I find it hard to concentrate. I repeat myself more often than I’d like. It’s the internet; it’s the pandemic; it’s the doom clouds above in another Victorian winter. I wonder how scatterbrained we would seem to my grandparents, their parents. In another decade I read Don Quixote in Berlin. I was by myself and staying in a quiet hostel that had once been a hotel. It was far too nice for a hostel and it was empty and I didn’t know why. Suspicious elderly East Germans glared at me and my long grey hair when I walked past. I walked so far every day my whole body hurt. In the evenings I drank beer in the empty bar and read about tilts at windmills. I haven’t done something like that for a while.
*
For a few years Choose Your Own Adventure books were the only books I read. The Mystery of Chimney Rock was my favourite, with its ghastly gothic American haunted house. You almost always died at the end.
*
I’ve been undone by John Cheever describing the light in the atmosphere.
*
And oh this poor mind, casting desperately around the room for some detail that will give it form and meaning, seizes upon an ashtray filled with butts or a crooked stocking, a tear in the rug. And then he sees the sky! the poignant blue, the line of darkness rising like a lid; the perfect clearness of line and colour that means a northwest wind has scoured the overcast and blown it out to sea.
(The Journals of John Cheever, p5)
*
Why this passage? I don’t know. There’s some weight in that exclamation point, and the description of the sky is lovely, but reading it back I don’t feel anything much. I guess it was the right thing at the right time.
*
I lost myself in Nardi Simpson’s Song of the Crocodile for a while last year. It grabbed me from the start. It’s heavy and ambitious and filled with magic and ancestral memory and sorrow. Its multi-generational story about the founding of a settler town and its insidious impact on the nearby Aboriginal community brings to mind a reverse One Hundred Years of Solitude. It feels vital and fresh, and it opened something, let something in. It shows how much good was broken by colonisation, how easily it was done, how cruelly and carelessly, how it is still being done. Months later I’m still thinking about its ending.
*
I increasingly appreciate extreme brevity in books. It feels like doomscrolling but with purpose.
*
A friend shows me the first passage of Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation and we marvel at it:
Antelopes have 10x vision, you said. It was the beginning or close to it. That means on a clear night they can see the rings of Saturn.
The conclusion is even better than the start. The book is short, its paragraphs tiny, but it conjures an entire marriage. Weather is similarly beautiful and funny and eerie and short and sad. There aren’t enough Jenny Offill books in the world. I respectfully demand she write all of them now.
*
The childhood memory of finding a book that delights and consumes you so that you read it over and over and over until you wear out its pages and can nearly recite it by heart.
*
Fantastic Mr. Fox, if you must know.
*
Deborah Levy’s Things I Don’t Want to Know leaves me ashamed of my own lack: both of writing skill and a room on a Spanish island in which to write. I complain to my partner, who isn’t sympathetic. I decide I need to start complaining less, but I don’t.
*
Sometimes I’ll re-read a Lydia Davis microfiction just to feel like I’ve achieved something.
*
I read Teju Cole’s brilliant essay collection Known and Strange Things and realise that I prefer writing that leans towards epiphany; divine moments without divine beings; people working it out, thinking it through.
*
Mostly I only read a book once. There are too many books. What if I miss one that says just the right thing at just the right moment?
*
No Document by Anwen Crawford is full of poetic, staccato passages that don’t always obviously relate to each other—a friendship cruelly cut short, a French film that features real animal slaughter, refugees and detention and protests—but they are juxtaposed so perfectly that I actually gasp, in public, several times. It does something the best creative nonfiction does—allows the reader to make their own connections, unaware they are being led precisely to them. The last line rings like a bell.
It’s a mournful, raucous, angry book; a rallying cry for the lost rebellions of those who, like me, were young and idealistic in the year 2000. After reading a few pages in a park I pass a teenage climate change protest in its hundreds and the crowd roars like it’s at the MCG. Maybe just St Kilda versus North Melbourne. But still.
*
Go, Dog. Go! by PD Eastman—in which many dogs rush to a party at the top of a tree—remains one of my favourite books. It’s because they are very funny dogs and they are somehow partying on the top of a tree without falling to the ground. It’s the only party I’ve ever wanted to attend.
*
I’m always hungry for books that mess with form. I’ll forgive many, many things for a page of redacted text, or a random table. I was hugely excited to see Carmen Maria Machado’s formally daring In the Dream House arrive last year. In it, an abusive same-sex relationship is broken down into dozens of different story types. Every new chapter brings a new perspective, with a nod to Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style—a chapter about the relationship as an ‘I Love Lucy’ episode, a murder mystery, or a road trip movie. It doesn’t always work as well as it could, but the bracing dissonance between its playful form and its dark themes hits home. The Choose Your Own Adventure chapter in particular lingers long after I finish reading.
*
I’ll read anything I can find by Olga Tokarczuk. The most recent is her incredible Nobel prize winning speech, in which she talks about a new kind of narrator to suit our multiplicitous age. I wait impatiently for translations of her back catalogue, but they arrive slowly. I consider learning Polish, but I’m very lazy. Tokarczuk has said that her novel Flights is a ‘constellation novel’, and I like that very much. I think I know what she means but I shouldn’t explain it here in case I’m wrong. Well, okay, it’s something about connecting dots, if the dots are stars and the stars fragments of stories and the lines are … and the galaxy is … um.
I keep telling people to read her, but few people bite, or if they do, they don’t know what the fuss is about. The fuss is: I think she’s a genius, and I don’t think anyone is a genius.
*
I find it hard to concentrate. I repeat myself too often. I prefer fragments to the whole. I want to connect the dots myself, thanks. Have the stars scream something, extract some meaning from the unmeaning. There are so many wonderful books out there and not enough attention to spend on them. But there’s always the next one, the one now hidden from view but soon discovered, the one that opens a door or describes the light in just the right way to bring you undone at just the right time.
Rhett Davis won the 2020 Victorian Premiers Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. His novel, Hovering, will be published by Hachette in February 2022. He lives in Geelong, on Wadawurrung country.
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