E-Books versus Book Books

If you are a reader of those longform things called books, do you have a preference for either e-books or paper books?

I love both.  And while e-books are sooo good, what they can't do is give you a lovely tactile experience.  Well, they can, if you have, say, a fur-lined reader cover, but it's not quite the same thing.

I recently read a book that I loved, and I also enjoyed the look of it just as much as the content of its innards.  When that happens, it gives an extra dimension of richness that an e-book can't provide.

I love the colours of this cover.  The earthy browny-purple made me hungry.

That colour continued on into the edges of each page.  They looked quite beautiful.

My cousin and I used to read a lot of books together when we were young - one page each, reading out loud, often in bed at night.  It was a delightful combination of sharing something while also getting lost in the lovely solitude of another world.

Apparently I used to do this thing while I was reading with the hand that wasn't holding the book, running it along the pages and flicking them and stuff while I was reading.

I think I maybe was doing some of that a bit more than usual here.

Of course, the cliche stands firm that it's what inside that really counts.


But it doesn't hurt to have a little beauty on the outside as well, as beautiful women floating through doors closed to the rest of us could well testify.  But if you ain't got anything but fluff on the inside, where's that gonna leave you when your outside beauty has gone?

So how about you?  What are your reading habits - e-book, paper books, a combo of the two, or a sadly dwindling reading of bookery now the interwebs is on the scene?  I love getting away from the computer, and its snippets of stuff here and there and the relentless urge to click on the next thing without having fully digested what I've just been reading.  To sit or lie down with a book, in whatever form, which is the same thing over and over, is harder to do since the advent of the net ... and also better.

Book Review ~ Mullumbimby by Melissa Lucashenko

"Everything changes, Jo thought, as the current carried her mentally upriver to the fresh water, but not at random.  There's a deep system and order to it, because everything is forever turning into its own opposite.  Swimming fish becoming flying hawk.  Swift hawk dying and decaying into solid earth.  Earth reaching skyward as trees, turning to fruits and honey and flowers, falling back down again as leaves.  Everything in the world was shapeshifting around her, every moment of every day.  Nothing remained as it was."

I loved this book.  Melissa Lucashenko wrote it as an "ode to country."   While she was writing the manuscript, fellow indigenous writer Alexis Wright told her it should be a "hymn to the ancestors" (see Radio National's Books and Arts Daily review from early 2013).  The feel of both of those sentiments runs like water throughout this novel for me.

As a whitey, reading a novel set in Queensland, a few thousand k's away from me both geographically and otherwise, I feel a rather keen sense of jealousy, running alongside a feeling of kinship, alongside a conscious need to check my romanticism.  I also feel a sense of defensiveness.  Don't lump me in with those who don't give a shit, because while the songlines are not mine, on wilder whimsy days I fancy I can feel the echo of them through suburban concrete, even if I wouldn't understand them.  Or at least perhaps I'd just like to think so, grasping for some sense of place and solidarity in a country that's seeped itself into my bones in my 43 travels round the sun, but which is not of my extended heritage.  I still feel that disconnect.

I have the requisite collection of a couple of ancestors transported here for stealing meat to feed their starving brothers and sisters, along with a gaggle of settlers, but go back five generations and all of my roots dig down into UK and Guernsey Islands soils.  Places I haven't even visited.  Australia is my home, though this book reminds me that so much of it is still alien and not-yet-known to me in comparison to the ancestors of those who can lay claim to hundreds of thousands of years of custodianship. 

Bill Gammage, in his book The Biggest Estate on Earth, opened my eyes up to a little of that a couple of years ago.  He spells out in detail the intricacies of the land that were known to those original custodians.  How early settlers described the land as akin to the parkland of a manor house, it was that well-ordered.  That the land and its inhabitants were understood and managed to such a degree that fire-sensitive trees and shrubs lived next door to fire-retardant ones, that fire management practices were ongoing, structured and complex, not written down in books or on websites, but passed along via generation-to-generation knowledge.

For the first time in her life, the novel's protagonist, Jo Breen, owns the land she lives on.  After a messy and traumatic divorce, she buys 20 acres of farmland 20 k's inland from Byron Bay on New South Wales's North Coast.  She's moved to Bundjalung land, the land of her ancestors, from Brisbane with her 13 year old daughter, Ellen.

Then Jo meets Twoboy, a looker with dreads who takes her fancy the first time she sees him raunch out of a bookstore with a book under his arm.  Not only a spunk, but Bunjalung, smart as, who's moved back here with his brother up from where he's been studying law in Melbourne.  They're going for a Native Title claim and are about to learn a little more about the cost of reclaiming what's been lost and how some bodies carry that cost in themselves.

Lucashenko is so deft with language and in Jo she creates such a likeable character who is both down to earth but smart and sassy:  "She gazed out over the saltwater, where a distant late-season whale was spouting.  A crow perched in the nearby lemon-scented gums, directly above a plaque proclaiming that somebody Devine had discovered this place.  Jo would normally have been delighted to see that the crow had crapped purple fig-seeded bullshit all over this spurious claim."

This book is about dualities. About the ways language is used as a tool, as a proof of identity.  About barbed wire spaced throughout land once stolen, fences which keep out or keep in.  It is about misconceptions, on both sides of the black and white divide, and about generosity.  It is about a familiar Australia and a foreign one. The dugais (whites) Jo meets out on the roads are dim and stupid and disconnected.  A woman with a camera stops to take an unasked photo of Jo on her horse and then speeds off, without even the consideration of showing her what she's taken.  Idiots driving around in Hummers with "Support our Troops" stickers.

If I wax a little romantic about this book, then forgive me my perceived weakness.  It's only because in the Australia of my currency, spirituality - even if it's earth-based - is still something of an embarrassment, to be kept private, an internal state unrelated to the outer world.  But Jo hangs easy with an unabashed earthy spirituality that is all about the land that is alive, that speaks back, and it makes me sink in.  Like it's safe to see the land in this way, even while I look over my shoulder, waiting for snide remarks about my floweriness.  The cynicism and alienation of 21st century Westerners hangs around my head like Fukushima.

Here, on the one hand DJ's child learns to count using ugari (shellfish) shells "which the full moon had left in its wake"  while on the other Humbug is locked up and belted in the cells for D&D.   Here, I smell a scent of people who are a little closer than mine to remembering that they belong to the earth.  People who rather than "go out" with a bang or anything else, "go in" when they die.

And yet this isn't a modern "noble savage" kind of story by any means.  Lucashenko's characters are layered and contradictory and judgmental, sometimes believing caricatures, not always what they seem, sometimes surprising and sometimes plain batshit annoying, regardless of their heritage.

Of course, the bitter irony is that I am jealous of the belonging of a people to land which for many of them is something they're relearning themselves, putting together pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, vast patches of songlines still unknown or lost forever.  Some people don't understand why January 26 is being made political by some.  This is the reason for me.

Mullumbimby has just been longlisted for the 2014 Stella Prize.  This review is part of the 2014 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

An Amnesty for Library Slackers

Do you still do that old-fashioned thing of actually borrowing actual books from your actual library?  I know, right?  It's so three-dimensional.  Moving your body into a public shared space to borrow books that are on paper?  Bizarre!

Though there is a growing amount of reading I am finding myself doing on my phone (must stop that stupid habit) on the e-reader and on the computer, for me they are still a shadow of the old ways.  The tactile nature of reading a book that is made from paper not plastic means that my enjoyment of book-learnin' has only grown alongside my e-reading.

I love the library, and do not take for granted living in a country that has a plethora of books available for me to borrow and read for myself, all for nothing at my local libe!

Well, nothing except for the fact that as taxpayers we actually pay for it anyway.  But nothing as in no user-pays charges.  Which is a refreshing change, I must say.

And except it doesn't even end up being nothing for me anyway, because as an avid user who struggles to maintain herself upright and responsible and adult and productive within space-time, there's often library fines on my card.

I feel bad about that.  Every time I get another fine I tell myself that that is the last time it will happen.  Next time, I will be more organised and get them back on time.  Which is sort of sad because I actually already am organised.  As soon as I borrow books I come home, make a note of when they're due, and type myself a reminder a day or two earlier to take them back.  But still, one never can tell what sort of a day one is going to have, and suddenly one can find oneself putting off the library till tomorrow, and then tomorrow forgetting about going to the library at all.

Mush-brain.

Which is why I am a little bit in love with the Eastern Regional Library Service's Xmas Food for Fines Amnesty.  Basically, it's a swap - you bring in some non-perishable food all this week, and the library will waive your fines.

Being able to contribute what constitutes a pittance in my country - like, five bucks - but knowing that it will make a diff to some of my fellow struggling folks via local charities, and in the process having the punishment for my impertinence wiped clean?  Nice.  I like that.  Very, very much.

And it ends tomorrow, so wish me luck for getting there on time. 

A Book Review When You're Only 1/5 Through?

I couldn't sleep last night, and so as I finished one novel, I broke open the next straight afterwards.  It always takes some time to hit your straps with a new book.  The first few paragraphs can jar as you suss out the writer's voice, and shake off the previous one.

Last night on First Tuesday Book Club, author Dame Stella Rimmington talked about the unwritten contract of trust that exists between a writer and a reader, and how sometimes you can't hand your trust over straight away.  Sometimes you never hand it over at all.  By page 12 of The History of Love by Nicole Krauss I was crying (and that's a large-print edition version of page 12, too), reading in bed by my book light, hoping it wasn't going to turn into sobs and wake the bed's other occupant.

I'm about a fifth of the way through this book and already I don't want it to end.  There is an inevitability about the ending, both physically when the pages will run out, and also within the story itself.  Leo Gursky is at the end of his life, a man you wouldn't look twice at in the street.  We get to see him through a golden lens.  Nicole manages the magician's feat of accomplishing this without any schmaltz.  There's no Vaseline on the lens, but she writes about love and loss, tragedy, loneliness, despair, beauty, and death in a way that highlights the beauty of life.  Hard to do.  Not many can do it as well. 

I'm so glad to have discovered Nicole Krauss, and so look forward to reading everything she's ever written ;)

Wowtcha Reading?

I've just got home from a great art therapy session at the end of a great weekend. It's going to get down to a chilly 4 degrees tonight (39F) and I'm tired and happy, so what better to do but snuggle down into Keanu and do some reading? On my bookcase is an area set apart for books that I have started or am about to start to read. Looking from here with my poor old astigmatised eyes I estimate there are about 30 books sitting there. It's patently untenable and patently ridiculous.

I received two new-old books in the mail today. They should go on the bookcase unread until I've finished all my other books like a good little girl. But that feels too much like having to eat your peas before dessert so fuck it - what's another two books gonna do when it's already untenable? Therefore I'm going off to read Dreams and Inward Journeys: A Reader for Writers by Marjorie Ford and Jon Ford and The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo (and yes, Tess, both of those books I got because of online recommendations or readings). On the go from the library I also have the monumental tome Oscar & Lucinda by Peter Carey.

Mmm, yummy - reading. Might crack open the Milo tin & eat out of it with a spoon while I'm there with a noice cuppa tea, aye what.

How about you, my most beloved, adored and revered-by-thineself reader? What are you reading at the moment?

Must Have Book

Richard Beck over at Experimental Theology had an amusing post the other day on Why the Anti-Christ is an Idiot. One of the commenters, Phil, referred to a satirical work called Right Behind which parodies the Left Behind series:

"The climax has the hero duking it out with the "antiChrist" in a Christian bookstore, throwing Precious Moments figurines at each other and smashing each other over the head with Thomas Kinkade paintings."

Must put it on the burgeoning to-read list :)

http://www.amazon.com/Right-Behind-Parody-Last-Goofiness/dp/1885767870/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195680528&sr=1-1

Awake Again

This is the second day in a row I've woken up at the 6.30am mark. I think the rain woke me up. It's still sultry, thundery, rainy weather. Stormy weather.

I am thinking I will probably go back to bed at some point, but for now I'm content to sit here online, drinking tea, feeling cosy, contemplating my book on my bedside table (a bit of T Austin-Sparks; has been a long time since I've read any theological stuff and I found it good and necessary to have a long break. Even so, a little goes a long way, these days.

My house has a flat roof, and I think the rain sounds louder than it really is outside. But that's okay. If you're gonna have rain, you may as well have it belting. Just like if you're gonna have music, you may as well have it loud.

It shows how little it rains here in Melbourne when it becomes a defining characteristic of my day. I forget how cosy it feels to be inside while it's pelting outside (and I remind myself that those five foot high weeds growing monstrously around the side of the house shall be much easier to pull out now the earth is wet). I feel pleased that my day is being defined for me by external forces like the weather. It gives me a childlike feeling somehow, a security feeling (is this just me?). Today I am content to stay home, to do some writing (and some weeding, if the rain stops). I am most pleased because I was going to wash Craig today but the rain has done it instead (I still have Craig; Mocca's plaster is off but he's not able to drive for another couple of weeks, so me and the sexy black beast have a bit more time together before Olive the Skanky Mitsubishi returns to my life with her rust, her McDonald's wrappers, her skankiness, to remind me that I don't really care anyway about material items :).

I am enjoying the rain this morning in a way only the seasonally affectively disordered can, knowing that it's not winter and that it shall not discombobulate me because today's forecast is for 31 degrees celcius. Tomorrow is going to be 37, which is just ludicrous for this time of year.

I did some more centering prayer yesterday afternoon and it never ceases to amaze me how it turns me from a bumbling occasional stresshead (it's in the genes, unfortunately) to a calm Zenlike creature full of contentment and Mona Lisa smiles. Really. It's amazing. And my lifeline. It makes me feel the way that writing and God do ... and all three of those things of course are tied up in each other. How beautiful you are, o Mysterious One.

I am now the proud owner of The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron and The Writer's Life by Annie Dillard (both being prepared to head my way from the good ol' US of A on Monday). Has anyone here read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Dillard? Oh to be able write about nature the way she does, with such immediacy. It really was wonderful and deserving of its popularity. The image of that exploding frog is impinged on my mind forever (in a horrible way unfortunately). But the way she unflinchingly recounted it just captured all of the angst of living in a fallen world. And made me think that it's only when you a have a vision of another world that you can face this one unflinchingly in all its ugliness.

Book Addictions

The internet is a nasty little beastie when it comes to fuelling my book addiction. I was reading Lucy's interesting post and the comments about the blurts we have in our heads that stop us creating. Lucy mentioned she was going through Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, which I have done before - at least partially - but don't own. I really like Julia's stuff. She has cool tips like taking yourself on an "artist date" once a week (I have found this quite powerful; has anyone else?) It's a date that you take by yourself, to wherever you go to fuel your creativity (for me it is often the movies). It must be done by yourself, and this is where I think its power lies. Doing stuff by yourself is empowering, but to frame it as an artist's date, while sounding a bit formal, is actually very inspiring. It's like telling the inner critic that you are serious about your talents. Good stuff.

Anyway, so all it took after that was a quick look at my bookshelf - a couple of other Cameron titles but not that one - and a couple of mouse clicks and voila, I am the leading bidder on EBay. So here goes another 30 buck purchase.

It's often cheaper to buy stuff secondhand from the US than Australia, even when you throw in postage. It's one of the bad things about being at the arse end of the world. (Although really, I guess that all depends on your perspective.)

I am just full of addictions, it seems. Stop smoking dope, start buying books. (Or keep buying books, I should say. My prayer to God to stop lasted for a few weeks but I have sinned again). Oh well.

I don't really care, to be honest :) Can you tell? I have other worse addictions than books (and no, I'm not telling. I've bared my soul enough lately).