Showing all posts about novels
Books men should read
2 December 2021
Seven books to buy for men in your life, by Sheree at Keeping Up With The Penguins. Unlike similarly titled lists you may see published by book-sellers at certain times of the year, this is one you want to look at.
So, why on earth am I making a list of books to buy for men? Well, I’ve noticed that people do actually pay attention to these recommendations, and the “books to buy for men” page is almost always almost exclusively populated with books written by men. What about the books by women, the ones that might “normally” find a large audience of women, but would actually really benefit cis-men?
I could probably say more about the matter of why the “for him” recommendations issued by book-sellers, are filled with titles by men, about men, when there’s a stack of awesome novels written by women they could also be reading. If the question is asked enough though, perhaps more people will think about it.
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Sarah Winman’s Still Life wins Dymocks Book of the Year award
1 December 2021
Some late news to hand… Still Life by London based British author Sarah Winman, was recently named winner of the Dymocks 2021 Book of the Year. Still Life is averaging a tad over four stars in reader ratings on Goodreads, which means the title should be on your to-be-read list.
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Are fiction readers ready for novels about the Covid pandemic?
30 November 2021
Fiction writers were always going to incorporate the current Covid pandemic into their work at some stage, and possibly some may have wondered when exactly that would be appropriate. Given there is doubt as to whether the virus will ever completely disappear though, many writers have decided waiting for a “better time” is futile, if a look at new and recent publications is anything to go by.
But Lara Feigel, writing for The Guardian, questions whether readers are ready to see pandemic-related plots featuring in the work of their favourite authors.
When lockdown hit last March, some writers offered their services as delivery drivers or volunteered at Covid test centres. Others attempted to make progress with preexisting projects, blanking out the new world careering into being in front of them. But nothing written in the past 18 months can be entirely free of Covid, with its stark blend of stasis and fear. And now, as we see the work made by writers who confronted it head on, questions emerge. Do we really want to read about the pandemic while it is still unfolding? Do we risk losing sight of the long view in getting too caught up with the contemporary?
For my part, I think it’s going to come down the tastes of different readers, and their personal experiences of Covid. The pandemic is prominent in a number of novels I’ve written about in the last couple of months, including Wish You Were Here, by Jodi Picoult, The Black Dress, by Deborah Moggach, and The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich, while Covid — in the form of another viral outbreak — is alluded to in The Quiet at the End of the World, by Lauren James, Scary Monsters, by Michelle de Kretser, and The Animals in That Country, by Laura Jean McKay.
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Three new e-readers from Kobo and Kindle reviewed
30 November 2021
Reviews of three brand new e-readers by Jason Snell at Six Colors, for anyone considering upgrading their current reader.
But change is coming to the e-reader world this fall, in the form of three brand-new readers. From upstart challenger Rakuten Kobo come the Kobo Sage and the Kobo Libra 2. And from the big dog, Amazon, comes the 11th-generation Kindle Paperwhite.
The Australia Reads 2021 National Reading Survey, which I wrote about yesterday, indicates up to two-thirds of Australian book readers peruse e-books to some degree. Currently about half the novels I read are e-books, though at the moment I’m still mainly using my smartphone rather than a reader.
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Results of the Australia Reads 2021 National Reading Survey
29 November 2021
According to the recently published findings of Australia Reads 2021 National Reading Survey, one in four Australians did not engage with a book, either by reading or listening to one, in the eighteen months to June 2021. So much for thinking people would leap at the chance to read more, given many have had lockdown enforced downtime on their hands recently. I know I would’ve if I’d not been required to pretty much work continually throughout the most recent lockdown.
But 64% of respondents found the lure of movies and television too tempting, while 46% of people said perusing social media, and browsing the internet took up much of their time. Of the some three-thousand survey participants, about a third were general readers, being the proverbial average person on the street, while the remainder were considered to be “engaged” readers, generally being people subscribed to news updates from publishing houses, and who no doubt can be found on Bookstagram.
I’m not sure if three-thousand or so people makes for a particularly representative sample, but the findings are nonetheless fascinating reading. A few items caught my eye as I looked through the data. For instance:
- 38% of Australians think they read more books during the pandemic, versus 53% who didn’t. 9% thought they read less.
- Of engaged readers, 37% are considered to be obsessed readers, typically reading at least one book per week.
- Many “obsessed readers” have numerous book in their TBR stack, and read two or three titles simultaneously.
- 52% of respondents have never listened to an audio book.
- 54% of Australians give up on (DNF) a book if they don’t quickly become interested in it.
- 43% prefer a book recommendation from family and friends, while…
- … less than 12% of respondents trust recommendations via social media.
- And, 3% of Australians think they spend too much time reading.
Encouragingly though, becoming a regular reader, for all the associated benefits, isn’t too difficult. If a person were to read for ten minutes a day, assuming a rate of three-hundred words per minute, that would equate to ninety-thousand words (the average novel’s word-count) a month, or twelve titles a year.
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Who is M in The Shut Ins by Katherine Brabon?
25 November 2021
NOTE: this article is choke full of SPOILERS for The Shut Ins by Katherine Brabon. If you haven’t read the novel, bookmark this page and come back when you have.
The Shut Ins is the second novel by Melbourne based Australian author Katherine Brabon, following up her 2016 Vogel Award winning debut, The Memory Artist. Mainly set several years ago in Japan, The Shut Ins recounts five people’s varying experiences of hikikomori, a Japanese term used to describe those who, for whatever reason, feel compelled to cut off all contact with the outside world, and confine themselves to their room. Sometimes they stay locked away for years before leaving their self-imposed internment.
Through the thoughts of five characters, Brabon takes us into one person’s hikikomori journey, a man in his late twenties, called Hikaru Sato, who has stayed in a room at his parent’s apartment for three years. We first learn of Hikaru’s story through Mai Takeda, an old classmate of his, who one evening after work runs into his mother, Hiromi Sato, ten years after Mai last saw him at high school. Long story short, Hiromi asks for Mai’s help in persuading Hikaru to leave his room. But Mai has problems of her own.
She recently married a conservative salaryman, known only as J, who expects her to give up working and start a family with him. When we meet Mai, she is anything but enthusiast about the prospect, and seems, if anything, to have a closer emotional bond to the reclusive Hikaru, whom she hasn’t seen or spoken to in a decade. In addition to Mai’s perspective, we hear from Sadako, a young woman working in Tokyo as a hostess, who entertains J – presumably without Mai’s direct knowledge – while he’s on week-long business trips to the Japanese capital.
The stories of Hiromi, and in the third act, her son Hikaru, are also explored, along with the thoughts of an unnamed Australian woman, who is travelling alone in Japan, and is interested in hikikomori. But perhaps the most intriguing character in the book, is one we don’t meet, a woman known only as M. The Australian traveller, who I’ll refer to as the Narrator, said she and M, who is Japanese, lived in the same share house, while they were studying at a university in Melbourne. But who is M, and why is she referred to only by the letter M? Is M a pseudonym for Mai, Mai Takeda? It’s tempting to think so for several reasons.
Mai’s name starts with the letter m, while the Narrator refers to her friend as M. How obvious. We also know Mai went missing at some point in 2014. Meanwhile the Narrator – who may or may not be an alter-ego of Brabon’s – writes that M, who becomes known to us through the Narrator’s notes, “no longer lives in Japan.” But unlike the stories of Mai, Hikaru, Hiromi, and Sadako, which are dated during 2014, we don’t know when the Narrator penned her notes. It may have been several years later. To illustrate this point, an ABC article tells us Brabon visited Japan in 2014, and 2017, while The Shut Ins was published in 2021.
It’s reasonable then to believe Mai made her way to Australia, as she created a new life for herself, and spent several years studying there. We later hear that M left Australia, and was working as a translator in Malta. She certainly didn’t seem keen to return to Japan. But there are other clues. At the time M and the Narrator were flatmates, we learn M had recently left a relationship. Could that be Mai’s marriage to J? M told the Narrator she had, until arriving in Melbourne, only seen herself through the “mirror” of other people.
Could this have been a reference to the expectations Mai’s family, and J, had placed on her? To marry – before she was “too old” – and have children. The Narrator also makes the comment that M’s long dark hair touched her elbows. We were also told Mai’s hair had been equally as long, when she was at high school. There really seems to be little doubt. M is Mai. And after reading about her somewhat cloistered life in Japan, we’re left hoping Mai did escape, and make a new start. But it’s not that straightforward.
In an interview at Theresa Smith Writes, Brabon said she has a friend called Mio who lives in the Japanese city of Shizuoka. In her notes, the Narrator tells us she stayed with M’s parents in Shizuoka. Mai, however, and her parents, lived in Nagoya, although Mai was born in the Gifu Prefecture. But it is possible Mai’s parents later moved to Shizuoka. What’s not so plausible perhaps is their “forgiving” Mai for leaving her marriage to J, something they had expected of her, to say nothing of her skipping the country to live as she chose.
Does it then seem likely her parents would go so far as to accommodate a friend of hers, such as the Narrator, who they may have viewed as aiding Mai in achieving her ambitions? At this point M and Mai are beginning to look like quite different people. But what then of M’s unnamed Japanese male friend, whom she suggested the Narrator meet whilst in Japan, as he could tell her more about achiragawa, a term meaning “the other side”. Achiragawa may be a place, one safer than their present environment perhaps, that hikikomori, in a sense, aspire to reach.
Could M’s male friend be Hikaru? If anyone could talk about achiragawa, that would surely be Hikaru. The male friend, who now lives in America (the other side?), happened to be visiting Japan at the same time the Narrator was there. We learned Hikaru liked America, it was one of the few topics he discussed with Mai, while they were at high school together. In emails to the Narrator, M’s male friend spoke of his “long new life” in America. This suggests the existence a previous “old” life, perhaps one he wanted to distance himself from.
But if the male friend is Hikaru, and M isn’t Mai, how does she know about Hikaru? Could that connection be through M’s mother, who was a social worker? Possibly her mother’s work involved helping rehabilitate shut-in people like Hikaru, after they decide to return to a more normal life. While M’s parents resided in Shizuoka, and Hikaru lived in Nagoya, it is possible M’s mother travelled to Nagoya for work, or it might be Hikaru stayed in a facility in Shizuoka after leaving, or more to the point, being removed from his room.
The Narrator also tells us “I was in Japan, alone, when the story of Mai Takeda came to me.” That also would suggest M and Mai are different people, but not necessarily. It could be M spoke more about her past life once the Narrator landed in Japan, since she was potentially meeting Hikaru. But in the end, we’re left with a satisfying mystery as to whether M is Mai, and M’s male friend is Hikaru. The Narrator and the male friend had planned to meet each other, but at the last minute, literally as she was approaching the appointed meeting place, the Narrator decided not to go ahead.
She had alluded to a reluctance to meet face to face, having become comfortable with her more anonymous, though in-depth, email correspondence, with M’s male friend. It is also a savvy outcome on Brabon’s part. Because the in-person meeting doesn’t proceed, we do not establish that M’s male friend is actually Hikaru, nor by extension do we ascertain that M is Mai. This looks to be a question we will continue wondering about.
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books, Katherine Brabon, novels
One hundred Notable Books of 2021
24 November 2021
One hundred Notable Books of 2021, compiled by The New York Times. Quite a few titles I recognise, many I don’t. Be nice to see more Australian work making the cut, particularly in the fiction segment, but overall an impressive list of books, spanning fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and memoir categories.
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Goodreads Choice Awards 2021
19 November 2021
The first round of voting is open in the 2021 Goodreads Choice Awards. From now until Saturday 28 November 2021, Goodreads members will be able to vote for their favourite title of twenty books, across seventeen categories, including fiction, romance, horror, science fiction, nonfiction, memoir, graphic novels, and young adult.
In the second round of voting, which will be open from 30 November to 5 December, titles will be whittled down to ten books per category, and members will be able to vote for their preferred book in each. The winners of each category will be announced on Thursday 9 December (which is less than three weeks now hereabouts).
Books published in the United States in English, including works in translation and other significant rereleases, between November 18, 2020, and November 16, 2021, are eligible for the 2021 Goodreads Choice Awards.
The Goodreads Choice Awards are said to be the only major book awards decided by readers.
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Klara and the Sun and AFs. What are AFs, and why are they needed?
12 November 2021
WARNING: while there are no explicit spoilers here (for instance I don’t describe how Klara and the Sun ends) this article does give away some story points…
Klara, the titular character of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel Klara and the Sun, is an AF. She is an artificial friend. AFs are robots that are able to walk, talk, think, and perceive the world around them. In the near-future universe Ishiguro has crafted in his eighth novel, AFs, who appear to be similar in appearance to humans, are highly intelligent companions for teenagers. Despite their human-like qualities though, AFs are easily distinguishable from people. But Klara is said to differ from her AF contemporaries by way of her keen perception and curiosity.
As narrator of the story, Klara often describes in great detail what she sees, or hears, even if she doesn’t always fully comprehend what she has witnessed. Early in the story, as she sits in the display window of a store selling AFs, she watches two older people – a man and a woman – run into each other on the outside street. Their joy at meeting for what may be the first time in decades, is palpable, but Klara is confused by the obvious pain the two people also appear to experience.
While then we may be walking into a future where children will one day have keenly smart and perceptive android-like friends, the question remains as to why there is a need for AFs in the first place. In an introduction to the story’s plot on the Klara and the Sun Wikipedia page, we are told children are schooled at home by tutors through tablet devices (objects Klara refers to as oblongs). For this reason, families who can afford it, buy an AF for their housebound children, as opportunities to socialise with people the same age are said to be limited. But is that really the case?
Soon after coming into the service of a teenage girl called Josie, Klara meets many of her (human) friends at a gathering called an interaction party, hosted by Josie’s mother. The name alone suggests such gatherings are standard, but not necessarily. The dynamic among Josie’s guests implies most the teenagers know each other well. While interaction parties, by virtue of their name, sound like regular affairs, that the event takes place at Josie’s house is notable. For one thing, she lives in a remote region, restricting opportunities to interact with people her age.
But what of her friends? Do they also live in similar circumstances? It seems unlikely every last one does, meaning many would be able to see other teenagers living nearby, outside of schooling hours, thus negating the need (and cost) of an AF. It is also obvious Klara is something of a novelty to some of Josie’s friends. While they’re familiar with AFs, and the attributes of models like Klara, few have actually seen one before. This suggests AF ownership is an exception, most people don’t need them, as they probably live relatively close to others.
For instance, at one point Klara travels with Josie and her mother, Chrissie, to the city where they stay at the apartment of a family friend. While there are vaguely alluded to significant problems in the world Klara and Josie inhabit, they have not resulted in a mass exodus from large urban centres, nor their abandonment. People continue to live and work in cities as usual. Those residing in remote areas then do so by choice. And while we know Josie is ill, and may not get out as much as other teenagers, the need for a carer for her alone would not be reason enough to fill the world with AFs.
It is through this illness – the unfortunate side effect of what seems to be a common genetic modification procedure some teenagers go through – we come to realise Chrissie, Josie’s mother, has another possible purpose in mind for Klara. But again this idea is not the usual intended function of an AF. We’re still left wondering why there is an apparent wide need for AFs such as Klara. Might they then be there to undertake tasks or parental obligations that some parents are unable, or unwilling, to fulfil themselves? For example we know Klara acted as a chaperone at times.
When Rick visited the bedbound Josie in her room, Klara was told to always be present. While she sat with her back to Josie and Rick, Klara could still hear what they were saying and doing. When once asked to leave Josie’s room during one of Rick’s visits, Klara initially resisted, saying she’d been “instructed to ensure against hanky-panky.” But that directive had been issued by the ever-present, live-in, housekeeper, Melania. If she, and by extension Chrissie, was so concerned about “hanky-panky”, surely Melania could’ve been present during Rick’s relatively short visits.
So far there’s little an AF can do that another person – be it a friend, or family member – couldn’t. Josie certainly had plenty of both in her life. Perhaps then AFs were a vanity item. Something you had to have, so you stood apart from other people. A must have, though ultimately dispensable, gimmick. Or was an AF’s unswerving loyalty and devotion the reason they came into being? Like an artificial intelligence chatbot, “someone” who’s always there, who’s always ready to listen, and someone who is never offended no matter how badly they are treated?
What a world to live in…
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For your to-be-read list, November 2021
8 November 2021
They’re making it easy on us this month, ABC literary writers and reviewers have suggested just five books for our reading consumption this month. Mind you, we’re already a week into the eleventh month, meaning we’ve lost eight reading days, so that might be a small problem. Anyway, I’m liking the look and sound of Byobu, by Ida Vitale, a 98 year old Uruguayan author, although Byobu was actually published in 2004 when she was eighty. Never let anyone say you’re too old to start a career as a writer.
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