Please join Alan Brough at a celebration at the State Library on Friday 20 March, 4 - 5pm when he announces the the top five books, as voted by Victorian readers in the State Library of Victoria’s Summer Read program 2008-9, and voter’s prizes.

Experimedia
State Library of Victoria
328 Swanston Street, Melbourne

RSVP by Wednesday 17 March 2009

Telephone                   8664 7555
email                          learning@slv.vic.gov.au
book online                summerreadawards.eventbrite.com

Thanks Steven for your beautiful posts, which will inspire many a classic to be added to ‘must read’ lists this summer.

As part of the free Summer Read events across Victoria, Steven will be appearing at:

• Radcliffe’s in Echuca on Thursday 15 January 2009, 8 – 9pm
For more information phone Echuca Library 5482 1997 or book online http://summerread2.eventbrite.com

• Sam Merrifield Library, Moonee Ponds on Thursday 22 January 2009, 7.00 – 8.00 pm
For more information phone 8325 1950 or book online http://summerread3.eventbrite.com

Vote for The Zookeeper’s War or SMS ZOO to 13 46 88

Care to share recommendations, anyone?  When I think about favourite books, it’s clear to me that I value different books for different reasons.  Instead of trying to rank my favourite books, I’ve come up with the following disorderly list (omitting those books I’ve already mentioned this week).

• The Innocent - Ian McEwan.  One of McEwan’s lesser known books, but for my money the best-plotted and with some of his most vivid characters (and most gruesome scenes).  I have to confess that I’m a McEwan groupie, though not all of his books reach the high standard of his best.
• The Heather Blazing - Colm Toibin.  In contrast to McEwan’s work, a book that achieves its wondrous emotional effects in a quiet, soft way.
• Affliction - Russell Banks.  One of the few books about (American) working class life that has really held me rivetted throughout.
• The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell.  Passionate purple prose.  As a 20-year-old I lived in these books.
• Possession - A.S. Byatt.  This book has a lot to answer for.  By making scholarship sound romantic, it encouraged me to sign on for a postgraduate education.
• Underworld - Don DeLillo.  Perhaps not the warmest book ever written, but staggering, astonishing, awe-inspiring.  Seems at times as if the prose could have been written by a god.
• Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut.  Science-fiction by someone who was there.  Unforgettable eyewitness account of the annihilation of Dresden by Allied bombers.  So it goes.
• All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy.  It’s only the horses and the senoritas who are pretty here.  McCarthy’s prose is unique.
• Lord of the Flies - William Golding.  The sober, unvarnished truth about children.
• The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie.  After this, Rushdie had nowhere else to go, and nor did his legion of immitators.
• Regeneration - Pat Barker.  A compassionate book about men and war that only a woman could have got away with.
• Nice Work - David Lodge.  One of his best.  Great characters, funny, intelligent.
• Mates of Mars - David Foster.  The best book by Australia’s most infuriating writer.  Triumphantly two-dimensional.

That’s it from me (though I’ll be keen to take part in any discussion).  Thanks for hearing me out this week, and have some happy summer reads.

Steven

(www.stevenconte.com)

        “The Reader” (1856) by Ferdinand Heilbuth

As a 20-year-old in 1986 I spent a year hitchhiking around western Europe, stopping to work in Belgium and Cornwall in order to fund each new leg of travel.  The year was rewarding in many ways, but one of the most enduring benefits was having the time to read 65 books, most of them novels.  In subsequent years I’ve sometimes let my reading slide, but that year of intense absorption in books in early adulthood gave me a reservoir of story which I still draw on as a writer.  

A subtle shift was taking place in my reading at this time.  Previously, I had tended, consciously or otherwise, to read with the aim of better understanding myself; now I was not only becoming more analytical about the craft of fiction but also more emotionally involved in the dilemmas of characters who were unlike myself.  Five more years would pass before I really understood the difference, and the book that clarified it for me was George Eliot’s Middlemarch. 

Middlemarch is a truly great novel (and one peculiarly suited to readers around the age of 25, I suspect).  It is full of interest, but what particularly fascinated me was the novel’s depiction of the marriage of the heroine Dorothea and the emotionally arid, elderly scholar Casaubon, particularly Casaubon’s attempt to extract a promise from Dorothea that after his death she will write the magnum opus he has spent his whole life researching.  The plea is both cruel and pathetic, yet later (at the end of Chapter 42) Casaubon seems briefly to understand that Dorothea deserves freedom: 

•   “Come, my dear, come.  You are young, and need not to extend your life by watching.”
•   When the kind quiet melancholy of that speech fell on Dorothea’s ears, she felt something like the thankfulness that might well up in us if we had narrowly escaped hurting a lamed creature.  She put her hand into her husband’s, and they went along the broad corridor together. 

I dislike the idea that fiction is for anything – that it functions as therapy for the writer, for instance, or as edification for the reader.  But while stories may not have a function they do have one powerful effect: the creation of empathy for others.  Eliot shows empathy in action, but by immersing us in the inner lives of her characters she also makes empathy a basic requirement for reading her work.  This has far-reaching effects, not just on individual readers (whose brains, I’d wager, are reconfigured by reading fiction) but also on the societies they’re part of.  Notoriously, many Nazis were connoisseurs of music and art, and yet novels were poison to them.  I’d go so far as to claim that the behind the great liberation movements of the last 200 years – the freeing of slaves, the universal franchise, decolonisation, the civil rights movement, feminism and equal rights for gays and lesbians and co. – there were people whose values were shaped by reading fiction.   

There should be more of it.

George Eliot, aka Mary Anne Evans

In my late teens, with writing in mind, I began to read with half an eye on the mechanics of plot and style, but for the most part I still read overwhelmingly for pleasure, and with an egoistic need to understand my own place in the world.  Increasingly, this became a need to understand where I stood with girls, and in particular where I stood in relation to a girl I’d fallen catastrophically in love with at the age of 17.  Let’s call her Beatrice. 

Beatrice was a smart, precocious and talented girl who, doubtlessly for sound emotional reasons, preferred to keep me as a friend while she went with other boys.  The effect on my ego was naturally painful, and in my reading I turned to a series of novels about unrequited love, discovering a veritable sub-genre in which a young male protagonist falls under the spell of a compelling and always beautiful woman, often with tragic consequences, usually for the woman.  It would be easy for me now to mock these books, or to subject them to searing feminist critiques, but lost or unrequited love is one of the great themes of literature, and some of the books I read at this time are profound works of art.  Even those of less literary merit continue to mean a lot to me.  The following is a list of the most memorable:

• The Girl in a Swing – Richard Adams
• Diana – R.F. Delderfield
• The Summer of Katya – Trevanian              
• Sophie’s Choice – William Styron
• Justine – Lawrence Durrell
• The Garden of the Finzi-Continis – Giorgio Bassani
• The Magus – John Fowles
• Le Grand Meaulnes – Alain-Fournier

On 9 October 1987 Beatrice was killed in a head-on collision on the New England Highway ten kilometres south of Tamworth.  She was 18 year-old.  To this day I can’t think of her without a gust of grief, and the word I detest most in the English language is “closure”. 

At the time of Beatrice’s death I was already aware of the problematic way in which some of the aforementioned novels effectively silence their female characters with admiration, and when I came to write a first novel, set in Tasmania during the Franklin Dam dispute and inspired by Beatrice, I tried to confront this problem by making it an explicit theme.  I’d like to think that the finished book has some good things going for it, but I was still new to the craft of writing and probably still too close to the events that had inspired the novel.  Maybe I’ll return to it someday.

                                       ”Dante and Beatrice” (1883) by Henry Holiday. 

At the age of 12 I went to live, for various complicated reasons, in a boys’ boarding school, and for the next few years I read in self-defence.  This is no exaggeration.  With novels, I attempted to protect a self that was reeling from sporadic beatings by other boys, as well as canings inflicted haphazardly by men.  Whenever gaps appeared in the institutional routine I would escape behind weather sheds or pine-tree windbreaks and read books such as The Hobbit, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, The Dark is Rising and Lord of the Rings. 

At 14, seeking other lengthy books to dwell in, I read War and Peace, which I’d earlier encountered in the form of a BBC television series.  Much of the novel must have gone over my head (I haven’t returned to yet it to check), but I retain vivid impressions of many scenes, including one in which Pierre Bezukhov, a Russian aristocrat held captive by the retreating French army, ponders his pleasure at being given a pinch of gunpowder to spice his daily ration of horsemeat. 

From Tolstoy I moved on to John Wyndham’s various visions of disaster – The Day of the Triffids, The Midwich Cuckoos, The Kraken Wakes – recognising in all of them, as I had in War and Peace, a vision of society reduced to chaos and at times to savagery (a scenario that readers of The Zookeeper’s War will also find familiar).

Of course, not all of my adolescent reading was self-directed, and since leaving school I’ve had to ruefully admit that I received a first-rate literary education there.  Shakespeare, Austin, Dickens, Lawrence, Steinbeck, Greene, Huxley, Orwell (in 1984 I studied 1984) were some of the writers I encountered in class.  By this stage, fiction was no longer just a form of self-defence; it was also a powerful method of self-fashioning.  From fiction I reinforced or modified the values, beliefs, philosophies and opinions I’d formed in childhood, and of course I also discovered entirely new ones.  Fiction was at the centre of my inner life, and at the age of 16 I resolved to become a novelist, never imagining that 25 years would have to pass for this ambition to become a reality.

The 1973 BBC television adaptation of War and Peace, starring Anthony Hopkins as Pierre.

John Wydham’s stinging indictment of our addiction to vegetable oil.

The significance of reading has changed for me over the years; or to be more precise, new reasons for reading have settled over earlier ones in sedimentary layers.  This week I plan to summarise various phases of my reading life (though I’m happy to chat about any aspect of reading or writing).

Like many bookish people I was read to as a child – in my case by my mother.  From the beginning I experienced reading as an act of love, and a passion for story naturally followed.  (It’s not surprising, perhaps, that love of one kind or another is a central theme of the vast majority of novels.)  A favourite book of mine from those days was The Sailor Dog by Margaret Wise Brown, which begins with the following immortal words:

      “Born at sea in the teeth of a gale, the sailor was a dog.  Scuppers was his name.” 

On the corresponding page, Scuppers is depicted in a mackintosh and rain-hat at the helm of a sloop in ferocious seas (apparently whelped and weaned and sent straight up on deck).  These days, I love dogs as avidly as books, and my mother has a Labrador retriever named Scuppers.

In a daring narrative move, the second page of The Sailor Dog recounts the hero’s puppyhood in a single sentence: “After that he went to live on the land”.  The rest of the story tells of Scuppers’ adventures as he reclaims his maritime heritage, and it occurs to me now that my subsequent reading – and for that matter my writing – is in part a search for fleeting moments of tenderness such as those experienced during my first contact with books.

“Born at sea in the teeth of a gale…”

Author with faithful hound, Meddles

Steven Conte is next Summer Read author blogging from 1 – 5 December.

Steven Conte was born and raised in rural New South Wales. He has lived and worked in Europe, Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne, and his first published short stories drew on his experiences as a traveller. He has supported his writing with numerous jobs, including barman, taxi driver and life model. In 1998 he moved to Melbourne and in 2000 began a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne, developing the manuscript that became The Zookeeper’s War. He graduated in 2005 and now lives in a Melbourne university college where he works as a student advisor.

His book The Zookeepers War is one of the books on the Summer Read shortlist.

The Zookeepers War tells the story of an Australian woman, Vera, and her German husband Axel who are zookeepers in wartime Berlin. When the zoo’s staff are drafted into the army, forced labourers are sent in as replacements. They become the zoo’s only hope as tension mounts in the closing days of war. This powerful story confronts the brutality of war and the challenges on many levels as a result. The Zookeeper’s War this year won the inaugural Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction.

As part of the free Summer Read events across Victoria, Steven will be appearing at:
• Radcliffe’s in Echuca on Thursday 15 January 2009, 8 – 9pm
For more information phone Echuca Library 5482 1997 or online at http://summerread2.eventbrite.com

• Sam Merrifield Library, Moonee Ponds on Thursday 22 January 2009, 7.00 – 8.00 pm
For more information phone 8325 1950 or book online at http://summerread3.eventbrite.com

What Steven says about summer reading

“Last June I took my first northern-hemisphere holiday in 15 years, and so my most recent summer reading was only half a year ago. I was in Morocco when I came across an old copy of a novel I’d first read as a teenager, The Girl in a Swing by Richard Adams, who also wrote Watership Down. I remembered liking the novel, so I swapped it for another and took it with me on a trip to the Sahara Desert. Books are passports to different worlds, and the England and Denmark of The Girl in a Swing gave me cooling relief from the Sahara sun. At the same time, this story of a timid porcelain dealer’s romance with a femme fatale, and its supernatural consequences, transported me back to the teenager I was in the 1980s. Books are like that: teleportation and time travel in one small and affordable device.”