Festivalling...

I have been festivalling, drinking up the observations of writers at The Melbourne Writers Festival. I have been to a young adult day and a few more adult things. I came away with some great suggestions for books to read... and I have read a few of them!

I read a series by a YA writer Justine Labastier, the Magic or Madness trilogy. These books seemed aimed at the tweenie end of the YA market and are based on the idea that using magic comes at a cost. Justine's biography is inspiring - she decided to be a novellist and got a contract based on her idea! Magic in these becomes becomes a metaphor for temptation and causes a conflict or two within Sarafina's magic family. The settings are the best things about these books. Courtesty of magical portal Newtown, New York and the outback are bought to life rather vividly. I also read the first of the Midnighters series by Scott Westerfield. I liked the authentic sense of teenage life he created.

I also discovered Lisa Unger an American crime writer. I read her novel Sliver of Truth and was rather swept away by it. I love the world she created and that characters were never as they seemed.

I also went to a great session on writing the Holocaust. I went for work, really, because I'll be teaching a book Once by Morris Gleitzman. But one other the other panellists, Thomas Buergenthal spoke about his life and his memoir A Lucky Child. I came home and read this book in one sitting. I was struck by the understatement of his story, when so many Holocaust narrative highlight the drama.

Being Charlotte B

Charlotte's Bronte's books were formative ones for me as a reader. I remember reading Jane Eyre and Villette as an 18 year old ( a bookish provincial one no less), about to leave my country town for university. I think what touched me about these books was the transformative power of the writer's life so I was interesting to read Jude Morgan's book about Charlotte and her family. It was an odd experience reading the book, seeing Charlotte, Emily and Anne suffering the vagaries of earning a living and intensely felt crushes , to know the plot and wait for it to reveal itself. When are the going to write the books? This question kept me reading. Its a very modern book. Although Charlotte emerges as the novel's main character - simply by longevity, her siblings fall one-by-one to consumption - the novel is very equally weighted; Jude Morgan moves easily between the characters and their consciousness. the novel ends with Charlotte's voyage to the sea "the real sea The Atlantic" and some comfort in her marriage.

The Romance of Birds

This elegant book has renewed my faith in reading after a string of so-so reads. I think it's a big question - how to write about love without making it the same old story - and it seems the secret is to write about the whole story, first love to death. Towards the end of the novel Tom (the leading man) says "you know, the only times we aren't mysterious to one another are probably when we're first falling in love and when one of us is dying. New love blinds us for a while to all the things we don't know".Tom and Addie fall in love around a common obsession with birds, Addie as a painter and Tom as a scientist. Through their lives as Addie develops a intense ecological awareness, this shifts and she almost becomes angry at the simple beauty of birds as involved as she is in various activist struggles. Artistically this is expressed through assembages of taxidermied birds, arranged to comment on environmental issues. These dark expressions of her rage find a popular audience. Through all this the bond with Tom morphs and shifts, as does her relationship with her daughter Scarlett. The writing is lovely and the novel, structured around Addie's first notebook with flashbacks and flashforwards, has a unity that is just so.