As part of a bio for a talk I’m giving in a couple of weeks, I’ve been asked to list my five favourite books. This question always makes my mind go blank. The same happens when my sons ask me, ‘What is your favourite song of all time?’ It’s impossible to answer and, besides, it changes every five minutes, at least for me, and yet I feel I need to provide a well-considered answer that I can substantiate in some way. I’m reminded of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, in which the two guys in the music shop keep quizzing each other about the top ten albums of all time, then arguing about the order and contents of the list as if there’s some absolutes involved.

 Having said all that, here are my ‘top five books of all time’ (for today, at least).

1. The Owl Service by Alan Garner: I see that Margo Lanagan is about to read Strandloper by Alan Garner (which I must hunt down as I haven’t read it yet). He was a favourite author of mine when I was a kid and The Owl Service is his best. He was the original YA author before the term was invented. He wrote of teenage relationships and family issues but never in a turgid way and he interwove all this with magic and legend. He never talked down to his readers. Beautiful, powerful stuff.
2. As I lay dying by William Faulkner. I haven’t read a lot of Faulkner but the US critic, Harold Bloom, recommends this as Faulkner’s best. It’s modernist in style, a kind of sparse poetry.
3. Disgrace by JM Coetzee. I love all of Coetzee’s work but for me Disgrace is the perfect novel. I often went back to it when I was writing Dissection. A great study in ‘how to do it.’ (I also looked at Youth a good deal too.)
4. Tree of Man by Patrick White. Perhaps the most accessible of White’s novels, the depiction of the central relationship between the husband and wife is acutely and tenderly observed as they raise a family and grow old against the backdrop of the Australian bush.
5. Home by Marilynne Robinson. The most current of my top five. Robinson is also the author of Housekeeping, which I’ve already mentioned. Home is a delicately structured and beautifully written novel about very little (in the way of plot) but a good deal in the way of the infinitely complicated nature of family. A joy.

As a postscript to yesterday’s blog, I would add Helen Garner’s The Spare Room as compelling and compulsory reading. A warts-and-all portrayal of terminal illness and its effect on those who care for the dying.

I’m now off to Warrnambool to speak at the library there. My last blog will be from Port Fairy (so long as I can find a computer and internet access.)