I have been delinquent in the reading department since 1) leaving the 2012 Melbourne Writers’ Festival (where books were flung at us regularly from every publisher in the land) and 2) finishing selection for Going Down Swinging #33.

You would think that being out of work for a few weeks would mean more time for books, but it never works like that, does it? Partly I blame The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead, which as it turns out is not a Lolita-esque diary of a paedophile. I had such a violent admiration for what little of this book I could absorb, only ever being able to read four or five pages at a time. I’m still only mid way through, though it is not a short book at well over five hundred pages. The story follows the family life of the Pollitt’s, a highly dysfunctional family muddling through life in 1930’s Washington. Like all highly dysfunctional families, there is a dialect to their misery and it is unlocking the code to these made-up words and phrases that demands work of the reader. Indeed, bizarre language use was one of the main reasons ascribed to the book’s failure in the US. Initially written to be set in Sydney, the publishers demanded a change of scenery to suit an American audience. Moreover, the characters, such as the depressive spendthrift mother are engrossing and repulsive at the same time. Perhaps Stead’s characters were a little too real? See now, I’m making excuses.