It sounds like something other think we think. Thanks to Kate at Books are my Favourite and Best for hosting:) Next month’s starter book is Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through? I haven’t read it but I’ve got The Friend on the TBR, perhaps I might read that instead… So there we are, that’s my #6Degrees for this month! The values which inform our novels with urban settings are entirely different to those which feature in the bleak wilderness of Cate Kennedy’s The World Beneath or the uncompromising isolation of Wildlight,by Robyn Mundy. Anita Heiss’s new novel Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray (River of Dreams) shows how the values of our towns can shift over time, so that now the people of Gundagai are ready to recognise the Indigenous heroes who saved 69 of the townspeople, a third of the population at that time. Kim Lock’s road novel The Other Side of Beautiful takes the reader south from Adelaide to Darwin in the north while No One, by John Hughes unravels our sense of place in Sydney. Reading our literature can take you anywhere. Indeed, it’s the diversity of our cities and towns, lifestyles and values that makes Australia such an interesting place to live.
#The six degrees of separation plus
Plus we have trams, and an obsession with coffee unmatched anywhere else on the continent!
We are also proud to be leading the nation in developing a treaty with our Indigenous people. As an indication of our cultural values, Melbourne is a City of Literature, (the only one in Australia) and we have the best art gallery in the nation. As Probert makes clear in her discussion about the landscapes of Australia, our country is just too vast and diverse to have lifestyles in common across the continent, and it’s not just a matter of climate and landscape. Having just read Belinda Probert’s Imaginative Possession, I have to quarrel with the last part of The Monthly’s summation which claims that Melbourne’s lifestyles and values are indicative of those in the rest of the nation. Reunion (2009) was described by The Monthly as a ‘kind of inner-city intellectual counterpart to Christos Tsiolkas’s suburban masterpiece The Slap…a novel about how we live now, about the lifestyles and values of present-day Melbourne and, by extension, Australia.’ My favourite is The Art of the Engine Driver.Īnother author who sets her novels in Melbourne is Andrea Goldsmith, who brings the inner city alive. These novels, including the Miles Franklin winning The Time We Have Taken (2007), are set somewhere like Glenroy, though the setting could be in any of Melbourne’s 1950s middle ring suburbs, really). My most ambitious effort was to read the entire La Comedie Humaine by Balzac, followed by Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, but my favourite has to be Steven Carroll’s Glenroy novels. It takes a certain kind of reading stamina to work through an author’s series. This was a wonderful series, and the Miles Franklin judges thought so too when they awarded the MF to Dark Palace. Books 1 & 2 of the series, Grand Days (1993) and Dark Palace (2000) trace a woman’s career in the failed League of Nations of the interwar years, while the concluding novel Cold Light (2011) features the expat returning home to Australia when the UN doesn’t want her. The Edith Trilogy by Frank Moorhouse also involves a young woman going to work for an international body. It’s the story of Jenny, who abandons her annoying relatives in post-war London, and sets off by herself, for work as a translator for NATO in post-war Naples. I’m going to choose The Bay of Noon (1970) which was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize. She wrote four novels, and I’ve read them all (both The Transit of Venus (1980) and The Great Fire (2003) twice) though only two are reviewed on this blog. So while the obvious link from The Lottery could be to another short story, I’m simply going to link to a book by another Shirley - Shirley Hazzard. I didn’t like the Short Story unit much either, but at least The Lottery was memorable, which is more than I can say for the rest of the short stories we had to read…
#The six degrees of separation professional
I read this short story years ago when I was studying Professional Writing and Editing, a course which I abandoned because the compulsory unit on journalism involved using Murdoch tabloids as models. This month’s #6Degrees starts with The Lottery by Shirley Jackson.