bedside_reading



=**Bedside Reading**=

As usual there's been a big pile of books beside the bed lately and some good things too!

I'm still going through my non-fiction phase a bit, just finishing Peter Timm's pictorial history of the Australian suburban garden, //Australia's Quarter Acre//, which would make a great Christmas present for that relative who stills thinks roses are the only flower. And, though my more high-brow friends describe it as pseudo-philosophy, I've always enjoyed Alain de Botton's work and //The Architecture of Happiness// too. I'm not sure whether John Berger's //Here is Where We Meet// is non-fiction or not, but his reunions with dead friends in this imaginary memoir is mostly really good, sometimes beautiful. And, just to keep my curriculum cred, Thomas Friedman's //The World is Flat//, about the globalised world in the twenty-first century is a great conversation starter at evening network meetings.

In poetry I read John Kinsella's rollicking memoir, //Fast Loose Beginnings,// about his early days as a poet (sex, drugs and poetry readings), but poets should stick to poems and Geoff Page's seventeenth (yes 17th!) book //Agnostic Skies,// about the difficulties in not believing is much better and might well be his last. Jennifer Maiden won the AGE Book of the Year with her poetry book, //Friendly Fire//, but I read it and it was too political for me. A book much more to my taste is Diane Fahey's //Sea Wall and River Light',// a series of sonnets set in Barwon Heads and of that landscape style I like so much. It's a new collectiona and I've been asked to launch it in Barwon Heads later in the month so it's top of the pile until then!

I took some 'guilty-fun' reading to Japan; a big fat trilogy of detective writer James Lee Burke's early books in his Dave Robicheaux series, //The Neon Rain//, //Black Cherry Blues// and //Heaven's Prisoners//. The irony of reading evocative books about the New Orleans swamplands while lying in bed in my hotel in Tokyo was not lost on me, but when I discovered a vending machine outside the school that sold 'Dr Pepper' (Robicheaux's favourite drink when he's on the wagon!) it just seemed so right.

As for fiction, well, blocking the clock radio and looming in the distance are new books by two of my favourite American fiction writesr: Cormac Mc Carthy's //'The Road// and the the final book of Richard Fords wonderful trilogy of the ordinary man in //The Lay of the Land//'. So excited am I about these, that I'm waiting for the holidays, and dread beginning them, lest they are as good as I hope and I wont want to finish them!