Category: fiction

MY BRILLIANT CAREER by Miles Franklin

Here is a book written by a teenage girl in rural Australia in 1899. Considered an Australian classic, I was well into it at first. Try the beginning:

“MY DEAR FELLOW AUSTRALIANS – Just a few lines to tell you that this story is all about myself – for no other purpose do I write it. I make no apologies for being egotistical. In this particular I attempt an improvement on other autobiographies.”

And shortly after that:

“You can dive into this story head first as it were. Do not fear encountering such trash as descriptions of beautiful sunsets and whisperings of wind. We (999 out of every 1000) can see nought in sunsets save as signs and tokens whether we may expect rain on the morrow . . “

The brilliant career is something of a joke. She wants to be a famous writer, but her family is poor and rural and she ends up having to work as a housemaid. The sequel is called MY CAREER GOES BUNG, which I thought sounded amazing. I won’t get to it though, because I confess I kind of quit this one part way through. It kind of read like an over excited teenager, which is I guess what she was, but for some reason I just didn’t have the tolerance. Feel a bit bad about it, because what a teenage girl she was!

WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE by Jenny Mustard

I’ve really got to stop impulse purchasing GenZ novels. I cannot now exactly recall what this one was about, as I finished it right before I went on holiday. I have a vague idea it was basically : girl finds first year of university hard, bends over backwards to get boy to like her, is embarrassed by her actual friends, etc, I mean I guess as I write it’s a universal story? It was set in Sweden (or Norway?) so everyone was disgustingly well fed and well adjusted about sex. So maybe not all that universal

STAINLESS by Todd Grimson

I just love the plug for this novel:

“Justine is a vampire. Keith just lives like one. An ex-junkie and ex-rock star, his hands mangled by his dead ex’s own jealous ex, he’s let go of his ambitions. It’s true that Justine has been around for a few centuries and Keith barely three decades, but they’re good for each other: Justine is teaching Keith to take the long view; Keith is reminding her how it feels to be alive. Yet a cohort of criminals, desperate artists, dead-enders, hangers-on, and wanna-bes, undead and otherwise, threaten their curious union. Can love stay untainted in a world of monsters?”

LOL. It was kind of cool and creepy, being a novel of the underbelly of LA in the 80s, which even by the standards of underbellys is pretty seamy. It did start to get a little same-y, another teenage junkie murdered, etc. And for a while I was enjoying the central relationship, until eventually had to give up when we had a lot of emphasis about how the vampire lady was just so insatiable for his penis. That crossed into oh dear.

THE DRY by Jane Harper

I found this in the NY Times list of the best thrillers of the last century. I was in a bit of a reading drought, so I thought I’d give it a go. I don’t usually read thrillers but I clearly needed a page turner. And it was pretty good. The pages turned as we investigated a murder-suicide that turned out to be a murder-murder.

I am still not so into thrillers. I did enjoy the setting, being a small Australian town during a drought. This being the warmest summer in the UK since 1976, it felt appropriate.

SUNSET SONG by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

This is often called Scotland’s favourite book, and I get it. Published in 1932, it is fiction, but based so heavily on the author’s childhood in rural Scotland that his neighbours complained about it on publication. Like most books about childhood, and particularly rural childhoods, it is very much an elegy. It absolutely aches with a love of the Scottish countryside. It’s also very funny, capturing a wide range of local characters, often not in the most flattering way (thus the complaints)

It mostly tells the story of the coming to adulthood of a young woman called Chris Guthrie. One plot line that really surprised me, given the period, was her mother’s death. They had already four kids when she got pregnant with twins, and after they were born she told her husband she didn’t want any more children. He told her she would be thanking god for whatever ‘she was given.’ She later killed herself and the toddler twins, apparently because she found out she was pregnant again. Poor lady, she just couldn’t face it. And all this just because this guy didn’t want to pull out. Apparently the entire neighbourhood did go ahead and blame the husband, for ‘breeding his lie like a sow.’ This all seems very modern to me now, and apparently it did to people then too, as it caused quite a scandal. I can only say, thank god for birth control and divorce.

One point of interest is that the book is fairly difficult to read, because the author was trying to capture the ‘Scotch language’ in English form (so a ‘braw’ hat becomes a ‘brave’ hat). The glossary is forbidding. But I enjoyed it all the same.

IMAGINE ME GONE by Adam Haslett

Honestly readers are just so difficult. Here is a work of great artistry that I whipped through. It’s a sad story about the long shadow of a father’s suicide. And yet I hardly remember it. I mean honestly I feel the author: what is it readers want!! I did like this part, where a thirty something is reflecting on the Ansel Adams in his New York apartment:

“I was reminded how little I done to make (the apartment) my own . . One of thousands of adult dorm rooms in Manhattan, where credentialed children performed their idea of adult lives.”

EXIT LANE by Erika Veurink

I seem to be reading more genre fiction these days. Does this mean brainrot? I fear so.

In any case, this one’s a romcom. Interestingly, it’s from a startup with >$4m in investment, that’s basically a publishing imprint with associated income streams (e.g., buy the wine mentioned in the book). I can only be amazed that anyone would look at their investment dollars and think: I know, lets go make money in literature.

The founders of this imprint apparently cold call writers who have never written romatic fiction, or in some cases any fiction at all, and ask them to write for them. (This author, Erika Veurink, is I guess a brand consultant?) Seems an odd approach, and something of a slap in the face for aspiring writers, but there you go.

It compares itself on the cover to NORMAL PEOPLE and YOU, AGAIN. This is very hopeful. It’s not close to their league. However I read it in a single day, while half-dozing in the sun on the Common, eating ice cream, so no complaints here. If this is brainrot, rot away.

CONTRAPPOSTO by Dave Eggars

I spent the first 150 pages of this book mildly bored and the last 250 entranced.   The last 250 I read straight through, on a night when I couldn’t sleep, which raises the worrying idea that the quality of my attention is what is driving my perception of the quality of the book. 

On the plot level, this is a book about a boy and girl who get to know each other in high school and are friends (and sometimes lovers) for the rest of their long lives.  On another level, it is a book about what artistic success means.  The girl is extremely career focused, and is a  big success as a curator.  The boy loves to draw, and while he would like to make a big success as an artist, he just doesn’t want it enough to do the non-drawing leg work this requires, such as e.g., making ‘contacts,’ creating things because they are ‘saleable,’ and etc.  He often does not draw for long periods, and she gets very frustrated with him, especially when he, in her view, ‘checks out’ by moving to Thailand. It was an interesting way of thinking about what your life is really for, and what it’s worth spending your time on.

Rather touchingly, he dedicates the book to those friends of his he’s had for ‘forty or fifty years.’  I’ve passed thirty years with some. I hope I get to fifty with them all.  

CASSANDRA AT THE WEDDING by Dorothy Baker

This book comes draped with reviews calling it a modern American classic.  I wasn’t feeling it.  It tells about a woman who goes to her twin sister’s wedding, and once there tries to commit suicide, because she is so unhappy about being left alone.

I don’t know what to tell you, I just found it kind of – meh.  I think I am just tired of books about people being so tortured all the time.  Stop drinking so much and go to therapy for god’s sake.