Maggot Moon

I picked up the audiobook of Maggot Moon from my library recently. I was looking for an audiobook for a road trip that Master Wicker wouldn't hate. I'd never heard of Maggot Moon particularly, although I've had a growing awareness of Sally Gardner for some time, never really hearing about her properly, but aware of her oeuvre, that it's very well regarded and that she covers a rather vast subject range.

So I didn't know what was coming when I popped the first disc of Maggot Moon into my car CD player. Oh. My God. It's so good. It's extraordinary actually. The young narrator Robert Madge did a particularly amazing job. He absolutely inhabits Standish Treadwell.

Before Hector came to this school, I hated it. I believed it was invented just so the bullies, with brains the size of dried-up dog turds, could beat the shit out of kids like me. A kid with different-coloured eyes: one blue eye, one brown, and the dubious honour of being the only boy in the whole of his class of fifteen-year-old who couldn't spell, couldn't write. 

It is 1956 and Standish Treadwell is 15, born into an impoverished and repressed neighbourhood in Sector 7 of the Motherland. Standish lives with his grandfather as his parents have left a few years before. People disappear frequently in Sector 7 and all evidence of their life disappears along with them. Standish and his grandfather have a marginal existence with little food, and many rats in the cellar. 

I tell you this for a bagful of humbugs, it was eerily deserted under this houses. All we could hear down there was the conversation of rats. A very stubborn thing is your common brown rat. I often wondered how it was the rats became fat when we were so very lean. 

The Motherland is a brutal regime and is out to impress the Evil Empires of the world by sending a manned rocket to the moon. It's hard to say much more about the story without spoilers. While I'm not a fan of allegory on the whole, and although Maggot Moon is clearly allegorical it's brilliance is such that I plainly saw that and just didn't care. 

Maggot Moon is not a gentle story by any means, it is actually quite violent, quite shockingly violent. But it is unbelievably gripping. I paid attention intently. And then I listened to it again. And again. Even now after I've finished listening to the book five or six times, I can't get it out of my head.

So much so that I googled about it quite a bit. 

Sally Gardner is dyslexic and she didn't read til she was 14 because of it. D'oh of course Standish is dyslexic. Rather embarrassingly I didn't form that word in my mind while listening to Maggot Moon, I just accepted Standish and didn't label him. But it's pretty obvious now. Sally Gardner has become a dyslexia campaigner and spokesperson. Jackie French is one of my favourite writers, and is also dyslexic. I'm not sure whether that has any significance or not.  

I also borrowed the physical book from my library because I was intrigued as to how it would look. It's fabulous. Illustrated with rats and maggots that make a great animation as you flip through (in parts).  Told in 100 short chapters it would be a lightning fast read. I think I'll read the book sometime. Maybe in a few months. 

And Master Wicker? He thought it didn't suck. High praise indeed. 

I will be reading Sally Gardner's work again sometime very soon. I'm totally intrigued. What a talent she has. What an imagination. 

How Proust Can Change Your Life

I do enjoy Alain de Botton's work whenever I get the time to appreciate it. I very much enjoyed The Art of Travel a few years ago. I was sold on How Proust Can Change Your Life from the time I first saw the front cover, and given that it was first published in 1997 that was some time ago. I bought the book a few years ago but it has sat on my shelf patiently waiting its turn although occasionally I would glimpse that lovely cover and hope to read it sooner. 

Happily a couple of recent(ish) events conspired to get me there. My friend Lisa at ANZLitlovers read it in March last year, and I read her review eagerly. And then it came time for Paris in July 2016 and it seemed the perfect time to pop the audiobook in the car CD player. Sadly I've long ago run out of July, and 2016, for the review. Indeed it's nearly time for Paris in July again. Ah, c'est la vie. 

How Proust Can Change Your Life is told in a series of nine lessons.

How to Love Life Today

How to Read for Yourself

How to Take Your Time

How to Suffer Successfully

How to Express Your Emotions

How to Be a Good Friend

How to Open Your Eyes

How to Be Happy in Love

How to Put Books Down

On one level it is a biography of Proust in some detail- his habits, his prodigious tipping, the precarious state of his health. I don't think I ever knew that Proust was self-published!

I haven't read Proust. Well, I did try to once but didn't get beyond the initial 30 pages of the narrator falling asleep, but I have an increasing fascination with him and his work. I want to give it a red hot try at some stage, but until now I'll read about him, and think about him. I've stalked him in his room. 

I couldn't help but wonder what the modern diagnoses for poor old Marcel may have been. He had such problems with his skin, his digestion, his asthma. 

Proust frequently has to suffer distressing insinuations that he is not as sick as he suggests. At the outbreak of the First World War the medical army board call him up for an examination. Though the man has been lying in bed more or less continuously since 1903, he is terrified that the severity of his illness will not be appropriately considered, and that he will be made to fight in the trenches. 

Alain and Marcel also had some helpful suggestions for Reconsidering My Life. Alain de Botton suggests that n'allez pas trop vite could well be a Proustian slogan. Don't go too fast. Wise words I'm sure, but is that even possible in the modern world of a single working mother?

Proust famously did not realise the nature of what he was trying to write until he had begun to write it. When the first volume of The Search of Lost Time was published in 1913, there was no thought of the work assuming the gargantuan proportions that it eventually did; Proust projected that it would be a trilogy [Swann's Way, The Guermantes Way, Time Regained], and even hoped the last two parts would fit in a single volume. 

However, the First World War radically altered the plans by delaying the publication of the succeeding volume by four years, during which time Proust discovered a host of new things he wanted to say, and realised that he would require a further four volumes to say it. The original five hundred thousand words expanded to more than a million and a quarter.

None of which is surprising in the least when you see the pictures that Alain has included of the rewritten manuscripts and the revisions and comments that Marcel poured onto every square millimetre available of the publishers proofs. 

Picture source
From the internet, not from the book

Chapter 7 How to Open Your Eyes, was my favourite chapter, about what would now be labelled gratitude, and of seeing the beauty in the quotidian.  Proust recommended studying the works of Jean-Baptiste Chardin in order to see the beauty in everyday objects. "Chardin's paintings succeeded in being extraordinarily beguiling and evocative."

The Silver Goblet
Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin
Musée du Louvre

"A peach by him was as pink and chubby as a cherub, a plate of oysters or a slice of lemon were tempting symbols of gluttony and sensuality." And I'm at least moderately certain that I would have walked past them in the Louvre- another reason to go back to Paris...

Why don't we appreciate things more widely? The problem goes beyond inattention or laziness. It may also stem from insufficient exposure to images of beauty, which are close enough to our own world in order to guide and inspire us.

While I do seem to prefer non-fiction audio books to fiction, the audio format does leave the listener without illustrations, or the rather intriguing layout of the book form of How Proust Can Change Your Life. A layout that I really wasn't expecting from de Botton.

Picture source

Fascinating titbits

Marcel's surgeon brother (gynaecologist, urologist and general surgeon) Robert Proust did indeed introduce radical prostatectomy via a perineal approach in 1901, a "proustatectomy".

Proust spent lots of time at the Ritz entertaining, and was a legendary tipper

Though he was well catered for at home, and had a maid adept at preparing wholesome meals, and a dining room in which to give dinner parties, Proust repeatedly ate out and entertained at the Ritz in the Place Vendôme, where he would order sumptuous meals for friends, add a two hundred percent service charge to the bill and drink champagne from fluted glasses. 

I can't express my relief that I've finally finished this post. I finished listening to the audiobook last August I think. This post has been an albatross around my neck. Now lifted. I can move on. 

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Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon The Second

I really enjoyed participating in my first Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon last October. Even though I didn't get all that much read in the end. 150 pages and 6 picture books. I'm sure I'll be able to top that this time round. For one thing the timezones are a bit kinder because it's not Daylight Savings here, so the Readathon starts at 10pm AEST, not 11pm like it did last time. And I'm not working this weekend. 

Last time it was all a bit of a last minute thing. This time round I've had over a week to prepare my TBR list. Short stories may work well. And some short books. Picture books. And there's still some books I haven't read from my last Dewey TBR.

Clearly, I'm not going to read all those books this weekend. But it's a great stack to dip into. And of course I may end up reading books not in this stack, but I figured this was a good place to start. I've got

Kids books
Adult books
Short stories
Verse novels
Graphic novels
Fiction
Nonfiction
Books I've had for ages
Books I bought this week
Books that were in the stack last time
Books that were gifts
Library books

I'm excited for the possibilities. 

I'll be joining Brona and #TeamANZ2017. Last year was the first time I've represented Australia on the International Stage and I'm very happy to be doing it again. 

It's not to late to join in. You can sign up at 24hourreadathon.com.

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Hourly Updates to come

I was too excited to start reading, so I snuck in two short stories from The Weight of a Human Heart by Ryan O'Neill, whilst having a bath to prepare myself.

Hour One 10pm

Opening Survey

1) What fine part of the world are you reading from today?
I'm reading from country NSW Australia

2) Which book in your stack are you most looking forward to?
Probably Joe Queenan's One For the Books

3) Which snack are you most looking forward to?
I have some very special French Salted Caramel Lollipops.

4) Tell us a little something about yourself!
This is my second readathon. I'm more prepared, and more excited than I was last time. 

And we're off!

I'm going to read another story from The Weight of a Human Heart, and then pick a novel. I'm not sure which one just yet. 

The problem with starting a readathon in the late evening is that sometimes you fall asleep, even though you don't mean to.

So my totals before I fell asleep during the first hour was

The Weight of a Human Heart - Ryan O'Neill 6 pages
After - Nikki Gemmell 6 pages

Yep. 12 pages all up. 

Hour Two 11pm

Sleeping. Oops! Guess I got myself too comfy.... That's a very early night for me. 

Hours Three to Twelve Midnight - 9am

Oh dear there was a whole lot of sleeping, not reading, going on. 

I did wake up around 2am and read 15 pages of After before falling back to sleep again. 

27 pages in total by 9am. Well that can only improve today. I need some quick reads to get that page count up.

Hours Twelve - Fifteen  9am - 12pm


Sleeping Beauty awoke. And got reading. 


37 pages of After

120 pages of The Weight of Water - Sarah Crossan (cheating with a verse novel)

184 pages in total 

Hours Fifteen to Eighteen 12pm -3pm


108 pages of The Weight of Water - finished. 

39 pages of After

331 pages in total. And 7 hours to go!

Hours Eighteen to Twenty One 3pm- 6pm

On a roll now....

40 pages of After

15 pages of The Weight of a Human Heart

141 pages of My Name is Book - John Agard - finished

527 pages in total. 

Hours Twenty One to Twenty Four 6pm-10pm

A sprint to the end. 

116 pages of After

32 pages of Don't Call Me Bear - Aaron Blabey - finished

32 pages of The Fabulous Friend Machine - Nick Bland - finished

25 pages of The Weight of a Human Heart (see my review)

732 pages all up. After a slow start wherein I pretty much slept the first twelve hours I'm pretty happy with that. It's been great. 
4 Books Finished

The Weight of Water - Sarah Crossan
My Name is Book - John Agard
Don't Call Me Bear - Aaron Blabey
The Fabulous Friend Machine - Nick Bland

Hmmm. I didn't get to finish After which I optimistically hoped that I would when I picked it up last night. But I got 260 of 300 pages read. That's pretty good for me, I am a ludicrously slow reader.

I've completed two readathons now, and realise that both times I didn't even start the book that I said at the start was the one I was most looking forward to. And I didn't even have one French Salted Caramel Lollipop. But I did have some rather delicious Dulce de Leche chocolate so it's not all bad. 

Will the French Salted Caramel Lollipops last till October? I'd say that would be a no. 

Reading Well Mood Boosting Books

There's a few lists like this. This list was chosen by young people in the UK. Seems we all need to find some inspiration and solace in books sometimes. 

See also 31 Books That Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity


We Should All Be Feminists - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A Bear Called Paddington - Michael Bond  (see my review)
Am I Normal Yet? - Holly Bourne

Bodyguard series - Chris Bradford
Finding Cherokee Brown - Siobhan Durham
Matilda - Roald Dahl
Milk and Honey - Rupi Kaur
More Than This - Patrick Ness
The Rest of Us Just Live Here - Patrick Ness
Wonder - R.J. Palacio (see my review)
Eleanor & Park - Rainbow Rowell
Harry Potter series - J.K Rowling 1/7
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe - Benjamin Alire Saenz
I Capture the Castle - Dodie Smith
This One Summer - Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki

Crongton Knights - Alex Wheatle
The Art of Being Normal - Lisa Williamson

3 1/7 of 27 (although I'm not really sure how many books make up the Harry Potter franchise these days, is it just the seven original novels? Or does the newer stuff count too?)

It's always amazing to see more books that I've never heard of. And a bit depressing really. But it should be mood boosting shouldn't it? Look at all these extra great books I've never heard of, but I'm sure I'm already well into the realm that I won't ever finish the books I want to read before I die.

The Helen 100

I was young once and I used to listen to JJJ back in the day and remember Helen Razer and her wit and humour from that time. But I'd kind of lost track of her for some years. It turns out she's written quite a few books now. Recently I saw this new release sitting on the shelves at my bookshop and I just had to buy it. I do suspect that if I hadn't been through my own rather recent breakup I may not have snatched it off the shelf quite so quickly, or read it so very soon. I can see a pattern emerging of reading books about misery and despair. 

The Helen 100 recounts the year or so after the end of Helen's fifteen year relationship. Helen's ex left her reasonably suddenly one afternoon with an 'I need to grow' speech. Helen falls to the floor with her cat, Eleven, and a home delivered chicken. I'm pretty sure I've lived in a small town for too long as I was most astonished by the concept of the home delivered roast chicken in this particular scenario. 

Helen felt burdened by the expectation that her same sex relationship should not fail. 

That my particular desertion happened to be of a homosexual flavour intensified my shame and my impatience with view on sexuality generally. 'Lesbians' are really not supposed to break up, these days. They are supposed to stay together forever and provide an inspiring liberal example to others. And, this, notwithstanding my actual intention to stay together forever, was an attitude that really ticked me off.

At least I didn't have to feel representative for my own particular subculture. Just one of the 40% or so of heterosexual marriages (the only sort allowed in Australia) that ends in divorce. 

At some point, gay became the new beige and we are today the class doomed to revive the discarded dream of marriage. We are the people charged with conspicuous carriage of rainbow babies in expensive baby slings. 

Helen launches herself into the world of XXX dating apps to achieve her waxer's advice to go on 100 dates in a year. It is a world of which I was blissfully unaware, and which sounds particularly awful. She then baulks at the punctuation, spelling and grammar of her online contacts which isn't too successful a strategy for obtaining dates electronically.

I don't particularly like to think of myself as too much of a prude but I was often quite uncomfortable reading The Helen 100. Too much of the book was way over beyond the wrong side of Too Much Information. I kept reading because a) well I'd started and b) I really did still like Helen's voice. She has a vast vocabulary and powerful wit. There just aren't enough books using words like jejune, badinage or tonsure these days. 

And well, she did warn us, right there on the cover - Helen took her waxer's advice. And Bam, there she is on page one at the waxer's, having her lady parts waxed by the same waxer who also waxed her recently departed partner's intimate places. Oh what a complex world we live in.

I think I can take some of Helen's advice though (well actually her grandmother's advice):

Public Service Announcement: Have a bath

It has taken me decades of more everyday conflict to see that a nice bath can make life easier. It doesn't fix everything but it can fix a fuck of a lot. 

I haven't had a bath in some years, I think it's time. 

Listen to Richard Fidler's recent Conversation with Helen Razer which finally does explain why the cat is called Eleven. It's rather obvious actually. 

http://australianwomenwriters.com

Lenny Henry: Finding Shakespeare

I'm pretty terrible at taping things and then not watching them, filling up my hard drive recorder. I always mean to watch them soon. But sometimes I eventually get to watching things while working through the ironing pile. Today I watched Lenny Henry: Finding Shakespeare. I didn't really know anything about this documentary and I think it was at least a year ago that I taped it. 

Lenny Henry is famous to me for being a comedian and previously married to Dawn French. I hadn't realised that in more recent times he had become a Shakespearian actor. This was somewhat surprising to Lenny himself too. 

It's incredible that I'm doing this play because for most of my life I've kept well away from Shakespeare. Like many of us I thought I wasn't clever enough to understand it. 

Finding Shakespeare was filmed in the leadup to a worldwide broadcast of The Comedy of Errors with Lenny in the lead role. Lenny shows us his childhood home and talks about his Jamaican working class roots.

"Shakespeare's nothing to do with us is it?"

Which is a very familiar feeling for many of us I think. He describes his school experience of reading Romeo and Juliet  as "a whole class of disinterested kids reading from this old, tattered book". Which is very much like my remembrance of Henry IV Part One. 

But where does this mental block about Shakespeare come from? And what are missing out on if we don't get past it?

I was shocked to hear Barrie Rutter of the Northern Broadsides Theatre say

the iambic pentameter, although it's poetry, is based on the heartbeat 

Wow. Really? There's just so much I don't know about poetry.

But today his 400 year old language stops most of us being able to relate to his work. 

Lenny later visits rapper Akala who "believes we can still connect with Shakespeare if we can just get over the fear of the language." Akala has even founded the Hip-Hop Shakespeare Theatre Company. He plays a great game of quotes called "Hip Hop or Shakespeare?"

I still don't feel clever enough to understand Shakespeare most of the time. I'm still working on it though. I do try and go to a Bell Shakespeare production each year. I saw Othello last year, and was completely shocked by it. Angered. And saddened. It's still very relevant. Jackie French has a new series that she's doing with Shakespeare retellings. I read I am Juliet back in 2015 (see my review) and have more sitting in the TBR. 

You can watch Lenny Henry: Finding Shakespeare on Vimeo if you need to get your ironing done too.

Newcastle Writers Festival 2017

Last weekend I enjoyed my third trip to Newcastle Writers Festival. It's such a fabulous festival. So well organised. A vast range of great sessions. And so many free sessions. This year half the 170 sessions were free! Four of the eleven sessions I went to over two days were free.

The program was so good this year that I had real difficulty with picking the sessions I wanted to attend, because it meant I was missing out on so may other great sessions. It took me weeks to sort out my sessions as I tried to maximise the number and range of authors that I would hear. 

Nikki Gemmell

Clementine Ford, Randa Abdel-Fattah, Jane Caro, Ruby Hamad

I got to see so much Australian talent-

Peggy Frew
Alice Pung
Holly Throsby
Magdalena Ball
Wendy James
Michael Sala
Andy Muir
Jackie French
Sarah Armstrong
Emily Maguire
Randa Abdel- Fattah
Jane Caro
Clementine Ford
Belinda Alexandra
Fiona Higgins
Tara Moss
David Hunt
Steven Amsterdam
Nikki Gemmell
Leah Kaminsky
Kirsty Eager
Jacklyn Moriarty


So much of it overwhelmingly female. But in doing so I missed sessions with

Richard Roxburgh (I think he had the biggest signing line of the weekend, definite rock star status and his was the only book to sell out in the bookshop)
Sarah Wilson
Elspeth Muir
Nick Earls
Julia Baird

and so many others, and other great sessions that included some of the writers that I did see.

All the sessions I saw were fabulous. Inspiring. Thought provoking. Covering such a vast range of topics-everything imaginable really. Feminism. Racism. Sexual assault. Death and dying. Family violence. Australian history. Balinese ritual vaginal cleansing. Yes, it's a thing.

NWF is five years old this year. There have been developments and improvements each of the three years I've attended and there were some changes again this year. While the sessions I attended were all in the Town Hall and Civic Theatre there was a new marquee in Wheeler place was a fabulous space and well used. 

And they paid attention to the details too. There were things to read everywhere.

An old phone loaded with short stories!

I do love writers festivals. Where else do you get to see grown men in Moomin t-shirts? And young women with cool Eric Carle ribbons?

There's something so intoxicating about stacks of books. The potential. The possibilities. 

Naturally I came away with a (relatively) small of a stack of books. It's important to support the authors, the festival and the festival bookseller.

My sister leant me Something for Nothing,
and I've already leant her An Isolated Incident

I might have managed to acquire some other books whilst away at various bookshops I sought out. New and used.

And obviously I want to read work from everyone I saw. And a few I didn't get the chance to see...

NWF 2016
NWF 2015

I know that I'll be back next year. Somehow I need to work on getting to a new festival soon(ish) to work on my quest to attend all the writers festivals in Australia. So far I've been to Melbourne, Mudgee, Newcastle and Sydney and keep going back to those because they are the easiest to attend geographically. Plus I really like them, especially Melbourne and Newcastle. 

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