The Bookshow Blog

Estelle Tang’s aide memoire

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011

Five years ago, I had a memory crisis. A friend had just read Jeffrey Eugenides’ acclaimed and extensive family saga, Middlesex. I’d read it too, on holiday in Japan a couple of years before. ‘What did you think?’ he asked. For someone whose patter can sometimes seem ceaseless, my reply was underwhelming: ‘Um,’ I said, ‘I think I liked it.’

Since this conversational ground was proving less than worthy of being mined, my friend and I moved on to another topic, but I didn’t forget my annoying inability to remember anything about books – the category of cultural item I professed to love the most. It was sheer vanity to claim I loved to read if I couldn’t even recall the barest detail of former paper-and-ink companions.

As in 2011, so in 2007 – I turned to the internet to solve my problem, and I thought it would be a good idea to start a blog as a sort of literary aide-memoire. I resolved to faithfully record my thoughts about every book I read. Would I, a known shirker of extra-curriculars, be able to keep up with this project? Surely the panopticon-like accountability of the web would keep me honest?

At first, it wasn’t to be. My first year of writing about books was dismal by any standard – I managed an uninspired fourteen blog posts. These initial writings barely warrant a mention here; they consisted of large, clunky paragraphs, and I seemed uninterested in structure or argument of any kind. But I gradually became more disciplined, and I began to read more widely. I also started reviewing books for media outlets.

As anyone who’s ever had the misfortune to chat with me about reading can attest, documenting my responses to books turned out to be a pretty successful way of augmenting my poor memory. But there were some very welcome side-effects to the new read-and-record process. My enjoyment of the qualities of novels, short stories and essays grew as I became better at parsing their elements. Nuances of language seemed more apparent – perhaps I was developing a better sense of what to look for. Resonances between verses or short stories started to sing, and the lineage of particular novels or phrases was easier to trace. In what was one of the better accidents of my life, I was becoming a better reader.

These days, I work full-time and freelance in spare moments, which has left me with less time than I’d like for literary account-keeping. But when I do read a book, whether for review or for leisure, my impetus is still the same as it was when I started blogging about books five years ago. Writing about books is my way of remembering and understanding what I read, and also my own response to it. This way, I give the book and its author the best reading I can offer. Yes, it’s a modest claim, but it’s a humbling and delightful task.

Estelle Tang is a reviewer for The Book Show and online editor for literary journal Kill Your Darlings. Her blog can be found here.

Tags: book reviewing, Estelle Tang, Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
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Gender bias in the literary world

Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011

Is there sexism in the literary world? That’s what a new study by VIDA would like answered. VIDA is a relatively new US organization aimed at raising the profile of women in the arts.

VIDA conducted a count of the male to female ration of contributors to major literary magazines. They also made note of the gender of authors whose books were reviewed. You can look at the results of the study here - it’s very easy to follow as it’s made up of handy pie graphs. The results can be summarised quite simply: men are more prominent as commentators in the pages of magazines like The New Yorker, Granta, The New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. Read more about the reaction to this report in the USA and UK here: Slate, The Guardian, The New Republic. 

The Book Show wondered what the situation is like in Australia so I asked three literary editors to reflect on their own review commissioning habits. I spoke to Susan Wyndham – Literary editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, Jason Steger – Literary editor of The Age and Stephen Romei – The Australian’s literary editor and former editor of the Australian Literary Review. They were open and honest in their appraisals and say that there’s a slight skew towards male commentators in their pages too, although their regulars are split 50-50.

The reasons for this skew were presented by the editors as:

• the greater willingness of male reviewers to pitch to the editors
• the dominance of women in genre fiction which doesn’t tend to be reviewed in literary pages, to Jodi Picoult’s chagrin (Jodi Picoult complained about the rave reviews Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom received – she wrote this on Twitter Is anyone shocked? Would love to see the NYT rave about authors who aren’t white male literary darlings, read the rest of the New Republic article here)
• a tendency to commission more male reviewers of serious books by male authors
• the possibility that men publish more books (we’d need publishers to do the sums on this though, so this is just speculation).

The literary editors also say that while they’re aware of the gender split in their review pages, they don’t believe it’s good policy to have gender dictate their commissioning criteria. Listen to my package on the Book Show here.

So, what’s the gender split on the Book Show? I did some ‘back of the envelope’ sums and this is what I came up with:

Since July 2010 we’ve had 13 male and 12 female reviewers (that’s almost an even split) and 14 male authors and 11 female authors reviewed. Check my sums here.

In terms of interviews and other segments on the show, since July 2010 to 22 February 2011 (excluding Summer programs):

The presenter has interviewed 132 men and 75 women.

The Book Show producers (all women) have interviewed 51 men and 37 women.

In the Off the Shelf segment, there have been 24 men and 9 women.

While the reviews are pretty evenly split , the rest of the Book Show is weighted towards male commentators. Is this because men as still more dominant in the public sphere? Because we’re drawn to subject matters more likely to be written by men? Is there an unconscious bias?

What do you think?

Tags: book reviews, gender bias, gender politics, literature, VIDA
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Patricia Maunder on book reviewing

Friday, February 11th, 2011

I clearly recall, at the age of four, holding up a fat novel in front of me like I was engrossed in reading it, though I was still essentially illiterate. When I did learn to read I took to it with a passion, and thought there was no better way to spend the holidays: three detective novels in one day when I was about eight or nine, or a Jane Austen a few years later.

Adult life being what it is, it’s now a very rare day that’s entirely devoted to enjoying them. Fortunately I do read plenty of books during the course of the year as a reviewer – for The Book Show and various print media – but have so much other reading to do as a freelance journalist (newspapers, journals, magazines, online) that I probably only get to a book of my own choosing once every six months.

I stare at books bought long ago, still unread on the shelf, and feel rather sad. Not too sad though, as I know I’m tremendously fortunate to read such a diversity of excellent books as part of my job. If someone had told me as a child that I’d be a book reviewer, I would have been quite awestruck!

So what do I look for in a book I’m reviewing? First, am I enjoying it? Whatever my conclusion, why did I reach it? If I’m not enjoying the book, I’m particularly critical of my response, trying to analyse where the author has legitimately failed or, indeed, whether I the reader has. Perhaps I’m prejudiced about the subject or style?

While reviewing is very much about one’s personal response to something, it’s absolutely essential to bear in mind the intended audience. I remember having to review a massive Bryce Courtenay novel, and while I thought it was rather tedious and formulaic, I did take into account that it was created for a general audience looking for lazy summer reads.

If I had time for lazy summer reads, though, my ultimate treat would be re-visiting a Jane Austen novel, especially my favourite book of all time, Pride and Prejudice. How predictable, but is it not the perfect novel? The books I love best have a mastery of language, witty observations about society’s hypocrisy, an astute understanding of human nature, and – my great weakness – historical settings.

But whether a book is set in the past or present, is witty or deadly serious, fact or fiction, those that I find most rewarding have a unique and powerful voice; they surprise and engage; they make me think. What better way to spend your working day than reading, thinking, writing and speaking about books like that?

Tags: book reviewing, Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Reading
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Rapping against Ben Ali

Thursday, February 10th, 2011

Bloggers fuelled the protests which began in Tunisia last December and spread to Egypt this January.

Mustapha Tlili, a guest on the Book Show discussion about writers views on the protests, told us about the rap artist, El Général, who’s words of protest against Ben Ali went viral too. Professor Tlili says he will probably go down in history as one of the most significant factors that inspired the Tunisian Revolution.

Tags: El General, North Africa, protests, rap, Tunisia
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Chris Flynn’s book addiction

Wednesday, February 9th, 2011

by Eirian Chapman

Chris Flynn is the former editor of Torpedo literary magazine, fiction editor of Australian Book Review, he is also a reviewer on The Book Show and a blogger

2010 was the first year I kept track of all the books I read. Given I’m a compulsive list maker, it’s amazing I never did it before and I wish I had. It would have been amazing to see what books have made up my life, and perhaps more interestingly, which ones are glaringly absent. All up, I managed to read 99 books last year, roughly 8 a month then, depending on how thick the devils were. Included in that lot were doorstops like The Passage (Listen to Anita Barraud’s interview here), The Lonely Polygamist (listen to or read the review here) and Freedom (listen to Ramona Koval’s interview here), which, as book 99, prevented me from breaking a century. I fell asleep about a dozen times whilst reading it, though that may have been due to the rum-laden Christmas pudding rather than Franzen’s convoluted characterisations. I guess we’ll never know.

Twenty-eight of those books were read in order to write reviews. The idea that some magazine, newspaper or AWESOME radio show is willing to actually pay me to tell them what I think about a book never ceases to amaze me (and probably never ceases to amaze my many dastardly enemies too). Writing about a book helps me understand its subtleties and nuances, and for that I am grateful. I don’t think about the review when I’m reading it though – I like to let it settle in my mind for a few days before sitting down to work out exactly why I liked or disliked it, to allow myself time to remember other books that might have been similar or attempt to understand what the writer was trying to accomplish. The book will expand in my mind during this time and flesh itself out and that’s when I start to see chinks in the armour, or flashes of brilliance.

Very few books are perfect and that’s okay, faults don’t bother me unless they’re blatantly ignored by single-mindedness and an author’s insistence that everything they write is necessarily amazing. I don’t like being condescended to in a book. I like being entertained, in a literate fashion. Who doesn’t love a great story well told, after all?

Tags: book reviewing, fiction, literature
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Trans-Tasman storytelling

Tuesday, February 8th, 2011

Tom Clark, Victoria University

The Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association holds its 36^th biennial congress in Auckland this week, with a focus on ‘Storytelling in Literature, Language, and Culture.’  Meeting from the 7^th till the 9^th of February, AULLA is a bit like a trans-Tasman version of the well-known Modern Languages Association in North America.

Reading through the congress program, you can see this is an important time for research into languages and the stories they can tell.  Literary studies specialists are increasingly engaged with the stories that unite and divide countries and cultures.  Poetry experts are explaining the meaning and importance of public trauma, testimony, and reconciliation in new ways.  And cultural critics are offering clearer and stronger readings of the world financial crisis than many of the conventional economic disciplines.

Australian and New Zealand thinkers are breaking much of the ground to create this new momentum in the humanities.  Europe and North America have recently commenced a decade of cutbacks in the arts and social sciences, but Australian and New Zealand institutions went through a similar period of waste and decline in the 1990s.  Along with India, the new jobs for English speakers in these fields are now moving to Australasia.

So now, a growing generation of writers and researchers follows figures like Meaghan Morris and Witi Ihimaera in exploring and making use of the powers of stories and storytelling.  They tackle questions of theory and practice, old questions of what stories say and how they say it, as well as new questions of how stories move us beyond the nation state to something more civil perhaps, or more heartless: the ‘market state.’

Now, growing numbers of language and literature devotees are questioning of the good and even the reality of nations, tackling the clichés and platitudes used to justify their existence.  This is an approach the China-based Australian academic Meaghan Morris has made famous ever since her 1992 essay comparing the poetry of John Forbes with the public persona of Paul Keating.  Morris’ work gives us the unsettling sense that we are nothing without our clichés — without the shortcuts we take when we perform as ourselves, or when we identify ourselves with larger groups, especially the nation.

In a very different way, it is also the focus of Maori writer Witi Ihimaera, most famous for his novel Whale Rider.  Ihimaera talks about the consequences of national stories for the scope and imaginations of writers who live within them — but also about the ways that writers ultimately come to set those stories, because storytellers are always re-tellers.

Tags: AULLA, Australian literature, conference
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A cover designer’s favourite covers

Monday, February 7th, 2011

As The Simpsons character,Troy McClure, would put it: “Hi, I’m W.H. Chong and you may remember me from the covers of Helen Garner’s The Spare Room, Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers, Peter Temple’s Truth and books by Kate Grenville, Peter Singer, Shane Maloney etc etc.”

A friend of mine was telling me about reading Lloyd Jones’ new novel, Hand Me Down World. She had an unusual take on book covers: “I noticed”, she said, “that you had done the cover. (I designed and illustrated the jacket.) You know, I see the cover in the shop, but I don’t really look at it. I know if I like it or not, but it’s not till I start reading the book that I really look at the cover — and this is to see if the cover fits with how I see the book. So I kept checking to see if your African woman felt like the one I was reading about.” I said, “And was she?” “Yeah, she really is,” said my friend. Phew!

That kind of connection is rich and potentially deep. Orhan Pamuk has written that, “if years after reading a book, we catch a glimpse of its cover, we are returned at once to that long ago day when we curled up in a corner with that book to enter the world hidden inside.” Which is why I have trouble thinking of my favourite covers — I tend to think of the book before its cover, which is surely designer heresy. To forestall the local chapter of the Design Police, here are some of my favorite* covers (*I’ve only read the Hamsun):

How It Feels, Brendan Cowell. The tight crop of faces is great, and the typography absolutely sparkles. (By one of the best local outfits: Design by Commitee)

The Girl Who Played with Fire, Stieg Larsson. An amazingly subtle and stylish cover for a very commercial blockbuster. Designer Peter Mendelsund.

The Book of Prefaces, Alasdair Gray. From a true eccentric. My view is that authors should never be in charge of their own covers, but Gray has been designing and illustrating his own books for a long time. He is excused on the basis that he is a sui generis genius.

Knut Hamsun, Hunger. The Nobel laureate wrote his astounding novel in 1890. The US paperback (left) from 1967 was designed by one of my heroes, Milton Glaser. I remember seeing the cover many years ago and thinking what a great idea — corny but irresistible. It remains one of my all-time most affecting novels. In 2006 I had the opportunity of revamping the concept for a local edition. (Not only was the title word split, but I broke the cover quote too: “One of the most” on top … “disturbing novels in existence. — Time Out” below.) I sent a copy to the great Glaser, who was 77 at the time. He graciously sent a note saying that he liked what I did and was touched by the homage.

The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño. A boldly literary title: the dashed off type (in fact, highly worked) and the sunray graphic overprinted in metallic gold ink. (Don’t know the designer.)

Tags: book design, Chong, cover and jacket design, literature, Text publishing
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Anna Hedigan reviews Travelling Light

Friday, February 4th, 2011

Sniff, Snufkin and Snork Maiden are some of the troll-like characters that populate the Moomin series of children’s books by Tove Jansson – the Swedish speaking Finnish novelist who died in 2001. In 1966 she won the Hans Christian Andersen Award – an international prize for children’s authors. She was also a professor of philosophy, an illustrator, political cartoonist and author of books for adults too. One of which has been translated into English for the first time.  It’s called Travelling Light and it’s a collection of short stories about ordinary, often ineffectual people.

Reviewer Anna Hedigan has been reading and re-reading it.

Tove Jansson is best known as author of the Moomin books. She has the status of a Roald Dahl, perhaps even Lewis Carroll for those of us who read her tales as a child. By which I mean that they have been absorbed into our molecular structure. The Land of Moomin was the work of Jansson’s writerly youth, now 50 years past, but this book of short stories is one of a number of her mature works recently translated for the first time into English.

Travelling Light has an affectionate introduction by English writer Ali Smith, herself a short story writer of restraint and discomfort in the very best way. As you might imagine from the title, the stories involve journeys of different kinds, and meditate on the inescapable connectedness of people to each other. Jansson insists we’re woven into the fabric of life, even when we yearn to escape the prattling talk, the hell that is other people, to paraphase Sartre. Jansson herself chose to live on a remote island.

But I’m not going to muse on Jansson and the condition of being human. I was more interested in the outstanding sensation I had after reading this book of being creeped out. There are queer children, and psychic vampires that appropriate the memories of others. A housewife who switches from supermarket to ’shopping’ post-apocalypse, scavenging with bloodless practicality in the rubble of her destroyed, empty town. Nesting gulls that screech and clatter against the roof of a holiday shack on a tiny island until the occupants feel besieged. (more…)

Tags: book review, children's books, short stories, Swedish literature, Tove Jansson, Travelling Light
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