My Life in Books: Karen and Lisa

This is My Life in Books, Series Six, Day One! The first pair this week are:

Karen, who blogs at Booker Talk

Lisa, who blogs at ANZ Lit Lovers

Qu. 1.) Did you grow up in a book-loving household, and did your parents read to you? Pick a favourite book from your childhood, and tell me about it.

Karen: You’re really testing my memory here! Since my childhood was more than five decades ago I have few recollections of that time. I had to ask my parents to fill in the gaps. Apparently yes there were lots of books around the house and they did read to me. Lots of fairy stories in my early years and later the classics like Little Women, Heidi, Coral Island and Treasure Island.

When I progressed to being able to read myself I used my pocket money to buy just about every boarding school book that existed. A particular favourite was Jane Eyre – it still is, though of course I read it very differently now. As a child I loved the rebel in Jane Eyre – a bit of a theme here since it was the rebel Jo in Little Women that I was drawn to most.

Lisa: Both my parents, but especially my father, nurtured my love of books.  Though I remember my father singing us to sleep, I don’t remember anyone reading to me, but that’s because I can’t remember not being able to read for myself. We had shelves and shelves of books in the house, adults’ and children’s, but even though we always received books at Christmas and birthdays, there were never enough because we were all voracious readers.  So Daddy used to walk us down to the library every Saturday to get some more. We moved a lot when I was a child, but the first thing my father always did was to join us up to the library so it became a lifelong habit.

My favourite book from my childhood was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle – and I still have it, inscribed ‘To Lisa with love from Daddy, Christmas 1965’.  I loved this book because I was fascinated by the idea of time travel, and I can remember talking about it with my mother, who thought it could be possible, and my father who (being a scientist) thought it wasn’t… I realise now, too, that I may also have liked it because it had a brave and intelligent female hero, which (although there was Alice) was not common in books for children in those days. 

Qu. 2.) What was one of the first ‘grown-up’ books that you really enjoyed? What was going on in your life at this point?

Karen: The first I can remember were the novels of Jean Plaidy that I discovered when I was about 12 years old. I couldn’t get enough of those tales of that roguish king Charles II or the intrigues of the Tudor court. They were way more exciting – more real – than all the boring political history about the Reform Act and Repeal of the Corn Laws we got in school

A friend shared my enthusiasm so our walk to school was full of discussion about what we’d read the previous night. We got too carried away however so inevitably arrived after the school bell had sounded.

The enthusiasm I had then for history has never gone away.

Lisa: As I grew older and started reading ‘adult’ books, talking about them with my father became part of our Saturday after-lunch-while-doing-the-dishes routine.  He suggested that I read Nineteen Eighty-Four and then went on to Aldous Huxley.  I was still at school, but rather bored, so these discussions about philosophy and the possible future were the intellectual highlight of my week.

1984, of course, was then still in the future, but in my immediate future as an adult, so it messed, in a good way, with my adolescent anticipation of being an adult and free to do whatever I liked, with a future controlled by faceless authorities. I think that’s what made me interested in (armchair) politics. 

Qu. 3.) Pick a favourite book that you read in your 20s or early 30s – especially if it’s one which helped set you off in a certain direction in life.

Karen: After university I embarked on a career as a journalist. One of my ‘heroes’ was Keith Waterhouse, a columnist for the Daily Mirror newspaper, one of the biggest selling newspapers in the UK. I’d read his columns throughout my teens, laughing as he held forth on his obsessions with the minutiae of life. He’d rail about shopkeepers whose shop windows advertised “potato’s” and “pound’s of apple’s and orange’s”

His book, Daily Mirror Style became my bible.  In it, he urged journalists to avoid cliches and puns and the ‘purple prose’ that George Orwell so hated. I took his advice to heart. Discovering this book set in train my life-long hatred of the kind of jargon found everywhere in business. Phrases like “mind-set”, “moving forward” and “North Star” are guaranteed to set me on edge. And don’t even get me started on “leverage”.

Lisa: That would be The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer. It was a revelation to me, and since I was married and a mother by then, it certainly triggered some lively discussions around the dinner table! I’d been a bit of a feminist without knowing it, but reading Greer gave me a philosophical framework and a legitimacy for the my ideas about gender equity.  

Apparently Greer doesn’t like it when people tell her that she changed their lives, because she thinks that we’re the ones who did the changing, but it’s certainly true in my case, that she triggered changes in what I expected from life and how I was to be treated. That moment when I picked up the keys to our one and only car *without* asking “permission” reconfigured the power relationship in our marriage and ultimately made us both much happier.

Qu. 4.) What’s one of your favourite books that you’ve found in the last year or two? How did you come to blogging and how has blogging changed your reading habits?  

Karen: I started blogging when I came up with an idea to read all the Booker prize winners and wanted a way to document my experience. What I hadn’t expected was that blogging would introduce me to so many new authors. It made me realise that my reading had a fairly narrow geographic focus; very dominated by British and American writers. Trying to broaden my horizons has led me to some delightful Japanese authors including most recently Yasunari Kawabata whose novel Snow Country I found utterly mesmerising.  

Lisa: Oh, such an impossible question! I’ll tweak it to choosing two standout Australian novels from the last month or two: a superb new novel called The Yield by Wiradjuri author Tara June Winch (which I reviewed during Indigenous Literature Week which I host every year), and Invented Lives by Andrea Goldsmith, a local Melbourne author who writes stunning contemporary novels that are always food for thought. 

My route to blogging began with learning how to do it for professional purposes, starting my LisaHillSchoolStuff blog to share resources with other teachers, and, truth be told, to pontificate in occasional rants about this and that. The ANZ LitLovers blog began as a site for an online book group to share their discussions, but that never worked out.  So I just kept it for my own thoughts about the books I read, which I was confident nobody else would ever read, and I was quite startled when I received a request to review a book. And to my astonishment, it just grew from there…

Qu. 5.) Finally – a favourite that might surprise people!

Karen: People who know me and follow my blog are aware that I don’t care much for science fiction, fantasy or anything that smacks of the supernatural. Yet one of my most enjoyable books of recent years was Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel. If this is an example of science fiction writing at its best then I could become a convert.

Lisa: The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela by Sisonke Msmiang. This is a favourite because I’ve found myself talking about it such a lot.  Everyone knows Winnie, and everyone has an opinion about her, usually a negative one. But because I’d read The Cry of Winnie Mandela by Njabulo Ndebele (2003), which is about the impossible position of so many South African women under apartheid, waiting for long periods of time for the return of their husbands and expected to keep their own lives on hold indefinitely, I had been wondering what it would have been like to be married to a secular saint.

Sisonke Msimang explores this idea further in The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela where she makes the point that “We like our heroines to be courageous, but we don’t want them to be messy”. For me, Msimang’s book is what reading is about, challenging our ideas and making us thinks about the lives of others so different from our own.

What sort of reader do you think would choose these books? And which book would you recommend they read?

Lisa on Karen’s choices: My partner’s first two choices hint that we are perhaps of the same gender and approximate age…

Because Jane Eyre was chosen as a favourite book, I think that my partner has an instinct for compassion and an intense dislike of injustice and hypocrisy, while a lingering fondness for Jean Plaidy suggests that we share a romantic streak, with a possible fondness for cravats. 

However Daily Mirror Style, it seems, is not a home decorating handbook, but instead may have been a catalyst for a career as a writer of some sort… maybe working as a journalist exposing injustice and hypocrisy!

Perhaps such a career has prompted a yearning to escape urban life and its underbelly, because although I suspect my partner is British, she likes reading about other cultures.  So I think she has a taste for travel, with a preference for desolate landscapes thinly populated by people with doomed love lives. But my partner remains an optimist: even when reading a book out of her comfort zone, she is open to the possibility of human beings rising to the challenge when confronted with the end of civilisation.  

My partner is an open-minded reader, interested in people and places unlike her own, but her choices are all from northern latitudes. She seems to like classics, so I’m going to suggest an Australian classic: The Battlers by Kylie Tennant, a journalist who walked the roads with unemployed men during the Depression, and exposed the cruelty and injustice that these men suffered to a wider audience. The Battlers is Australia’s Grapes of Wrath and it’s never been out of print since published in 1941 —it’s a story about men on the road, driven by hope while looking for work, but unlike Steinbeck’s story, The Battlers features a feisty female travelling companion called Darcy.  

Karen on Lisa’s choices: This sounds like someone who reads widely, across genres and countries. They are interested in big ideas and enjoy thoughtful books which raise big questions. The list has some well-known titles but the inclusion of The Yield leads me to think this is a reader whose choice of books isn’t driven by publishing buzz. 

It’s tough to think of something that would suit their tastes but which they are unlikely to have already read. I’m going to recommend The Armies by the Colombian author Evilio Rosero. This was published in 2009 and won the International Foreign Fiction. It’s a short novel about a man caught in the crossfire between state forces, drug traffickers and guerrillas and facing a moral dilemma about his missing wife.