The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood

What a truly awful book. It’s a combination of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Cormack McCarthy’s The Road, but without the brilliance. It’s a sort of dystopian novel, though the setting is contemporary, about women who have been shamed by the media as sluts – women who have slept with the whole football team, who’ve been caught having affairs with politicians and so forth. Other people in their lives – friends, brothers, other women – somehow have the power to have them disappeared by a group called Hardings. There are shades of the forced lobotomies of the early 20th century, of the corporate run detention centres of the present, of the systematic abuses of children in care. But it’s such a miserable, depressing, gloomy read. Some women cave in, other women find strength, lots of women go mad. I can see this writer is a fire and brimstone feminist, and good on her for that, but the book is just so bloody depressing. And again, so mundanely written. And it just goes on and on. Emma, who lent it to me, told me not to bother returning it.

The Husbands Secret by Liane Moriarty

Liane Moriarty's books are chick lit really but absolutely terrific when you're on holidays and cant be bothered concentrating on something more serious. This one is about a murder that took place a long time ago and about the people who knew and or know the family of the girl who died, Janie. It's fast paced and compelling and pretty well written.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

This was a compelling book that jumped around in time a bit and was told from the point of view of the three main women in the story, Rachel, Anna and Megan. It's a murder mystery thriller thing. The problem was that I really didn't like any of the women in it, much less the men, and so didn't engage with them or hope things turned out OK for them. At the same time, I did want to know who dunnit so powered through it on trains and so forth. It was an easy enough holiday read.

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

What a heartbreaker: this absolutely top notch gifted neurosurgeon struck down by cancer at the age of 35. His thoughts on death and dying, on a person’s place in life, their purpose, what matters, what doesn’t and, fundamentally, their connection with and responsibilities to other people. Box of tissues required.

Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf

What a magical little book. It's the story of two older people finding companionship and love but also of the mean spiritedness of others, damaged people like the woman's son. It’s just an afternoon’s read but wise, wonderful and mature.

Commonwealth by Anne Patchett

I loved this book. It’s the freewheeling story of a family riven by infidelity, divorce, betrayals and yet somehow retaining a weird kind of loyalty and love despite everything. It’s beautifully written, compelling and clever. I particularly liked the way Patchett managed to get those unfinished bits and pieces that flow around families. There are gaps and loose ends. Not everything is explained. The reader has to think. This gives the story an authenticity that is rare in family sagas and I came away feeling I really knew Franny and Jeanette, from whose point of view the story is mostly told.

Ghost Empire by Richard Fidler

Somebody told me this book has had average reviews. WHAT???? I could barely put it down. Having been to Istanbul many years ago now, it was easy to place the events in this lucid history, and perhaps that’s part of why I loved it so much. But there’s also Richard Fidler’s amazingly easy style. He brings his skills as a conversational type of interviewer directly into his story telling, so that it’s relevant, engaging and grounded. But let me begin at the beginning. This big book is a history of Constantinople, from its inception as the capital of Byzantine Rome to its fall to the Ottoman Turks in the middle of the 1400s. Richard Fidler and his son Joe, both history buffs, are wandering through the city tracking down monuments and relics and then Fidler tells the story behind each one. It’s a good structure, hanging a story off an object as it were, and one I’ve used myself writing a family history. The light peppering of anecdotes and observations from their trip provides some gentle relief from the historic content too. I must admit that though I was a keen reader throughout, there were times where my eyes glazed over a little at the endless battles that took place and some of the descriptions of war tactics. I did confuse some of the historical characters but then I don’t think it’s essential to remember every name. I came away with a sense of the richness of the city’s history, its pivotal political and geographical role through time, an understanding of how the Christian church developed and split into the orthodox and Latin factions if I may call them that, and a complete horror at the cruelty and disregard for human life and wellbeing that was all pervasive. I spent a lot of time investigating the things I was reading on the internet – flicking back and forth on the iPad provides a new dimension to reading – and underlined so many utterly fascinating bits of information in the text that I will probably never look at again. For example: the origin of the term ‘navel-gazing’, which I’m not going into here. I just loved the way Fidler brought together so many incredible stories, patching them into a really readable and so often un-put-downable whole. I loved it so much I sent his radio program website a message telling him – a groupie no less – and he wrote back saying to watch out for his book in Iceland coming up. I’ll be the first in the queue.

The Healing Party by Micheline Lee

A lot of people are making a lot of fuss about this book and on the strength of recommendations from Helen Garner, Annabel Crabbe and Leigh Sales, I bought it. I can see why they carried on about it: the story. It’s largely true I believe and quite an astonishing insight into what it’s like growing up in a Pentecostal Christian family, let alone a migrant one (if you’re a fan of Benjamin Law, and I am a mighty one, you’ll have read his story of growing up with his madly wonderfully crazy Chinese mother, which is both a comfort and a delight for people who have, shall I say, ethnically blended families). Anyhow, this story is good. It’s sad and shocking too, with the damage the crazy old father has inflicted on the writer-daughter something she’ll carry to her grave. I hope this book served as some sort of therapy for her. However, the writing is poor. I can’t say anything kinder about it. It’s the sort of unrestrained diary writing that a teenager plonks down on paper and then discovers twenty years later in the attic and cringes with embarrassment as she/he re-reads it. So my view: OK, interesting, funny, sad but definitely not great.

Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift

What an elegant piece of writing. Graham Swift captures a moment in two people’s lives, a moment that becomes a turning point for them both. One is the housemaid, orphan Jane Fairchild, and the other the privileged upper class Paul Niven, who are having an affair. Swift’s writing is lovely, balanced, evocative; and he captures perfectly the instant when things change, the instant that we of course always miss when it’s happening. It’s a very short book, almost a novella, and requires measured careful reading to get the most out of it. Mmmm, lovely.

Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty

A wonderful holiday read – a Sydney story about the upper middle class mothers at a kids’ primary school in a leafy beachside suburb, with all the bitchiness, gossip and hidden secrets that you just know are out there. The protagonist, whose name I’ve already forgotten such a lightweight little gem of a read this is, is a single mum who moves to the suburb to give her son a nicer lifestyle. When she enrols him in school the problems begin. These mothers are like so many of the mothers I’ve been avoiding at various pre, primary and secondary schools all my life, the reason why I could never bring myself to join committees or tuck shop rosters. I knew them all. It’s a vastly entertaining book, carefully observed, with an interesting structure and a few genuine surprises peppered throughout the story. Loved it and ploughed through it in a couple of greedy sittings.

The Alan Clark Diaries by Alan Clark

I don’t know where to begin describing Alan Clark’s diaries except to say that the three volumes of them, spanning 1977 to 1999, kept me utterly absorbed for a couple of weeks. Alan Clark was the son of Kenneth Clark the historian who wrote Civilisation. He graduated from the bar and was a historian himself, with a dozen or more books to his credit, but he is best known as the flamboyant member of parliament for the Conservative party in England. He was ego-centric, selfish, colourful, charming, highly intelligent, a spendthrift, a pants man and extremely right wing. At the same time, he has a certain charm about him that I imagine made him irresistible to a certain kind of woman. The diaries are a fascinating and compelling account of both his lurid private life and his years as a parliamentarian. There were slabs of the politics that I simply didn’t understand, being both too young and an Australian, but there were many references and people I did recognize. Most of his service was under Thatcher, whom he adored, and later John Major. The Falklands and Gulf Wars are discussed, but most of the political talk is about the back room deals, old boys clubs, betrayals and secret agreements that are the staples of political life. Watching the Tories collapse through Clark’s eyes is absolutely fascinating. He adores his family and the diaries also give an insight into the life of the British upper classes, not titled, but loaded – he was worth something like twenty million but always broke because of his obsessive car collecting and the properties he had to maintain: Saltwood Castle in Kent, an estate in Scotland, a chalet in Switzerland and his digs in London. His uncensored commentary on the royal family had me in stitches – he loathed them! Despite the fact that he was an unabashed philanderer – he maintained relations with two daughters and a mother, seemingly all at the one time – he is devoted to his long suffering wife Jane, whom he wooed from the age of fourteen and married at the age of sixteen (he was thirty!!!) He is also devoted to his animals, who figure larger than human beings in the diaries and whom he makes no bones about preferring to people. I knew of course that he had died but wasn’t expecting to be so affected by his last diary entries, written on his death bed, which had me sobbing. I suppose that’s because it was real: this is no piece of fiction, it’s the innermost thoughts of a real person and when you read that he’s dying, he actually is. These diaries had me frantically fact checking and googling more and more information about the people and events and places that I came across as I read. Reading them has been an incredible experience and I’ve come away feeling that, love him or hate him or just watching him with a mixture of shock and admiration, I’ve been invited into this man’s life.

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith

Right up my alley, this one! It’s a nicely researched piece of historical fiction, or sort of, with modern overlays a bit like that secrets of the book or whatever novel from Geraldine Brooks where the timeframe jumps around from present to past. It moves between Australia and Holland and America. And it’s about an art historian on the track of an obscure Dutch woman painter. I like the research into Dutch painting, and Dutch painters being a particular interest of mine, the detail appealed. And there’s a sort of love story intertwined in it all. Probably it’s a book for the girls but still, a nice thing to read on a wintry day, light enough but intelligent.

The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver

Another dystopian novel …. but I must say Shriver does it in a more accessible way than Margaret Atwood. She has at least some characters for whom you feel sympathy. This book is very timely and, like all her books, incredibly well researched. I’d like to know what somebody who actually understands economics would make of it. It follows the collapse of American society when their financial system collapses because of debt that can no longer be repaid. In particular it focuses on the Mandible family, really pretty awful people with a couple of interesting exceptions, who have vast inherited wealth and are suddenly on their uppers because of draconian decisions made by the government of the day. The ‘hero’ of the book is Willing, a prodigy really who through his clear sighted common sense is able to rescue his family from the worst of the fallout. While I like this book, I often find modern dystopian books a bit thin and a bit silly. And perhaps also a bit scary??

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

This is an old young adults book by the woman who later wrote 101 Dalmations. I remember reading it as youngster but re-reading it as a (very) mature woman brings a bitter sweetness to this coming of age story that was almost unexpected. I say almost because I picked it up again following a review or some mention of it in my wider reading as somebody or other’s favourite. Vague, I know, but enough to pique my interest. There are times when I want sweet and old fashioned, something dating from before that cynical hard edged chick-lit sort of novel, full of pseudo feminists, was invented. It is beautifully written. It is poetic. It is charming. And the characters are marvellous, especially Cassandra who is a semi-autobiographical creation. It’s the kind of can’t put down book you read under the covers by torchlight as a kid. And you really don’t know what’s going to happen. Cassandra lives with her ridiculously eccentric father and step mother and her beautiful sister Rose, who unaccountably reminded me of Ophelia for no other reason than for her looks, in a derelict castle that they’ve rented for forty years. The father is a genius one-book wonder of a writer, who has plunged the family into penury through his inactivity. Along comes a rather brash American family who have inherited the local ‘hall’, a Mrs Cotton and her two eligible sons Neil and Simon. They interfere completely in the lives of the English family. You know from the outset it’s going to be a romance and of course you’re not disappointed. However it’s not the sort of romance story a teenager would expect and raises all sorts of ethical questions about people’s relationships that are quite unexpected. It’s a lovely old fashioned but eminently readable book and much, much better than a lot of the trashy fraught stuff that has superseded it.

Everywhere I Look by Helen Garner

Yum. Another book by Helen Garner. I have been a fan of hers since she first published Monkey Grip. There are times when I think it’s me talking, not her. She and I view the world through the same eyes. I love her to pieces. This is a fabulous collection of bits: articles, observations, snippets, journal entries. I doled them out, one, perhaps two, definitely no more than three at a time, so I wouldn’t swallow them all up in one gulp without properly appreciating them. I loved the piece about the ballet rehearsals, something she wrote as a magazine article I think because she’s accompanied by a publicist. It’s observant and poetic. And I loved her observations on getting old and invisible and the sudden, irresistible need to sort people out. I’ve been trying to think what it is about her that is so wonderful and I think it comes down to one word: honesty. She says it like it is. And that applies both to the story concept and to her words. I love the colloquialisms that pepper her writing too, her use of words that remind me of my childhood like ‘chewy’ – how long since I asked my brother for a piece of chewy? Do people today even know what that means? Mmmm, she’s my hero.

Angel by Elizabeth Taylor

I disliked the main character of this book so much that I finished it thinking that I’d disliked the book. But wait – no, in retrospect it was indeed a wonderful book! It’s the story of the rise and fall of an Edwardian woman writer, somebody who, as Hilary Mantel said in her introduction to my copy, never underestimated the taste of the general reading public. Her books are trash, utter trash, and while the critics have a heyday the public cannot get enough of her. She is driven, producing a book a year and pouring all her earnings into tasteless extravagances (while at the same time denouncing the nouveau riche.) Her greatest extravagance is the purchase and restoration of Paradise House, the place where her aunt worked as a ladies maid and which has been held up to her as the pinnacle of cultivated life. Even her own name, Angel, has been given to her after the daughter of Paradise House. Angel herself is a loner, completely unable to relate to other people and selfish in the extreme. Her only interest in people is in what they can do for her and she never, ever holds back. The book charts her rise, her marriage to Esme, and her decline in the ruins of Paradise House surrounded by her animals and her small group of strangely devoted followers. The secondary characters are a joy: the charmless waster Esme, whom she marries; her ladies maid aunt Dottie with the all-seeing eye and acerbic tongue; her benevolent publisher Theo; her devoted companion Nora and the surprising chauffeur Marvell, who sticks with her through thick and thin. Elizabeth Taylor’s humour is subtle and black, at times leaping out of nowhere and socking you in he jaw. Read carefully and think about it, or you’ll miss the sly innuendo or the carefully pitched little bit of wasp.

Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym

Sometimes you come across a piece of writing that is so subtle and understated that you almost absorb what’s going on by osmosis. This marvelous novel is like that. I loved Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women and Quartet offers more of the same quiet observation of ordinary human lives. It’s the story of four ordinary single people, two men, Norman and Edwin, and two women, Letty and Marcia, who work together in unspecified clerical jobs, live alone and struggle with a deep loneliness. They are all nearing retirement age and when the two women retire they must adjust to this new landscape. Letty has to find a new home when her plans to join an old friend in the country fall through; Marcia has to find a new way of living when her normal workday routine has disappeared. Despite the bleakness of the setting and the drabness of these people’s lives, Quartet is frequently full of black comedy. I’ve read this described as ‘tender’ comedy, and yes, Pym is both understanding and forgiving; at the same time however she is a keen and humorous observer of the ludicrousies of these mundane lives. It’s a book for reading very, very carefully, watching for the wry smile on Pym’s face as she makes some small and easily overlooked observation.

The Shepherds Life: A Tale of the Lakes District by James Rebanks

What a lovely book. It’s not what I’d call literary and it’s not a rollicking good yarn, but it is an authentic, humanly written account of the lives of farmers in England’s Lakes district who have been farming sheep on the mountains there for 600 years or more. One of the things I liked best was the connection Rebanks feels with pre-historic peoples. He talks particularly about the showing and selling of sheep, regular calendar events, and draws a comparison with the gatherings that ancient people had to trade, socialize and even find wives and husbands. We visit these places of standing stones and ancient post holes, and it’s truly satisfying to think that a remnant of social behaviour still carries through to the present. I loved his sense of connection with the seasons, also. The book is divided into the four seasons with bits of story interwoven with descriptions of the work that is done in those times. He’s a keen observer of the plant and wildlife of each season. Of course he is a farmer through and through - despite his Oxford firsts in history! – and I loved the practical farmer’s approach to difficulties, to life and death, to foxes and crows, to his relationships with other farmers and his family, with little sentiment. Having lived and worked in rural Australia I recognized it immediately and found it true. Rebanks talks about the sheep hefting to the land, getting connected to a particular place on the mountain so that they can return to it year after year and know they are home. I think he’s talking about himself as much as his sheep.

Utopia by Thomas More

So, having bailed out of a day-long meditation session that smelled remarkably like a cult brainwashing session, I came home and spent the wet and wind-blasted afternoon finishing Utopia. This is a book erudite people refer to all the time. Not being particularly erudite, I hadn’t read it but I’m about to begin an on-line literature course based on the English country house and Utopia is the first book we’re studying. It’s short, just 128 pages, and detailed and I’ve been reading it in bursts. ‘I can have no other notion of all the other governments that I see or know, than that they are a conspiracy of the rich, who on pretence of managing the public only pursue their private ends, and devise all the ways and arts they can find out; first, that they may, without danger, preserve all that they have so ill acquired, and then that they may engage the poor to toil and labour for them at as low rates as possible, and oppress them as much as they please. And if they can but prevail to get these considered as the representative of the whole people, then they are accounted laws.’ ‘Now if in such a court, made up of persons who envy all others, and only admire themselves, a person should but propose anything that he had either read in history or observed in his travels, the rest would think that the reputation of their wisdom would sink, and that their interest would be much depressed, if they could not run it down…’ if better things are proposed they cover themselves obstinately with this excuse of reverence to past times.’ My father used to say that the one thing humankind had never done was to learn from history. So here is someone in the 16th century describing the malaise of modern life. This book is frightening because nothing has changed.

Odd Women by George Gissing

At the Sydney Writers Festival this month there was one book whose name came up time and time again, a novel published in the mid 1800s, and revered by writers such as Vivian Gornick, Hanya Yanagihara and Drusilla Mjodeska: Odd Women. So I downloaded it - free of charge for heavens sake! - on iBooks and plunged in. I could not put this book down. What a joy to read something where the conversation was all absorbing. Indeed I'm not sure I can think of another book where I have responded in such a way; it's nearly always the plot, or the character development or sometimes simply the language that carries me through a novel. But here, it was the argument. I can't compete with a genius-woman like vivian Gornick, so here's her take on the book which absolutely sums up everything I have been thinking. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/odd-women

Purity by Jonathan Franzen

I love Jonathan Franzen, I really do. It’s his way with words, a sort of cutting to the bone in his prose that is somehow elegant in style, if not in content. His language is real. However, the premise for this book is really nothing short of ridiculous. It’s about a girl searching for her identity and through an elaborate plot, which reads like some sort of conspiracy theory, she finds her way. It is utterly unbelievable. I’ve had this sort of problem with his wacky stories before, specifically the guy who runs off to South America in the last novel of his I read. Mostly Franzen’s humour and language redeem him, but this time the book was so very long – about 800 pages or something – and with so much silliness in it that I really can’t forgive him!

The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes

I loved this book. It’s blessedly short because, as is always the case with this magnificent writer, every single word counts. It’s the type of book you need to savour, because it’s not about story, it’s about a psychological state. The book is about Shostakovich and his life in the Soviet Union. It is well researched and uses the facts of his life as a basis for a psychological exploration of how this famous composer dealt with strictures of living in Russia at that time. From that point of view it is fiction, almost like historical fiction I suppose, but better. I was completely fascinated with the relationship between the musicians that were living there at the time and the blind, clumsy-minded power of the officials running the union. Barnes has captured the fear that ran through everyday life like a mineral lode through rock. There was no rhyme or reason to officialdom’s decisions and there was no predicting their behaviour. What astonishes me is that any of these composers like Shostakovich or Prokofiev managed to produce what they did. This was a fascinating insight into living and working under a totalitarian regime.

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

This is an incredible book. Yanagihara writes like an old, experienced woman; I find it hard to understand how someone so young can be so in touch with the inner workings of people’s minds. The story is simple: it traces the lives of four men who share rooms in college and go on to be friends for the rest of their lives in New York. They are very real. I particularly liked her rendition of JB, a character both attractive and lovable and very flawed, a completely authentic character. There were some parts that didn’t ring true, their amazing career successes for one. It’s also almost impossible to write a story chronicling four people’s lives in a book of any readable length, without skimming over bits and lapsing into that sort of shallow story telling that drives me nuts. There’s a little bit of this; there has to be I guess, because even though the book is 800 pages long the scope of the story is four lifetimes. There’s also a little bit of sentimentality, because it’s impossible to do other than sketch a secondary character and as a result their actions become almost superficial, like Harold’s relationship with Jude (though even there she manages to give us clues about why Harold is so attached to this man.) But the real focus of the book is the story of Jude and Willem, the childhoods that formed them and the men they become. Although I’ve not experienced anything like it myself, it seems to me that her exploration of Jude, a victim of horrific abuse as a child, is masterful. And her exploration of grief is so on the money that it had me in tears. That I have experienced and I’ve watched close friends experience too, and I was right there with the characters, recognising and identifying with their suffering. Her research has been astonishing. There’s a great long list of people who worked with in the areas of mathematics, law, medicine and so forth, an incredible achievement. I couldn’t put this book down.

You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz

I found this book in the apartment we were renting in Rome. It’s a typical holiday read, a thriller of a rather unusual kind but a book you would leave behind rather that take back home with you to weigh down your luggage. The story is about a New York Jewish therapist married to a paediatric oncologist. She’s written a book about women taking responsibility for the choices they make when they choose a man in their lives. And then of course, surprise surprise, her own marriage ends up in chaos. The chaos is pretty horrific. The husband is not all he’s cracked up to be and after the collapse of everything she goes on a sort of hunt to uncover all sorts of surprises. The ending is very schmaltzy. But pretty much what you’d expect from a holiday read. It’s compelling enough to keep you powering through it, but all the time you know this book is the literary equivalent of a Maccas.

Trespass by Rose Tremain

The plot of this book was the blackest most depressing story. It was about a particularly unlikeable older English antique dealer who had issues with both his mother and his sexuality, his sister who is living in a lesbian relationship in France and her partner, a French brother and sister who have a desperately ugly relationship and a very unhappy child who has been transplanted from Paris to the country. The English brother moves to France and decides to buy a property there from the French brother, who has to get rid of his sister from her portion of the land for the sale to go through. It goes on from there. There are no resolutions really to anybody’s issues, and nobody ends up happy or fulfilled, just more miserable than before. It’s a most depressing read and not what I expected from Rose Tremain.

The Complete Clayhanger Family novels: the first two, Clayhanger and Hilda Lessways, by Arnold Bennett

Bennett’s style of writing takes a while to settle into but his stories and above all his characters are wonderful representations of provincial English life. These stories are about the son of a self-made man, a printer, whose childhood in a workhouse has formed him into a hard businessman determined to succeed. And of course he has. The son is altogether different, educated and arty, but prepared to give up his dream of being an architect and toe the line as he joins the family business. I’ve only read the first two. The first details his childhood, education and entry into the printing world; the second, his success as a businessman, his first flights of love and his tentative standing up to the dominant father. I’ll be back for the others shortly.

The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

These were listed on some literary newspapers top 100 list but honestly I fail to see how this author got on that list. Talk about over-written – adjective after adjective in long convoluted sentences in unbelievably complicated stories. I hated the first two stories, which I have now forgotten in what is obviously a bid for self preservation and I’m not reading any more.

Excellent Women by Barbra Pym

I was surprised by Barbara Pym. She writes in the style of EF Benson or PG Wodehouse almost, or perhaps even Jane Austen, presenting carefully observed social satire with fine wit. But it’s different, and far more believable, and for goodness sake, it’s feminist in its sentiments! The protagonist Mildred is half in love with vicar and then falls half in love with an anthropologist called Everard, but this isn’t a love story. It’s a story about finding one’s place in the world and the value of common sense when surrounded by really pretty silly people. He writing is surprising, funny and charming and I’ll be reading a lot more of it!