A couple of years ago, we published a short piece by Madeleine called “Defining Moments”. It raised the topic of favourite books – always worth a chin wag.
Last birthday, one of my mates (well, my only mate, really… well, he’s not really a mate, but he used to live next to a mate … or a person with whom I am acquainted)… Anyway, because I was shouting him dinner (actually I was bribing him to come out and eat with me so I wouldn’t have to birthday it up all alone), he gave me a copy of a book that he had gone to the trouble of asking the retailer to wrap for him, but he forgot to also make sure that they had removed the price sticker … which, as we well know then reveals how cheap books are overseas and how dumb we are for not buying a stash of them from overseas to use as emergency birthday gifts. But I digress.
Luckily, the cost of his dinner was about the same as the value of the book, neatly and by pure accident avoiding the embarrassment of either of us appearing to be a total cheapskate.
The book in question was Rhys Darby’s “This Way to Spaceship”. A cursory glance at this book reveals a lot about my mate’s world view and his rough sketch of what MY world view looks like. Rhys Darby writes in the promo on the back page: “If there is just one book that you would take on to a desert island… grab a copy of this book and take it too”. This is the essence of Darbeyesque humour. The insightful observation coupled with the bait and switch.
My mate got that right. I adore the unexpected idiot twist. Child-like, I love to be told stories and especially to be led up the garden path and to be fooled.
And I also love to hear about other people’s favourite books. Take me to the spaceship ! Away we go…
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
As a 10y boy I could not wait for our school library to open. It would only open up after school hours. It was housed in an old timber shed in The Hague and painted a Brunswick green. I remember walking in the dark with snow underfeet, hoping to get yet another un-read Jules Verne. At home,crawling under the blankets, I had rigged up with tape a square battery with some wires leading from both poles to a little 6v globe. I used to lick both ends of the battery to test the left over charge still available for reading. The sharper the taste, the more reading time left.
Now we have recharge batteries and kids are on the computor.
Back then, it was different. Most kids haven’t heard of Jules Verne.
LikeLike
I read everything and anything, even my brothers’Tarzan books.
LikeLike
Kids who read read like there’s no tomorrow. Fancy Gez you rigging up a light. I snitched a torch and created a baffle to prevent the light shining through the blanket. I remember a phase of escape stories including The Great Escape, Captain E.W. Johns, and anything that was on an island or might lead to one including of course Treasure and Quokka. They were my really young years not neglecting the essential wonder of The Faraway Tree.
Did you have Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates, Gez? Maybe Helvi knows Hans Brinker? 🙂
LikeLike
My favourite books are the ‘found’ books I had never heard of before, purchased in an op shop or council library sale. One reason I enjoyed the movie ‘Hurricane’ was the respresentation of the little boy learning to read who selects the book about the boxer’s life at a remaindered book sale. When he finds out it is so cheap to buy he utters this line I love for its irony, “Can’t be much of a book.” An intelligent child with a strong mind already forming opinions and the book that informed him in this respect its subject matter profoundly changed the course of the rest of his life.
Charles Dickens did (change my life) when I was a child, taking me down the alleyways and alongside the murky depths of inner city drains. Poverty spoke large and the bullies were horrendous individuals without a single redemptive grace. As much as a volume about the history of Russian anarchists and existentialists set me free, allowed, gave me permission indirectly to think. I thought the latter was titled “The Crystal Palace” but not sure anymore It’s lost as favourite books sometimes get.
Oliver Sacks, of course for entertainment and education…many to choose from… “The Island of the Colour Blind”…although the good Professor has a new volume out for Christmas.
I reckon maybe ‘Kangaroo’ by DH Lawrence for its translation of the Australian accent and showing me the impact of Australia as a different culture on the visiting Englishman…witness the opening and the main character hails/converses (memory) with a taxi driver, in Sydney…later through the book the characters develop through a series of places so a reader is informed about the author’s visual experience of Australia and the prevalent culture that interested him. Clever device, looking at Australia in its relative isolation and people attracted to a focus on an individual as an agent of collectivism, dissent. It’s dark and full of human frailty as I remember it.
The name of the author escapes me, a novel of addiction written in the 1930’s that I found in a paperback translation from the Italian, titled ‘Cocaine, it tells the story of a student doctor whose experience reads to me as tongue in cheek, humour. One chapter I amazed at the frank revelation of the nature of a sociey party dripping with aesthetic embellishment and drugs. A reading of a party where otherwise few have opportunity to attend. Mind, it sparked a chord of recognition of a student party, a story for another once upon a time. 🙂
LikeLike
I feel a bit guilty, ‘Shoe. I read a lot of Sacks’ “Uncle Tungsten”. I was still in the metallurgy section when I wandered off topic. It was fascinating, though. Fancy being a specialist at this intriguing metal. As hard as hard – almost as hard as diamond, but much less brittle. It is so dense that it sinks in molten lead. Without it, not many light globe filaments would last a day, let alone several thousand hours.
Does anyone enjoy Italo Calvino ? I rate his “Cosmic Comics” a hoot. And of course, David Ireland who’s “Glass Canoe” not only won a Miles Franklin Award in the early 1980s, it inspired the birth of the Pig’s Arms.
LikeLike
‘Shoe, I can say proudly – as the Emmlets call me – an Ubernerd – or even a proto-nerd (that is I was a Nerd before Nerd had been invented as a class of underling). One Christmas holiday, our English Master set us the holiday task of reading David Copperfield. Two of us from a class of 30 did. It was over 1,000 pages – which today would see the teacher had up for cruelty. It was a quieter, slower-paced life then – a bit like the current test cricket, which, I can attest goes very nicely with house painting – kind of an aural equivalent watching paint dry, even 🙂
LikeLike
David Copperfield is a nice story though, with its focus on David and his fortunes and falling from grace … with a fair bit of life’s harsher experience write large)… but also the love story between Barkis and Peggoty whose names I remember because Barkis entrusted David with the message that Barkis was willin’. It needed several readings to work out what it was he was willin’ to do, Emmjay. Funny how an enterprising reader could work out the matrimonials and spice.
Mind you, I read Lady Chatterley’s Lover the moment I got wind something in it was unacceptable. For the life of me I couldn’t determine what (puzzle).
Funny, Emmjay, reading your experiences, because It fell to me to provide passionate explanation in Matriculation English for why Dickens was on the syllabus. Current test cricket, aaah. Like watching paint dry. eh. And you’re house painting, eh. Watch this space. I had better tell the story soon about the test cricket, especially before I’m outed. 🙂
LikeLike
Most my reading is non fiction (well I suppose from time to time its fiction but the author would tell you its not). When I do however I tend to devour them fairly quickly.
LikeLike
I could never list ten of my ‘best’ books, because what I Iiked in the past might not delight me much at all anymore…I’ll try to think of more titles…
LikeLike
Yes, just lately I have discovered Hemingway. I realised that I had known about him all of my life, his exploits, beautiful daughter, etc, but not really read him. He has a strangely gentle manner, that seems to disconnect the words from the action, although, I gather, “A Farewell to Arms’ is essentially autobiographical, and the disconnect is the man from the violence. Of course, ‘To Have and Have Not’, one of my favourite Bogart films, is by Hemingway.
Thanks for sharing.
LikeLike
Big, I came late in life to Hemingway. At first I thought him far to “Boy’s Own” for my tastes as a callow student. When I was going to Paris – for my second visit in 25 years !! I read his “Moveable Feast”, and I was hooked. AFter that came “the Snows of Kilimanjaro”- a man dying of gangrene poisoning for who there was not enough time for saving rescue, but plenty of time for reflection on his life. And a few G&Ts. Then “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and “The Old Man and the Sea” – a short work, rich in allegorical possibilities, which some people love and others despise. But for which he received a Nobel Prize for Literature.
Lots more to come when time permits !
LikeLike
Some months ago I discovered another Australian Madeleine, Madeleine St John. Loved her little book The Women in Black, of which Barry Humphries says:” A major minor masterpiece, a witty and poignant snapshot of Sydney the year before yesterday.”
Later I found two other books by her in my favourite second-hand shop.I thoroughly enjoy her sparse succinct style, not a word out of place..
Yesterday I found another gem; The Poet and the Donkey by the American poet May Sarton. It’s a charming tale of an old poet who has lost his Muse, and can’t pen a poem anymore…It has only 128 pages and Í have already read half of them. According to The New Yorker it’s “A small, sophisticated, elegantly sentimental journey through a New Hampshire village summer.” I second that… I also found out that May Sarton originates from Belgium. Not many Belgians anywhere but in their own country, they are not the migrating type (have known two in OZ)…
I also picked up a brand-new copy of Lionel Shriver’s WeNeed To Talk About Kevin… I think it will harrowing reading, after all Kevin shot NINE people, seven of them school mates. A timely read?
The prices of these books ( some are new) wary from fifty cents to three dollars, some of the author signed copies might be ten or fifteen dollars. I think I’m suffering from addiction to books…at least it’s not costing me much 🙂
LikeLike
Helvi, I adore trawling second hand book stores. FM is such a patient woman. And there are certainly many bargains. As well as a plethora of new and used books in Inner West Cyberia, we also have local “libraries”, strategically placed shelving on the streets, tolerated by Council, where people leave books they have finished with and other may borrow – or just take them, or swap them for their own surpluses.
And I do enjoy the efficiency and saving of Internet book shopping – both the wonderfully discounted UK Book Depository (free shipping to Australia and super competitive prices), as well as Amazon’s e-books for PC Kindle – I read on my Mac or my iPad – or, in a pinch on my iPhone. Some of these are great deals. I bought a collected works of GK Chesterton as an e-book for $2.95. The same thing in paper was ten times more expensive.
Now I’m shopping for a large supply of time at a very competitive rate so I can enjoy the bountiful harvest.
LikeLike
Oliver Sacks s good, so is Heinrich Hesse, Heinrich Boll, Frantz Kafka, getting into Patrick White finally, the movie Eye of the Storm was an eye-opener so to speak…I usually read lighter stuff at night, the more serious has to wait till morning. My bedside table is an old oak coffee table( used to be a small dining table, legs cut short); the stacks of books are getting higher and higher….I also love the Finnish writer Fagerholm, hope she writes more books…
LikeLike
oops, Herman Hesse, got a bit carried away with Heinrichs… 🙂
LikeLike
I thought you foreigh lot had a Heinrich Hesse and there was I just catching up with Bol.
It is truly amazing helvi how before you read some of these people you think it’s all beyond you and some of these writers are masters of easy prose (Kafka). Mind us, some of them are not. Withness my struggle with Patrick White’s The Eye of the Storm, because of the interjection of German and French and other languages not to mention the way the action skips around through time and place. I think I said before I was very happy with the television movie of The Eye. It at least validated I got somewhere along on track with the reading of it even though I gave up (thinking I likely wasn’t getting anywhere). I ‘got’ the sense of the characters. They were so surprisinly like I imagined them.
The ruse of that was I gathered to illustrate how these characters had a stake in their various other cultures and slipped in and out of thoseidentities. That must have been right radical when it hit the book stores in Australia, and of course shows up those of us who have only schoolyard proficiency in other European languages. Did White do that on porpoise? 😉
LikeLike
I am reading a Mark Twain travel book where he writes about his experience during the Ballarat gold boom. He reckons the world should adopt ‘Ballarat English’.
Quote: At first you have some difficulty in understanding it when it is spoken as rapidly as the orator whom I have quoted speaks it. An illustration will show what I mean. When he called and I handed him a chair , he bowed and said: “Q.”
Presently, when we lighted our cigars, he held a match to mine and I said: “Thank you,” and he said “Km.”
Then I saw. Q is the end of the phrase ” I thank you.” “Km is the end of the phrase ” you are welcome.”
All Ballarat English is like that, and the effect is very pleasant and soft; it takes all the hardness and harshness out of our tongue and gives to it a delicate whispery and vanishing cadence which charms the ear like the faint rustling of the forest leaves. Unquote.
Good word order, don’t ye reckon?
LikeLike
I love Mark Twain!
LikeLike
Me too…
He was called ‘the funniest man in the world’ back then… and he WAS… And he’s still one of the funniest! He had the most delightful sense of the absurdity of human behaviour!
Though I couldn’t list my ten all-time fave books, Mark Twain would certainly be high on the list of my top ten favorite authors! Then maybe Dickens… Orwell… Arthur C Clarke; Asimov, of course… trouble is I’d still be thinking of more ‘favorite’ authors long after I’d run out of room with just the ‘ten best’!
Gerard, I’d say that Mr Twain’s word order was not just good but excellent, exquisite and elegant…
🙂
LikeLike
I love Twain. He is so funny.
LikeLike
Me as well, but Twain is long overdue for a grown up re-read.
LikeLike