The September Issue

Mr Andrew Riemer
Chief Book Reviewer
Sydney Morning Herald


Dear Mr Riemer

Thank you for many hours of enjoyment over the years of reading your thoughtful and erudite reviews. This week-end's review of the Best Australian Essays 2010
was particularly helpful, especially for its comment:

The only disappointment amongst these frequently anthologised writes is so and so's pretentious and condescending demolition of the Minogue sisters. I wonderered: why bother?

This article was orginially published in The Monthly magazine.

I've subscribed to this magazine since it was launched, not without mixed feelings as it has sometimes lost its way and changed editors with great chaos last year. Its fiction selections are very uneven and its poetry choice is woeful but its long essays on politics and crime are often really good and Robert Forster's music reviews are usually the best thing in it.

I had a single issue left on my current subscription after the September issue. The pointless over-long article on the Minogues was enough for me to resolve not to renew. Then of course the October issue was really good so I changed my mind.

Your review made me realise I wasn't alone in disliking this article.

In answer to your question, I think the new young gun editor trying to attract new readers from newstand browsers with his cover.

I'm surprised Rhianna isn't on the current issue.

Yours sincerely

Mary

Too late for the bandwagon but I'll play the same tune

My two-year-old was holding the copy of Debra Adelaide's Household Guide to Dying I'd borrowed from the library a few months ago but couldn't bring myself to read thinking it might be unnecessarily upsetting or depressing when there were likely to be other more cheering things to read like um the newspaper.

"What's this?" she asked.

"It's a book about death," I said.

She laughed and threw it back on the bed. "No it's not. It's a book about teapots!"

As practically everyone else already knows, we were both right.

I started to read it that day and didn't stop until finishing it after midnight by which stage I was a teary emotional mess.

I've often thought there should be warnings on the front of books like they show at the beginning of telly shows.

This Household Guide's would say "Some readers should be advised they may have strong emotional reactions to the contents of this book. These include parents of young children, sick people, anyone who has ever had a serious illness, anyone who has known anyone with a serious illness, anyone who is scared of sudden death, slow death, leaving things undone, in fact anyone really."

Apart from that, it was utterly charming, especially the chooks called after the Bennet girls.

I think I might like this book

Last night I started to read Alex Jones's Helen Garner and the Meaning of Everything . It's about a retired academic of literary studies pondering life while reading the books of Helen Garner.

This is an odd choice, firstly, because the only book of Garner's I've ever read was Monkey Grip a really long time ago. I was 18 and, of course, I knew everything about life and love and most of the time I was reading the book I wished I could just SHAKE the central charater for being so utterly HOPELESS about men. And, secondly, I spent yesterday whimpering in bed with the sort of cold where you need to sleep for 18 hours and can barely remember your own name much less follow complex things like the news or books about other books you haven't read.

And this is a complex book. I mean it has appendices! And endnotes! Endnotes in a novel! Moreover, endnotes well worth reading because they're not just references but comments!

So I am a bit surprised to find how much I'm enjoying it.

Well, so far, of course.

On the bus this morning I giggled out loud and disturbed my neighbour mid-application of lipliner when I found this on page 35 where the protagonist (the Dreamer) is advising Poppy, a high school student with a much older friend who may or may not be a boyfriend, about studying:

At last we came to English. Polly's class were reading a number of novels. Rita had bought copies of them, and Poppy produced them now - a low, uneven stack of mulitcoloured covers reflected in the glass of the coffee table. Uppermost in the pile was The Great Fire.* I put my finger on it.
'I'd start with this one,' I said, 'it should appeal to you. It's like Lolita retold as a Mills and Boon.

Now I LOVED Shirley' Hazzard's The Great Fire . I bought copies for at least two other people as gifts. But, it has to be admitted, it is about a love affair between a very young teenaged girl and a much older man and even worse, the ending was really really really contrived in a chocolate-boxy way and not really entirely credible. So, you know, I felt a bit bad about laughing because I was emotionally involved so I thought maybe this Alex Jones isn't such a nice man after all.

But THEN, I realised there's an endnote!

I flipped over to it.

It says:

Perhaps the Dreamer's unduly harsh judgement is coloured by his circumstances at this point.

So funny and not that mean after all! Hooray!!

I like this book!

I read Margo Lanagan's Tender Morsels a couple of months ago but can't really stop thinking about.

I picked it up in a shop because of the pretty cover (isn't it pretty?)

I almost put it down again because I didn't like the blurb:

Tender Morsels is a dark and vivid story, set in two worlds and worrying at the border between them. It is a gloriously told tale of journeys and transformations, penetrating the boundaries between male and female, reality and myth, conscious and unconscious, temporal and spiritual, human and beast.

Because, you know, ick. Sounds like 10,000 bad fantasy novels and hippy stuff.

I hestitated because there was a quote from Neil Gaiman saying it was the best book he's read for ages. Cool.

But then, I mean, I like him but he comes across as a terribly nice man who seems to be superenthusiastic about everyone he's ever met (the acknowledgements page of his most recent book made him sound particularly grateful to anyone who had bought him coffee).

So, on balance, I wasn't convinced I should buy it that day and I put it down.

But then I saw it in the library the following week and borrowed it without thinking.

And found I couldn't put it down. It has a fantastically imagined world where magic kind of works but it's really about women's lives and choices and adolescence and ageing and motherhood and love and and and...

It's the sort of book I wish I was in a lovely G&T drinking and chocolate quaffing book club where we could go "did you like this bit?" and "what did you think of this bit? Wasn't that clever?" rather than the snackless serious Alexander McCall Smith scoffing book club I'd join in the real world, if I was in fact a joiner.

Loved it. Gave a copy (not from the library) to my sister for Christmas and she loved it too. Hope it wins some of the prizes it's up for. Go Margo.