‘You are what you read,’ writes Malcolm Knox in The Simple Act of Reading. ‘By digesting books I am creating myself.’ Knox is one of 21 writers in this anthology who explain how reading has shaped their identities and writing. And here’s my A to Z of why Debra Adelaide’s handpicked homage to reading should top your reading list.
A is for … Atmosphere. Jill Jones’ childhood books all seemed to be about ‘specific places with definite atmospheres’. ‘And not places nearby, not the mundane,’ she writes in her essay ‘A Place of Possibilities’. There’s bags of atmosphere in these essays and heaps of intriguing details. Quite a feast.
B is for … Book bounty. So many books and authors are mentioned in The Simple Act of Reading that I’ve simply listed a few here to pique your interest and spark your memory. Mary Grant Bruce’s Billabong series, Anne of Green Gables, Seven Little Australians, The Drums of Mer, The Coral Island by R.M Ballantyne, Cole’s Funny Picture Books, The Railway Children by E. Nesbitt, the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis, Madame Bovary, Finnegans Wake, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Agee, Fast, John Mulgan, Ronald Morrieson, Janet Frame and Katherine Mansfield. Happily, there’s a much more comprehensive list at the back of the book for further reference.
C is for … Companionship. ‘A great book is a companion, a friend and, like a friend, it changes with you,’ writes Tegan Bennett Daylight in ‘A Phone Call to Helen Garner’. Garner’s Monkey Grip was the book that helped Bennett Daylight to see that a writer must be awake. She says Garner’s images altered the way she saw the world—making her feel ‘somehow present, alert to the shifts in light or weather, to the look of a street or a park or a house’.
D is for … Discussion. In ‘Reading and Secrets’ Guilia Giuffrè says that sharing discussion after reading increases the companionship of books. She also says, ‘Open discussion of books and ideas with others … can enhance the solitary pleasure of reading.’
E is for … Empathy. Debra Adelaide says science has recently confirmed the benefits of reading—one of which is empathy. ‘Empathy, sensitivity, perception and understanding of social nuance and complexity are all improved after an individual reads a story or novel.’
F is for … Follow your nose. Adelaide also writes in ‘The Tower’ about being in her Honours year at Sydney University and being given the freedom to read and interpret poetry for herself, ‘to follow my nose’. She says it has still taken her a lifetime of reading to understand how vital it is for children, young adults and others to ‘follow their reading noses, always’.
G is for … Gratitude. I closed The Simple Act of Reading and made a list of the hundreds of authors who’ve influenced my thinking. Add to this list all the editors and publishers involved in producing the books I’ve read and there are thousands of people who’ve made my life incredibly rich. I’m grateful for this.
H is for … Health. Kate Forsyth spent a great deal of time in hospital as a child and found reading therapeutic. ‘My body was kept prisoner by railings and intravenous drips and monitors,’ she writes in ‘Books Are Dangerous’, ‘but my mind could roam free. It doesn’t matter how awful real life is, there is always a way to escape it through the pages of a book.’
Gabrielle Carey describes a reading group that has gathered in her kitchen for 10 years to read James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. She writes: ‘I had known for a good while that Finnegans Wake was an antidepressant and that collaborative reading of the Wake can bring immediate and tangible health benefits—not least because of the belly laughs—but until Gerry’s illness I’d never thought of the Wake as essential to palliative care.’
I is for … Indigenous literacy. Anita Heiss quotes alarming statistics about literacy rates among young Indigenous people in ‘Not All Writers Began As Readers’. ‘What these statistic tell me,’ she writes, ‘is that these kids in all likelihood will go on to become adults solely reliant on their non-Indigenous people to make decisions for them in key areas of their lives. This is the opposite of self-determination for Indigenous people. This is why it’s important for us to continue to support this [Indigenous Literacy Foundation] project and raise awareness however when can.’
J is for … Journeys. ‘What is it to read?’ asks Gail Jones in her essay ‘Eleanor Reads Emma’. ‘They [books] are paper wings you fly on … You travel through air to the last page. You do not actually exist. You are carried along … It is a cunning procedure. Impersonating and depersonating. And you are lost. And you are found. And you have been everywhere and nowhere. Interiority itself is traduced and shanghaied. Think of it: how strange! What a peculiar absorption.’
K is for … Kindle. ‘It gives me a glutton’s buzz to have a library in my hands,’ says Malcolm Knox about his Kindle in ‘This is Your Life’. Note: Knox has well-stocked real bookshelves too.
L is for … Land of reading. ‘Reading created a space I experienced physically, as a new land opened up in my head; an alternate reality I could whoosh off to at any time,’ writes Catherine Keenan of her childhood book forays in ‘A Native in the Land of Reading’. She adds, ‘The worlds created by each book were different, but they became one: each story was just new territory added to an ever-expanding continent in my mind with relief, mostly because it felt like this was a place I truly belonged. I fitted awkwardly into my own life, but I was a native in the land of reading.’
M is for … Multiple lives. ‘By ushering a way into multiple lives, reading provides relief from self,’ writes Guilia Giuffrè in her essay ‘Reading and Secrets’. Different ways to be human are also made possible through reading, she says.
N is for … Nuggets of joy. Luke Davies recounts a wonderful anecdote from Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are, and it’s one of this anthology’s many gems. ‘A little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters—sometimes very hastily—but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, ‘Dear Jim: I loved your card.’ Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, ‘Jim loved your card so much he ate it.’ That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.’
O is for … Optimism. ‘There is no greater optimist than a reader,’ writes Sunil Badami in her essay ‘In Your Dreams’. The reader is ‘always hoping that despite all the disappointments before it, the next book will bring them the enjoyment that first neck-shivering, heart-fluttering one did. The same, I suppose, could be said of any dreamer,’ she writes.
P is for … Perception. Many of the essayists included in the anthology believe reading broadens and deepens their perception. In ‘Books are Dangerous’ Kate Forsyth says, ‘Whatever tribulations I suffer in the world of the book, whatever triumphs I win, they change me as if they had really happened. Whatever I learn returns with me to the real world.’
Q is for … Quiet. No need to speak. As Debra Adelaide writes in her introduction, ‘Find a quiet place, open the page, follow the line of words: the art of reading might be simple but as these splendid essays demonstrate, it is also one of the most important things in all this human world.’ Yes.
R is for … Refuge. An introvert’s bliss. ‘Reading can be a refuge from social interaction,’ writes Guilia Giuffrè. ‘It can be a defensive activity, shutting out the world as effectively as plunging underwater blunting observation by others and deflecting emotional arrows. A favourite book is a mental cubbyhouse to which one retreats and within which one relaxes.’
S is for … Story Factory. Proceeds from The Simple Act of Reading will go to the Story Factory—a not-for-profit creative writing centre for young people in Redfern, Sydney. Its programs target marginalised young people, and those from Indigenous and non-English speaking backgrounds, but are open to everyone.
T is for … Tintin. You could buy this delectable anthology solely for Luke Davies’ essay ‘Hergé and Me’ and not be disappointed. I was moved by the ‘improbable and exhilarating’ journey of the letters that Davies wrote to and received from Tintin’s creator Hergé. This sentence still gives me goose bumps, ‘It is as if at that moment my old life—that innocent boy—was being given back to me, in the form of a new life; and everything in-between was wiped clean-slate.’
U is for … Unusual finds. I liked learning from ‘The Not So Simple Act of (Collaborative) Reading’ by Gabrielle Carey that, ‘The Wakean [Finnegans] way of thinking derives partly from the influence of the Irish language on the English.’ Carey quotes the writer John Banville, who says that the English language is declarative and commanding while Irish has an in-built ambiguity and is more oblique. This is something I’ll ponder.
V is for … Virtue. A local seamstress in Grenfell called Mrs Virtue gave Geordie Williamson a stack of decommissioned library books when he was a boy and these books led him to seek out more. He is now The Australian’s chief literary critic with an encyclopaedic knowledge of, and unquenchable passion for, literature.
W is for … Walking to the library. ‘I used to walk along the green tunnel of Rangiwai Crescent to the library, which was hushed and lovely, with views of the sea and bush from every window, and even that walk up our soft country road was a joy in itself,’ writes Rosie Scott in ‘Reading for Life’. Scott says she learned moral courage from reading and that this helped her to cope with the adults in her life at a difficult time.
X is for … X-factor. Carrie Tiffany’s ‘Wessex’ and Luke Davies’ ‘Hergé and Me’ both had the X-factor for me. Sunil Badami in ‘In Your Dreams’ describes the way particular works attract us. ‘Perhaps that is why we consider the books we love, the books that really touched us, to be as dear and cherished as friends, because they say, in ways we can’t, things we wished we could. They’re not sermons, but conversations, reminding us we’re not alone, we’re not the only person to feel this way.’
Y is for … Yearning. As Gail Jones writes in ‘Eleanor Reads Emma’, when Eleanor Marx reads Madame Bovary in order to translate it ‘it seemed ineluctably herself’.
‘I am Emma Bovary, Eleanor thinks to herself, I simulate her yearning; I long for the sweet and discriminate engulfments of the amorous. … But then, she reconsiders, I am also Charles Bovary, I am besotted. I am foolish. I am unreciprocated. I am work-enclosed and over diligent and possess meritorious solidity. And what I feel for Edward Aveling is like words written on the wind.’
One significant connection I yearn for from literature is summed up succinctly by Tegan Bennett Daylight, ‘The sense that one was just about to think what is on the page—the sense that that thought was only waiting for the writer to express it for us; this is why we read.’
Z is for … Zzzzs. Reading alone, late at night while others are sleeping, is Kate Forsyth’s favourite way to read. ‘It is such an acute and secret pleasure,’ she writes. ‘All is quiet and dark. Shadows lean over you, but the small light that you read by is a golden globe of protection, a little sun that shines on a multitude of worlds in which anything might happen.’ Indeed.
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