Which book takes 28 years to read?

A book club takes 28 years to read an Irish novel, while Julia Baird brings our literary editor face-to-face with a shark.

Jessica Au has won the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Cold Enough for Snow (Giramondo).

We all love our book clubs but let’s not pretend that we always get around to reading every word of the prescribed text as closely as we perhaps should.

If you’ve been feeling guilty about this, I have some good news for you.

The Times this week reported that a reading group in California has just completed Finnegan’s Wake, by the great Irish writer James Joyce, 28 years after they opened the first page. Yes, that’s right, they started reading it 28 years ago, and they’ve only just finsihed.

Finnegans Wake was published in 1939 and it is reportedly a challenging read. Have I read it? No, I have not. The Times says most people who start the book don’t finish it because it is “written in a torrent of idiosyncratic language over more than 600 pages (and) includes made-up words in several languages, puns and arcane allusions to Greek mythology.” So it’s hat’s off to the reading group in Venice, for perseverance.

The group was established by Gerry Fialka, a filmmaker. They did two pages at a time, before slowing to one page a month, which was about all anyone could handle, in a discussion. Fialka told the Times that the reading had become, over the years, “more a performance art piece than a book club”. And here’s the thing. Even though they’re finished, they’re not finished.

“The book ends mid-sentence and then it picks up at the front of the book. It’s cyclic. It never ends,” he says, and so they’ve started it again.

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The winners of the 2023 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards were announced this week. Jessica Au’s Cold Enough For Snow (Giramondo) won the fiction prize and why wouldn’t it?

Truly, a sublime book.

Jessica Au's Cold Enough For Snow has won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction

It’s about a mother and adult daughter who take a trip to Japan together. It’s cool, crisp, clean. Tender. Disturbing. I wasn’t sure, at the end, that anything had happened in the book. The undercurrent is strong and I still find myself thinking about it.

The nonfiction award went to Sam Vincent, for My Father And Other Animals (Black Inc) who was a 20-something writer scrabbling to make ends meet, when he got a call from his mother, saying his father has stuck his hand in a woodchipper.

He had to return to the family farm to help out. His book is a memoir.

The PM’s Lit Awards, as they are fondly known, give prizes in six categories, and they are the richest literary prize in the nation, with a tax-free prize pool of $600,000.

Some fun facts about the writers: two of the six winners use they/them pronouns. There is one First Nations writer on the list of six, as well. This year’s winners were all making their debut on the shortlist. They were chosen from 643 entries received across six literary categories: fiction, nonfiction, young adult literature, children’s literature, poetry, and Australian history.

The winners are:

FICTION: Cold Enough for Snow (Giramondo) by Jessica Au – a young woman has arranged a holiday with her mother in Japan.

NONFICTION: My Father and Other Animals (Black Inc) by Sam Vincent – a young man who yearns to be a writer returns to his family’s fig and cattle farm, with his partner, and a baby girl called Orlando (she’s named for the Woolf novel).

YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE: The Greatest Thing (Allen & Unwin) by Sarah Winifred Searle – a young writer who also draws comics and makes ’zines takes on young adult literature. They have also written memoir.

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: Open Your Heart to Country (Magabala) by Jasmine Seymour – from a descendant of Maria Lock, who was the daughter of Yarramundi, the Boorooberongal elder who had met Governor Phillip on the banks of the Hawkesbury River. She is now a primary school teacher in the Hawkesbury area of NSW.

POETRY: At the Altar of Touch (UQP) by Gavin Yuan Gao - poetry by a genderqueer, bilingual immigrant poet who grew up in Beijing. They now live in Brisbane.

AUSTRALIAN HISTORY: Unmaking Angas Downs (MUP) by Shannyn Palmer – a book that traces the history of colonisation in Central Australia by tracking the demise of a rural enterprise across half a century.

The winner of each category receives $80,000 and the prize money is taxfree.

This is the first year that the Awards have been managed by Creative Australia, an initiative of the Albanese government to support the arts, but they were established in 2008 to recognise “individual excellence and the contribution Australian authors make to the nation’s cultural and intellectual life.”

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Today’s pages: I couldn’t be more delighted to bring you the review of Julia Baird’s new book about grace. It’s a difficult thing to define, grace, and yet, don’t we know it when we experience it, in the world around us?

Julia is a friend, and she once insisted that I drive halfway across Sydney with our mutual friend James Jeffrey, who is now a speechwriter to the Prime Minister, to join her for a bracing ocean water swim, before the sun was even up, because leaping into the ocean is something she loves to do. Inspires awe, she says. Well, I saw a shark. Apparently it wasn’t dangerous but that’s difficult to determine, when you’re tooth-to-tooth with the thing in its natural habitat. Julia was delighted by the shark, because of course she was. She is herself delightful.

Also today, Christopher Zinn has cooked for you! Well, he cooked for me, and a bunch of friends, for his review of a new Indonesian recipe book. We also have a new poem by Geoff Page. There’s much more. I hope you find something you like.