Reading

With Parliament over for the year and Christmas just around the corner, our politicians will be looking forward to a well-earned rest. So what will they be reading over the summer break?

Usually they tell us they’re tucking into long, complex works by Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or biographies about obscure and impressive sounding military strategists from ancient Rome. Of course that’s rubbish.

Luckily, someone in Kevin Rudd’s office has leaked the entire list of what our leaders will really be reading this summer. Some of the highlights are reproduced below.

Continue reading "The definitive summer reading guide for our pollies" »

Reading the news yesterday that the United States bookstore chain Border has gone into bankruptcy, I began to ask myself how long it could possibly be before a big Australian chain met the same fate. Unfortunately the wait wasn’t long.

A press release came out that afternoon announcing that REDGroup, who control Borders Australia, Angus and Robertson and Whitcoulls in New Zealand, were being placed into administration. This will affect 260 stores.

Really, it is a wonder this didn’t happen earlier given that Australian booksellers have been defying the laws of market theory that would have sent other businesses bust long ago. There are a few reasons why this was pretty inevitable. One involves parallel import laws and the other the internet, but the two are closely linked.

Continue reading "Publishers and book sellers have sealed their own fate" »

I could lay some line on you about it being that time of year again when I go to the great effort of trawling through twelve months of this blog to painstakingly figure out the best items of 2010 so that if you missed them the first time around, you won’t now.

But the simple fact is, like an ageing rocker with no new hits and a great back catalogue, releasing a “best of” compilation at Christmas is just too easy an opportunity to pass up.  Apparently I have more in common with Rod Stewart than just a penchant for blonde tips and women half my age.

That was a joke people.

The only thing I actually have in common with Rod Stewart is a disturbing tendency towards patterned jackets.  I present Rod as Exhibit A and myself in the Rod Stewart stylings as Exhibit B (above).

Continue reading "Well read-head’s best of 2010" »

I remember once going to Guantanamo Bay on assignment and reading “Lolita” on the military jet en route. 

I didn’t think anything of it until I noticed a few people giving me sideways glances. 

It made me wonder if it weren’t slightly inappropriate reading material for a public place.  Sort of like clipping your toenails at the dinner table.

Continue reading "Well readhead: the most arrogant interview ever" »

Is conflict an essential ingredient in a successful creative partnership?

Two memoirs released during the past fortnight beggar the question. 

Life, by the seemingly indestructible Rolling Stone Keith Richards, reveals greater animosity in his relationship with Mick Jagger than anyone imagined.

Continue reading "Well readhead: relationships, conflict and creativity" »

I have a passion which many others might quietly share: I am in love with the Mitford girls.

Such is my passion I have developed a parlour game which some players initially sneer at but soon become obsessed by.

What sisters they were: Dowdy and heroic Jessica, ultra sophisticated Nancy, gloriously beautiful Diana, Unity the tragic Valkyrie, and Pamela who, in Decca’s (Jessica’s) phrase, emerged as ``a you-know-what-bian’’ living with an Italian woman.

Continue reading "Hit or Mitford - everybody’s doing it" »

One of the things I’ve always loved about foreign languages is the way they throw up the perfect single word for a complex concept which takes many English words to explain.  Perhaps the most famous of these is the German word ‘schadenfreude’, meaning the delight we take in another person’s misfortune. 

For Lateline, I recently read a book called ‘Tokyo Vice’  that included a number of fascinating Japanese examples.  My favourite was ‘doki’ which refers to a group of people who join a corporation at the same time; the sort of work family which whom you form a strangely unique bond which endures even after everybody moves on. 

There were also a number of different words for the generic English word ‘sadness’.  ‘Setsunai’, according to author Jake Adelstein, is “a feeling of sadness and loneliness so powerful that is feels as if your chest is constricted, as if you can’t breathe; a sadness that is physical and tangible”.  Another word ‘yarusenai’ means a grief or loneliness of which you can’t rid yourself.

Continue reading "Well readhead: now with less schadenfreude" »

One recent evening, my husband posed the question: If you only had three months left to live, what would you choose to read?

The discussion was travelling along perfectly well until he raised a name guaranteed to set me on a rant: Harold Bloom.

Bloom is a professor at Yale University and the author of many books including How to Read and Why.  That title alone makes me want to employ the great Dorothy Parker quote: “This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly.  It should be thrown with great force.”

Continue reading "Well read-head: Throwing the book at literary snobs" »

With the whole nation absorbed in post-election intrigue, I’m declaring today’s reading list a politics-free zone.  But before I do, I’d like to nominate my favourite ‘what the?’ moment from the coverage of the election campaign.

I rule out going with Mark Latham’s transformation into a ‘journalist’ because it’s far too obvious.  An in-depth analysis of the size of Julia Gillard’s earlobes is a hot contender but also too predictable, given the fun cartoonists have been having with that issue for years.

A front page profile of Rhys Muldoon certainly caught my fancy, complete with its ‘Underbelly’ style photo, implying that the ‘Playschool’ actor had some sinister inside influence in Canberra. But to my taste, nothing topped this rolled-gold quote in a revealing profile of Kevin Rudd: 

Continue reading "Well readhead: the politics-free zone" »

There’s been some buzz around a recent article in New York magazine titled: ‘All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting’. The cover of the publication shows a mother holding her baby with the cover line ‘I Love My Children.  I Hate My Life’.

The author Jennifer Senior (a mother herself) explores a wide range of research on parenting and reports that it overwhelmingly supports the view that parents are not happier than their childless peers, and in many cases, are less so.

She writes about the changing views of childhood in Western society, arguing that before urbanisation, children delivered their parents an economic advantage that’s no longer evident:
‘If you had a farm, they toiled alongside you to maintain its upkeep; if you had a family business, the kids helped mind the store.  But … as we gained in prosperity, childhood came increasingly to be viewed as a protected, privileged time, and once college degrees became essential to getting ahead, children became not only a great expense but subjects to be sculpted, stimulated, instructed, groomed … kids in short went from being our staffs to being our bosses.’

Continue reading "Well readhead: Everyone’s talking about parenting" »

In his new memoir Hitch-22, the public intellectual Christopher Hitchens writes that he now drinks ‘relatively carefully’.  By that, he means only a glass of scotch and half a bottle of wine at lunch, followed by the same at dinner and occasionally a nightcap.

Hitchens’ drinking is the stuff of legend.  In fact, according to family folklore, his first fully-formed sentence was ‘Let’s all go and have a drink at the club.’ 

A 2006 profile in The New Yorker (which among other things notes that ‘Hitchens only recently gave up smoking in the shower’) describes Hitchens as ‘drinking like a Hemingway character: continually and to no apparent effect.’

Continue reading "Well Readhead: Hitchen’ my wagon to the Prat Pack" »

The other day at dinner, my friends and I were discussing the Ten Commandments.  It’s party, party, party when you roll with my posse.

My friend George claimed that God originally made Eleven Commandments, but that one of the tablets was smashed so only ten were left (the actual Bible story is that there were two lots of Commandments; Moses smashed the first batch in anger and then a second series were produced).  Whatever the facts, George’s story excited me enormously.

“I’ve got a great idea for a movie!” I cried.  “The Eleventh Commandment!  What if it wasn’t really smashed and there was a race to find it, like secret treasure?”

Continue reading "Well readhead: There’s Nothing New Under the Sun" »

There’s nothing wrong with the Beach Boys per se. The album “Pet Sounds” routinely shows up on best-of-all-time lists. But I’m feeling a bit less fondly towards them after recently having the chorus of “Help Me Rhonda” stuck in my head on a loop. It reappeared several days in a row. 

This experience is called an earworm. Germans first came up with the term ohrwurm to describe the musical itch that apparently affects almost everyone at some stage or another. Research into earworms has found that virtually any piece of music can become one. Most people have a particular song of their own that they find uniquely irritating. But more generally, there are factors that make certain songs more likely to become earworms than others. 

One of the world’s authorities on earworms is Professor James Kellaris, a marketing and music expert at the University of Cincinnati.

Continue reading "Well read-head: I’ve got worms" »

When tennis legend Andre Agassi won Wimbledon for the first time, he telephoned his father afterwards.

“Pops?  It’s me!  Can you hear me?  What’d you think?” Agassi asked him.

There was silence at the other end of the phone.

“Pops?” said Agassi.

Finally his father spoke.

“You had no business losing that fourth set,” his father replied.

Continue reading "Well-readhead: The memoir boom" »

Take a look at my bookshelf:

Judging from the available space, any books purchased after 2013 will need to be stored in the fridge.

You can see why an electronic book reader might appeal. I’m a serious book lover so have had some resistance to the idea of an e-reader. But I bought an Amazon Kindle late last year and have now been using it – alongside regular books – for about three months. I know the world needs another kindle review like it needs another Britney Spears crotch shot, but I feel obliged because I promised on twitter that I’d share my thoughts after I’d given the kindle a decent workout.

Continue reading "Well readhead: Take a look at my bookshelf" »

We all know the Prime Minister writes books but does he read them? We are left wondering because the author of Jasper and Abby and the Great Australia Day Kerfuffle did not take part in a landmark survey of federal politicians’ reading habits, to be published this Wednesday in The Australian Literary Review. 

Tony Abbott was not so shy, revealing his favourite novel to be J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings. 

Julia Gillard played it safe with Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, Joe Hockey showed his SNAG side with Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Peter Garrett was immersed in a Bunnings catalogue (he also mentioned March, the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by the one-time Fairfax reporter Geraldine Brooks).

Continue reading "Revealed: our federal politicians’ favourite books" »

Today I’m going to be a curmudgeon.  Let’s start with Avatar.  I hated it.  Before anyone starts:  yes, I know the special effects are amazing.  Yes, I saw it in 3D.  Yes, I know it’s nominated for a Best Film Oscar.  I still hated it.  The plot was lame and I resented being bashed over the head with the groaningly obviously political message.

While we’re at it, I also didn’t like Lord of the Rings. Fell asleep in the cinema in fact. Hell, as long as I’m bucking conventional wisdom, I may as well really disgrace myself: I find Monty Python terminally unfunny. I don’t get the big deal about Bob Dylan. And I don’t reckon Brad Pitt’s that attractive.

I usually keep these views to myself because of the reaction they provoke. The Monty Python one in particular attracts gasps of disbelief and horror.

Continue reading "Well readhead: Avatar, Dylan and Monty Python suck" »

Let me begin with a couple of disclaimers.

I’m the first to acknowledge that – unlike the creator of this column Leigh Sales – I don’t have red hair (or even muted tones of burgundy) although I’ve occasionally been a little daring at the hairdressers.

Just a little.

Continue reading "Well read-head: Births, Deaths and Marriages" »

The people who run my local coffee shop must think I’m a freak.  I fear I’m the only patron who ever shows up with both Who Weekly AND The Australian Financial Review. So that people won’t think less of me, I hide The Fin inside Who Weekly cover.

Even though I have a constant back stack of New Yorkers, Atlantic Monthlies, Economists and Spectators, the damned Who Weekly manages to suck me in every other week it seems.  The reason is that it constantly offers lists: Sexiest People, Most Beautiful People, Skinniest Celebrities, Fattest Celebrities, Best Break-Ups, etc etc etc.

I’ve always been a sucker for a ‘Best Of’ list.  This time of year is heaven because invariably newspapers and magazines rank the year’s top political scandals, celebrities, news events, films, natural disasters, photographs, books – anything you care to name.  Not only do I love to read a good list, I love to write them (as the oeuvre of this blog demonstrates).  And there’s no way I’m going to let the end of 2009 pass without a few ‘best of’ lists of my own.

Continue reading "Well-readhead: I’m a sucker for a “Best Of” list" »

I recently gave an address at the Media 140 Conference in Sydney about the impact of social media on journalism.  I was invited to speak about the ethics and professionalism of the way I use twitter.  Today’s post is adapted from my remarks.

My guiding principle is ‘If in doubt, leave it out’. 

In other words, when it comes to what I put on twitter, I err on the side of caution - as I do with what I write or broadcast generally.

Continue reading "Well-readhead: How and why I use Twitter" »

Here’s a few things we learned this week: lip-synching and Kevin Rudd are predominately out, keeping university colleges safe is in and we’ve all got something to ask Tiger Woods.

A selection of some of the best writing from this week @ The Punch follow after the jump. And if you’re looking for something else to help pass the afternoon,  watch the video above about a National Geographic photographer.

Continue reading "This week @ The Punch" »

I regularly find myself chairing panels at writers’ festivals or in bookshops and I give a standard spiel at the beginning of every event.

‘We’ll have time for questions at the end,’ I say, ‘And let me emphasise that we want questions, not statements.  If you stand up and make a statement, I will cut you off and publicly humiliate you.’

It usually gets a laugh ... until they realise I’m completely serious.

Continue reading "Well-readhead: Don’t make me publicly humiliate you" »

A few highlights from Punch staff and contributors are over the jump. For a bit of fun, check out the #medievalbumperstickers thread on Twitter from today. And here’s a video that’s worth another look.

One reader insight from this week is from Punch regular Zeta, with a considered position on asylum seekers (also over the jump). Have a great weekend.

Continue reading "If you missed them" »

Is there any way I could convince you to read aloud in public from a diary you kept when you were fourteen?

A group called Cringe is encouraging people to do just that.  Its founder, a blogger named Sarah Brown, started Cringe in a Brooklyn bar in 2005 and it’s since spread to London.  Members of the group get together and read aloud from things they wrote as teenagers – diaries, poems, letters, songs, plays, you name it. 

Sarah Brown has turned the best – or perhaps the worst – of the material into a book.

Continue reading "Well read-head: ‘Dear Diary’" »

‘There,’ I said, balancing the candle I’d snapped off the broach in the palm of my hand. ‘What do you think?’ I ran my other hand through my hair, pushing back my recalcitrant fringe. My fingers came away moist. It was hot in the workroom, but that wasn’t the only reason I was sweating.

Even though I had been making candles ever since I could remember, I awaited Pillar’s opinion nervously. It wasn’t that Pillar was such a great candlemaker; in fact, he often lamented how pedestrian and ordinary his work was and that he only earned enough lire to survive. Pillar was right. His work was nothing special, not compared with the work of the master candlemakers who lived on the salizzada and controlled the Candlemakers Scuola, but what he thought mattered terribly to me. While he lacked the artistic flair of the masters, or their golden ducats to spend on exotic waxes and wicks, his candles were solid, the wicks dependable, and they burnt long and brightly.

‘Well?’ I pressed. He didn’t usually take so long to offer his opinion. ‘Can we afford to purchase more beeswax?’

Continue reading "Book extract: Tallow" »

It has become somewhat fashionable of late to out oneself as a bit of a reader. A self-confessed bookworm. A well-read head, as it were.

The trend, of course, was started by this site’s resident well red-head, complete with that strangely-situated hyphen of hers, and it is indeed her shining example that has compelled me to write this piece. In her first column for this website, and in more or less each of her columns since, Ms Sales has – I’m sure you will have noticed – been detailing her personal history as a reader: her obsessive love of word puzzles; her discovery of camaraderie and community at a writer’s festival; and the origin of her love reading, Enid Blyton’s The Enchanted Wood, as well as the many tributaries that have fed into that love ever since.

For my money, though, her best piece remains the one she wrote, somewhat earlier on, about being interrupted when very obviously engaged with a book. “The final step,” she wrote in that piece, “is to explode.”

Continue reading "Shed kilos and get bitchin’ abs with existential prose" »

Not long before Patrick Swayze died, I watched Dirty Dancing, partly for fun and partly searching for an answer to a pretty callous question: why was I oddly upset about Swayze’s terminal cancer when not only was he a stranger, but an average actor whose only real hits, Ghost and Dirty Dancing, were twenty years ago?

Harsh, yes.  But it’s what I thought.

I still recall the day that I first saw Dirty Dancing.  It was 1987.  My three best friends and I were on school holidays and Melissa’s dad dropped us at the cinema at the Toombul Shopping Centre in Brisbane.  We were buzzing with excitement, no doubt wearing acid wash jeans and oversized shirts with our fringes sprayed and teased into concrete boards, like every other fourteen year old girl of the day.

Continue reading "Well read-head: The Time of My Life" »

If you are reading this piece you’re probably not among the close to half of the population with literacy and numeracy skills below the required levels to meet the demands of everyday life and work.

This figure comes from the Adult Literacy and Lifeskills survey undertaken by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2006 and while not up-to-the-minute, is worth reflecting on in light of last week’s National Literacy and Numeracy Week.

Specifically the survey revealed that between 46% and 70% of adults in Australia had poor or very poor skills across one or more of the five skill domains of prose literacy, document literacy, numeracy, problem-solving and health literacy.

Continue reading "Almost half of Australians have problems with literacy" »

Are people who read better people than those who don’t?

That’s the view of a well known Italian writer who was recently in Australia for the Melbourne Writers’ Festival. You know Vicenzo Cerami’s writing if you’ve seen the film Life is Beautiful. He wrote the screenplay.

‘Those who read are better people,’ he told The Australian newspaper. ‘They are able to travel with their imagination, so they can look at things from different perspectives and don’t take things at face value. They are more mature and tolerant and therefore more realistic about the complexity of life.’

Continue reading "Well read-head: Does reading make you a better person?" »

A selection of reads from Punch contributors and editors over the course of this extraordinary news week is below the fold, but first it’s worth a close look at this pic, which ran with this piece imagining Sex and the City VI. Enjoy the weekend.

Continue reading "In case you missed them…." »

Recently, an oily looking salesman in a shopping mall unexpectedly grabbed my hand and starting rubbing some cream into it.

He had a mono brow and a lank, black ponytail at the nape of his neck. 

‘Oh, very dry hands,’ he declared triumphantly as he massaged in the cream.

Continue reading "Well read-head: Antidotes to people who spoil your day" »

Julie and Poh know what to do with century eggs, tempered chocolate and rabbit hindquarters, but even they might struggle with these ingredients: 1 x 425g tin of crushed pineapple, 1 cup of coconut and 1 x 250g container of sour cream.

Do you know what it makes?  Here’s a hint: ‘Mix together and leave for a couple of hours.  Serve on lettuce leaves.’

If you answered ‘Pineapple Salad’, then perhaps your childhood, like mine, included neighbourhood pool parties at which the adults downed shandies and Coolabah cask wine while nibbling on devils-on-horseback (prunes wrapped in bacon). 

Continue reading "Well read-head: Julie and Poh inspire a cookbook trip" »

The Productivity Commission’s recommendation for the removal of parallel importation restrictions on books is a cause for celebration for book lovers in Australia.

By that I mean the millions of Australian consumers who will benefit from the removal of these outdated protectionist measures.

The books debate this time round (there have been five earlier reports to Government - all but one recommended the full removal of protection, while the fifth recommended partial removal) has predictably been dominated by hysterical doomsday claims from authors and publishers.

Continue reading "Freeing up the books market is great news for readers" »

Recently, a stranger walked up to me in a café.

‘Is that The Sydney Morning Herald you’re reading?’ she asked.  She looked about 30 and her hair was tied back in a ponytail. I told her it was and she immediately drew closer to take a look.

‘I just need to see yesterday’s word,’ she said.

Continue reading "AMARKEEGO spells GEEK-O-RAMA: Well read-head" »

My husband and I have a running gag about trying to find our ‘peeps’ (as in people).  We’re from Queensland so Sydney’s segregation has always bemused us.  When you meet somebody from Brisbane, and you’re also from Brisbane, the opening question is always the same: ‘North side or south side?’  And really, there’s not that much difference.

In Sydney, the options are endless.  You can be a beach person, but there’s a difference between an eastern suburbs beach person and a northern beaches person.  You can live at Newtown and be urban grunge.  You can live at Paddington and be urban sophisticate.  The North shore is foreign to the Inner West.  The Inner West bears little relationship to greater Western Sydney.  Balmain, Chatswood and Double Bay are all affluent but they’re as varied as espresso, green tea and French champagne. 

Somebody who lives at Kings Cross is not the same as somebody who lives at Potts Point, even though they can probably spy on each other through their curtains.  It’s overwhelming.  Finding your peeps in Sydney takes a lot of searching.

Continue reading "Well read-head: my peeps are pensioners in ponchos" »

Why is it that some people obviously consider reading to be “doing nothing”?  Many a time I’ve been on a plane or a train, reading, and the person next to me will strike up a conversation as if I were doing nothing.  It happens in my own home too. 

When I open a book in the living room, it’s apparently a signal to members of my family to sit down and start chatting.  In fact, so often am I pestered while reading that I’ve built up an arsenal of manoeuvres to deflect interrupters.

The first step is to ignore.  The interrupter will usually assume you’ve not heard them because you’re so absorbed in what you’re reading.  While this is often enough to deter a stranger, it won’t stop a family member.  Relatives – and the bold - will certainly blunder forward.

Continue reading "Well read-head: back off or I’ll throw the book at you" »

Some people are obsessive about cleanliness.  Others can’t leave the house without checking the stove twenty eight times. 

My compulsion is reading.  Lost pet posters, religious tracts, magazines, junk mail, children’s books, fashion websites, coffee shop noticeboards, blogs: if it has words on it, I can’t help myself reading it.

The extent of my addiction struck me once when I was sitting in a doctor’s waiting room.

Continue reading "Well read-head: Three cheers for the world wide web" »