Because the hash brown, NCIS and cat-obsessed sharehouse I live in doesn't have internet yet, I was actually in the uni library when I came across the AWWC. So for once in my life I thought, 'There's no time like the present!', looked up the Miles Franklin shortlist, read a few synopses, chucked The Beloved into the library search engine, walked up a few flights of stairs, and took it home with me that same night.
I did not intend to finish it that same night, I had half a season of Sabrina the Teenage Witch to lie catatonically in front of, but this book grabbed me from the first page.
The Beloved is a story about mothers and daughters, about the individuality that women can lose when they have children, and about how they and their children navigate this loss. It perfectly captures the prickliness of tense mother-daughter relationships in a way that doesn't simply write off adolescent desires as a phase or portray mothers as always knowing best in the end. Its first-person narration by the child in the relationship, Roberta, means that the main story, hers, has a clear and ongoing progression throughout the years over which it is set. This is particularly striking given the number of subplots and the extent of the secondary characters' development, which combine to give a strong sense of the richness of the world around Roberta, escaping the trap of the entirely private sphere which often affects books centred on family relationships.
This novel is beautiful on a number of levels - its vivid descriptions of Papua New Guinea, which reminded me strongly of Peter Goldsworthy's impressions of Darwin in Maestro, its harsh and often, in reality, unspeakable truths, and its ability to draw a shocked laugh from me every so often, just as events and people in my own life do. And it is beautiful for the way it made me cry over a throwaway sentence about the mere humanity of parents. I've already called my mum to tell her to read it.
Tuesday, June 4, 2013
they told me to get a hobby...
A bit of background.
I'm Lauren. I'm twenty, living in Melbourne, struggling with mental illness and only studying my BA part-time because of that.
Last year, in an effort to make myself read more, I made a New Year's resolution to write a list of all the new books I read. It was the first New Year's resolution I'd ever stuck to, and I read thirty-one books. I've been doing the same this year, and so far I've read ten. But last night I came across the Australian Women Writers Challenge, and although it's already June, I've decided that it is going to be my reading goal for the year.
The AWWC began in 2012, the National Year of Reading, as an attempt to address the gender bias in literary reviews. The challenge it poses is reasonably simple: read and/or review a given number of books by Australian women writers. There are three levels: Stella (read four, review at least three), Miles (read six, review at least four), and Franklin (read ten, review at least six). Participants can also design their own challenge, whether they aim to focus on a particular genre, or to read as many books as they possibly can within the year.
The key element of the AWWC, which sets it apart from other public reading programs I have completed, is its requirement that the books be reviewed, in order to get more reviews of women's writing out into the public sphere. Hence this blog, on which I will be reviewing ten books over the course of this year, beginning with Annah Faulkner's The Beloved, in my next post.
Happy reading/joint destroying/patriarchy smashing, everyone!
I'm Lauren. I'm twenty, living in Melbourne, struggling with mental illness and only studying my BA part-time because of that.
Last year, in an effort to make myself read more, I made a New Year's resolution to write a list of all the new books I read. It was the first New Year's resolution I'd ever stuck to, and I read thirty-one books. I've been doing the same this year, and so far I've read ten. But last night I came across the Australian Women Writers Challenge, and although it's already June, I've decided that it is going to be my reading goal for the year.
The AWWC began in 2012, the National Year of Reading, as an attempt to address the gender bias in literary reviews. The challenge it poses is reasonably simple: read and/or review a given number of books by Australian women writers. There are three levels: Stella (read four, review at least three), Miles (read six, review at least four), and Franklin (read ten, review at least six). Participants can also design their own challenge, whether they aim to focus on a particular genre, or to read as many books as they possibly can within the year.
The key element of the AWWC, which sets it apart from other public reading programs I have completed, is its requirement that the books be reviewed, in order to get more reviews of women's writing out into the public sphere. Hence this blog, on which I will be reviewing ten books over the course of this year, beginning with Annah Faulkner's The Beloved, in my next post.
Happy reading/joint destroying/patriarchy smashing, everyone!
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