endemic poverty.)

It can be quite hard to source books from some parts of Africa: the ones we hear about tend to be from Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa because they have well-established publishing industries and translation is not generally an issue.  But also, the ones we hear about are often written by authors who have left their country to study in the UK, US and France, and while they may write really interesting books such as British-based Onyi Nwabineli’s Allow Me to Introduce Myself  which was about the problem of parents monetising their children’s lives for social media, they do not contribute much to our understanding of life in African countries.  Although laced with Nigerian cultural references Allow Me to Introduce Myself was set in the UK, and although I thought it was an important book, I venture to say that it was about a First World Problem.  OTOH Water Baby (2024) by Chioma Okereke (resident in London, Lagos and rural France) is set in a slum area of Lagos, (the capital of Nigeria) and is about the problem of urban displacement in the service of foreign investment in development projects.

From a book that is — to quote Emily May at Goodreads — largely about nothing, with the plot consisting of basically sad people being sad, to books which have widened my horizons and taught me more about the world we live in …. that’s my Six Degrees for this month.

Next month’s book (November 2024) is what Kate describes as a beach read – Sandwich by Catherine Newman.

Thanks as always to Jennifer at Tasmanian Bibliophile at Large for the reminder.

Update, later the same day, in response to Kate’s comment below:

The story about the origin of chess that I learned long ago comes from the ‘King Kaid of India’ in the Victorian Readers Fifth Book which I read at school not long after we arrived in Australia.

King Kaid had conquered everything in sight and was bored, so he promised a reward — even to the half of his kingdom — to anyone who could invent some means of interesting him. So a wise old man invented chess, and the king loved it: warfare that involved skill, strategy and cunning but no one was slain.

When it came to the reward, the sage said he wanted only one grain of corn for the first square on the chess board, double for the second square, double that for the third and so on. King Kaid was shocked and offered to pay him much, much more…. until his treasurer came back with the calculation for 1×2 to the power of 64 = 18,446,744,073,709,551.615 grains (a number which I confirmed with an online exponential calculator) which was more than the value of his whole kingdom.   King Kaid did not know what to do.  If he kept his word, he would lose his entire kingdom, and what kind of a king doesn’t keep his word?

The sage tells us the moral of the story: he wanted no reward except to teach the king that there better things in life than slaughter, and to make him realise that he cannot keep every rash promise made without thought and in pride of heart. 

The Victorian Readers were turfed out years ago for being imperialist, colonialist, and racist, but they chucked the baby out with the bathwater when it came to this story.

This month’s #6Degrees, hosted by Kate from Books are my Favourite and Best starts with Long Island by Colm Tóibín (see my review), the follow up novel to Brooklyn (see my review) — but, no, I am not going to follow the easy route and make that my first book in the chain… and I’m not going to do a chain featuring the travails of migration, even though we are awash with books about that at the moment.

Instead, I’m going to segue to another author who had more to say about her characters than would fit in a single novel, and thus a series was born…

The choice of series is an easy one because as regular readers know, I have — thanks to an essay by Hilary Mantel — just discovered Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Light Years (see my review) and now I am on a mission to read the entire Cazalet Chronicles, and probably her other novels too.  I have reserved Marking Time at the library and am peeved to see that someone else is ahead of me and has not yet collected the book which they should have done five days ago.  Considerate borrowers do not do this, they collect, read and return promptly so that the next reader can enjoy the book!

#OffMySoapbox…

As readers, writers and editors know, it is only too easy to mess up a series, either by assuming that the reader will remember the stuff they need to know from Book 1, or by rehashing it all over again so that the reader is fed up before she starts.  Sigrid Undset (1882-1949) was a Nobel Prize winner in 1928 and so not to be dismissed lightly, but IMHO her magnum opus, the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy (see my reviews) was interesting to read but it was hard to keep track of all the characters and their relationships and misdeeds as I made my way from book to book.

Not only the author of a series, but also an author from Norway and a Nobel Prize winner is Jon Fosse, whose Septology (2022), was originally a series of fictions published separately until gathered into one volume of 745 pages by Giramondo Publishing.  One has to admire his translator Damion Searls who has also translated other Fosse fictions, and a host of other notable books besides. His list of translations at Wikipedia reads like a Who’s Who of European literature, and includes works by André Gide, Dubravka Ugrešić, Elfriede Jelinek, Hermann Hesse, Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, and Marcel Proust — and that’s just the ones I happen to have reviewed on this blog.

His most impressive effort, IMHO, is Searls’ translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s weighty and incomprehensible Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which I read but was not brave enough to review when I was doing a Masterclass called Great Books at the University of Melbourne.  (Before attending the lecture, I wrote inane things about my experience of reading it at Goodreads — with the intention of writing erudite things about it here afterwards, but mercifully I never got round to it.)

While I was in recovery from reading Wittgenstein, I came across Wittgenstein Jr, A Novel (2014), by Lars Iyer, a campus novel which was much more fun.  Narrated by a Cambridge student called Peters, it tells the story of a group of undergraduates and their perplexed response to the tortured musings of their philosophy lecturer, whom they nickname Wittgenstein.  If you read my review you can also enjoy a photo of Amber when she was only six weeks old. (Amber is currently recovering from eye surgery, and is feeling poorly.  She looks as if she’s been in a prize fight, and she is wearing The Cone of Shame to prevent scratching the wound, so this is not the time for me to share a photo of her as she is now.  Get well wishes in comments below will be passed on to her with alacrity.)

Campus novels tend to be comic novels and satires, yet strangely, none of those I’ve reviewed here have been comic. Stoner by John Williams is especially melancholy, see here, and Ceridwen Dovey’s Life After Truth (here), alas, reminds me of the impending US election and I would rather not think about that.  (I have Don Watson’s Quarterly Essay ominously titled High Noon but I haven’t been able to make myself read it.) But at Goodreads, I have tagged David Lodge’s very droll Changing Places (1975) and Nice Work (1988) from his Campus Trilogy.  The description from Changing Places gives you a hint of what is to come:

The plate-glass, concrete jungle of Euphoria State University, USA, and the damp red-brick University of Rummidge have an annual exchange scheme. Normally the exchange passes without comment.

But when Philip Swallow swaps with Professor Zapp, the Fates play a hand…

And if you are in need of a chuckle, a comic novel might be just what you need.

From an Irish lament about what we leave behind when we migrate, to comic novels about academic life, that’s my Six Degrees for this month.

Next month’s book (November 2024) is the much-hyped new release from Sally Rooney, Intermezzo.

Thanks to Jennifer at Tasmanian Bibliophile at Large for the reminder, which you can see here.