It’s a fine spring day here in south-east Melbourne, Australia. There is an intense bite to the sunshine as it wavers through the thick clouds and pallid sky, and a damp, chilly breeze gusts up at frequent intervals. I can’t decide if I’m feeling too hot or too cold as I type at my outdoor table, in the shade of the creaky old laserlite roof. My cats Riker and Odin are snoozing in their outdoor cat run. Though they are mostly indoor cats, they enjoy their daily dose of fresh air, sunshine and grass in the sheltered safety of the cat run, stocked up with water and food and warm bedding.
I spent most of the last two months being quite ill – as did roughly half of Melbourne, from what I heard from my other unwell friends. A nasty flu virus ripped through the suburbs, leaving most of us bedridden for weeks, coughing and spluttering and in incredible discomfort. Thankfully the spring school holidays saved us from the daily grind so we could get some desperately-needed rest. Sure, we had to give up on our plans to do catch-ups and playdates with all the friends they don’t see regularly since they changed schools, but we redeemed it through Star Wars and lots of homemade hot lunches.
I am still recovering from the virus, and am pretty sure that I need my own personal reserved car park at the medical clinic by this stage (maybe a silver, gold and platinum card status for regular patients? Or every fifth appointment comes with a free coffee?). But the spring sunshine and cheerful birdsong and just the whole “thank God it’s Friday” vibe gives the chilly air a kind of creative optimism to it, as though the sunlight carries generative powers beaming down, carried on the light. Or it could be the caffeine coursing through my system after my morning coffee. Either way, I feel like today should be a good one for writing and drawing. I am still in the throes of Inktober (a daily ink-drawing challenge held in October) while also preparing for NaNoWriMo. This year I participated in Camp NaNoWriMo for the first time, so I do come into this new NaNo proper with more material than I normally would, but as I look with mild alarm at the looming start-date on my calendar, I realise that I have a lot of work yet to do before I am ready to begin the 50,000 words first draft in 30 days challenge. This will be my fifth NaNoWriMo (not counting the two Camp NaNos) and I now have a pretty good sense (I think) for how it will pan out. I also have a better sense of just how much planning and preparation I need to realistically make it a successful writing month. Basically, more than I expect.
Hello, I am a NaNoWriMo Plantser!
“Why am I not asleep?” he thought, while shining a beam of pure information directly into his eyes from eight inches away.
— Josh Gondelman (@joshgondelman) September 25, 2016
To that end, as part of my NaNo and pre-Christmas / summer holidays prep, I’ve been cramming as many books as my eyeballs can read. I must admit that I lost book-reading momentum while I was sick – lying in bed refreshing facebook at 30-second intervals because it felt too hard to do much else. Honestly I think bingeing on facebook was a mistake. I probably should’ve tried to sleep more, or do quiet, gentle creative things instead of diving into the abyss of my newsfeed, which as always left me with sore thumbs from scrolling, sore eyes from staring at the screen, sleeplessness from the bright phone light, and a feeling of growing mental exhaustion through exposure to the highly polarised politics of my friends and family (who cover basically the entire spectrum from extreme conservative to extreme liberal).*
*Though I’m sure most of us think of ourselves as “centrist-moderate,” regardless of our objective point on the political compass!
Once I recovered a little and put the phone down, it was time to get back into reading. Since the last time I posted here I have added another seven books to my list of books I’ve read cover-to-cover – most of which were in the last week or so.
They are:
- J. R. R. Tolkien (1955, 2008) and Alan Lee (illustrator). The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. London: HarperCollins Publishers.
- Richard Rohr and Mike Morrell (2016). The Divine Dance: The Trinity and your transformation. New Kensington: Whitaker House.
- John Mullan (2006). How Novels Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- N. K. Jemisin (2015). The Fifth Season. New York: Orbit. 498 pages.
- J. O’Barr (1981, 2002). The Crow. New York: Simon & Schuster.
- Andrew Scott (2014). Northern Lights: the positive policy example of Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway. Clayton: Monash University Publishing.
- Tom Gauld (2013, 2014). You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack. New York: Drawn & Quarterly.
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
This was my second re-read of this magnificent trilogy. A significant section of the novel comprises the appendix and future of the characters. It is, I think, ultimately a very sad story. Yes, they achieve their purposes and triumph, but the appendices tell us also of their ends. How they all, one-by-one, disappear from the world. I found the death of Arwen especially sad.
The Divine Dance
This was a frustrating example of a book I really, really wanted to like. The content was brilliant; the writing style was – in my subjective, personal opinion – so choppy and disconnected, distracted even – that I struggled through it. The whole way through it I felt that it wasn’t up to Richard Rohr’s usual excellent standard. It read to me like a Gen X trying to write an “authentic” “relevant” book for Millennials. I sort of picture someone awkwardly making gang signs and misappropriating other cultural expressions, saying, “Hey kids, can you hear what I’m rapping? Word!” (All right that’s not fair, I’m being too harsh.) The problem I have (as a Millennial) is that when I picked up this book, I didn’t want someone trying to be relatable to my age – I wanted to learn from the wisdom and life experience of the 70-something Franciscan hermit priest whose name is in the bigger typeface on the cover. I wanted to read someone who writes like my devout Catholic grandmother with her collection of Thomas Merton books, not someone who quotes from a whole bunch of recently popular movies and songs I’ve never watched nor heard. Personally, and it really bothers me to have disliked the book, Fr Rohr’s freely available lectures on the same topic that I’ve watched on YouTube did a far better job communicating the content of Rohr’s learning on the topic. I think if the book would work for anyone, it would be for Gen X/ older Gen Y evangelical protestants who want a non-threatening read on the Catholic perspective of Trinity, especially if they’re looking for points of connection and ecumenical discussion.
How Novels Work
This book was brilliant and very helpful. It is intended for readers, especially reading groups, who want to understand the texts they have at a deeper level. The book discusses various elements of novel writing – from titles, to tense, to perspective, to characterisation, and it draws on a number of historical and recent texts. Most helpfully, it was written in such a way that one did not need to have read any of the example books to be able to appreciate what the author John Mullan was explaining. (However, it did make me add a few books to me to-read list!) As someone who wants to learn how to write, I also found it very inspiring and informative. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who considers themselves a book lover, reader or writer.
The Fifth Season
Wow. What do I say about this spectacular novel?! I first heard of it in a recent article I read (on my facebook newsfeed, so I guess maybe facebook can be helpful at times) about the achievements of the author N. K. Jemisin, who is an African-American woman fantasy / speculative fiction writer. In a genre of writing that in my own reading exposure far too often seems to fall back on Anglicised masculine tropes (though this year I’ve been reading outside of those limitations and discovering many wonderful writers with all kinds of different voices), and monocultural characters, The Fifth Season was a wonderful change of pace and perspective.
Firstly, Jemisin’s writing style is magnificent and quite frankly I have never read anything like it. Just purely as an example of a very unique, very clever piece of writing, this novel is a must-read.
Secondly, the fantasy elements of this story are genuinely original: a world in which some people are born with the ability to control and manipulate the movements of the very structures of the earth, volcanoes and earthquakes; where statue-like creatures of stone move in and out of the landscape; where strange objects orbit the Pangea-like continent of this dangerous world. It is incredibly rich, cleverly imagined, and so well written I felt like I was able to see what the characters could see as they extended their powerful awareness into the physical earth.
Thirdly, it is really helpful (to my Anglo-Celtic/Norse Gael Australian perspective) to read a book written from the standpoint of a woman of African heritage whose ethnicity and culture form the fundamental assumptions of the world: the characters’ hair, as a really obvious example, is described in terms of locks, tight curls, dark and ashen grey; skin colours are in a wide array of rich browns and blacks. These elements of the story are so seamlessly woven into the story that I felt like it was a good lesson in how to write multi-ethnic fiction without falling on stereotypes. And quite frankly, an imaginary world inhabited by different sorts of people is far more interesting, as well as being far more believable. For example, where I live in Melbourne is very multicultural and multiethnic, yet my friends and acquaintances who identify with local ethnic minority groups have often expressed frustration that they rarely see people who look or speak like they do in the media, films or stories they encounter. These are friends and peers who have at times expressed a kind of self consciousness purely because their accents, languages, hair colours and textures, eye colours, skin colours, or body shapes don’t fit the culturally prescribed norms they see on the television. Until I started listening to their stories about their own experiences, I had no idea what it might be like to feel like such an outsider in the country you call home. From that purely practical sense of trying to be a kinder, more compassionate, more inclusive person, it is good to read stories written from different cultural vantage points. Anyway, stories that are monocultural are kind of boring, once you start exploring other cultural narratives and seeing a bigger, more complex, more multifaceted view of human experience. Everyone looks and acts and thinks the same in so many stories. It’s exciting and challenging to break out of that box.
Fourthly, Jemisin weaves into the story really interesting elements of discourse that reflect real-life social disparities and injustices, like the offensive labels characters give to those who are born with the ability to manipulate the geology of their world. The story confronts inequalities and injustices that are very real, though reimagined for this alternate world.
Anyway, I won’t go on too much because I don’t think I can do this book justice. There is so much I could say about the clever manipulation of narrative timelines, the interwoven narratives, the inclusive and cleverly-written take on gender and sexuality, and the genuine emotions evoked through reading about the characters’ various successes and tragedies. I can’t wait to read the second and third books in the trilogy. N. K. Jemisin is a brilliant writer, and I could not put this book down. The fact that she is a psychologist too means that her characters are very deeply written and understood. She has fabulous insight into people’s inner worlds. This book is one of the most exciting novels I’ve come across in a long time. And while I wait for my copy of the second book in this trilogy to arrive, I’m going to spend some quality time reading Jemisin’s blog.
The Crow
This is my second time reading this incredible graphic novel. It is so sad, so moving, and so desperate. The emotions seem to pour out of the contorted body shapes twisting their way through a sorrowful world of grief and the ultimate hollowness of the justice meted out by The Crow as he seeks revenge on the drug dealers who murdered his fiancée.
Northern Lights: The positive policy example of Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway
It might seem a bit odd for me to include a political science / sociology text book in my reading but in my university days I majored in sociology, and took several subjects in the political science and history school. If anything, I ought to read more of these sorts of texts.
I really got a lot out of this book. It’s written by an Australian academic and lecturer in political science: its main question is, what can Australian society learn from Nordic social policies? As an Australian myself, with far-flung Scandinavian and Finnish heritage, my British ancestors’ ancestors, I have long been drawn to the mythology, music, and arts of these cultures. So this book caught my eye – admittedly mainly because of the beautiful Aurora Borealis photograph on the cover – but when I read the blurb and saw it was published by my alma mater, I thought I should at least try reading it. There is a lot that is good in Australia, but we have so much we could collectively learn from other countries. As the author argues, Australian policy makers and media tend often fall into the trap of only ever comparing the state of our nation against other English-speaking nations like the USA, the UK and New Zealand.
According to the author Dr Andrew Scott, there is in fact a long history of Australian interaction and discussion with Nordic states dating at least back to the first half of the 20th Century: delegations of Australian school principals are sent to Finland to learn what they can from the spectacularly successful Finnish school system; Australian academics, politicians and political activists have a long history of collaboration with Swedish counterparts; the social welfare system in Australia and reliance on manufacturing industries is not dissimilar to Denmark but handled in a very different way; and there are major similarities and glaring differences between the ways Australia and Norway manage mining for natural resources.
This book is a very important and timely critique of the ways Australian policies need serious attention. When natural resources are mined and sold overseas, when some schools are funded and others aren’t, when the human rights and equality of women, Indigenous people and children are still little more than paying lip service to a good idea with few major improvements in these issues, when industries shut down and unemployed workers are subjected to punitive systems to force them to compete for jobs that do not exist, Australians need to start asking, “Who actually benefits from these arrangements and policies?” By comparing our history to some similar scenarios in Nordic states, while also showing in a practical sense how these other countries implemented changes that benefit their people, this book provides some important food-for-thought on possible areas in which Australia could progress.
You’re All Just Jealous of my Jetpack
After reading so many serious books, this compilation of comic strips by Tom Gauld was a delightful and joyous and deeply intelligent breath of fresh air. It is a hilarious series of strips, many of which follow an academic and literary theme. I really enjoyed it.
So, what’s next on my agenda?
I have 11 days of October remaining in order to cram as many books as I can before NaNoWriMo. In terms of blogging, I intend to follow my usual NaNo routine of keeping a NaNo blog journal. In the past blogging through NaNo a few times a week has been a helpful way to keep me focussed and reflexively consider how I am developing as a writer throughout the month. Following NaNo I usually get so swept up in the demands of the holiday season that I don’t get as much time as I’d like to write, blog, read or draw. I will see how it goes.
Meanwhile, WordPress tells me that today is my tenth anniversary of blogging with them! Over those ten years my writing has changed and developed and hopefully grown. I started out writing art and spirituality blogs and while, on the surface, not much has changed, I would like to think that the content has become deeper, as I have journeyed out of a kind of psychologically cloistered fundamentalism and re-embraced the more inclusive spiritual paths of my childhood church, while studying and dialoguing with people from a greater number of beliefs, philosophical systems and cultural backgrounds.
Fiona Kat: Art and Words 