I’m packing my bags for a month’s stay in New South Wales and along with swimming, socialising and attending a week-long poetry workshop in Wollongong, I’ll be reading. So here’s what I have made room for in my luggage:
- back copies of Times Literary Supplement and New York Review of Books,
- Patrick Cullen’s Between the Flags, Gretchen Schirm’s Having Cried Wolf and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge – stayed tuned for a post in the New Year about connected short story collections.
- Thea Astley’s The Multiple Effects of Rain Shadow and Chloe Hooper’s Tall Man - for another post I’m planning about non-fiction and fictional treatment of similar subject matter.
- Love and Desire – the 2007 collection of 4 novella, edited by Cate Kennedy
- Griffith Review’s and Black Inc’s anthologies of Australian Short stories.
That should keep me going until I hit the Sydney bookshops, don’t you think? Use the Comments option below to let me know what is on your list of holiday readings.
Cheers, Bronwyn
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December 9, 2010 at 10:56 am |
Jandamarra (teaching it next year), The latest Overland, the rainbow bridge (picked it up at NT writers’ festival and keep meaning to read it) and hope to track down The Lieutenant as I just read The Secret River and loved it.
December 9, 2010 at 12:04 pm |
Do you need sponsor’s for your readathon?
December 9, 2010 at 12:13 pm |
Great idea. Yes! Minimum is $0.01 per page. Proceeds go to supporting my increasing subscriptions (healthier and cheaper than prescription drug)habit.
December 9, 2010 at 4:15 pm |
Chloe HOoper, The Tall Man; Cate Kennedy, The World Beneath; Best European Fiction 2011; The Philosophy of Andy Warhol; Raymond Carver – Cathedral; A social history of Dying (Kellehear); and yet to buy Paul Kelly’s How to Make Gravy. Maybe father christmas will put it in my stocking ..
December 10, 2010 at 6:33 pm |
While you’re there, go to Dymocks at Broadway! (I really miss Dymocks the REAL bookshop – Darwin’s version seems to be a DVD store that also sells a couple of books). Broadway has a good collection of reference books about writing. Then there’s Glebebooks, Gould’s, BORDERS (yep, I’m a sellout, but I did get a great book about writing at Chatswood Borders) and all the little poky secondhand bookshops that just don’t seem to exist up here.
I’m currently reading The Brave by Nicholas Evans and the Book Thief by Markus Zusak, and I’ve got the audio version of Solar by Ian McKellan on my iPhone. My summer goal is to get my mitts on a copy of Best Australian Stories 2010. I’d like to have a list of more books I’m going to read, but Palmerston’s shops have a limited range and I don’t count “Mr Men” or Liquorland’s trading hours as a reading goal… I miss Sydney
January 10, 2011 at 3:03 pm |
That’s a great list! Patrick Cullen and Gretchen Shirm’s books are absolute crackers, and you already know how I feel about Olive Kitteridge : )
I’m reading What the world will look like when all the water leaves us by Laura Van den Berg, Paul Kelly’s How to Make Gravy, and rereading Gatsby for a particular short story I’m writing.
Hope the workshop went well!
February 1, 2011 at 8:13 pm |
Ah, I intended to write something here … so long ago … but then the computer said NO and kept saying it for six long weeks … But better late than never …
I did get my hands on New Australian Stories (Scribe) and also read Three Dollars by Eliot Purlman. Also Levin Diatschenko’s The Rooftop Sutras, started reading Stephen King’s book on writing, and read lots and lots of stuff about shacks … funnily enough, and reports about South Australian coasts and coastal protection, and Yorke Peninsula history and stuff like that … all grist for the novel mill. I also read Dav Pilkey’s Ook & Gluk – Kung Fu Cavemen from the Future to Leif (aged 6) about ten times (and it’s a 6 chapter book, no picture book…). sigh.