A Quick Word... On Acquisitions and Other Oddities

Just a quick update!

Another review of mine has gone up on Crikey's LiteraryMinded. In it I review Brisbane author Angela Slatter's great new book The Girl With No Hands.

The review begins:

In my first year at University I studied fairytales, and more specifically Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, a book which is arguably the poster-child of fairytale re-imaginings. Carter writes well, and in many cases her stories spin beautifully away from tradition while remaining neatly tied to the history of the tales they retell.

Yet I’m sorry to say that I didn’t really like them and they were an immense struggle to study. I found them elusively constructed and occasionally prepared to sacrifice good narrative in exchange for overtly feminist plots. So when Angela Slatter’s The Girl With No Hands arrived at my door, and billed the other Angela as one of its key influences, I settled down to read the book convinced I knew the way it was going: bestial males and victimised women. Truly Slatter was in trouble: my verdict was as good as written before I had even started...

You can read the rest of the review here.

*****

In other news this week, I managed to pick up my new laptop on the weekend. This is not usually noteworthy news... except that this is a particularly special computer.

You might like to take a look at it:

I knew when I bought the laptop that I didn't want another ordinary grey Apple logo floating around the world. As such, I got in touch with the remarkably talented Georgie, from Tselliah Online, a Tasmanian based artist who agreed to paint a miniature mural for me.

Georgie - as I'm sure you can see - is an amazingly talented artist. The design is incredible - a lot of the time I have no idea which side of the screen to look at (I certainly know which side is my favourite, and it's not the one with Facebook). Her work has never failed to impress me from the moment I first discovered she was painting a mutual friend's wardrobe, and I lament for the day when she gets the recognition she deserves - and she will get it - because it means she'll probably be too busy to be painting the laptops of small timers like me.

For now though, I have a wonderful new computer that is grabbing positive comments wherever it goes. The same computer I am typing these words on to you now. And I couldn't be more happy. Thank you Georgie, you're a marvel.

*****

And finally, a treat to get you through to the end of the week. This video came to me from a few directions, and I re-watched it every time. Great fun. My thanks to Joe, Ryan and James for sharing it.

A Quick Word... On David Eagleman's 'Sum'

Sum: Tales From The Afterlives - David Eagleman

In the afterlife, you find that God deals in the realm of microbes. He is on the wrong spatial scale, and has no idea you exist. Or perhaps you find that the events of your life are re-played in chunks according to categorisation - you spend six full days clipping your nails, fifteen months looking for things that you've lost. Maybe your eternal rest is disrupted by the fact that the world of the afterlife only contains the people that you remember; you keep swapping cars and can no longer buy groceries because you never bothered to commit to your memory the individuals who filled these voids for you.

These options and thirty-seven more make up the various chapters of David Eagleman's Sum: Forty Tales From The Afterlives, perhaps the most exciting work of speculative fiction I've encountered in the last twelve months. A talented neuroscientist and writer, Eagleman throws away everything you think you know about the post-death experience. Instead of starting with already existing religious narratives and expanding on them, all previous superstition is cast to the wind and Eagleman postulates brand new scenarios which we might find ourselves in when the plug is pulled.

The book is written entirely in second person, but as most of the entries are only a couple of pages, it never becomes jarring. It is you who has to navigate the rocky road of your own death, and you who becomes so immersed in this gorgeously original piece of work. The book reads like an instruction manual for those who have shuffled off the mortal coil. Massive in scope, but a casual ninety pages long, it's an incredibly personal and insightful book.

Sum counts among its fans big names like Stephen Fry and Philip Pullman, and deservedly so. It shines and sparkles with wit, beautiful writing and immense imagination. More importantly, like all the best writing that deals with death, it holds strong and profound statements about life too. It is a book wholly and perfectly wonderful, and a book that can't be read in one sitting (I tried, I really did) simply because every chapter is exhausting in it's exploration of what it means to be human. If heaven is real, David Eagleman's wonderful collection of stories better be there.

For more information on Sum you can check out David's website, or download his wonderful interview (with readings) from the itunes 'Meet The Author' series.

A Quick Word... On Young Adult Fiction and Returning To The Scene of the Crime

Today has been a great day for thinking about writing. My 'Writing Tasmania' course started at Uni this week, and I've spent every other moment obsessed with words and the art of the craft. This has perhaps been my favourite find today - a Joss Whedon song about plucking out the heart of a writer's mystery - something we demand these days from almost everything we consume - an answer to that age old terrifying question: 'Where do you get your ideas from?'

Joss is a genius and his response to the problem is a good one. I suppose it reveals that writing is a magic trick. The process is always reductive - a hand slips behind the back here, and slides the all important card there - but does it ever make the magic more enjoyable to know its tiresome construction? There is a lot that we can learn from writers about the way they work when they are interviewed... I certainly wouldn't want to stop every author ever speaking about their work. I guess what I'm saying is that it's the writer's right to choose how much they reveal about their creations, and perhaps it's not always a good thing for us as readers, watchers, and listeners to demand all-inclusive access to our favourite celebrities brains. It doesn't make you stupid to not know everything - it just helps the magic trick keep working.

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Another great find from today was Kathy Charles' blog 'Where Are All The Weirdos In Young Adult Fiction?'

Kathy says:

Being a teenager is a supremely weird time. The only weirdness in young adult fiction these days is the kind that turns teens into werewolves and causes misogynistic male suitors to sprout fangs and glow in the dark. This all has its place metaphorically speaking (who hasn’t as a teen experienced hair growing in all the wrong places?) but even with all this paranormal strangeness going on, the YA world seems conventional, antiseptic, and most disappointingly, boringly predictable these days...

...All these ethereal looking girls on YA covers are making me feel like a freak.

She's dead right too. It's even worse in a Post-Twilight world where both television and literature often lead us into the escapism and fantasy of a simple and rather than comforting us to be the unique creatures we are. Even Harry Potter had his own odd physical quirks - his dorky hair, skinny frame and necessity for glasses. These days most YA characters don't have as much as a discretely embarassing birthmark. There are authors dealing with some unique and original characters out there, but there are sure as hell a lot of blank and generic placeholders too. I remember that scene in Alan Bennett's History Boys where Hector says that 'the best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.'

I hope Y.A Readers still feel like this, but I often wonder if that's the effect that the authors are striving for, or if they're instead gunning for entertainment. What were your most defining teenage novels? Did you get that feeling from them? And have I treated books like Twilight too harshly? Can they give you that feeling too?

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I have also had a new review go up on Angela Meyer's LiteraryMinded. I think I neglected to mention it before, so here it is! I reviewed the spectacularly interesting and very unique Five Wounds by Jonathan Walker and Dan Hallett. It's up at LiteraryMinded here.