Time to read: Christmas, New Year holiday books

Looking for the right book for the Christmas-new year break? Here are some suggestions.

Summertime reading is just a deserted beach away.

If your year has been anything like mine, it swept through like a willy-willy, a swirling cloud of obligation that cleared only to reveal the holiday season. It may be a function of age, this sense of acceleration, a subjective glitch of the middle-aged mind. But surely it is also an effect of our social and technological moment.

My iPhone chirrups and whirrs and vibrates, my laptop groans. Netflix parades its must-watches. Then there are the saved newspaper long-reads, audiobook epics for long drives with the kids and the albums I haven’t listened to yet. And the Kindle, replete with books bought out of momentary interest and now languishing on the digital bedside table.

This summer reading guide is designed to be something else: an antidote to the superficial and bitty, the unnecessary and distracting and merely informational. What follows is a slow reading list for a hurried age. And as the year turns, what strategies might we have to resist the enclosure of our attentional commons in 2019? Me? I’ve bought a typewriter. A happy Christmas and new year to all.

Ceridwen Dovey. Picture: Sam Mooy

Australian fiction: Tim Winton’s The Shepherd’s Hut, an unapologetically jagged shard of narrative, stunning in its evocation of place and visceral in its unfolding, manages to capture much of what is wrong with Aussie masculinity these days. Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe is a wonderful surprise: sharp as a drawer full of knives in terms of subject matter; unrepentantly joyous in its child’s-eye view of the world; the best literary debut in a month of Sundays. Ceridwen Dovey’s new novel, In the Garden of the Fugi­tives, is so formally inventive, so wickedly intelligent, so alert to the torsions that exist in relationships between old and young, wom­en and men, coloniser and colon­ised, that it should be hawked on street corners. Tracy Sorensen’s The Lucky Galah is narrated by a bird, one who is wise, witty, and tragic. This novel, set in the north of Western Australia from the late 1960s onwards, contains an entire nation in its pages, and a whole world of ideas.

International fiction: Lisa Halliday’s novel Asymmetry burns to the touch, it’s so smart. Disparate narratives — one outlining an affair between a young woman and a famous older male writer, the other exploring the memories of an Iraqi economist being held at Heathrow customs control — converge in ways that thrill and surprise. Anna Burns’s Milkman won the Man Booker Prize, and for good reason. It’s a ruthlessly described and darkly comic story of a young woman trying to maintain her independence in the face of masculine violence in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

Richard Powers is the most intellectually questing and aesthetically rewarding American novelist at work today. His new novel The Overstory, which takes as its subject the effort by a small group to save a virgin stand of forest, one of the last of its kind, represents a kind of ecological intervention. It asks no less of us than to re­imagine our place in relation to the natural world.Rachel Cusk’s Kudos is the final novel in a trilogy of autofictions that have moved her from an interesting outsider to a major figure in English literature. Spare, astringent, elegantly adumbrated narratives pour out of her creations. A chilly brilliance, and a bracing conclusion to a remarkable project.

Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight is made from warmer stuff but is no less rigorous in terms of language and form. Beginning as an account of postwar London told from a child’s perspective, it grows into a novel of espionage with a grandly expansive literary sensibility.

History: Stephen R. Platt’s Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age is one of those magisterial stories that says as much about the present as the past. He brings a novelist’s eye and a scholar’s insight to this remarkable book. The Kremlin Letters: Stalin’s Wartime Correspondence with Churchill and Roosevelt provides readers with a window into great-power politics at a pivotal moment in the 20th century. Edited and contextualised by David Reynolds and Vladimir Pechatnov, two eminent scholars of diplomatic politics, this volume is the fruit of a decade’s research in British, American and Russian archives. Charles Bean was a man of immense decency, bravery and empathetic imagination. His Western Front Diaries, edited by Peter Burness, reveal the human side of the official war historian. Supplementing the Gallipoli diaries and containing 500 images, it is a handsome production, too.

Biography and memoir: Danielle Clode’s The Wasp and the Orchid recounts the life of Edith Coleman, a remarkable amateur naturalist and science writer of the early 20th century. She convinced a generation of Australians to love native plants and animals, and she made discoveries that changed forever our understanding of plant-insect relations. Thomas Cromwell: A Life, by Diarmaid MacCulloch, may sound redundant as the man has received so many visits from biographers, scholars and novelists over the years. But MacCulloch is no ordinary historian, he’s the author of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, one of the best works of its kind. And Hilary Mantel rates this Cromwell biography as well.

Anne Summers is a woman of substance and wit. Her memoir, Unfettered and Alive, is a brac­ingly honest and intense act of remembrance. This country would be a lesser place without her. A Tokyo Romance is a memoir by Ian Buruma, one of the West’s pre-eminent Japan-watchers, that details his years as a gaijin, or foreigner, in a culture that embraces visitors while keeping them at arm’s length.

Literary nonfiction: Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering mines an old generic seam — the memoir of addiction — and somehow locates pockets of gold. It’s a meditation on literary creativity shorn of the dubious glamour of booze, and Jamison makes a powerful case for narratives that heal wounds instead of making a ­virtue of self-harm.

James Hamilton-Paterson is a genius of a kind almost extinct: a great English eccentric, at home in the world but obsessed by the country of his childhood. What We Have Lost: The Dismantling of Great Britain is a vivid account of postwar decline viewed through the prism of industries and engineered objects (from Triumph motorcycles to the National Health Service) for which Britain was once justly admired.

And two local instances of brilliance. Maria Tumarkin’s Axiomatic manages to take a handful of empty cliches and turn them into tough, urgent essays on life, love, society and the law. It is a glorious, Gordian tangle of a book. Sebastian Smee’s Quarterly Essay, Net Loss, is an extended look at what the digital realm has wrought on our minds and our souls. It is a plea for the survival of the inner life.

Writer and academic Maria Tumarkin.

Literature in translation: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) was Brazil’s greatest writer and so ahead of his time that we’re still catching up with him. The Collected Stories, a 1000-page anthology of his short fiction, marks the first time that most of them have appeared in English, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson. A translation of an uncategorisable Polish author also has made waves, winning the Man Booker International Prize. Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft, is an exploration of travel, whether as a physical event or a metaphysical notion.

Economics and foreign affairs: James Buchan’s John Law: A Scottish Adventurer of the Eighteenth Century is an intelligent and engaging biog­raphy of the financier who was one of the progenitors of modern capitalism, and an inveterate gambler. In Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?, Robert Kuttner argues lucidly that democracy has lost control of capitalism, abetting the rise of the populist, authoritarian Right. And if you want to understand why Russia can’t help but foment conflict, read Gregory Carleton’s Russia: The Story of War.

Science and ecology: David Reich’s account of paleogenetics, Who We Are and How We Got Here, explains how the study of DNA is rewiring our understanding of what it is to be human. A profound and entertaining book. In The Order of Time, theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli marries philosophy, art and science to unravel the mysteries of time. Back home, Rick Shine’s Cane Toad Wars tells the story of the ecological disaster (though the final implications are more nuanced) unleashed by the introduction of the species to Australia. Billy Griffith’s Deep Time Dreamin g is a mind-bending book that shows how archeologists in Australia wrote a wholly new story about indigenous occupation of the land.

Short stories: Helen DeWitt is a classicist, mathematician and linguist (14 languages and counting). The stories in Some Trick, her first collection of short fiction, suggest a writer for whom there exist no creative or intellectual restrictions. At the other end of the spectrum is William Trevor. Last Stories brings together the pieces still extant at the end of his long, successful career. Elegant, poised, yet trembling with violence or ordinary human tragedy, they remind us what a quiet giant of 20th and 21st-century literature he was and remains. At home, Laura Elvery’s debut Trick of the Light introduces a genuine new talent to Australian literature. Her 24 stories contain vignettes as varied, poignant, funny and daring as anything I’ve encountered in years.

Poet Les Murray. Picture: Darren England

Poetry: Scotsman Robin Robertson is a poet’s poet. The Long Take sees him combine lyric ­poetry and prose to create a melancholy vision of one returned serviceman’s guilt and retrospective wonder in the wake of World War II. Les Murray’s Collected Poems requires no justification for inclusion. It is an immense volume, as large as the man and his wild, feral talent. There is no book this year, here or anywhere on the planet, that contain such riches, such dazzling play with word and idea. I read it with awe. English classicist Emily Wilson has taken Homer’s Odyssey and furnished us with a translation that does something you may think impossible: make one of the central poems of Western culture entirely new. It is swift, flowing and crisply rendered: Wilson has given us Homer stripped back to crank and piston.

Scrublands author Chris Hammer. Picture: Mike Bowers

Crime and thrillers: Chris Hammer’s Scrublands takes endless Australian drought as its metaphor and motif. It is written in an idiolect of thumbnail dipped in tar, shaped around a narrative of uncommon sophistication. Hammer has managed to merge the contemporary crime novel with the pure antipodean elemental. Everything you have heard about Jock Serong’s On the Java Ridge is true. That is to say, the tale of a party of Australian surfers and a boat carrying refugees who are caught in a storm off Indonesia is unrelenting in its brutality and marvellous in its ethical balance. A genuinely tense, marvellously wrought thriller. Leila Slimani’s Lullaby is the creepiest psychological thriller to come out of France in years. Its account of the relationship between a nanny and the children of a middle-class Parisian couple manages to hit all the hot culture buttons of the moment while speaking to an enduring fear of strangers in relation to the traditional nuclear family. A murder story and a why-dunnit of uncommon acuity and ferociousness.

Science fiction and fantasy: Chinese author Cixin Liu often is spoken of as the most important science fiction author alive today. His Ball Lightning defies easy explanation. Electromagnetism and quantum mechanics, terrorism and war combine with the larger story of Liu’s body of work to make an entirely new, entirely weird work of speculative fiction. Dyschronia is even stranger but it unfurls in a recognisably Australian space. Jennifer Mills’s account of a town that wakes one morning to discover the sea has retreated, leaving nothing but a marine apocalypse, explores ideas of time and ecological breakdown, neoliberalism and human community. The Bottom of the Sky, by Argentinian author Rodrigo Fresan, takes the coming of age of two boys, science fiction obsessives, and their shared love for a beautiful girl, and tears it wide open. An homage to David Lynch and Philip K. Dick, told through the prism of Jorge Luis Borges’s cosmic micro-fictions, this novel has been embraced by the literary community just as much as by hardcore speculative fiction fans.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian's chief literary critic.
Next week: Books of the year — writers and critics name their favourites.