We were nothing like the quirky characters in the BBC TV series The Book Group, but we did meet every month or two to discuss a book we’d all planned to read.  The key difference with the TV show was that we weren’t all sleeping together.  The main similarity was that often a whole night would pass with us barely mentioning the book of the month.

Back in 2004, I was invited along to a group by my then-housemate and my overactive sense of responsibility quickly made me one of the “reliables”, the three or four who would turn up every time and have read the book without fail.  The rest of the group was made up of semi-regulars who mostly just wanted to hang out for a beer.  It was a great group.

If you’ve ever been a member of a book group, you will likely have encountered the same issues that we did.  How do you keep everyone interested?  How do you pick a book that everyone wants to read?  Do you bother rescheduling for people who never turn up anyway?

Picking books was definitely the biggest challenge.  The two men in the group weren’t so keen on some of the more Oprah’s Book Club-type selections.  No one was especially keen on books over 400 pages long—who has time?  Finding enough copies for everyone was always a challenge, especially for anything left-of-centre.

There’s something to be said for book-choice-by-committee, though.  That group and its democratic selection process were responsible for me reading a dozen books that I never would have picked up otherwise.  Sometimes this only confirmed my initial impression of the book (My Sister’s Keeper was compulsive but very superficial) and other times it blew my preconceptions away.

Cloudstreet by Tim Winton was the biggest surprise.  It’s a phenomenally popular book and one of the biggest landmarks in recent Australian fiction.  For some reason, I figured it would be dull and very middle-of-the-road.  Instead, it was engaging and beautifully told.  Rather than relying on the worn clichés of Australiana, it dug deep into the world of post-war Perth and turned up all sorts of unique characters and situations.

Being in a book group and reviewing books are similar in a few ways.  Firstly, you have to read to a deadline and somehow fit a book in with all your normal activities.  The deadlines for our group weren’t too strict—every meeting was delayed at least two weeks—but once you factored in sourcing a copy and the rest of modern life, it could be difficult.

The other similarity is being forced to verbalise your opinion on a book.  Once we’ve finished with the rigours of High School English Lit, most of us are more than happy to just enjoy a book and leave any analysing to our subconscious.  But talking about a book in a group takes you away from vague feelings and impressions and requires you to put boundaries around those feelings.  Once you’ve expressed an opinion out loud, it feels more fixed but also more dubious.

This is a mixed blessing.  Some books open up under that kind of analysis and you find yourself loving them in a deeper way.  Other times you realise that your positive feelings evaporate once they’re aired, especially when you have to defend them.  My good feelings regarding Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised didn’t survive the questioning.

It doesn’t matter, really.  Some books will change your life, others will amuse you briefly and others will let you down.  But talking about a book over a beer in warm pub on a frosty winter with good people, well it’s one of life’s little pleasures.

—David Pullar

Sam De Brito keeps a blog called All Men Are Liars over at the Sydney Morning Herald website.  It’s popular and very interactive.  He posts most days with something provocative, usually about masculinity and gender issues, and his sizable readership will run with it for a few hundred comments.

I read it pretty regularly, not without a certain guilt.  The generalizations about gender roles can be pretty crude and it’s mostly entertaining from a voyeuristic angle.  Occasionally he’s right on the money and it’s those moments of insight that keep me coming back.

Now he’s branched out into fiction with a novel called The Lost Boys.  De Brito has tried his hand at a book before: No Tattoos Before You’re Thirty is a little pocket-sized volume of advice that Sam would give his unborn (and unconceived) offspring.  Now he’s trying something more ambitious.

If you’ve read All Men Are Liars for any length of time, you’ll have a pretty clear idea what’s in store.  Sam’s not shy about talking up his past and there’s a strong autobiographical element to The Lost Boys.  Young blokes go out, do stupid things, keep doing stupid things and wake up in their thirties wondering what happened.  There’s a lot of sex, drugs and general misbehavior.

I’ve picked up a copy in a bookshop, flicked through it and put it back on the shelf on a few occasions.  I’m sure there are some interesting insights into the psyche of young Australian men, but the passages I’ve read are so full of misogyny and unrelenting squalor that I just couldn’t be bothered.

That’s the problem with “gritty” literature.  In some shorter art forms, say films or photography or journalism, grime and unpleasantness can be exciting—over a 400 page book, it can be draining.

That might be worth it for a brilliant statement about society, but De Brito doesn’t really speak for Australian Masculinity, if there is such thing.  He speaks for a subculture of lower middle-class urban thirtysomethings, the products of a very specific time and place.  There are any number of Aussie males who would struggle to see much of themselves in these lost boys.  There are big themes involved, but they tend to get buried in all the extreme behavior.

Most of us have a tendency to universalize our experiences and writers only more so.  It goes something like “I’m a man, therefore this is what men are.” Maybe De Brito’s goal is something less grand, but from his blog and the publicity around the book, it seems as if he’s trying to take the pulse of an entire gender.

Who will The Lost Boys appeal to?  Probably not the Maroubra Beach toughs that De Brito is depicting.  Readers of new Australian fiction tend to be a more sensitive lot.  Maybe a lot of men will read it with a sigh of relief, “Thank God I’m not like that.” I don’t think that was the author’s point.

—David Pullar

Most book-lovers will notice at some point that they’re really in the minority.  Even if you work in the book industry or join a book group, you’ll still spend a lot of time around people who don’t read for pleasure.

I was personally hit by this when I saw the social networking profiles of some intelligent hipster-type friends, which included words to the effect of “I hate reading”.  This was a surprise—I couldn’t help but associate loving things like art and music with a love of reading.  The two often go together, but it’s no sure thing.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics just released a publication called Arts and Culture in Australia: A Statistical Overview.  Even if you love reading you’d probably draw the line at statistical works, but there’s some interesting bits in there.

First of all, reading isn’t all that rare in my country.  When asked to rate their favourite pastimes, 61 per cent of people surveyed nominated reading for pleasure.  It’s a hell of a lot more common than synchronised swimming or quoits.

It’s what they’re reading that makes the difference.  Newspapers and magazines are big choices, with 77 and 58 per cent respectively reading them once a week at least.  Books (48 per cent) do much worse, but are still read weekly almost one in two.

The vast majority of people will read a few pages of something for recreation, it seems, but the real book-geeks are still going to feel in the minority because of differences in reading material.  Honestly, if you’ve picked up one of the high-circulation daily newspapers in Australia, you’ll know that it’s not exactly reading—it’s more looking at pictures and large-font puns.  And there’s also a difference between casual readers and book devourers.  The numbers say nothing about how much your average Aussie reads in their average week.

These numbers are from a 2006 survey, so it’s strange that there’s nothing in there about the internet.  After all, it’s a text-based medium and there’s more content and substance in a lot of blog posts than there is in most magazines—not specifically referring to Re:Print, obviously.

For the younger generation, though, so much of our learning and exposure to ideas has been through the web.  And it hasn’t been spoilt for us the way high school English Lit has for books.

—David Pullar

Poets usually have a choice between writing on mythical themes or of mythologizing the ordinary.  Anything truly mundane it’s…well, prosaic.  For modern writers dealing with everyday life, there needs to be a kind of transcendence introduced, something larger than life itself.  You’ll find that in the poems of even the most down-to-earth, like Simon Armitage or Wendy Cope—a sense that someone brushing their teeth or reading the newspaper actually represents something more.

Of course some topics and themes stubbornly resist mythologizing, as do some locations.  Grimy and degenerate can be poetic – and has been ever since Blake’s reference to “dark Satanic mills”.  But boring?  Boring is hard to make poetic.

Sometimes a poet can overcome this with sheer skill.  John Betjeman’s “Slough”, made famous through TV’s The Office, looks at the most extreme example of boring suburbia and in its ennui and pretensions finds something bigger and more universal than the town.

Modern Australian poetry faces a similar uphill battle.  The golden age of our national poetry was the “bush poetry” of the late-19th and early 20th centuries.  Now the “jolly swagman” and “Man from Snowy River” are gone and we’re left with a more uniform suburban existence.  We’re a lot like other countries, except newer and less certain in our identity.

Adelaide’s Aidan Coleman has it even harder.  The City of Churches is a byword on the east coast for boredom and sameness.  Its residents are forced into a polite defensiveness combined with an awkwardness about talking themselves up lest they be laughed at.

So you know what he means when he writes in “Mythology” that:

“Home never seemed worth writing about.
The place was post-history”

As a first-generation resident (Coleman was born in Wales), he identifies with his town, but doesn’t see in it anything worthy of poetry.  A bit of a dilemma for a poet!

So he does what the modern British poets have done faced with a similar ambivalence towards their own country and a tendency to understate—he sucks it up and writes some poems anyway.

Out of it we get a volume like 2005’s Avenues & Runways in which housing estates, airport terminals and government research facilities are given the poetic treatment we once reserved for natural wonders.  And it works because it’s clever and simple and speaks to all the ordinary poetry readers who aren’t blessed to live somewhere timeless and dramatic.

It’s the same way that a clever painter or photographer can turn an ugly scene into something remarkable.  It’s the reason we read poetry in the first place.  It’s far less efficient than prose at transmitting facts or information, but it’s much better and communicating the things behind the things, the subconscious feeling that the ordinary isn’t really that at all.

—David Pullar

Last week was my first Sydney Writers’ Festival—I somehow missed it completely last year.  Even this year I only managed a paltry two sessions, but it was sufficiently worthwhile to keep a close eye out for next time.

The first session, “Writing and Research”, was a panel discussion between four writers of creative non-fiction.  Alice Pung, who I’ve discussed previously on Re:Print, spoke engagingly about her desire to subvert expectations of Asian writing.  Her main point was the efforts she went to avoid what she called the “Tony Robbins” narrative of Wild Swans and Amy Tan’s books.  “The biggest adversity I’ve overcome was head lice in Grade Two,” she quipped.  I’m not sure what this had to do with research, but it was entertaining.

Most of the panelists struggled to get a word in, thanks to the gregarious investigative journalist Gideon Haigh.  He was meant to talk about his James Hardie exposé Asbestos House, but ended up giving a sneak preview of the upcoming abortion history The Racket.  A significant part of his investigation involved 1960s court transcripts from abortion trials and they make fascinating reading—so fascinating in fact that Haigh spent half his time reading them verbatim.

The closing address, the second session I was able to attend, was presented by Junot Diaz.  Author of buzz novel and Pulitzer Prize winner The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Diaz spoke on the topic “All Our Gratitudes, or Literature Is Not Forever”.

I didn’t like Oscar Wao’s style much, but it had a lot of heart.  The same could be said of Diaz’s speech.  His delivery was mostly in a monotone and read straight from a pile of A4 notes.  The overly formalist structure seemed more appropriate for an essay than a speech, but that’s to be expected from a writer—possibly less so for a college lecturer, though, which is what Diaz is in his day job.

The heart came through when Diaz talked about librarians and books and reading as the things that had “saved [his] life”.  Literature is not perfect, he told us, but we love it because it reflects our own imperfections.  Nor is it eternal, as his title pointed out, but we enjoy the ephemeral pleasures.  It was an appropriate reflection on the importance of books for a festival dedicated to their celebration and appreciation.

Diaz closed his brief (25 minute) address with a reference to the importance of outside voices.  As a Dominican, Diaz brings a different perspective to the mostly domestic line-up at this year’s festival.  On reflection, it seems odd that he didn’t take the opportunity to draw on that perspective in his closing address.

—David Pullar

The most notable thing about the Australian book industry is just how small and isolated it is.  There are only a handful of major publishers (mostly Australian operations of larger UK and US houses) and the smaller publishers are very, very small. 

With only 20 million inhabitants and a serious reading population much smaller than that, there simply isn’t the critical mass that would allow independent and new talents to find a foothold. And “making it” in Australia doesn’t equal “making it” in practical terms—things like reaching a large audience and earning a living from writing.  The number of local authors with any substantial profile can be counted on a couple of fingers.

Australia does not have as well-developed systems for nurturing young authors as North America or Europe.  Our literary journals are small and generally conservative.  Our creative writing schools do not have high profiles, nor are their links with the global publishing industry very strong.

Even to achieve success and recognition from local critics, writers are often expected to gain overseas validation.  Our biggest cultural and literary icons are usually those who have found success in the wider world.  To be simply a local taste is to be perceived as a B-lister: maybe good for a trashy read, but not enough for real critical acclaim.  It’s probably unfair, but it’s hard not to see it as the difference between an Olympian and the winner of the Upper Bradfield Little Athletics U14 long-jump.

An interesting case study is young Australian writer Max Barry.  American readers are actually more likely to have heard of Barry or read one of his books than his fellow Australians.  Even though Barry is Australian born-and-bred and even lives in Melbourne, he is only belatedly receiving some attention in his homeland.

I came across Barry with his 2006 novel Company, an offbeat corporate satire inspired by Barry’s time with Hewlett Packard.  It was a funny, if imperfect, novel and it pointed to an exciting new talent.

Except that it wasn’t so new—because Barry had already published two novels in the US, Syrup and Jennifer Government, both mostly unnoticed in Australia.  In fact, Scribe Publications has just re-issued Syrup for the Australian market, a mere 9 years after its first publication, in response to the success of Company.

Barry didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter.  As an aspiring writer with a populist bent, why would you bother “paying your dues” in Australia, where the most you could expect would be a short run with a niche publisher with your book stocked in three shops?

Yet he had an option that many local writers do not have—the advantage of writing American-themed books, rather than idiosyncratically Australian work.  Sadly, a lot of writers telling Australian stories are going to be stuck between a rock and a hard place.  Australia is not exotic enough for publishers to see escapist potential, but is too foreign to be an easy sell.

In that sense the Australian industry serves its purpose by keeping alive our national tales and experiences.  But there will always be the suspicion that those who don’t sell well offshore don’t quite have what it takes.

—David Pullar