Here are 15 book ‘elves’ that cheered and challenged me in 2015. Each review has just one quote and one comment from me—so they’re short and sweet just as elves should be. Find a stocking filler or two here perhaps …
Six bedrooms
‘I was drinking Brandivino, a foul, sultana-flavoured brew.’
Yep. I was there. Bennett Daylight describes some scenes from my teenage years with astonishing accuracy.
The War of Art
‘Tomorrow morning the critic will be gone, but the writer will still be there facing the blank page.’
This is me; now, every day. Terrifying. And what I was born for.
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
‘Now I searched through my weariness, into every breath, every muscle, every heartbeat, and I found a reassuring, bone-deep certainty. I loved Fern. I had always loved Fern. I always would.’
Your parents adopt an ape called Fern and you grow up as sisters but then she’s taken away. Watcha gonna do? Read this PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction winner to find out …
The Empathy Exams
‘The insistence upon an external agent of damage implies an imagining of the self as a unified entity, a collection of physical, mental, spiritual components all serving the good of some Gestalt whole—the being itself. When really, the self—at least, as I’ve experienced mine—is much more discordant and self-sabotaging, neither fully integrated or consistently serving its own good.’
Leslie Jamison’s essays cover wide territory, including: Morgellons disease, in which patients believe they’re infested with hairs or fibres; the time she spent as a paid medical actor; the culture surrounding an ultramarathon in Tennessee; and an exploration of the case of the West Memphis Three. If you want to think more deeply about the mechanisms and ethics of empathy and the gulf between sufferer and witness, this book is a good place to start.
The Librarian
‘The building in which my uncle used to live was a five-storey structure from the Khruschev era, standing on Shironin’s Guards Street, right on the edge of town beside a flooded construction pit overgrown with sedge … The pitiful grin of the doorway was flanked by two old women sitting opposite each other like a pair of rotten teeth.’
This book grew on me like fungus. I didn’t understand the first few chapters at all and then a voice took over that hooked me. I’m still not sure I can accurately assess or express what I feel about the book that divided the Russian Booker Prize committee in 2008—a committee from which Alexander Kabakov resigned in protest over the decision to give the prize to this “worthless, fascist trash”. But I think I’m glad I persevered.
Dog Years
‘The death of a pet is, after all, the first death that most of us know.’
If you love dogs and beautifully written memoirs, read this. Doty’s love for Beau is sure to move you.
Deep Lane
‘November and this road’s tunnel / of soft fire draws you forward, as it descends, as if you were moving toward / — radical completion, / some encompassment? Dark kindness / woven in the fabric of the afternoon.’
Doty’s collection is called ‘Deep Lane’ (as are eight of the book’s poems) after the name of a little road near where he moved to in East Hampton. Like Alice down the rabbit hole, I was lured through the lane and to deep places through Doty’s perceptiveness and way with words.
Shy
‘David delivers a little homily. “My own fear completely disappears when I remember that the dearest friends I have were once strangers.”’
If you’re shy, try this. Thankfully, shyness can be managed (at least by some of us to a degree) and you can make wonderful friends as a result.
Reckoning
‘The Panzer tanks arrived on the outskirts of Warsaw on 8 September 1939 … My family’s apartment survived, but almost all of Warsaw’s buildings were damaged or destroyed. The streets were filled with the corpses of people and horses. The Germans bombed the water supplies. Fires raged throughout the city. It was not long before people were starving.’
Magda Szubanski starred in the most successful comedy in Australian television history but she still reckons her mother’s the funny one in the family. An eloquent, compassionate and startling memoir.
Dear Thief
‘While I write my spare hand might be doing anything, for all you know; it might be driving a pin into your voodoo stomach.’
With one of the most captivating openings of any book I’ve read this year, Dear Thief could well steal your seat from beneath you. A woman writes to an estranged friend called Butterfly, dredging up a shared past that ran the gamut from love through to betrayal and hatred. This is powerful writing.
At Hawthorn Time
‘How she had yearned for green places when she lived in Finchley; for somewhere ancient and unchanging, somewhere where the past lived on in the woods and fields, where you could imagine its previous generations and feel connected with the things that were there now.’
I know this yearning for soil and stone, sedge and hedge. I also know the green places are disappearing fast: The woods you imagine losing yourself in, are encroached on by housing, public lands have become private and private farms are sold or abandoned due to the precariousness of life on the land. So, think twice before you make a tree change. Or just go anyway. Spring is irrepressible after all.
‘Flying Foxes’
‘My brother Tony has slashed his head with a razor blade. Blood ran into his eyes, blinding him as he staggered up the street. I sensed my workmates listening as I talked to the hospital. There’s no need to tell them Tony’s back in the bin.’
Skelton’s a great storyteller and ‘Flying Foxes’ is one of many gems in the Michael McGirr Selects Series of short stories published by Spineless Wonders. The series also includes my story ‘We’re All Travellers Here’.
The Last Act of Love
‘We made a collage of the news stories and pinned it up above Matty’s bed at the hospital so that everyone could see what he was like and how much was at stake. We wanted the nurses and physics to know that his headmaster thought he was an Oxbridge certainty; the nurses seemed a little less keen on treating people who were there through their own fault or stupidity.’
I cry just thinking about Cathy Rentzenbrink’s family and what they went through when Cathy’s brother Matty was knocked down by a car on his way home from a night out. As the dust jacket says, the family learned that ‘there are many and various fates worse than death’. After eight years of grief, care and anxiety they must make a hard decision.
Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World
‘Bewilderment before questions of speech and silence, ambivalence before the experience both of seeing and being seen, run through the words of many writers.’ And, quoting C.P. Cavafy, ‘From my most unnoticed actions, my most veiled writing—from these alone will I be understood.’
With great nuance, sensitivity and enthusiasm, Jane Hirshfield describes how good poems enlighten and change us.
Big Sur
‘My reason for coming to Big Sur for the summer being precisely to get away from that sort of thing. Like those pathetic live high school kids who all came to my door in Long Island one night wearing jackets that said “Dharma Bums” on them, all expecting me to be 25 years old according to a mistake on a book jacket and here I am old enough to be their father.’
This is jazz for the written word and I tuned in to this Beat boy. Quirky. Jack Kerouac’s a one off.
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