Dearest Readers,
I’m sorry for my absence. With the state of the world (grim) and Christmas being our busiest season at the bookshop I have felt the opposite of *inspired*.
The irony of owning a bookshop is that you often don’t get time to read and as soon as my head hits the pillow I have five minutes before I am dead to the world.
But do not fear. I have returned from holiday and am back with a vengeance. Some call it a holiday, I call it ‘parenting elsewhere’.
I love Summer because it invites you to slow down in a way that no other season does. It is too hot to do much, apart from lay on the beach (I do not do this by the way), read, watch films, sit in the air con, drink chilled wine. This holiday I found an octopus in a rockpool, ate copious amounts of cheese and was a bookshop customer for once at Text & Co in Dunsborough.
The books I read ……
A friend of mine was visiting from LA and asked for my recommendations. I found myself giving her Piranesi which fit her brief for ‘magical realism’. There is always a hesitance when recommending books I haven’t read but I was confident it would land. 48 hours later I got a text from her. She was crazed, she needed more recommendations. She had to hide herself in a seperate room during a family dinner in order to finish the book.
With this frantic review I needed to read it immediately and by chance it appeared on my parents bookshelf down south. I, too, devoured it in a day.
Without giving away the plot, the book opens with Piranesi, a man who lives in a world that may/ may not be our own.
Is it the future? The past? Nothing is clear.
The ‘House’ is a labyrinth full of corridors and rooms and waves that crash into the marble statues that adorn the halls. Piranesi lives alone, albeit for a few skeletons he passes along the way. His only acquaintance is a man who visits him twice a week, Piranesi has named the man ‘The Other’.
That is all I can tell you except if you enjoyed The Secret History and books with fantasy elements you will love this book. It is epic.
Question 7 by Richard Flanagan
People are often surprised when I admit I haven’t read well known authors, like old mate Richard Flanagan. They assume that because I own a book shop I must’ve read EVERYTHING.
As an old boyfriend used to say ‘Do not assume. It makes an ass out of u and me.’
Can you imagine my cringe every time he said this? And he managed to drop into conversation often and earnestly. It was giving…. false prophet.
Moving on….
I don’t even know how to describe this book as it’s so layered. So here’s the official blurb.
By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West’s affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan's father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this genre-defying daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die.
At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, literature, place and memory is about how reality is never made by realists and how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.
Reading this book at night did in fact feel like some sort of hypnotic fever dream. It was touching, dark and thought provoking. I love Flanagan’s iron clad grasp of story, his weaving of his own personal narrative through the broader histories of the world.
Do not read this book if you didn’t enjoy Oppenheimer. It is very disturbing in some parts. see: the end of the world etc.
The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright
I had seen The Wren, The Wren sitting on the front table of the shop over Christmas and didn’t even pick up the book to read the blurb UNTIL I saw Madeleine Gray (author of Green Dot) post about it. Maddie is one of those people whose suggestions I take as gospel.
The Wren, The Wren is a book where nothing much happens and yet EVERYTHING HAPPENS. It is a book about reconciling with a bad relationship, motherhood, the tumultuous bond between mothers and daughters and intergenerational trauma. It is poetic and is a book with a beating heart.
There are so many passages I dog eared but here is one to muse over.
“Waiting for this man was better than being with him, it was certainly more intense, the way longing kept eating itself and giving birth to more longing. And nothing, but nothing was better than that first flash of arrival.”
- The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright
So Late in The Day by Claire Keegan
Seriously, what is Claire Keegan putting in her coffee because I want what she’s having. How is she this good at writing? I delayed reading So Late In The Day because I was riding the high of Small Things Like These and didn’t want to have to knock her off her pedestal.
But my rockstar employees, Abbey and Marijke, had been talking about the use of the ‘C’ word in literature whilst discussing So Late in The Day and I’m not gonna lie the scandalous nature of their conversation piqued my interest. The C WORD?! Oooooo.
I think So Late in The Day is a journey you need to go on yourself without any interference but I love how Keegan disguises major social issues and much needed conversations under the invisibility cloak of a ‘simple story’. Her books are like eating a block of chocolate. You start with one piece and then the next time you look you’ve demolished the whole bar in one sitting.
I have more books to talk about but I will leave you with these for the time being.
Before I sign off for the week I wanted to put it out into the ether that this Saturday is my friend Abbey’s 30th birthday. A few of you would know that Abbey was like a sister to me and passed away a few years ago. The courtyard in the bookshop is dedicated to her.
I think the hardest part of losing a friend is that you don’t want the memory of them to fade. You cannot imagine life without them around but life very much goes on.
So as a way of calling it into being I imagine Abbey in an alternate universe with her family, her kids, the love of her life, whoever they may have been. I see her dancing to ABBA and singing Delta Goodrem at a karaoke bar in a glamorous city like Tokyo or LA. In this alternate universe she’s a newsreader, beloved by those who watch her on a popular weekend morning show. She probably lives in Sydney and her hair is always blowdried. She spends her weekends away at wineries, goes shopping on the regular and swims at the beach. She drinks Aperol Spritz like she did in this universe.
She is living her ‘best life’ as she used to describe mine.
So, if you find yourself at a bar this weekend and are at a loss for something to order, order an Aperol Spritz and remember my fabulous friend Abbey.
And Abs, if you are reading this in the alternate universe…I love you ! Happy Birthday. God sisters forever.
Happy Reading (and spritzing!)
Jessie
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