Best books to read this week
New York crime, the Brisbane floods, fine Australian literature and the secret diary of an Australian pope feature in this week’s list of Notable Books.
Former Mojo Melbourne creative director Philip Taffs is pleased to announce that his thriller, The Evil Inside, will be published in the US under the new title, Bubby.
Taffs lived for a year in a shabby hotel on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, just 120m from the Dakota Building on the steps of which John Lennon was shot. The experience informs this book: Bubby tells the story of an Australian copywriter, Guy Russell, and his family, who move from Melbourne to Manhattan. They experience a series of terrifying events while based at the Olcott Hotel, a building with a morbid history of its own. Warmest congratulations, Philip. May it go like a rocket.
Brisbane Breached
This book was launched in February by a Brisbane City councillor, Nicole Johnston, who is as concerned as the self-described “pale male” author David Topp about Brisbane’s viability.
The book explores the city’s enduring struggle against the dual forces of severe flooding and prolonged drought, linked to Brisbane’s geographical position on a flood plain. The author says dams won’t be enough to protect the million or so extra residents expected to be living in Brisbane by 2032. Well done, David. It’s an important topic.
One Another
This is the 10th novel from Gail Jones, whose previous book, Salonika Burning, received the ARA Historical Novel Prize, and was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award as well as the Voss Literary Award. In 2022, she took up residence in Tasmania, as the 2022 University of Tasmania Hedberg Writer-in-Residence.
She used the time to work on One Another which is set at Cambridge, in the summer of 1992. The idea is this: an Australian student, Helen, is completing her thesis on Joseph Conrad. She is distracted by a charming and dangerous lover, Justin – and by a manuscript she left on a train.
I Confess: Diary of an Australian Pope
The author of this cheeky book wrote to say: “If there’s faith, corruption, ambition, political backstabbing, and sex, it must be the Vatican.”
I’m an Anglican, Melvyn, so I guess I wouldn’t know. Morrow says he has recreated “the diaries of an Australian cardinal who has, through extraordinary circumstances, become pope.” Realising that his tenure may be short, he begins enacting sweeping reforms, but that’s going to upset somebody, isn’t it? Morrow says “It’s like an Agatha Christie mystery set in the Vatican” – and who isn’t here for that?
The Shortest History of Economics
Andrew Leigh is the assistant treasurer. He’s also the federal member for Fenner, in the ACT. He has a PhD in public policy from Harvard, and he’s one of those politicians who likes to share his policy ideas, mainly by writing about them.
His previous books include Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Are Changing the World, and Reconnected: A Community Builder’s Handbook. This is a short volume, with a big remit: Leigh is trying to figure out how capitalism and the market system emerged, and he promises many interesting asides, including the history of Monopoly, the invention of the plough, and why American cities were first to get skyscrapers.
Print and Prize: Travels in the Commonwealth
In January 2006, Nicholas Hasluck was invited to chair the committee that oversees the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.
In this role, he had to attend literary festivals in Delhi, Colombo, Jamaica and South Africa. The conversation was always lively, covering such topics as the role of the monarchy, national identity, and truth-telling about colonial times. He notes that members of the Commonwealth share certain characteristics – most are Westminster-style parliamentary democracies, which enjoy the rule of law, and so on – but they still have much to learn from each other, and literature is the way to understand a culture.
Television
Television used to be a much bigger deal. Parents made decisions about what you could watch; pretty much everything was wholesome.
I’m not sure you could say the same about the internet, to which every child is addicted. Kate Middleton is an award-winning poet. In a new collection, she considers the “emotional impact” that childhood cartoons like Astro Boy and shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twin Peaks had on her. She remembers, in the process, the shame, fear, regret, desire and excitement of being a teenage girl. Glorious.
It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over
The manuscript behind this book was the joint winner of The Novel Prize, a biennial award for a book-length work of literary fiction, run jointly by Giramondo Publishing, Fitzcarraldo Editions and New Directions.
The prize offers the winner simultaneous publication of their novel in Australia and New Zealand (the inaugural winner of The Novel Prize was Cold Enough for Snow). Anne de Marcken’s idea is a thrilling one: her protagonist is alive in the afterlife, “adrift yet keenly aware”. She has forgotten her name, but remembers with unbearable longing the place from whence she came. She is carrying “a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest”, which sounds rather interesting, no?
Is it too late to start your life anew?
Is it ever too late to learn a new language, or even write that book? Here’s what late bloomers can tell you about reinventing your life.
Gallery puts female artists in the frame
Ethel Carrick Fox and Anne Dangar, the two subjects of the National Gallery of Australia’s latest exhibition of women in art, are of a very different calibre.