The computer is giving me grief. Viewpoint has hijacked the homepage and search engines and refuses to be removed in its entirety. And now I am scanning to make sure a nasty little trojan horse has been removed (well, it must be nasty if it's a trojan horse but as Viewpoint is making hay with the search engine, I'm having trouble finding out exactly what kind of horse my trojan is). So, happy new year to all!
I have spent a little time today being a book nerd and reviewing my 2008 reading stats (yes, truly). This year just gone, I completed 36 books. This was a slight improvement on last year's 34 and doesn't include the handful of books that were started but never finished (I have to admit that Helen Garner's novella, The Children's Bach, was one of these but that was because I mislaid it). I didn't read any of the books on my reading list but I did read 19 novels and exactly half of all books read were by Australian authors. This is a huge change from earlier years when Australian writers would have been in an embarrassing minority.
It was a bumper year for Australian fiction with lots of new novels by big names, most of which I haven't yet read. Only Murray Bail's eloquent novel, The Pages, made it on to my reading list. 'A quiet, subtle book about Australia and being Australian and how to live a life'. That was my mid-year assessment of it.
Another theme to my reading this year was the environment; more specifically, our urban gardens and the food chain. It began with Peter Timms' Australia's Quarter Acre; continued with Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food and Ethical Eating by Angela Crocombe; and ended with Pollan's Second Nature: A Gardener's Education. The year ended, in fact, with Second Nature - I was reading it's final pages as the clock struck 12. Altogether, these books have made me think about how we live in our suburban environments. I have become more aware of where food comes from (although have still been duped in the supermarket, discovering too late that I have bought corn from Thailand and grapes from the US, although the pomegranate from the US was a deliberate and indulgent purchase). I have also started to rethink how we use our suburban plots - as our raspberry and youngberry crops have been fantastic this year and we still have peaches, plums and tomatoes to come, I might be a little slow to have come the realisation that we could all have our own little farms and be taking some control over what we eat and how we grow it and helping the "environment" in the process. There is more thinking to do here.
This year, I have expanded by stats to include a 'book of the year' award. Perhaps not surprisingly, it is fiction, as are the three runners' up. Here are my favourites for 2008 - I recommend them all to you if you are looking for great reading in 2009.
In third place, I have taken the soft option and nominated two books: Peter Temple's fantastic Australian crime novel, The Broken Shore, which was my favourite crime novel for the year; and The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones, which made me want to go to China and learn how to cook amazing Chinese food.
In second place, the award goes to The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenberger. I resisted this book for a long time but have finally succumbed, arranged to have a copy given to me for Christmas and am already planning a re-read. Okay, the plot is a bit fanciful - it's about a man who time travels for heaven's sake. But if you let yourself sink into it, you will discover a book full of love and longing, a book about how important memory and hope are in keeping us alive. It's a book about how we influence and alter the lives of those we love. Yes, it's completely romantic. Don't go and see the film. Read the book.
But the book of the year must go to Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones. I read this novel in June and am still talking about it and thinking about it. The book's climax is unforgettably and unexpectedly horrible. Yet the book itself is a wonderful meditation on the power of books and the imagination to help us survive. It also tells a bit of the story of a part of the world those of us in Australia should probably know more about. It's won many, many awards and now I know why. And I almost didn't read it. Don't make the same mistake.
Have a happy reading year!
