Your FAVOURITES - 2008

On the theory that most readers like to hear suggestions from others - Classic readers are requesting suggestions on favourites you have read for say the past year or so. If you would like to please go ahead and whet our appetites - Just tell us why .

I will start the ball rolling with three Australian books I read or re-read last year which I would recommend for one reason or another.
Tim Winton's ' Breath ' - Tim Winton has not been one of my real favourites but I was reading this for another group and I have to say that I found such a lot to admire in this work that i would recommend it. The lyrical, easy flow of his language really bears close examination. It is beautifully written without a loose sentence in sight. I am now convinced he is one of the best . This is a most unusual story set in Western Australia of course - it is at the one level a paen to surfing and youthful daring .The lyrical descriptions of this boys own and rites of passage stuff is wonderful. Along with this aspect of the book there is another hard theme about what daring can do to a person and linking it to loss and sexuality . Overall it is the writing itself which won me over - it is no wonder he took several years to write it.

Miles Franklin's 'My Brilliant Career" - Having read this years ago and been influenced and impressed by it (and loving the film too) I was fascinated to pick it up again . What an astounding work it is - a novel written by an 18 year old in the late 19th or early 20th in the Australian countryside about an 18 year old . I had to keep reminding myself this was not a mature woman developing the character of Jo March for our edification and delight , nor an established adult writer exposing Holden Caulfield to us - the writer is only as old as her heroine. Have a look at it again. No wonder we thought it a marvel when we were young as did Henry Lawson when he was given the anonymous manuscript to appraise. He loved it and he rightly picked it was written by a woman - despite the name she adopted. It was originally published in England because A & R rejected it. It has a lot of faults but it is a glorious read.

Dorothy Hewitt's "The man from Muckinupin'. Dorothy is another of the daring women of Australian writing and in this play she wrote a classic. The Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney is showing it this year and I cant wait . It is a Melbourne theatre and 30th anniversary production. One of the characters called a "Touch of the tar" personifies a statement of pure resonance. In my preview notes from Belvoir, Hewitt is referred to as one of our great poets and ratbags. It is a little bit wheatbelt Shakespeare in comedy mode. It is a musical also. See it if you can - and read it anyhow - It reads very well.

Father and Son by Sir Edmund Gosse

This is one of the most personal of biographies I have ever read. It was first published in 1907. It is also of its time a masterful document of religious thinking of the Non-conformist , puritan groups in England in the period from fifty years before. It is much more besides - a brilliant set of memories of early childhood and the way of thinking as a child. The stories of the relationships between each of his parents - the naturalist, non-conformist minister father, his incredible , stoic mother who died when he was only seven and the son himself in turn with them are breathtakingly told. The characters of his father and mother are wonderfully and tenderly observed. The writing is crytsal-like about religious feelings and the philosophy of the family members .

There is amazing material in this short memoir - ( It is a strong social history I wish I had read it when doing 19th British History) - highlighting the dilemma of the Creatonists with the new Lyell/Darwinian Natural Selectionists and their dramatic findings. Chapter five where the author Edmund Gosse described the almost personal destruction of his Scientist/Bible believing father when his compromising published work fails to gain the kudos he had hoped from his fellow scientists at the Royal Academy is perfectly realised and written.

Having said all of the above this memoir is also delightfully humorous at times and is so inciteful about the country folk in Devon where his father takes the young Gosse to live after the death of the beloved wife and mother. - to be near the sea where they can collect sea shore specimens. The chapel people here are wonderful.

If you have half an interest in the way our ideas have been formed over the last 150 years please read this superbly written shortish memoir and then please discuss.

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

This novel is a literary a well as a social satire . We are used to Austen as the first rate commentator and writer about social manners but in this one she is having fun in a different way. The author is spoofing the type of writer very popular at the time at which it was written , ca 1803. Catherine , the heroine, is addicted to Gothic romance novels and is on the lookout for any real life applications of the fantastic story lines of those novels - in applying this logic she makes the usual mistakes . But it is no way as serious a comment on the behaviour and thinking processes of self centred young persons as in Emma , for instance. I enjoyed it very much when i first read it . I would be delighted to hear what others think. I will be adding some further comments also a bit later.