What I’m reading Dame Fiona Kidman
What is there not to read? My house groans with new books waiting for me to pick them. Choose me, their pages rustle. And remember me, sigh the old ones with dessicated brown edges at the top of the bookshelves. I love them all. Their presence, anyway, even if their contents sometimes make me want to hurl them out the window.
Anyway, I’m just starting The Promise by Damon Galgut (Chatto & Windus), winner of the 2021 Booker Prize, set in South Africa. It’s about a promise of land made to a black woman farmworker, the failure of that promise, and the fate of those who have made it. It’s too soon to predict my response, but I sense that some of it is uneasily close to home.
I am loving Vincent O’Sullivan’s latest, the stunning Mary’s Boy, Jean Jacques and other Stories (Te Herenga University Press). Much has already been said about the novella of the book’s title, a wild speculative ride into the ‘‘rescue’’ of Mary Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein’s Creature, by an eccentric English expedition to the Arctic. But what I like especially are O’Sullivan’s contemporary characters and the deep wells of their pasts that he explores.
Cuba Press has brought out two beautifully presented books: novelist Maggie Rainey-Smith’s first collection of poems, Formica, evoking women’s lives with directness and tenderness, and Breach of All Size: Small stories on Ulysses, love and Venice (edited by Michelle Elvy and Marco Sonzogni) celebrating 100 years since the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and the foundation of Venice in 421. Thirty-six writers have written delicious, bite-sized stories, each 421 words long. Confession, I wrote one of them.
There is a bit of an Irish slant here, but true and all, I love the writers of Ireland and the book that sits beside my bed for frequent dipping is Seamus Heaney’s-Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996 (Faber & Faber). Because the poems remind me that love and the land, and trees and oceans are the truths, the joys and sorrows of the world.