The Woman in White

First of all a confession… I am not, strictly speaking, “reading” this book, but listening to an audio version. Audio books provide a really convenient way to increase your amount of reading, if you commute or spend time at the gym you can listen to the audio. Fortunately there are more and more excellent audio titles available through the public libraries in Perth and they are narrated by some fine actors.

At the moment I am “reading” The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. Incredibly, The Woman in White has never been out of print since it first appeared in serial form in Victorian England (1860) and it still has readers in its thrall.

The narrative hook draws you into the story right in the beginning when the hero, Walter Hartright, comes across the mysterious woman in white late at night on a lonely road north of London. She stops him, appears agitated and asks strange questions. Later on our hero comes across some men who are searching for the woman, claiming has escaped from an asylum. Then the story moves to another location where Walter meets another woman in white. Is this a doppelganger? As the story develops, Hartright becomes a type of Victorian detective as he follows clues along the way to discover the truth about this mysterious woman: who is she and why was she so agitated, why is she on the run?

In many ways Wilkie Collins' novels were forerunners of contemporary crime fiction and they certainly influenced many current writers of crime and mystery. Collins most famous novel is The Moonstone (published 1868) which Dorothy L Sayers considered "probably the very finest detective story ever written". I plan to read The Moonstone next and I already have downloaded a free ebook copy onto my Kindle.

As an aside, Wilkie Collins was a great friend of Charles Dickens and he lead quite a sensational life for Victorian times.

My post for the July readit2001 Twitter #whodoneit

Books I read in 2010

I’ve been inspired by Ruminations list of books read in 2010 to come up with my own list of what I read in 2010. I hadn’t actually kept track, apart from the bookgroup readings, but here’s an approximate list of those read in the year. New Year's Resolution read more in 2011...

B indicates the bookgroup ones and A the Australian ones.

1. A year of wonders : a novel of the plague by Geraldine Brooks
2. Frenchman's Creek by Daphne du Maurier
3. War and peace by Leo Tolstoy
4. The spare room by Helen Garner (A)
5. Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey (A)
6. Lovesong by Alex Miller (A)
7. Purple hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
8. Half of a yellow sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
9. Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd (B)
10. The Other Side of You by Sally Vickers (B)
11. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (B)
12. Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey (A) (B)
13. Wanting by Richard Flanagan (A) (B)
14. The Black Englishman by Carolyn Slaughter (B)
15. The Red Highway by Nicholas Rothwell (A) (B)
16. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
17. The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson
18. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest by Stieg Larsson
19. A Journey Tony Blair

Highlights

The Spare Room by Helen Garner would be my highlight. It's about a friend dying of cancer who comes to stay in the spare room. Don’t be put off by the subject matter as the clear writing and honesty make it shine. What a wonderful writer Helen Garner is, and she is not afraid of tackling difficult subjects. Joe Cinque's Consolation is another amazing book by HG.

Ordinary Thunderstorms is a rollicking good whodunit story about a guy who loses all his ID and survives on the streets of London while trying to get back his life and find the criminals. It would make a great movie. I’ve read another by William Boyd (Armadillo), also excellent and they did make a movie of that.

And I finally read War and Peace which, according to Elaine in Seinfeld was really meant to be called “War what is it good for” ;). Once you get your head around all the characters (hint: make a list) and the fact that they all have many different names you can get an entree into the story.

Two of these I read as ebooks on my Kindle: A Journey Tony Blair and Lovesong by Alex Miller

Six of those, the (A) ones are Australian literature. Geraldine Brooks is Australian too, but I don’t think of her as writing about Australia, especially.

One Australian Book Meme

After doing the One Book Meme a few weeks back I've done my own variation on that:

The One Australian Book Meme. Unlike the others, this one has some non-fiction in it.

One Aussie book you’ve recently read:
Doing Life: a biography of Elizabeth Jolley by Brian Dibble. Thoroughly researched and full of detail, but a good read for those who know a bit about EJ's amazing life

One Aussie book you’d want on a deserted island:
Eucalyptus by Murray Bail. If you were stuck on a desert island you'd need something to lift your spirits and remind you of the Australian bush

One Aussie book you’ve read more than once:
Highways to a War by Christopher Koch. I love this book and it's so evocative of time and place. It transports you into the life of a war correspondent in South East Asia in the 1970s. I had a thing for Neil Davis, on whose life the novel is loosely based

One Aussie book you’ve never been able to finish:
Illywacker by Peter Carey.
Enjoyed Carey's Oscar and Lucinda, Bliss, and several others, but couldn't finish this one for some reason

One Aussie book that made you laugh:
Unreliable Memoirs by Clive James. I'm chuckling just thinking about it. The others in the autobiographical series are great too

One Aussie book that made you cry:
Joe Cinque's Consolation by Helen Garner
Clearly a one sided picture of this terrible miscarriage of justice, but good on you Helen for tackling this story. Wonderful writing too.

One Aussie book you’ve been meaning to read:
Tree of Man by Patrick White. I have the first edition at home, bought by my father when it came out in the 1950s, so I have no excuse ;)

One Aussie book you keep rereading:
The Reader's Digest Book of Australian Birds.
This is the book that got me started on my whole crazy bird watching life. Parts of the book are imprinted on my brain.

One Aussie book you believe everyone should read:
The Man who Loved Children by Christina Stead. It's an Australian classic and should have been recognised as such at the time, except for its American subject matter. Apparently Stead had originally set the book in Sydney, but changed it to meet her U.S. market. It is a depressing, Depression story :(

A One Book Meme

The One Book Meme has been posted by:
reeling and writhing and Ruminations

Here's my go at it:

One book you’re currently reading: The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
One book that changed your life: Bury My Heart of Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
One book you’d want on a deserted island: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. So many ways to interpret this book. After reading this my friend went into the Claremont bookshop and asked the owner what else they had that was like The Name of the Rose. She was told there IS none!
One book you’ve read more than once: Lord of the Rings by J.R.R.Tolkein
One book you’ve never been able to finish: An Instant of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears
It's the sort of book I normally like, but when Pears started looking at the story again through different eyes I sort of lost interest. I should give it another go...one day.
One book that made you laugh: The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
This one was hard. And then I remembered this hilariously anarchistic adventure I came across in the 1980s. I must read some more fun stuff.
One book that made you cry: A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
It's wonderful, but pretty grim
One book you keep rereading: Pride and Prejudice and everything by Jane Austen, what a genius. How many novels of that period are still so fresh?
One book you’ve been meaning to read: Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder
After buying it some years ago it's still sitting on my shelf
One book you believe everyone should read: 1984 by George Orwell

This was fun, but if I did it again next week I'd probably come up with a different result.