The Bookshow Blog

Radio National’s best reads

Friday, December 17th, 2010

John Jacobs, Media Designer, producer Night Air ABC Radio National, Pool.org.au

I am always looking forward to catch up over summer, some titles on my list are;

• The UNIX programming environment (a real classic from 1984, lays out the foundations of contemporary data linkage)
• Balkan Melodies for Accordion (I like soulful tunes in minor keys, and play rather badly, sadly :~)
• The Smell Culture Reader (this is a great collection. The olfactory spectrum is an abstract partner to the sound spectrum)
• Deep Search (beyond Google conference. Search is so political)
• Creating Insecurity (Edgy)
• Reassembling the Social Bruno Latour (he gets used by everyone, but I have not read him yet)
• Og bicycles, bakelites and bulbs: towards a theory of sociotechnical change W.E. Bijker (Steam-punk as theory)

Tags: ABC Radio National, summer reading
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Edwidge Danticat’s recommended reading

Friday, December 17th, 2010

On the Book Show recently (listen here), author Edwidge Danticat gave Ramona a suggested reading list of Haitian writers. She kindly sent it to the Book Show.

For your reading pleasure, here it is:

Dany Laferriere
Marie Vieux Chauvet
Jacques Stephen Alexis
Gary Victor
Yanick Lahens
Louis Phillipe Dalembert
Lyonel Trouillot
Evelyne Trouillot
Rodney Saint Eloi
Phillipe And Thoby Marcelin
Ketly Mars
Gary Vicyor
Paulette poujol Oriol
Jacques Roumain

Tags: Edwidge Danticat, Haiti
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Amanda Smith’s best reads

Thursday, December 16th, 2010

Amanda Smith, presenter Artworks, ABC Radio National

At the beginning of this year I picked up a stylish old hard-cover edition of Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair. I still haven’t finished it.

It’s not that I wasn’t enjoying it, it’s just that the year got in the way. Nobody writes heavily brocaded sentences like that anymore. And the thing is, they just don’t match the pace of working life. As the summer holidays ended, so did my Twyborn Affair.

Instead I turned to the Stieg Larssen trilogy. Whizzed through it. And as many have already noted, Lisbeth Solander is the coolest outsider to have appeared in print for ages. I kept up the snappy pace with Peter Temple’s Truth. Never before have I loved reading such slabs of incomprehensible dialogue. All that police lingo was, in its mysteriousness, rivetting. The novel I most loved this year though was Cate Kennedy’s The World Beneath. It’s got vividly drawn characters and a ripper plot – in my book, it’s got the lot.

As slow, hot days lying in the shade hopefully approach, I’m back to The Twyborn Affair. Will I finish it this summer?

Tags: ABC Radio National, Patrick White, Reading
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Robyn Williams’ best reads

Tuesday, December 14th, 2010

Robyn Williams, presenter, The Science Show ABC Radio National

I read too much. Sometimes I have to do it quickly with interviews at work (often 2 or 3 books a week); or very slowly and deliciously when away, as if I’m a different person.

This year I enjoyed Matt Ridley writing beautifully but annoyingly about being a Rational Optimist. He’s a toff (Eton & Oxford), who ran a bank that went bust (Northern Rock), but still thinks that the market will guide us to the Promised Land. If you like, as I do, dealing with contrarian ideas, he’s the man. The Contrarian himself, is, of course, Christopher Hitchens. In Hitch 22, he flirts with the reader, has the most beguiling personal voice, and tells a life story all the more poignant now we know it will soon end. I relished every page and, again, enjoyed disagreeing with a favourite writer.

Here On Earth, by my good friend Tim Flannery, is quite different from his other books. Unlike so many campaigning writers, especially of the green variety, he is able to give you fresh ideas as well as thoroughly original ways to illustrate what he’s on about. Who’d have thought that the ants are a way to showcase human civilisation? Flannery is also meticulous in selecting facts or histories you didn’t know or had misremembered.

The novel Lustrum, by Robert Harris, reminded me of life in the ABC, but I didn’t quite like it as much as The Ghost, which I still insist is a straight history of T. Blair.

The surprise read, this summer, so far has been The Great Barrier Reef, by James Woodford. It is gripping, amusing, unexpected – and about a vitally significant topic. You too will be surprised.

Coming up: Howard Jacobson (of course), Paul Auster (again), Margaret Atwood (who never fails) and, inevitably: Keef.

Tags: ABC Radio National, Reading
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Alicia Sometimes reviews A Fine Madness

Tuesday, December 14th, 2010

A Fine Madness has been described as ‘a charmed, mad and maddening prose poetry in which an armed man snoops into Africa’s history of deprivation and strife to do the painful arithmetic’.

The armed man is the author,  Mashingaidze Gomo who served in the Airforce of Zimbabwe and fought the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s Conrad territory: Heart of Darkness was set in Congo, but this book’s written by an insider.

For the Book Show, Alicia Sometimes read Gomo’s first book.

A Fine Madness is a collection of prose, poetry, memories, reflections and grit set amongst the background of the 1998 Democratic Republic of Congo war. Mashingaidze Gomo, a native of Zimbabwe, was a member of the Zimbabwean Defence Forces from 1984-2007. Gomo is both soldier and poet. Ngugi wa Thiong’o – a highly regarded Kenyan author – writes that this book is not only about ‘the horror and loneliness of war; but also the beauty of resistance’ and that Gomo ‘comes tantalizingly close to that Divine Madness that possesses poets and prophets.’ He is right. (more…)

Tags: African literature, book review, Mashingaidze Gomo, poetry
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Natasha Mitchell’s best reads

Monday, December 13th, 2010

Natasha Mitchell, Presenter & producer, All in the Mind, ABC Radio National. Science journalist.

My year is jam-packed with non-fiction, sometimes two even three solid science books in a week for interviews, so my Summer reading is all about blissing out on novels. A grassy patch of mottled shade, a glass and a book. Heaven.

The bedside table is already tetering with some of my possibles (admittedly, some are left over from last year’s must reads!)

Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna is there, long awaited since her stunning saga, The Poisonwood Bible.

Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is too.  I’m itching to see the Swedish film of the first in Larsson’s hit-trilogy, but I’m a “read-the-book-first” kind of girl, and relish the opportunity to generate my own vivid imaginings about characters before a film does it for me.

I just picked up a copy of Ian Thomson’s biography of Primo Levi in a second-hand bookshop. Levi is a man I’m compelled to know more about, and this, alongwith finishing Rebecca Skloot’s acclaimed The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, might be my concession to non-fiction this silly season. Ten years in the sleuthing and writing, Skloot’s powerful work stands out as a beacon of science writing in 2010.

If you haven’t read Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender and Rebecca Jordan-Young’s Brainstorms, I recommend them from my reads this year, for their foray into the hot debate over the science of sex differences.

Summer is all about the music too, so I’ll be flicking through Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth and Paul Kelly’s How to Make Gravy. 

And, I can’t resist including a picture book. I’m learning about gardening, and have a passion for Australian natives. 2010 has been my personal festival of the gardening book, including the spectacle that is Wildflower Country: Discovering Biodiversity in Australia’s Southwest. The work of award-winning photographers Stanley and Kaisa Breeden reminds me of the triffid-like pictures of 19th Century German sculptor and photographer Karl Blossfeldt. Flowers come alive with personality – gorgeous and grotesque – as if almost human.

This year I also caught up with Tim Winton’s Breath, and Sonya Hartnett’s Butterfly, both of which I loved for their dark evocations of Australian childhood. Quite melancholy, even chilling, but beautiful too.

What do you think I should read in the fiction stakes this Summer? I’d love your recommendations.

Happy reading!

Tags: ABC Radio National, fiction, non-fiction, summer reading
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Australian Poetry Slam – National Final

Friday, December 3rd, 2010

Miles Merrill, Creative Director, Word Travels

The mightiest, tightest spoken-word artists from every corner of Australia bound on to the Sydney Theatre stage with blood, sweat and poetry.

Why Slam?
The next time you walk into a video store try to calculate the amount of money sitting in cases on the shelves. Trillions of dollars burned into celluloid, a lot of it panned, one star and sent straight to the bargain basement. In a world of vast waste and frightening poverty, does entertainment need such extravagance? Let’s strip it back.

Imagine: no props, no music, no camera, no crew. It’s just you and a mic in a spotlight. You’ve got two minutes. Armed with an infinite platoon of words, sounds and gestures, you explode. The audience goes wild.
(more…)

Tags: Australian Poetry Slam
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Author hunt in Paris

Thursday, December 2nd, 2010

Jemma Birrell, event organiser, Shakespeare and Company, Paris

I spoke to Chales Recoursé recently, the French editor of Douglas Coupland and translator of David Forster Wallace. He’s going to come and read an extract of his French translation of Infinite Jest next April at Shakespeare and Company in Paris to celebrate the publication of the new Foster Wallace book The Grey King. He was lovely. Lovely! Even in response to my accented overly-enthusiastic-anglophone French. This was a surprise. No patronizing-you’re-not-French-why-are-you-trying-to-speak-our-language tone there…

Working at Shakespeare and Company gives me an unusual position in a sort of no-man’s land between the French and English publishing worlds. We’re not in the heart of either but dabble in and out of both. I’ve been speaking to various French publishers over the last few years, trying to find authors to tap dance in the bookshop. Trying to hunt down anglophone authors coming to Paris is a tricky thing and not easy when you don’t have a budget. And why would French publishers want to organise an event at an English bookshop where there are zero copies of the French editons to sell? I send off emails, randomly call and sometimes go and visit these French publishers. (more…)

Tags: Adam Haslett, Chales Recourse, Dinaw Mengestu, English, Europe, fiction, French, Nam Le, Nick Flynn, publishing, Shakespeare and Company, Wells Tower
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Anita Barraud’s best reads

Thursday, December 2nd, 2010

Anita Barraud, Walkley winner. Producer, The Book Show ABC Radio National

This has been a year for catching up on some, but not nearly enough, of the current fiction. Until I started on The Book Show in April this year I lived mainly in the non-fiction world apart from the occasional thriller (I like Jesse Kellerman particularly Brutal Art about outsider art) or revisting my best loved classics read as a young teen and therefore all the more imbedded (there was an amazing librarian at my school) such as Flann O’Brien’s wonderful The Third Policeman, The Fall by Camus, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, The Tin Drum by Gunther Grass – sometimes poetry – WB Yeats is a favourite as well as modern poets like Charles Simic and sometimes reading well loved children’s stories to young friends. Dido Twite is one of my favourite girl characters from Joan Aitken and her Wolves Chronicles. I tried reading The Wolves of Willoughby Chase to a seven year old boy recently but he wriggled too much so I had to resort to the old faithful – Roald Dahl. Her language is old fashioned but for me that’s the charm.

But in my new role as a producer on The Book Show, I’ve come across some good contemporary reads. I really enjoyed Paul Harding’s The Tinker. It’s a small book less than 200 pages but meaty. It was the surprise award for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this year. When I was reading it I was humming with its rhythm- sometimes I would re-read a page just for its lilt. The plot sounds simple and even derivative – it’s set in New England across a couple of generations with a Maine clock repairer George Washington Howard looking on his life in the past and present as he counts down to his death. And there are further reflections from his father, the tinker Howard Crosby, as well as other characters’ thoughts and philosophies and even comments on those. I even accepted the idea of the clock ticking down George Washington’s dying minutes… It came as no surprise to read that his mentor was Marilynne Robinson. (more…)

Tags: classic fiction, fiction, literary criticism
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