Favel Parrett was one of these. I saw her speaking at a panel about literary influences, and she listed a whole pile of books that I love. She talked about writing landscape, and the poetics of water, and writing as tracing little pieces of your self. She was prepared. And she is dead cute. And I figured these were all reasons I might like her book.

Past the Shallows is a heartbreaker. It’s so gently told, through the eyes of three young brothers, growing up in a grim coastal town. Their father is a gruff and angry man, and an exacting one, the family struggling to survive on the money they can make fishing in an outdated boat.There’s not much hope for any of the boys, but their gestures of  tenderness – a warm cup of milo, a borrowed jumper – shine through all the more for it.

But it’s the minor characters that really shake up the book, from a burnt-skinned hermit, feared and scorned by the town, who offers strange respite and companionship to the youngest son, to a brittle and irascible aunt powerless to intervene in the shipwreck of the brothers’ childhoods and a wealthy fisherman whose kindness is simple. They build up a picture of a town that is all too aware of what goes on behind closed doors, that really does care for the fate of the boys, but yet is unable to step in or really speak out. Against this, there’s a lyricism and a power in the landscape and the water that is arresting.

In many ways, what Past the Shallows offers are the staple ingredients of Australian writing –  landscape, the coastal town, the father trapped by his own rough masculinity, the outsider, the uncanny child. But its emotional tenor is so finely felt that this hardly matters, and the plot moves along delicately. A great deal is left unspoken in the book, and allowed to palpitate just below the surface. It really was a swoon to read.

And at the same time, for equally dubious reasons, I picked up Chris Currie’s The Ottoman Motel. Chris is one of the sweetest people on the literary scene, affability incarnate in my opinion. And I’d already heard about the book’s beautiful acknowledgements, which make any engagement-ring-inside-the-champagne-glass gesture look, well, most lame.

But what hooked me into this book was also its delicate and slightly damaged protagonist, another sensitive young boy. The opening sequence, where Simon is travelling in a car with his parents is enchanting – the imagination and machinations of the mind of a child I’ve never seen as convincingly and beautifully portrayed as they are here. And states of waiting, of unknowing and of irresolvability are at the heart of the book, and lend it a heightened, luminous sense of suspendedness, of the weight of time, and of the uncanniness of longing. I loved Simon. And I loved his oddball friends – a girl who wears her missing mother’s dresses, a boy who dreams of building a restaurant in an abandoned swimming pool – even more.

I’d been warned that the book might be disappointing, because it becomes something of a thriller, or another small-town mystery, but it’s so wonderfully handed, so littered with oddities and moments of raw and vulnerable emotion and so resistant of easy solutions that I never found this to be the case. And the idea of disappearance, of missingness, is something of an obsession of mine at the moment.

Or it could just be the ranga factor. Adding ginger to any recipe can’t help but make it better.

I’ll start on the controversial note. My housemate has incredible calves, and has adorned them with a literary tattoo: someone had blundered. If that isn’t a sign of a novel making a real and lasting impact on someone, I don’t know what is. So I borrowed her copy of To The Lighthouse.

And I was determined to like it. I have a major crush on Leonard Woolf. I adore Orlando. And Virginia Woolf’s essays. Hell, I even love The Hours, despite the droopiness of Nicole Kidman. But I just couldn’t do it. I’ve always believed that  the books that really touch you, that you really experience as a part of your life, that change the shape of your heart and your brain, are the ones that you come across at the right time. I read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as an angsty teenage feminist, for example. Beverley Farmer’s The Seal Woman at the end of a confusing not-that-into-you romance. To The Lighthouse I tried to take on when I was writing essays for uni, preparing two books for publication at work, giving a series of poetry readings in short succession, ‘doing’ the Sydney Writers Festival in proper party mode, and having the occasional nap. A brain that is fragmented can’t cope with narrative that’s so subtly fragmented, that shifts in subjectivity so swiftly and skillfully  that any inattention means you lose the plot. Pun intended. I’m sorry Virginia. I’ll visit the lighthouse in less stormy conditions.

And under that brain-battery, I chose to revisit a book I once loved, Nikki Gemmel’s Lovesong. When I read this years ago, I was enchanted by its rich and lyrical writing, and by the control over the plot – the story is remarkable for what it holds back, and slowly reveals to the reader. But on re-reading, I didn’t quite get that far. What struck me then a poetic and beautiful in the language now hit me as overwrought and overwritten. And the voice, speaking in direct address to an unborn child, now felt precious and unconvincing. There’s so much longing and waiting and felt; so little seen and heard and touched. But the disparity in my reactions to the novel shocked me – as much as it saddened me to be losing an old friend. There’s no better indicator of how much I’ve changed as a reader and a writer, how much I’ve learned and taken in and tossed away.

I’ve had a few conversations with other writers since, quite a few of whom had also re-read old favourites with considerable fear. Some wouldn’t do it at all, in case they were disappointed, in case they lost that old pleasure and delight, that onetime joy. Others who believe there are too many other books in the world to revisit an old story. And others yet who make a point of re-reading the books they love on quite a regular basis, and claim they find new secrets and new treasures every time.

That said, I navigated my reading doldrums pretty quickly. But I’m saving that story for next time…

Kazuo Ishiguro, where have you been all my life? Over the last months, entirely by chance, three Ishiguro novels have come into my hands, loaned to me by a housemate, a friend, my mother. What has dazzled me most is the variety of the books, their subjects, scopes, their narrative voices all so different from each other that they seem like they’ve been penned by different hands. Over the last months, I’ve listened to the narration of a traumatised Japanese woman living in an English county, an ageing and upright butler, a brittle and doomed young woman, and believed them all entirely. And it’s been an interesting journey, to say the least.

I started with A Pale View of Hills (Faber& Faber, 1982), a slender and scruffy volume plucked from my housemate’s Billy bookshelves. What amazed me about this book is the depth of its control – from the opening pages, you’re aware that some kind of tragedy has taken place, that something terrible has happened to the narrator’s younger, more Japanese daughter, but this never entirely unravels. It’s a story told in hints, and in glimpses, and riddled with doublings, mirrorings and misunderstandings. And the narrator is lovely – an observant and touchingly melancholic woman, describing the early days of her unhappy marriage in post-war Japan and her current quiet twilight in the English countryside, visited by her estranged daughter. It’s a tale of the uncanny, a ghost story and a tale of the occluded, the deluded and the ruptured – and it’s this central mystery, this unresolve, the things that are withheld and suppressed that make it such a powerful and striking book. And had me caught. It was such a beautiful, sticky web that Isiguro weaves.

So I was shocked, or disconcerted at the very least, when I moved on to The Remains of the Day. Instead of that beautiful, dreamy and ambiguous female voice, here was a butler as black-and-white in vision as his upper lip is stiff. This book is almost an exercise in the British accent, and masterful in its control – the narrator’s self-delusion reveals itself so slowly, and his entire narrative unfolds in arcs of memory and reminiscence, as he drives through the English countryside. So slowly the novel’s real concerns become apparent – it’s a story about class, about race, and about nostalgia – that is, a story about a very specific kind of Britishness that is so keenly observed and sharply drawn, and startling in its poignancy.

Finally, then, my mother lent me Never Let Me Go in the months before the film was released here. Unfortunately, her copy didn’t have the beautiful cover pictured here; instead, I had to carry around Keira Knightley’s horse-face in my handbag for a week. I suffer for my stories.

And it’s a story well known for its heartbreak, for its devastating sadness in conclusion and melancholy right throughout. But reading this as the third part of a trio, I was struck mostly by its similarities with Kazuo’s other tales. Ostensibly, there are huge differences – this is a kind of speculative fiction, the narrator is a young and self-aware woman, there’s a love story here that’s largely missing from the other books. But it’s a story built of memories, of looking back at a childhood in a lost and unrecoverable world. And Hailsham, the school at the novel’s centre, is an archetype of that very British institution – the country boarding school.

Englishness and loss both haunt this novel – just as they lie at the core of the other two books. And I think, somehow, that this is writing about migration; that by both observing a culture from the outside, and by examining the workings of memory, nostalgia and unrecoverable pasts, Isiguro is writing books of exile. That there is something of the Japanese writer at the heart of these very English books, and something strange and estranged there that pulls so strongly on the heartstrings.

Oh Kazuo. Thank you for giving me such pleasure.

Tsu-Ming Teo, Behind the Moon

I’ve got a lot of time, and a lot of love for Western Sydney literature. I’m a Westie, I still work in those big badlands, and there’s a whole world of stories and voices – often startlingly accented –  there that struggle to be heard in the wider world. This one is set in Strathfield, and follows three young people through those horrid years of early adulthood, when it’s still not certain who you are and what the world is. The dialogue is lovely, and often hilarious, and it’s a book with a lot of heart – but no danger and not enough dash to really grab me.

Thea Astley, Reaching Tin River

I love Thea Astley, and think she’s one of our most underrated writers. And this book had me from its opening lines:

I am looking for a one-storey town, with trees, river, hills, and a population of under two thousand, one of whom must be called Gaden Lockyer. Or.

Mother was a drummer in her own al-women group, a throbber of a lady with midlife zest and an off-centre smile. Or.

I have decided to make a list of all the convent girls who learnt to play ‘The Rustle of Spring’ by Christian Sinding between 1945 and 1960.

Three alternative opening statements, all perfectly fitting. It’s a beautifully quirky book, about obsession, dissatisfaction, nostalgia and fantasy. And I bought it on my Summer holiday at Vinnies for one dollar. Gold.

A.S. Byatt, Sugar

Possession is one of my ‘comfort books’ – books that I can read again and again, when I need something snuggly and dependable. Which is why I borrowed Sugar from a friend’s bookshelves. I just love raiding other people’s shelves. And these are smart and sexy stories, sometimes folkloric or mythic, but really, only the last of them – the title story – had the dazzling complexity and challenge that I expected from Byatt. It’s a digressive and fragmentary story of family myths and lies, remembered as a relative lies dying in a Dutch hospital. And it’s brilliant. I would have loved it as a novella all its own.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

I think I waited too long to read this, and had heard so many hyped-up reviews that my disappointment was almost inevitable. I did love the spare and brutal language, the incredible stripping back of every word and mark of punctuation not needed, the strange similes. But there’s a terrifying spareness of narrative as well. Goddamn it, nothing happens.

Roberto Bolano, The Savage Detectives

I’ve decided that Bolano is a bit like Entourage. Guys think it’s fantastic. Rave about it. Just love it. Because it’s a big male dream – a glamourous fantasy of wealth, women and fame. Women, on the other hand, enjoy it perfectly well, but don’t go losing their heads over it. The poet characters in this book are living the Beat dream. They drop out of uni, they bicker, they wander. They hang about in cafes and bars and pick up women and smoke and drink and plot to kidnap Octavio Paz. It’s glorious, and terribly funny, but I do think it’s a very masculine imagining, and so didn’t find the books as life-changing as a friend of mine had warned. That said, it’s an incredibly dexterous and skillful book, the gradual unfolding of facts is so masterfully controlled through a series of dramatic monologues that are nothing short of virtuosic. I have a favourite section, where each of these begins with ‘The thing about poets is…’ and then romps through a story of wild behaviour and betrayal. And it’s also a keen and witty portrayal of writerly cliques, and the tiffs and hissy fits that they throw. It did make me long for a place where poetry matters as much as it does here, for poetry that is the bread and butter of such lives…

I first came across Lorrie Moore via the New Yorker Fiction Podcasts. Subscribe. They’ve bruised my soul at least a dozen times already. Her story, ‘Dance in America’ opens with an incredible description of leading workshops in schools, which almost immediately started churning through a story of my own. I also read her novel Anagrams last year, which delighted me with its quirky leading lady. But the petrified fishlips are from her new novel, A Gate at the Stairs, a novel that I already know is going to be one of those incredibly important books that you carry within you for years.

There’s those metaphors. ‘Like Gertrude Stein speaking through a burqa.’ ‘I lay beneath the sheets… feeling storky.’ ‘The summer moon… an orange peel stuck up their like the lunch garbage of God.’ But more importantly, there’s their speaker, a first-year college student named Tassie, who has moved from a country town to a bigger university city. She’s awkward (‘I searched, as I often found myself having to do, to find a language, or even an octave, in which to speak.’) and slightly naive, she bumbles a bit because she cares too much, she struggles with the isolation and disconnection of university life. And she’s an oddball, constantly toying around with language and looking at the world slightly askew. That is to say, we’d be great mates, Tassie and I. We’d understand each other. And that’s not even getting started on her housemate Murph, a pierced-nosed and gutter-mouthed bombshell of a woman who gives Tassie her old vibrator to stir her milkshakes. Hmm.

But the remarkable thing about The Gate at the Stairs is its complexity of story. Like those constantly erupting metaphors, it constantly throws disparate elements together, in a way that makes it seem that things could never have been otherwise. It’s more than just a coming-of-age story, or a story of a small-town girl finding her feet in the big, bad world. Set in the months immediately after the World Trade Centre attacks (‘we did not yet call [the events] 9/11′), the story moves between Tassie’s two worlds – with her colleagues and employers in Troy, and her potato-farming family in Dellacrosse. So what starts as a surreal and satirical college story becomes a bildingsroman, becomes a love story, becomes a family drama, becomes a tale of race-relations, becomes a search for things lost. The provincial butts up against the metropolitan, and against the dramas of the international world, and Tassie’s struggle is one of how to be, and of how to make meaning, on all of these fronts at once. Her tragedy is realising the full complexity of the world, and the impossibility of coherence within it. (‘The end of comedy was the beginning of all else.’)

And I’ll be haunted by these images for time to come: decaying cheese in a closed-up restaurant. A bleeding ankle on a prayer rug. A young woman dressed as a bird, to frighten mice away from the blades of a harvester. ‘Sky-wide and tree-toppling’ storms. ‘The very particular sadness of a vanished childhood yoghurt now found only in France.’ And Tassie’s riffing description of her hometown, a place that reminds me scarily of mine:

… the dining was divided into ‘casual,’ which meant you ate it standing up or took it away, and the high-end, which was called ‘Sit-Down Dining.’…[and] the seats were red  leatherette and the walls were covered with the local gemutlichkeit… sauces were called  ’gravy.’ … A la carte meant soup or salad, dinner meant soup and salad…’

I love the excess of this language, the glory of these descriptions. Quite simply, I love this book.

I was startled at the end of 2010 by the lovely Ange, of Literary Minded inclination, listing her favourite book of the year. Casting back over the madness that was 2010, I knew I’d read alot, read constantly, read strange and wonderful beasts and been moved in so many directions. I’d moved in with another editor and gained a whole new bookcase of treasures to troll through. But I couldn’t remember exactly which books had coloured my year, and which of them could have been my favourite.

And so we have a new project: this year, I’m keeping track of every book I finish. And am going to write here about the ones that set me firing.

The first cab of the rank: Kristell Thornell’s Night Street (Allen and Unwin, 2009). In late 2009, I heard Thornell give a paper at UWS about this book, the Vogel, the things she had to leave aside as she developed it. The idea of another book, absent from the final text, but haunting it somehow in traces, in the book’s spaces, in its gaps and ellisions fascinated me – it hints at something at the core of any writing, or of any work, that the idea of the work is always more perfect, more whole, than anything that its actual creation can approach. And it would seem to be even more pertinent to what this, the story of an artist and her art.

Night Street is loosely based on the life of the Australian artist Clarice Beckett, a landscape painter from the 1920s and 30s. But it’s a loose base, and the Clarice of the novel is an imaginative one. What does it mean to be an artist, and what does it mean to be a woman? How do you preserve an inner space for creation, for contemplation, imagination and craft, and is solitude a necessary precondition for any art? Thornell’s Clarice is a prism for her questioning of this work that we do, and the strange lives that we live, both in the world and making something from it.

But the most striking thing about this novel is the way in which it writes about paintings, and images. Beckett’s art is constantly described as ‘difficult’, unladylike and unfashionable, because it’s nebulous. The paintings are fog-ridden, misty and difficult to pin down. And it’s just these qualities that Thornell brings into her prose. This isn’t just writing about the surface of art, it’s writing that works with the same aesthetic as the art, that attempts to portray the art from within. It’s refreshing, and beautifully done. And it also brings a something new to the well-laden table that is Australian writing about landscape.

And I’m haunted still by an image of Clarice on art camp by the coast, falling asleep on a clifftop, naked with her lover, and waking up hours later, with an entirely sunburnt skin. The afterburn of love, the very physical marking of flesh-memory, the trace that lingers for days later. There’s something startling and painfully lovely about it. And makes for one very even suntan.

I saw I Am Love yesterday, with my friend Rosie-the-incredible. I gave her this moniker because she has a remarkable habit of saying sentences that could very easily have come from my own mouth:

‘I really do like The Handmaid’s Tale, but my absolute favourite of Margaret Atwood’s books is Alias Grace.’ and

‘Tilda Swinton is amazing. I really loved her in Orlando. And that books is incredible as well.’

Also because she introduced me to Lemon Shorties at Newtown’s Luxe Bakery. But that’s another story altogether.

The film has this incredible intensity right throughout it, because the emotions and the important moments are handled obliquely, with extreme close-ups of details both unexpected and telling – fingers curled in short-cropped hair, darkly lustrous pearls on a neck, long mirrors, a long fork balanced in a hand. Its a kind of cataloguing of the moment that draws it out into a hyper-real, into a place somewhere already between happening and remembering.

The word ‘poetic’ is overused for anything that’s resonant or moving, but I think it applies to the use of small detail in another way altogether. It’s something I read about in Phillip Mead’s wonderful book Networked Language, something that had my brain exploding all over the place at the time. Describing the influence of film on Kenneth Slessor’s poetry, and on  Five Bells in particular, Mead writes a great deal about attempts to hold on to the moment. As if by drawing out and holding on to the small details of a person or event – such as Joe Lynch’s clinking coat pockets, gaunt chin and penny gaslight – the poetry is struggling to arrest the flow of time, to fix memory, to hold on to what is being lost even as it is occuring.

It blew my mind because it brought to mind something that I’ve always strived for in my poetry, the small detail that speaks of something greater, the little specific that sticks and sings. It is a cataloguing of kinds, a memorialising, and a grasping. And that is why Tilda and I are meant to be together.

“‘Callum,” said the Chief, ‘call Shemus un Snachad…Shemus, Mr Waverley is to wear the cath dath; his trews must be ready in four hours. You know the measure of a well-made man: two double nails to the small of the leg -’

‘Eleven from haunch to heel… if there’s a pair of sheers in the Highland that has a baulder sneck than her’s ain at the cumadh an truis.’”

Reading Walter Scott’s Waverley for my uni course on history, fiction and the history wars, the first impression I had was once of utter incomprehensibility. I’m not a big fan of mannered old English novels on the whole – they put my in mind of the frocks and cops of a Sunday night on the ABC

But I can’t deny that there’s something lovely about the cadence of these passages, something poetic and all the more resonant for the damned mystery of just what it actually means.  It’s almost ethnographical – and that’s what I really found startling about the book.

Waverley is set during the Jacobite Rebellion in 1745, and the eponymous hero finds himself posted on the Scottish frontier – and eventually, visiting and living amongst the Highland chiefs and clansmen. And they are wild. Fierce, skirt-wearing barbarians.*  Their speech and songs, habits and kinships, beliefs and battle-cries and costumes are detailed in all of their sheep-stealing, whiskey-swigging glory. They’re brutal and proud. And fiercely different. And it takes a while to remember that they’re just Scots. Regular, boring old Scots – we’re now so unused to seeing them as anything exotic.

I was talking about this with my mother, a woman who gave her children such flinging Highland names as Ian James, Fiona Kathleen, and has traced her clan back to the McWhirters. She travelled to Scotland on a holiday last year, and told me that she really felt at home in Scotland, felt familiar and comfortable. After all, those wild men are her heritage, those cities her ancestoral home.

But I’ve never been to any place where I could trace my roots – I like to travel in warm places, where the fruits are squashy and abundant and my Highland skin turns pink and peels. But there are some cities that I passed through and felt just that way – comfortable, settled and at home. Cities that I instantly felt I could live in, that I felt connected to, that got under my skin. Ho Chi Minh City was one of those. It’s a long way from Edinburgh to Saigon, but familiarity and strangeness can pop up in the most unexpected of places.

Ho Chi Minh City

Motorbikes dart like a school of startled fish.

Fart petrol fumes, flick through

the strange melody of car horns,

their crisp and tonal language

speaks me out of sleep

each daybreak.

The peddlers on the street

hang from their bamboo baskets

of fisty mangosteen and limes.

Toothy cyclo-men slurp soup for breakfast

on their haunches, unperturbed.

The kaleidoscope

of motorbike mirrors

silvers the boulevard and I don’t dare

duck past.

Young men turn callisthenic in the park,

smile as they kick their hackysack towards me.

The older women

sweep between the ordered piles of leaves.

The days roll slow. I buy postcards

of silk-tuniced women, printed

Vietnamese Charm

and old propaganda posters

priced in American dollars.

Squid dry on cricked clotheslines,

the telegraph wires are kinked

and knotted as noodles.

The evening breathes through the balconies

where ex-pats share their chilli crab

and chilled cab sav

and tell me stories

of just how they wound up here.

I taste the sting of possibilities, their afterburn.

* Tangentially, I’d like to warn you never to ask what a gay man wears at under his kilt to a leather party. The answer is as disturbing as it is unexpected.

To backtrack: I’ve recently gotten my hands on a beautiful copy of the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, a book that sounded like it had been published just for me. Books and baking. A simple equation of bliss. But I did not really realise the sheer delight of the thing until I went searching for a little something-something with which to cater a university seminar on poetry and Gertrude Stein. Every geek has a sweet tooth. I learnt it early, learnt it well.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is one of my favourite books. I love its cheekiness.  And the way Stein gets away with being egotistical, shamelessly self-serving and downright mean by putting words into her lover’s mouth is so breathtakingly bold. There’s also a real affection there to the narration – it’s clear that Stein adores the woman she’s using as something somewhere between a ventriloquist dummy and a muse.

But back to the cake. Alice’s cookbook is more a collection of anecdotes about Modernists and their food. There’s a section of recipes for artists, including a bass cooked for Picasso; a section of recipes stolen from artists, including a hash cake.  The Tender Tart comes from the chapter titled Murder in the Kitchen, and from a story about Kaspar, the couple’s Austrian servant, who claimed to be from the same town as Hitler, where everyone is a little bit mad. Kaspar was courting a French girl named Lili, but absconded from Paris with another, who Alice simply calls ‘The Devil.’ Lili visited Toklas and Stein in tears and ate the last slice of this tart, the last thing that Kaspar cooked in that apartment.

I think Lili got the best part of that man. The tart is all manner of amazing. It’s a soft, sweet pastry shell, around a slightly gooey centre of hazelnuts, sugar and eggs. It looks unimpressive, but has a centre that’s a little bit ecstatic.

One step involves gently stirring the mixture for twenty minutes – which I did whilst reading an incredibly arresting chapter of a new work by Matthew Thompson (which may end up in the next edition of HEAT) about repression, fear and censorship in Iran. It was a disjunctive experience, to say the least. But I think both stories were really about uncovering the everyday – the small things, the routines, the unevents – that happen in the background of bigger histories, be they national or cultural. Regardless of the literary revolutions they are working towards, or the political revolutions they are aching for, people still need to eat.