Birthdays often bring some nice books as presents, but they also bring a reminder that there is less and less reading time left in your life. This depressing prospect has now been quantified, using average life expectancies for men and women: Read more
The Life and Writings of Astrid Lindgren
Memoirs to Read
I have read some excellent memoirs recently and can recommend them all: Read more
Sydney Writers Walk
Do you know why Agatha Christie visited Australia? What did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle do here that was so controversial? What did D.H. Lawrence do at the zoo? And what did Rudyard Kipling have to say about Sydneysiders? The Writers Walk at Circular Quay consists of 60 brass plaques set into the pavement between the Opera House and the Rocks. These plaques commemorate the visits of various writers to Sydney, some from other parts of Australia and others from much further afield. Read more
Poem of the Month, March 2018 – ‘Naming of Parts’
Naming of Parts by Henry Reed
Henry Reed (1914 – 1986) was a journalist, radio dramatist and poet. He’s not particularly well known today, but I have always loved his war poem Naming of Parts:
Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But today,
Today we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all the neighbouring gardens,
And today we have naming of parts. Read more
Literary Travels
A Shelf-Catering Holiday
The Diary of a Bookseller
I do love reading books set in bookshops. Recently I very much enjoyed The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell. It recounts the joys and pains of running a second-hand bookstore and is full of amusing anecdotes. I do not much share Shaun’s reading tastes, and almost every book he himself read or recommended, or even sold, seemed to have been written by a man and I was tempted to send him a good list of books by women. But his book was funny and sad at the same time, and it did make you ponder the troubled future of bookshops. He describes how one day he shoots a kindle, then sticks the damaged kindle on the bookshop wall, as a warning to his customers of what e-books are doing to shops like his. Read more
Have You Ever Seen a Fore-edged Book?
Have you ever seen a fore-edged book? Generally I feel that a book is a wonderfully complete object in itself, needing no decoration but an attractive cover. However, fore-edged books do transform books into unusual works of art, in the painterly sense of the word, as well as in the literary sense. Read more
Literary Jigsaw Puzzles
‘Persuasion’ – One of the World’s Great Love Stories
How about celebrating Valentine’s Day this month by reading (hopefully re-reading) Jane Austen’s Persuasion which has just turned 200? Her brother arranged publication after her death. It has to be one of the world’s great love stories. Read more
A Cracking Start to 2018
A Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington 1888 – 1903 by Redmer Yska. I thought I knew a lot about New Zealand’s greatest writer and I even some years ago recorded a CD for a British recording company on Mansfield’s life and writings (you can buy my CD Finding Katherine Mansfield here), but this book was a real eye-opener. Read more
Robert Louis Stevenson & Requiem
Requiem by Robert Louis Stevenson
Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you ‘grave for me:
Here he lies where he long’d to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
W.H. Auden & Stop All the Clocks
Wystan Hugh Auden
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East, my West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song,
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
Being a Kwaussie
The National Australian Dictionary chose as its ‘new word of the year’ a word that describes me aptly – ‘Kwaussie’ (ie, someone who is both a Kiwi and an Australian). Read more
People and their Bookcases
We recently had some guests over for dinner who had never been in our house before. (Which, by the way is not the picture above, that’s the library at Westbrook Station, Queensland, ca. 1898.) They sat for a few hours in our lounge facing two large bookcases which must hold at least a thousand books. And they never made a single comment about the books all night. About 500 of the books are about Jane Austen, so it is an unusual sight to say the least, but even that provoked no comment. Read more