In the good books

Stephen Romei tries to find something for everyone in Review’s annual summer reading-Christmas gift guide

THE man in the photograph is a young god, broad-shouldered and beautiful. He is looking down and to his left, unsmiling, intense. It is Aug­ust 9, 1950. The Warner Bros Studios blackboard in front of the man reads: Wardrobe Test for “A Streetcar Named Desire” of — and the soon-to-be indelible name is scrawled in chalk — M Brando as Stanley. It’s a mind-blowing image in a book full of wonderful photos (and words): John Lahr’s Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh.

This biography of the towering American dramatist is top of my holiday reading pile, which I mention by way of introduction to this summer reading-Christmas gift guide. As in previous years, the following recommendations are based on books I’ve read, reviews, the thoughts of book-loving friends, prizes, sales and general literary world chatter. Most of the books were published this year so should be available, but if you have any trouble tracking one down e-mail me and I’ll try to help.

While I hope there will be something for every reader on this list, it is inevitably influenced by my own reading preferences. I read a lot of fiction, so there I am offering personal recommendations, which makes it a good place to start.

AUSTRALIAN FICTION

Next week we are running our annual Books of the Year wrap-up, in which various writers and critics share their top picks, and I can tell you the most-mentioned book is Only the Animals, by South African-born Australian writer Ceridwen Dovey. This extraordinary short-story collection, in which the souls of animals — from mussels to dolphins, apes to bears to camels — tell the stories of their lives and deaths, usually due to human intervention, is on my books of the year list too. It’s the most original, surprising and inspired book I read this year. These are also good words to describe Christos Tsiolkas and his short-story collection, Merciless Gods, which, while not for the faint-hearted, is a book you will know you have read, one that will make you feel and think.

There were some terrific Australian novels published this year and my top pick is The Snow Kimono, by Mark Henshaw, an exquisitely written, truly haunting story set in France, Algeria and Japan. This is Henshaw’s second novel in 25 years, so prolific he is not. His first, the amazing Out of the Line of Fire, was reissued as a Text Classic this year with an introduction by yours truly. No one writes about childhood as well as Sonya Hartnett and her latest novel, Golden Boys, is perhaps her most personal yet. Michelle de Kretser’s wonderful Sydney ghost story Springtime is perfect summer reading, slim enough to read during a day on the beach. Peter Carey seems to irritate a lot of people but few living writers put down one sentence after another as skilfully as he does and Amnesia, which takes the Dismissal as its backdrop, is no exception. Tasmanian writer Rohan Wilson is a rising star, a fact confirmed by his second novel, To Name Those Lost. Of course, this year’s Booker was won by another Tasmanian, Richard Flanagan. The Narrow Road to the Deep North was published last year but if you haven’t read it yet you must.

INTERNATIONAL FICTION

It was such a rich year that it’s difficult to pick just a few. American novelist Richard Ford and his Canadian contemporary Margaret Atwood have a bit in common. Both are very funny writers, for starters. This sense of humour shines through in Ford’s Let Me be Frank with You and Atwood’s story collection Stone Mattress, each of which also explores the challenges of ageing and its unexpected upside. Two of the best books I read this year.

We all await the third instalment of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor England trilogy, next year it is hoped, but in the meantime we have her engrossing story collection The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Ford’s novel was probably the most enjoyable I read, but the finest (along with Henshaw’s) was Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest. It’s about the Holocaust, so enjoyable is not the word to describe it, but it’s a work touched by genius. Edward St Aubyn can go toe-to-toe with Amis as a prose stylist and his Booker prize satire Lost for Words is perfect summer reading, as is Hanif Kureishi’s novel about VS Naipaul and his biographer, The Last Word. Those two books are fairly breezy, but if you want something even lighter try a couple of first-rate “continuation novels”, Anthony Hor­owitz’s Moriarty, about Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis, and Sophie Hannah’s revival of Hercule Poirot in The Monogram Murders, and also Ben Elton’s latest historical thriller, Time and Time Again.

I don’t think anyone would be brave enough to write a “new” JD Salinger but, almost miraculously, we can look forward to new works by the man himself, who reportedly left instructions in his will for up to seven completed books to be published between 2015 and 2020. Text Publishing has launched a little pre-emptive strike with Three Stories, an engaging collection of short fiction that Salinger published in American magazines in the 1940s. Another towering American writer, Peter Matthiessen, published a new novel this year, In Paradise. It’s good but not his best. Read it by all means, but if you are unfamiliar with the work of Matthiessen, who died in April, do yourself a favour and check out his backlist, particularly his nature memoir masterpiece The Snow Leopard.

That leaves a handful of novels I’m yet to read but are high on my holiday pile: Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things and Colm Toibin’s Norah Webster. That I’m yet to read the Toibin is almost inexplicable: he’s one of the most gorgeous writers on the planet. I’ve also read good things about Sarah Waters’s The Paying Guests.

CRIME FICTION

Every year I say I’m going to read crime novels myself and not defer to my colleague Graeme Blundell, and every year I end up asking him to bail me out. So, Graeme’s top six summer crime reads are: Garry Disher’s Bitter Wash Road, Tony Cavanaugh’s The Train Rider, Adrian McKinty’s In the Morning I’ll Be Gone, Michael Robotham’s Life or Death, Barry Maitland’s Crucifixion Creek and James Lee Burke’s Wayfaring Stranger. Next year I’m going to read my own crime novels. I’m going to start with Melbourne-based Irishman McKinty’s Sean Duffy series, the latest of which is on Graeme’s list (and there will be a new one next year).

POETRY

Top of my list is the marvellous Poems That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men on the Words that Move Them, in which well-known men, from Salman Rushdie to Colin Firth to Nick Cave, reveal a poem that loosens their tear ducts. My own choice is Seamus Heaney’s Mid-Term Break. You won’t find that early poem in the just-published Seamus Heaney: New Selected Poems 1988-2013, but you will find plenty else of beauty. Clive James’s Poetry Notebook, in which he writes about his lifelong engagement with poetry, is a charming, witty and accessible work.

Speaking of James, in his books of the year contribution to The Times Literary Supplement he singled out Sydney poet Stephen Edgar, who has had several poems published in Review this year. I wouldn’t presume to make a observation about great minds, etc. Edgar’s latest collection is Exhibits of the Sun, and I would also steer you to Eldershaw. David Malouf turned 80 this year and inverted the usual order of things by giving us a gift: the gorgeous poetry collection Earth Hour. Robert Gray’s Coast Road is another sublime collection. Australia is blessed with an outstanding group of young female poets and you will find many of them in the annual Black Inc Best Australian Poems. While you are at it you may as well get the Best Essays and Best Stories too. I always look forward to these anthologies as one-stop shops for catching up with good writing I may have missed during the year.

SHORT STORIES

I have covered individual collections in the fiction sections, but I want to make sure you are aware of That Glimpse of Truth: 100 of the Finest Short Stories Ever Written, selected and introduced by David Miller. The short fiction gang’s all here, from Chekhov to Alice Munro, and include a handful of Australians (most pleasingly Review regular James Bradley). This handsome volume is the perfect bedside table book for dipping into over the long hot summer.

LITERARY STUDIES

A short but elite list: James Ley’s The Critic in the Modern World: Public Criticism from Samuel Johnson to James Wood, David Malouf’s The Writing Life and Tim Parks’s Where I’m Reading From.

MEMOIR and BIOGRAPHY

I mentioned the Tennessee Williams biography at the outset. Still on the entertainment beat, I have heard very good things — in a “this book is tragic and disturbing and necessary” sense — about Not My Father’s Son, the childhood memoir of Scottish actor Alan Cumming. (For a warmer take on the father-son relationship, though it’s an unsettling book in other ways, try To Begin to Know: Walking in the Shadows of My Father, by Australian writer David Leser.)

I confess to having a soft spot for American actor Rob Lowe and I did spend a pleasant Sunday afternoon with him, in the form of his memoir Love Life, this year. John Cleese’s So, Anyway … focuses on the formative years of one of the funniest people on the planet. Locally, we have Bert, Graeme Blundell’s biography of Bert Newton, which Louis Nowra, a hard man to please, reviewed glowingly in these pages, and Ian “Molly” Meldrum’s memoir, The Never, Um, Ever Ending Story, which is an ideal gift for a large target group: people who in their teens were obsessed with ABC TV’s music show Countdown. David Walsh, the professional gambler who founded Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art, is a remarkable person and, though I am yet to read it, his memoir A Bone of Fact has the feel of a remarkable book. Reviewing it here this week, David Free says it instantly establishes Walsh as one of Australia’s most interesting writers, and that’s recommendation enough for me.

Also high on my to-read list (which at this point I have to ask you to think of as a mesa rather than a mountain) is Robert Dessaix’s What Days are For, a memoir inspired by a near-death experience. Dessaix is an unapologetically big-brained writer, and I like him for that. Philip Larkin is the most represented poet in Poems That Make Grown Men Cry, so clearly his words move people. His personality, though, has been subject to much adverse scrutiny. In that sense James Booth’s Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love is a revisionist biography as it posits that Larkin wasn’t such a bad bloke. As someone who always tries to see the best in writers, I am in favour of that. Another book perched on my shelves is Helen Macdonald’s H is For Hawk, a memoir about the English writer’s relationship with a hawk named Mabel. It won this year’s Samuel Johnson Prize and is, on my count, the most mentioned title in the books of the year lists coming out of Britain.

NONFICTION

I doubt there’s much of a market for books about taxes (though I’m sure Gideon Haigh or Jane Gleeson-White would write good ones) but death sells like there’s no tomorrow. American surgeon Atul Gawande has established himself as one of the best writers on medical matters for a general readership, following the footsteps of Jerome Groopman. His latest, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, is essential reading for anyone who has reached the age where they realise immortality is not an option. Local writer Christine Kenneally is winning rave reviews, including in The New York Times, for her book on how DNA shapes our lives, The Invisible History of the Human Race.

I know this is a summer reading guide, but I’m sure most of us read the books we want to read, regardless of the weather. In that spirit I am recommending Helen Garner’s This House of Grief, about one of the nation’s most appalling crimes, the drowning of three little boys when their father drove his car into a dam. I am sure it is some sort of masterpiece.

Climate, not weather, is central to Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, which is a scary book, but not one without hope. I would like to put an early bet on Don Watson’s The Bush: Travels in the Heart of Australia picking up a few prizes next year. Reviewing the book in these pages Tom Keneally said it was a “great, succulent magic pudding of a book’’. While we are on the land, two good books about horses: Cameron Forbes’s Australia on Horseback: The Horse and the Making of a Nation and Nicolas Brasch’s Horses in Australia: An Illustrated History. As a bird lover I am keen to read Tim Low’s Where Song Began: Australia’s Birds and How They Changed the World. Errol Fuller’s The Passenger Pigeon is a sad and gorgeous book.

My music book of the year is Bleddyn Butcher’s A Little History: Nick Cave and Cohorts, 1981-2013, a words and photos record of the 30-year career of one of the most talented artists this country has produced. When the Swedish Academy finally decides to give the Nobel Prize in Literature to a songwriter, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen will need to form an orderly line behind Nick Cave.

HISTORY

I admit to being a little gun shy of military histories, such was their number this year, as writers and publishers acknowledged the centenary of the outbreak of World War I. Leading the charge is the indefatigable Peter FitzSimons with Gallipoli, his vivid account of the disaster in Turkey. I have a lot of time for Fitz­Simons and his infectious passion for our history. Similarly, I am interested in Ross Coulthart’s Charles Bean, an investigative reporter’s biography of the fabled Australian war correspondent.

However the (post) war history I took home this year was Ian Buruma’s Year Zero: A History of 1945. And if I were heading to a desert island tomorrow, the two recent World War I-themed books I would take are No Man’s Land: Writings from a World at War, a collection of prose and verse about the Great War, and Poetry of the First World War, an Oxford University Press anthology edited by Tim Kendall. I focused on ancient history at school and still know more about the early Athenians than the early Australians, so I know I would benefit from reading Alan Atkinson’s The Europeans in Australia, the third and final volume of which was published this year. Tom Keneally, too, published a third volume of his national history, Australians: From Flappers to Vietnam, and there is a promise of more to come.

For a single volume explanation of where it all began, for the Europeans that is, Rod Mundle’s The First Fleet looks the goods. I’d also like to know more about the English Civil War than my nine-year-old, who has the jump on me courtesy of the Horrible Histories books and TV show. To that end I have taken home the just-published third volume of Peter Ackroyd’s The History of England, which centres on the Roundheads and the other lot. I’m yet to see a copy of Anand Gopal’s No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes, but a recent review of it in The New York Review of Books suggests it’s an important work.

POLITICS and BUSINESS

I used the Clive Palmer joke last year, so moving right along ... Of the many political memoirs published this year it strikes me that Julia Gillard’s My Story probably is the most important. She was our first female prime minister, which should be a source of national pride rather than bitter regret. How did it all go so disastrously wrong, for her and for us? The answer to that is still spooling out, but this memoir provides some insights. For a take on the same question from the nation’s pre-eminent chronicler of the past 40 years of Australian political life, turn to Paul Kelly’s Triumph and Demise: The Broken Promise of a Labor Generation. If you think that doesn’t sound like a beach book, consider this (possibly apocryphal) story: one summer holiday the peerless PK packed as his relaxing read the Mabo legislation.

Speaking of apocryphal stories, Bob Carr is surely a rarity in telling them about himself. His Diary of a Foreign Minister is easily the most entertaining political memoir not just of the year but of recent memory. Of course the capital H historic moment in Australian politics was the death of Gough Whitlam in October. A couple of new books on the great man have come out in recent weeks and there’s the certainty of more to follow. For now, the one that appeals to me is Susan Mitchell’s intimate portrait of a political partnership, Margaret and Gough: The Love Story that Shaped a Nation. Margaret’s titular top billing is a nice touch. There were quite a few business biographies published during the year but my pick is Andrew Rule’s Kerry Stokes: The Boy from Nowhere. I was vaguely aware the Perth billionaire’s story was one of rags to ­riches, but I didn’t realise just how ragged were his early days. His achievement is inspirational.

SPORT

I read two sports books this year, both on my favourite sport: Patrick Bartley’s excellent Roy Higgins: Australia’s Favourite Jockey, which transported me back to the great days of the turf in the 1970s and 80s, and Bob Charley’s beautiful coffee table book, Heroes and Champions, which tells the history of Australian thoroughbred racing through paintings and drawings of horses, jockeys, race courses and so on.

Speaking of the 70s, no matter what else he does in life — win the Nobel Peace Prize, say — John Sattler of the South Sydney Rabbitohs will chiefly and rightly be remembered for playing the 1970 rugby league grand final with a broken jaw. Satts has had an eventful life, on and off the field, as he recounts in Glory, Glory: My Life. With Souths winning this year’s premiership after a three-decade drought, I expect this book to be under a lot of Christmas trees in Sydney’s southeast. Of the Aussie rules books I glanced through, the one that stood out was a self-published effort, Doug Ackerly’s painstaking biography of the great Essendon full forward John Coleman, Coleman: The Untold Story of an AFL Legend. (By the way, I always think books with subtitles such as The Untold Story need to add Until Now.)

Cricket is still in mourning for the tragic death of Test batsman Phillip Hughes, but the sport will go on and there are new books by legends of the game that have “dad gift” written all over them: Allan Border’s Cricket as I See It (grumpily?), Adam Gilchrist: The Man, the Cricketer, the Legend, Merv Hughes’s 104 Cricket Legends and Sachin Tendulkar’s Playing It My Way. John McEnroe’s first memoir, Serious, was a bestseller. He’s back with another instalment, But Seriously, which I’ll take a look at because I’m interested in extreme personalities. I’m also keen to track down Bouts of Mania: Ali, Frazier, Foreman and an America on the Ropes, by Richard Hoffer, because I like boxing books.

CHILDREN’S and YOUNG ADULT

The richest reading experience the nine-year-old and I have shared this year is tearing through the old Classics Illustrated comic book versions of great works of literature, which I buy in bulk on eBay. We have read so many good books this way. He loves it and it’s a joy for me too. A standout example: after reading Homer’s The Odyssey we went online to see how Samuel Butler translated our favourite scene, when Ulysses reveals himself to Penelope’s suitors. Another mouse click and we listened to Ian McKellan reading the scene. Just brilliant. In terms of this year’s books, Syd continued to devour the big franchises: Andy Griffith’s The 52-Storey Treehouse, Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul, Stephan Pastis’s Timmy Failure: We Meet Again, Liz Pichon’s Tom Gates: A Tiny Bit Lucky.

Our favourite picture books include Trace Balla’s Rivertime, Leigh Hobbs’s Mr Chicken Lands on London, Sonya Hartnett and Lucia Masciullo’s The Wild One, Aaron Blabey’s Pig the Pug, Corinne Fenton and Robin Cowcher’s Little Dog and the Christmas Wish, Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen’s Sam & Dave Dig a Hole and Kes Gray and Jim Field’s Oi, Frog! And the just-published The Book With No Pictures, by American actor BJ Novak, is an absolute delight, as is a book without words, Ronan Badel’s The Lazy Friend. On the YA front, I asked regular reviewer Joy Lawn to name her top six Christmas gift books for teens: Alice Pung’s Laurinda, Claire Zorn’s The Protected, Clare Atkins’s Nona and Me, Geoffrey Maguire’s Egg & Spoon, Melissa Keil’s The Incredible Adventures of Cinnamon Girl and Jackie French’s To Love a Sunburnt Country.

BOOKS I IGNORANTLY IGNORED

When Rowing Blazers, by Jack Carlson, thudded on to my desk my immediate thought was, “Who the flip would read this?” The answer, dear reader, is I would. I picked it up one idle-ish afternoon and was engrossed. For starters, who knew that all rowers are also GQ cover models? The stories of various rowing clubs and their blazers (including a couple of Australian ones) are oddly satisfying and the photos are beautiful. I’m even more abashed by my knee-jerk dismissal of Green: The History of a Colour, by French social historian Michel Pastoureau. Not even the smoking-hot cover photo of Faye Dunaway swayed me. Then Ceridwen Dovey, of all people, told me it was a great book, as were Pastoureau’s other colour histories. So I had a look and she is right: it’s a fascinating read. I hope mentioning these two books here will go some way to redressing my foolishness.

STOCKING FILLERS

Sean Usher has followed up the fascinating Letters of Note with Lists of Note, which reproduces lists as various as Francis Ford Coppola’s casting notes for The Godfather to Michelangelo’s shopping list. It’s a must-own book. Bernie Hobbs provides the words to go with the photos that make up a duck is watching me, a book about “strange and unusual’’ phobias. There are some crackers. I didn’t know about pogonophobia, for example, and neither must half the male population under 30. It’s fear of beards. Downton Abbey: Rules For Household Staff will appeal to fans of the TV series. And Dogs Hanging Out of Windows is full of photos of, well, take a guess. Happy holiday reading to all.