So I finished The Forrests a while ago and got busy, so this blog is half-baked but at least it's up. For anyone who has not already read any Emily Perkins, she is a New Zealand writer whose short story collections and novels have been continually excellent, original works. I was introduced to her writing by my kiwi friend Peter Johns in Melbourne. The Forrests has been nominated for the Man Booker Prize Long List 2012, and I'm trying to locate the short list, if any ... and did you know that an actor from TV series Downton Abbey is a JUDGE?! Goodness! I try to always read the ultimate winner, hence my comment on Barnes' Sense of an Ending in a previous blog.
The Forrests are a family - with slightly dysfunctional aspects like any family. They also have an interloper, Daniel, whose story is slightly annoying because it is so veiled. We never really find out why he is so embedded in their family and how his life pans out, which is frustrating, but he appears in Dorothy's life at crucial moments - and in her sister's life. I suppose this is fair - the focus after all is on Dorothy herself, and her closeness with her sister Evelyn is part of her identity. I worried about Dorothy. She was not always in charge of her own life. I found her life unutterably sad at times, really, although reviewers are saying she is bursting with life - and she does - I found her somehow trapped and tied down by her sense of fixedness and a sort of lumpeness. BUT Perkins has this amazing ability to capture how we/I feel or see - so many times in this book I recognised the moment, the way children speak, the way it feels to pick up a child from school, the expressions of awkwardness in personal life, the being mid-40s, the ongoing struggle - ah, Perkins is perceptive! It's funny too, lots of it, and I enjoyed it while also noting the frustrations I felt.
Towards the end of this book, Dorothy, whose whole life we sweep through in the course of reading, resorts to reading books with her magnifying glass, even in public. 'How did women go about the world on their own without books?' she wonders: 'You saw it, but she would never understand.' Dorothy is a curious person for me. This book moves through time in a most interesting way - we are allowed to see the whole of Dorothy's life more or less but in bursts, so in childhood, in young adulthood, married life and middle age and so on until she is, in the final, amazing chapter, in and out of consciousness and time as she fades away. (That final chapter is actually one of the most challenging pieces of writing I've read of Perkins or anyone for a while. Terrific, moving, intelligible only by reading the book from start to finish, intoxicating.)
I think it's the movement of time in the story which both propels it and makes it work so well, and which also destabilises any clear reading and makes it deflect aspects of detangling - in other words it's just obscure enough without being ridiculous - a bit like Perkins' Novel about my Wife. I suppose I was also surprised by The Slap in the way that Tsolkias takes readers forward in the narrative with separate narrators but also in time so there's no exact or real retracing of steps - a really cool approach.
Get yourselves a copy and read - now, I've found out there's a new Drusilla Modjeska book called The Mountain - a fitting companion title to this one, I wonder???
**Oh and on tigers in literature - I should've noted that the tiger motif is a powerful one in imperial literature (The Tiger's Wife) and that also makes the Obreht book highly interesting ... **
Monday, June 11, 2012
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
The Tiger's Wife, Tea Obreht
Too long between blogs, friends! Life became consuming - I've also nearly finished The Forrests, and am now digesting it ... today I'll recommence with a relatively short blog about a wonderful book I also read fairly recently. Winner of the Orange prize for Fiction in 2011, Tea Obreht's book kept asking me to read it, with its effective cover, like a lino or woodcut print, of a woman embracing a tiger. That the author is young and this is her debut novel is of course sobering since the book is utterly magical and beautifully written. I can't imagine many young writers being able to produce this work. Set in the Balkans following conflict - during wartime and after it, and also moving between periods of time using very interesting narrative modes - The Tiger's Wife unravels myths and legends about a tiger who lives with a woman on the edges of town, becoming her lover. Her own history is a dark and secret tale, but only one of many in the book. The main narrator is a doctor, Natalia, tending to communities of ill and wounded, and to children, during wartime. She remembers stories about her recently deceased grandfather - he dies during the story - and his tales of meeting a curious 'deathless' man who reappeared at intervals during his life, edging him, possibly, closer to knowing his own end. Obreht has such control over these multiple stories, layers of myths, legends, characters peopling the stories, and also over language itself that I was totally in awe of her skill.
I fell in love with this book, kept eking it out so I did not have to say goodbye to it. Revisiting it now for the blog makes me find it again. I suppose I found resonance in it about history - my own craft and subject - and about twentieth century war and conflict, the disputes across ethnic and religious lines and social divisions which are more than repugnant - they are simply horrendous. Natalia must deal with this too. To soften the political edges of this story, Obreht uses magic realism. We are never quite sure where we are in time or place - so much so that one bookstore person I was chatting to said this was one drawback of the book for her. But for me, this was a useful device. We can see Bosnia-Herzegovina, this recent tragic conflict in our own times, and link it to Europe's dark history, the 'dark continent', to borrow from historian Mark Mazower http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/67. You can see from Obreht's biography her own personal history woven into this work, too. See: http://www.teaobreht.com/biography.html This is, then, a powerful, engaging and fully-charged story with much beauty and many significant interludes within it. I was journeying through this book in ways which made the political and drier historical work about our own times come to life, breathing.
Read! Read! Read!
I fell in love with this book, kept eking it out so I did not have to say goodbye to it. Revisiting it now for the blog makes me find it again. I suppose I found resonance in it about history - my own craft and subject - and about twentieth century war and conflict, the disputes across ethnic and religious lines and social divisions which are more than repugnant - they are simply horrendous. Natalia must deal with this too. To soften the political edges of this story, Obreht uses magic realism. We are never quite sure where we are in time or place - so much so that one bookstore person I was chatting to said this was one drawback of the book for her. But for me, this was a useful device. We can see Bosnia-Herzegovina, this recent tragic conflict in our own times, and link it to Europe's dark history, the 'dark continent', to borrow from historian Mark Mazower http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/67. You can see from Obreht's biography her own personal history woven into this work, too. See: http://www.teaobreht.com/biography.html This is, then, a powerful, engaging and fully-charged story with much beauty and many significant interludes within it. I was journeying through this book in ways which made the political and drier historical work about our own times come to life, breathing.
Read! Read! Read!
Thursday, May 31, 2012
The Artist of Disappearance, Anita Desai
Since last writing about books here I've had some interesting conversations with our daughter about book dust-jackets. What are they for? why are they called 'dust-jackets'? Can she go round the house to collect all of the ones we took off her books to stop them from tearing when she was a bit rougher with her books, and look at them?
There is something about the dust jacket on a hardback book that is both appealing and something of a nuisance. Do others taken them off temporarily? But as I was about to say, The Artist of Disappearance (2011) is a collection of three novellas by Anita Desai who happens to be the mother of Kiran Desai (whose own book, The Inheritance of Loss, I still have not read). I circled around this little red hardback book with a dust jacket in February in the Hobart Book Shop http://www.hobartbookshop.com.au/ off Salamanca Place. It was on the new books table. I kept going back, feeling like buying any new book at that stage was an indulgence. But I'd recently passed a Sebastian Faulks book unfinished to my friend Julia, as halfway through I just decided I could not keep believing in the posturing of the writing or the people Faulks was writing about. I wonder if she read it? And I'd had some joy in reading a small, hardback copy of Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending. Perhaps, I thought, this little red book will be the one! I was alone, you see, and waiting for CH and our daughter to join me. I knew people but was trying to write and digest research. I was staying in an apartment and needed books, as the evenings were pretty much solitude, as I sometimes like it.
The Artist of Disappearance is a sharp, poignant, exacting selection of Desai's writing. The first novella, 'The Museum of Final Journeys', is terrific. An Indian civil servant is approached by villagers wanting to know what to do with a huge collection of international artefacts made by a man who had since died, and among the items collected was a live elephant. In 40 pages Desai examines the mood, motivations and passions of a passionless man and the final outcome of his journey is both sad and ridiculous. This story made me think, and I had to savour it so as not to read the rest of the book too quickly (one of my bad habits is to read too fast). The second, longer story, 'Translator Translated', is again a very perceptive piece of writing about a person who takes liberties and is reckless but this covers up a huge lack of confidence and a kind of anger at not being recognised by the world. A woman begins to translate the writing of an indigenous writer unknown to a wider audience but finds the writing so spare and dull that she embellishes it for the English audience, blurring the lines between the original and her own writing, and leaving everyone in doubt as to her integrity. She is quite a frustrating character but the story is both intriguing and sort of funny, except that it is is not. I know this probably does not make sense but I do not want to give it all away in telling plots! In the final story, with the same title as the collection, some young explorers expose a secret and yet do not uncover its deep past. Very curious piece, but I liked it very much. This collection is one I shall re-read.
I've been looking everywhere in secondhand stores for earlier Desai books. I've found one that I started reading but discarded, a novel called Baumgartner's Bombay, which was quite good but which I simply lost interest in. It turns out our university library has quite a bit of Desai in its collection so that's one way I'll try more of her work. Watch out for posts on the wonderful world of libraries, adventures in libraries, and more.
A note on dates - Blogger seems to calculate my writing days as being in the Northern Hemisphere. I must get more Blogger literate and fix that!
There is something about the dust jacket on a hardback book that is both appealing and something of a nuisance. Do others taken them off temporarily? But as I was about to say, The Artist of Disappearance (2011) is a collection of three novellas by Anita Desai who happens to be the mother of Kiran Desai (whose own book, The Inheritance of Loss, I still have not read). I circled around this little red hardback book with a dust jacket in February in the Hobart Book Shop http://www.hobartbookshop.com.au/ off Salamanca Place. It was on the new books table. I kept going back, feeling like buying any new book at that stage was an indulgence. But I'd recently passed a Sebastian Faulks book unfinished to my friend Julia, as halfway through I just decided I could not keep believing in the posturing of the writing or the people Faulks was writing about. I wonder if she read it? And I'd had some joy in reading a small, hardback copy of Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending. Perhaps, I thought, this little red book will be the one! I was alone, you see, and waiting for CH and our daughter to join me. I knew people but was trying to write and digest research. I was staying in an apartment and needed books, as the evenings were pretty much solitude, as I sometimes like it.
The Artist of Disappearance is a sharp, poignant, exacting selection of Desai's writing. The first novella, 'The Museum of Final Journeys', is terrific. An Indian civil servant is approached by villagers wanting to know what to do with a huge collection of international artefacts made by a man who had since died, and among the items collected was a live elephant. In 40 pages Desai examines the mood, motivations and passions of a passionless man and the final outcome of his journey is both sad and ridiculous. This story made me think, and I had to savour it so as not to read the rest of the book too quickly (one of my bad habits is to read too fast). The second, longer story, 'Translator Translated', is again a very perceptive piece of writing about a person who takes liberties and is reckless but this covers up a huge lack of confidence and a kind of anger at not being recognised by the world. A woman begins to translate the writing of an indigenous writer unknown to a wider audience but finds the writing so spare and dull that she embellishes it for the English audience, blurring the lines between the original and her own writing, and leaving everyone in doubt as to her integrity. She is quite a frustrating character but the story is both intriguing and sort of funny, except that it is is not. I know this probably does not make sense but I do not want to give it all away in telling plots! In the final story, with the same title as the collection, some young explorers expose a secret and yet do not uncover its deep past. Very curious piece, but I liked it very much. This collection is one I shall re-read.
I've been looking everywhere in secondhand stores for earlier Desai books. I've found one that I started reading but discarded, a novel called Baumgartner's Bombay, which was quite good but which I simply lost interest in. It turns out our university library has quite a bit of Desai in its collection so that's one way I'll try more of her work. Watch out for posts on the wonderful world of libraries, adventures in libraries, and more.
A note on dates - Blogger seems to calculate my writing days as being in the Northern Hemisphere. I must get more Blogger literate and fix that!
Monday, May 28, 2012
It's Fine by Me, Per Petterson
Per Petterson is a Norwegian writer translated into English, with this book originally published in 1992, and only much later available in English (translated by Don Bartlett in 2011). I stumbled across It's Fine By Me having already read his later novel, Out Stealing Horses (2003, with an English translation by Anne Born in 2005). Both novels are written the first person and feature young men facing a 'coming of age' moment in family life. The landscapes of both books is stark and cold. In It's Fine by Me, Audun is a teenager and struggling with the death of his brother, as well as a fragmented family life. His absent father is a drunk, and his mother hardly features. This is an account of his internal world, his friendships in and out of school, being an apprentice in a newspaper printery, which is a comic, intelligent section of the book, and finally, learning to face the death of his father. I wondered if Petterson had been examining the father-son dynamic over time in his writing since Out Stealing Horses tackles that theme too. These books are pretty dark. Families appear broken and full of secrets. Young men struggle with violence and mental health problems. But they are also very beautiful and absorbing stories. As well as that, often, translations interest me. Two different translators here capture the essence of Petterson's writing (so far as I can discern) and show remarkable consistency in their style, though Born has translated three Petterson books thus far. Petterson has won and been nominated for several prizes: see http://perpetterson.com/
The secret of the blog
Another weekend passed with plenty of time to play, go for walks, cook seafood paella (yes! though it turned out somewhat blander than expected it was good to try it again after some years!) look at the garden that needs some replanting for Winter veges (am I too late?) And finally, I summoned the courage to actually look at some other blogs on books and writing. Well, I never! There is one place to find a ranking of the top 50 blogs on books! http://www.invesp.com/blog-rank/Books As it is sparklingly clear to many of you sophisticated blog-readers and social media types, I am a complete novice. Laughable even. So yes, I could let self-doubt and embarrassment creep in at this point but am sick of allowing myself to do that so I am just ignoring it. Anyway, most of them accept advertising!
The secret of the blog is that it is actually working. I have finally unlocked, after just a few days of trying this blogging caper, a renewed enthusiasm for writing my academic history due at the publisher in September. Hurrah! I was processing ideas all day until finally at 8.30pm last night a flood of academic sentences hit the page on my laptop. So, if the blog is good for this - and making it public on Facebook helps to know it has some kind of 'purpose', however limited - I'll keep it up.
Stay tuned for blogs on Anita Desai, Tea Obreht, Toni Morrison, and many more.
The secret of the blog is that it is actually working. I have finally unlocked, after just a few days of trying this blogging caper, a renewed enthusiasm for writing my academic history due at the publisher in September. Hurrah! I was processing ideas all day until finally at 8.30pm last night a flood of academic sentences hit the page on my laptop. So, if the blog is good for this - and making it public on Facebook helps to know it has some kind of 'purpose', however limited - I'll keep it up.
Stay tuned for blogs on Anita Desai, Tea Obreht, Toni Morrison, and many more.
Saturday, May 26, 2012
Short Stories II
Good afternoon, a Saturday. I've launched into reading The Forrests, by Emily Perkins. Stay tuned for thoughts on that one another day. In the meantime I've a few assorted books and themes to talk about in coming posts.
Yesterday I endured almost 3 hours of dental treatment and all I could do to stay focused on the end was to think about my blog themes - so it's already stimulating me and those creative juices! I was lying back in the dentist's chair thinking about more short stories - as well as making a mental note to tell our daughter NOT to eat anymore sticky lollies. In my previous post I did not mention the wonderful collection Sleepers Almanac No. 7. Kate Ryan's story, 'The Leaves', is really terrific. She writes as an observer of a difficult exchange between a pharmacist and a customer, bringing a rare quality of empathy for the stringy character of the user looking for some methadone, all the time reflecting on her own dilemmas, relationships, failed and otherwise. Go to: http://sleeperspublishing.com/2011/the-sleepers-almanac-no-7/
The other thing that was great about this was that it was at the end of a short trip to Melbourne that I discovered the book (after Kate mentioned it) at the Brunswick Street Bookstore in Fitzroy http://www.brunswickstreetbookstore.com/ where I sat and read her story twice in the armchair. Bookstores with chairs! being able to read! it might seem somehow stingy but I was travelling and couldn't fit ANYTHING else in my small bag. The great pity was that I really do want to own that book for the story. Next time, perhaps.
Another blog theme will be 'On Appearing in Other Peoples' Fiction and Poetry' but I'm saving that for later. I know Kate is writing a novel and there have been times when she's grilled me on happenings in my life with such intensity, over and over, that I know they'll appear in other guises reworked as fiction. It's an interesting question about writers, isn't it? I want to mention here Patrick West's The World Swimmers (Western Australia, 2010) where I appear in the little desert in Victoria, however much the 'reality' has been modified. Patrick really likes Gerald Murnane, a Melbourne writer, and both of their stories are written in a mode I appreciate: very spare and precise writing, slightly obsessive. Here's a passage:
"For no known reason, we had each taken a different way from the other. Tiny desert mice and prodigious desert rats were in shadowy motion within the scrub. ... Under blazing sun, it had felt nevertheless as if I were looking into darkest night.
There was orange peel on the ground where the main path took up again: the first sign of recent intrusion that either of us had ever seen."
- from 'Nhill', p. 5
In 'life', I had peeled an orange and we'd agreed to leave the skin to decompose. In the story it becomes a shot of colour in the desert of the relationship, where the 'wife' is tired and grumpy and things are faltering badly. 'How could such intensity ever seem so deep to us again?' (p. 8).
Yesterday I endured almost 3 hours of dental treatment and all I could do to stay focused on the end was to think about my blog themes - so it's already stimulating me and those creative juices! I was lying back in the dentist's chair thinking about more short stories - as well as making a mental note to tell our daughter NOT to eat anymore sticky lollies. In my previous post I did not mention the wonderful collection Sleepers Almanac No. 7. Kate Ryan's story, 'The Leaves', is really terrific. She writes as an observer of a difficult exchange between a pharmacist and a customer, bringing a rare quality of empathy for the stringy character of the user looking for some methadone, all the time reflecting on her own dilemmas, relationships, failed and otherwise. Go to: http://sleeperspublishing.com/2011/the-sleepers-almanac-no-7/
The other thing that was great about this was that it was at the end of a short trip to Melbourne that I discovered the book (after Kate mentioned it) at the Brunswick Street Bookstore in Fitzroy http://www.brunswickstreetbookstore.com/ where I sat and read her story twice in the armchair. Bookstores with chairs! being able to read! it might seem somehow stingy but I was travelling and couldn't fit ANYTHING else in my small bag. The great pity was that I really do want to own that book for the story. Next time, perhaps.
Another blog theme will be 'On Appearing in Other Peoples' Fiction and Poetry' but I'm saving that for later. I know Kate is writing a novel and there have been times when she's grilled me on happenings in my life with such intensity, over and over, that I know they'll appear in other guises reworked as fiction. It's an interesting question about writers, isn't it? I want to mention here Patrick West's The World Swimmers (Western Australia, 2010) where I appear in the little desert in Victoria, however much the 'reality' has been modified. Patrick really likes Gerald Murnane, a Melbourne writer, and both of their stories are written in a mode I appreciate: very spare and precise writing, slightly obsessive. Here's a passage:
"For no known reason, we had each taken a different way from the other. Tiny desert mice and prodigious desert rats were in shadowy motion within the scrub. ... Under blazing sun, it had felt nevertheless as if I were looking into darkest night.
There was orange peel on the ground where the main path took up again: the first sign of recent intrusion that either of us had ever seen."
- from 'Nhill', p. 5
In 'life', I had peeled an orange and we'd agreed to leave the skin to decompose. In the story it becomes a shot of colour in the desert of the relationship, where the 'wife' is tired and grumpy and things are faltering badly. 'How could such intensity ever seem so deep to us again?' (p. 8).
Thursday, May 24, 2012
On short stories
I said I still revered the form of the short story. This is like poetry to me too but more sustained and often a fragment of a novel. Some of my absolute favourites are collections by authors who build towards an interconnected story or narratives which intersect and share characters, like the brilliant Jhumpa Lahiri - wow, she is an amazing writer. I think some people might find her somewhat depressing but her stories are spartan and yet rich, controlled and also incredibly wild, for me, anyway. There's some interesting commentary around - go to her official site at: http://www.randomhouse.com/kvpa/jhumpalahiri/
One of my best friends in Melbourne, Kate Ryan, is writing brilliant short stories. I told her they were the kind that made me want to write. One of them appears in http://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/title/new-australian-stories-2/ . Kate's been working on a scholarly account of American writer Lorrie Moore who also writes short stories and novels. We talk as much as possible about our favourite short story writers. I'll never forget discovering Salinger's classic 'A perfect day for bananafish' as a kid reading the books from the glass cabinet in my grandparents' house in Orange, NSW. Probably not considered terribly appropriate then, though I've not realised until recently re-reading it that it was so dark. What I must have admired then was the strange, hypnotic and spare form, the odd landscape in the American hotel at the beach, the silence, if not the terrible conclusion. My mum's parents lived at the top of a sloping cul-de-sac and only possessed a few books unlike our own groaning shelves but what they had was good stuff. I remember that cabinet of books, my gran whistling and singing all day with the endless cups of tea, the smell of porridge cooking since 5am, the walnut tree in the backyard, and my pop on the red painted porch (or was it green?) peeling oranges.
The senses evoked by short stories are different too. Sometimes all the patience I have is for a bite, a morsel, something little that opens up a world of words and thoughts. And sometimes I need to be shocked or disturbed, or taken out, elsewhere. I go to Granta quite often for that! Buying the latest Granta is a regular, special treat on less frequent trips to Auckland.
Ok so my real ambition (fantasy) is to set up a Unity Bookstore in Hamilton. How I wish it could be true. There would be an e-corner for the e-books and the e-nuts. I promise, if only I had capital, drive, the will!
One of my best friends in Melbourne, Kate Ryan, is writing brilliant short stories. I told her they were the kind that made me want to write. One of them appears in http://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/title/new-australian-stories-2/ . Kate's been working on a scholarly account of American writer Lorrie Moore who also writes short stories and novels. We talk as much as possible about our favourite short story writers. I'll never forget discovering Salinger's classic 'A perfect day for bananafish' as a kid reading the books from the glass cabinet in my grandparents' house in Orange, NSW. Probably not considered terribly appropriate then, though I've not realised until recently re-reading it that it was so dark. What I must have admired then was the strange, hypnotic and spare form, the odd landscape in the American hotel at the beach, the silence, if not the terrible conclusion. My mum's parents lived at the top of a sloping cul-de-sac and only possessed a few books unlike our own groaning shelves but what they had was good stuff. I remember that cabinet of books, my gran whistling and singing all day with the endless cups of tea, the smell of porridge cooking since 5am, the walnut tree in the backyard, and my pop on the red painted porch (or was it green?) peeling oranges.
The senses evoked by short stories are different too. Sometimes all the patience I have is for a bite, a morsel, something little that opens up a world of words and thoughts. And sometimes I need to be shocked or disturbed, or taken out, elsewhere. I go to Granta quite often for that! Buying the latest Granta is a regular, special treat on less frequent trips to Auckland.
Ok so my real ambition (fantasy) is to set up a Unity Bookstore in Hamilton. How I wish it could be true. There would be an e-corner for the e-books and the e-nuts. I promise, if only I had capital, drive, the will!
Traitor, Stephen Daisley
This book is written by a New Zealander living in Perth in Western Australia. I would probably never have given it a second glance except that I was looking for a new novel in Melbourne in March in Readings Bookstore St Kilda http://www.readings.com.au/st-kilda, with my friends Kai and Rajni. They recommended it and I've just finished it. It was the book I waited to read at the end of each day and kept sighing about and saying 'this is so good, you must read it'. It is about World War One, again, not usually a topic I fancy so much in novels, but it twists the emphasis away from heroism and onto sheer loss, fear, love, spirituality, belief, longing ... it is a truly remarkable and powerful book. The main character allows us to reflect again on war and question it through his memories of being a 'traitor' and consorting with an enemy, and the book touches on questions of masculinity and sexuality as well as notions of bravery and emotions. It's a poetic book, so powerful an account of war and also the relationships between NZ and Australian soldiers that I felt utterly moved by it. There's an amazing passage about going over the trenches. I so wish we could talk about war like this more often. I am so glad I tried it and ignored the cover which made me think it would be dull or derivative. Published in 2010 by Text publishing in Melbourne, it is a simply beautiful book - read it! http://textpublishing.com.au/books-and-authors/book/traitor/
Goodmorning from Bookshelf
I'm not going to pretend that I have a huge amount of time to read. I do it in snatches and bursts, and I'm fussy about books. If I don't like it, I can't read it. I'm sad to say that some books languish lonely without readers in my house until I despatch them to friends, or to Browsers http://www.browsersbooks.co.nz/ (thank you Rachel!) and I've been known to give them away in airports ever since the woman gave me her horrible, tatty and falling-apart copy of an unmentionably awful book to me in the bookstore at the Dubai airport - sorry lady, hated it, but great idea to gift books that way! (I can't even remember the author but it involved a sticky marriage plot so outlandish it made me reel in the airplane seats and laugh outloud, so I guess it was good for something.) Over the years I've been immersing myself in novels again after reading mostly non-fiction and poetry. The novel! such a fantastic way to have a conversation with a book. I am so glad to have rediscovered novels. To be able to carry that strong narrative through and build a world is so impressive and something I can't imagine doing. Though I still love the short story as a form - and will comment on a few short story collections here too. This is my way of having the chance to share some great books without joining a book group. I feel like in my work life I have enough 'homework' and deadlines and commitments so I can't read to order. But I wanted to at least talk about some of my favourites. So here it is.
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