I hate Easter egg chocolate so books are my Easter treat. Who needs dud chocolate when birds, love, war, art forgery and poems of great immediacy are on offer?
H is for Hawk
Helen MacDonald’s photographer father died suddenly and training her new goshawk, Mabel, helped her through it. MacDonald’s an academic who writes about nature and human nature with candour and precision. ‘Wild’ is a word she ponders — including the kinds of wildness we won’t fight for and why. This is one of the best books I’ve read in the last six months, so I’ll be queuing to catch a glimpse of MacDonald at the Sydney Writer’s Festival. Bring it on!
The Birdwatcher
Set in the Daintree, this tale of two world-weary love birds offered excellent escapism on a rainy Easter Saturday. I relished being reminded of Rawleigh’s Antiseptic Salve and Kenneth Slessor’s poem ‘The Night Ride’ with its Hurrying, unknown faces — boxes with strange labels — /All groping clumsily to mysterious ends,/ Out of the gaslight, dragged by private Fates. I also enjoyed learning more about the strange species of human called ‘birdos’ (or twitchers). David’s chasing the rare sight of a pygmy goose and Clare is struggling to pack up her bird-mad father’s house. The two meet and there’s chemistry …
The Notebook
The Notebook was 2014 ‘Book of the Year’ in The Australian, the Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian and I finally understand what all the fuss is about. Twin boys are deposited at their grandmother’s house in a small Hungarian town during the last years of the Second World War and the early years of communism. The boys are survivors in a war and occupation not of their making and they defy traditional notions of identity and social convention. They record their exploits in a Big Notebook they keep hidden in the attic. The acts described in their ‘composition exercises’ are chilling. A girl they know is unkind to a starved Jew so they take their revenge. She’s badly disfigured when she detonates explosives they put in her stove. I’m not sure yet whether I can stomach the trilogy’s other two parts, The Proof and The Third Lie. But I will read The Illiterate — Kristof’s memoir of her childhood, escape from Hungary, work in factories in Switzerland, and the writing of her first novel, The Notebook.
Seamus Heaney: New Selected Poems 1988-2013
These are poems about birth, death, cartwheels, whirlpools, tinkers, marvels and much more. Heaney died in 2013 and this collection provides a heart-warming overview of his last 25 years of work. The Irish poet, thought by some to be ‘the greatest poet of our age’, creates characters and worlds so convincing you can almost touch their faces and fabrics and ply their streets.
The Art Detective: Adventures of an Antiques Roadshow Appraiser
For lovers of Antiques Roadshow, here’s a book written by one of the show’s original stars. Philip Mould is a London Gallery owner and art adviser who is known affectionately as the art detective. In this book his sleuthing unveils a Norman Rockwell forgery, a Winslow Homer found on the side of a tip by a fisherman and more. His detective work involves art worth millions of dollars (or not as the case may be) and his engaging storytelling makes it easy to get caught in the thrill of the chase.
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