I often go through phases with my reading. Recently I had a huge American phase (because I was in the States) and then a nineteenth century phase (when I got home) and then these phases joined up so that I had the combined power of a nineteenth century American phase! Anyhow, a couple of weeks ago, I got sucked into what I think is the literary equivalent of a supermassive black hole: Russia. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I’ve always been very dismissive of Russian literature. I don’t know why. Probably just to […]

‘There is no frigate like a book,’ wrote poet Emily Dickinson, ‘to take us lands away.’ And recently, the captain of my soul has been Dickinson herself, that master of floral economy and passionate doubt. Dickinson’s poetry (crisp, chiefly unadorned) and ideas (skeptical, unorthodox) are surprisingly modern, however steeped in her life and era. But this book, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, is more modern still. It might have been unrecognisable to the author. Not only because the poet rarely published in her lifetime, but also because of the format: charged pigment particles in black and white, in a […]

All of a sudden there is a flow of books in that rare literary genre—the Australian political novel. Flow. Well, a few. My bedside table includes Sulari Gentill’s, A Few Right Thinking Men, Nicholas Hasluck’s, Dismissal, John M. Green’s, Born to Run, Anna Funder’s, All That I Am and added just last night, Elliot Perlman’s, The Street Sweeper. I still can’t talk about political novels without thinking of Dal Stivens’ classic, Jimmy Brockett and the gutsy energy of his rogue entrepreneur and the political corruption of Sydney (what changes?) in the early decades of the 20th century. There is the […]

I’m re-reading Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (John le Carre) at the moment to prepare for the new film starring Gary Oldman as George Smiley. It’s a wonderful perspective on the the British secret service, far more realistic than Spooks on TV, which I like as well. Le Carre went off the rails a bit in later years I reckon, but his early Smiley books are fabulous. Book Club last month was Rites of Passage by William Golding. I hated it. Dreadful book. All of the characters were appalling, the story went nowhere and not much happened, the language sodden and […]