Tag: books

Good books: a power beyond measure

Late last year, when at a writing retreat, I picked up some second-hand books at a little bookshop cafe called Brunch Cafe. (Side note: a lovely place to stop in The Dandenongs, breathe in the books, browse with delight for your bookshelf and palate.)

My holiday plans included lofty ideas of reading them all, and I lugged them with me to every part of my meandering holiday.

Last week, I finally started on The Stonor Eagles by William Horwood. I’m a big fan of his Duncton Woods books, and I honestly cannot rave enough about the spectacular yet horrifying reflection they hold up to society and religion (think Animal Farm, but about trials of heretics across the history of Europe).

To my delight, I discovered a sweet little love note between the books pages, its writer and receiver forever a mystery.

The Stonor Eagles simultaneously reminds me why I want to be a writer and how far I have to go (Hi imposter. Thanks for stopping by; there’s the door!). With one page and one scene, Horwood riled my misanthropic heart with the merest description of the human desecration of the sea eagles of Skye.

How these symbols on the thinnest, pulped slice of a dead tree can transport you half way across the globe in an instant, have you weep for beings that exist only in the hearts and imaginations of the writer and readers.

This is what great writing does. And it’s a power beyond measure.

The unspoken divide: books & comics

My love of books and story started before I could really read; my parents tell me that I could happily entertain myself for hours as a little tacker.

As with many of us with a love of reading, this began with picture books, learning many of the basic rules of language: cadence and intonation, grammar and pronunciation.

Long and short: I have always thought of myself as a reader. But when I call myself that, I see weighty tomes, hundreds of pages and not an illustration in sight.

I’ve never thought of myself as someone with an interest in comics.

Anime for sure–I’ve been obsessed with AstroBoy for as long as I can remember, and Sailor Moon and Miyazaki’s work since my teens–but if you asked me about comics, I’d say not really.

Until this weekend, encouraged by a friend to attend an event at All Star Comics in Melbourne, I would not have said that I read comics. And I would have been lying to myself.

As I wandered around waiting (briefly) for my friend, I looked at the shelves, for names I knew, thinking idly that it seems silly that we don’t have more comics cross-over with spec-fic authors. I saw an author or two I knew, many titles I had read about on social media, and kept thinking about why the two mediums are so divided.

A little voice in my head, trying to be heard, made me think of my love of anime as television, and of X-men. A little more gently, it nudged me to think about how I consume graphic works, largely as graphic novels.

Then I remembered buying the boxed set of Nausicaä, the gifts from people I love from Serenity and Hark A Vagrant properties. To Asterix and Obelix, and The Adventures of Tintin. And more recent (to me) discoveries of Sandman and others.

Lastly, I thought about the last decade of reading webcomics like Bunny, Questionable Content, XKCD and Ctrl+Alt+Del. Of my new loves from Minna Sundberg, A RedTail’s Dream and Stand Still, Stay Silent.

Over the last decade switched-on loved ones have been trying to get me to bridge that gap and recognise the other reading love in my life, and it’s taken me this long to understand.

It might be related to internalised worries about being thought a fake geek girl. It might be a prejudice, an elitism I’ve picked up against “picture books”. All I know is that it’s been silent and unconscious and held me back from a whole other world of stories that I could have loved.

Whatever the reason, today I acknowledge my own obtuseness, and accept that being a reader for me means a love of stories in all their many and varied forms. That perhaps I am indeed a comics reader.

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My comic book haul

For anyone interested, the event I attended today was a meet and greet with Katie O’Neill for the All Star Women’s Comic Book Club. Katie writes and illustrates delightful LGBTQI-friendly comics, but to spruik my particular favourite, the whimsical The Tea Dragon Society. Highly recommended.

Post-book depression

Frequently, when I finish a book I enjoyed, or a series of them, I suffer what feels to me like a depressive state. Dragged from that world, populated by characters I could rely on and places vividly expressed in my head, adjusting to the often mundane, gritty and imperfect world is a challenge.

It seems that it depends on how you view books. Are they a gateway to knowledge? Escapism? Easy entertainment? If I answer it for myself, it was immersion. Being somewhere else, someone else.

I was a kid always with my head in a book. My home was always safe, I was always loved and cared for. There were bullies, times of maladjustment and loneliness too, but not on-going ostracism to build this need for a book into something innate. This melancholia, present before I could even spell the word or describe it.

There’s two reasons I can see for it in my case. A book will never reject you. It can disappoint you, be unsatisfying but never specifically make you feel insufficient. Having read it can connect you to others, though I can probably count on one hand the close friends I remember discussing books, particularly formative books with.

The second is you can be the best version on yourself. You inhabit someone’s psyche, a moment in time. You can stand up to injustice, dare to take on the evil, hold someone who you feel deeply for when they cry, and yes, love a little. A great author can make you feel everything.

Their words can take you to places you want to go to but have never been without that cultural disconnect, the jet lag, the biting insects, or soggy socks and bone deep fatigue. There’s no work or cleaning or ablutions. No one needing anything from you.

Regardless of what drives you to disappear into a narrative world, the broken, flawed but very real life seems a disappointment. And the next book is unappealing for a time: it’s not the right world. You can’t know what is between those covers.

Short of waiting, and wallowing, the only answer I’ve found is time, letting the echoes of that previous novel fade before you can begin that new journey.

Until then, I’ll wait over here with my disappointment and personal grey cloud. Just until I am ready to start, all over again.

Spring adventures in Canada: Part 4

Kindred spirits

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Prince Edward Island was our next destination, a place I have dreamt of visiting since I was a preteen and top of my list for my stay in Canada. I loved Lucy Maud Montgomery’s books and always wanted to find Anne Shirley on that island. We stayed in a lovely little hotel on a little inlet, but I dreamed of staying in one of the weatherboard homesteads. The soils are definitely rusty red and striking, and remind me of Phillip Island, a small island not far from Norfolk Island. There’s a lot of appropriately weathered docks with shacks, and in some places lines and lines of oyster farms. We had our first lobster of the trip here, fresh from the sea. Scallops and haddock too. The taste of such fresh seafood was incomparable to what most of us pick up from our local fishmonger.Green Gables as it is today

20130617-IMG_8018-120130617-IMG_8014-1First item on the agenda: visit Green Gables. The state made a park of the house that inspired Anne Shirley’s Green Gables. It was well preserved and I could feel the love of a thousand fans (and even perhaps the little girl that Montgomery was) around that house. She obviously drew a lot of inspiration from the people around her as the house belonged to her cousins and it is said her grandparents were a bit of a model for the Matthew and Marilla. They had preserved two of the areas around the house that Montgomery had described in the Anne of Green Gables series, but disappointingly only as much as they absolutely needed to. We could see the golf course (and hear the teeing off) from Lovers Lane and heard trucks in the Haunted Woods, which spoilt the atmosphere a little. We went to the site of her grandparents house, and it was enchanting walking up the quiet lane to the wooded house site. All that remains of the house are the foundations and a charming little well, where people throw shiny coins to wish.

   Haunted wood    Lovers lane

You might be interested to know that any business on the island is entitled to call upon the Anne of Green Gables name for free; it is only those businesses off-island that have to pay a licensing fee.

Charlottetown, the capital, was a redbrick town that has maintained its small town feel. The outskirts are filled with industrial areas and warehouse style supermarkets. We found out that one of the musicals, Anne and Gilbert, based on the Anne books, was playing on my birthday but disappointingly was sold out.

Our hosts recommended a trip to Brackley Beach, which was romantically windswept and mostly unoccupied. Definitely worth a visit if you’re wanting golden sands against dark blue oceans. It was a little cold to swim then though.

20130618-IMG_1213-1On the day of my birthday, Duncan, Phoebe and I took a ride on Confederation Trail, which used to be the tracks of the island’s unnecessary steam engine. It’s a good story that steam engine: the island thought they ought to have one, as they had them on the mainland, but it bankrupted the council, so they had to join the federation of Canadian states, as opposed to what they were originally planning. It was a long time since I had been on a good ride like that, but I think I did alright. In the background of the flower photos above and below, you can see the colour of the tilled land and roads.

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While on the island, don’t forget to try Cows ice-cream. You can get the ice-cream elsewhere, but it’s one of the tastiest and largest exports from Prince Edward Island. Plus, they have nerdy and funny t-shirts in the stores, so there’s entertainment too.

I have to say that Green Gables was my highlight. I’ve always felt that Lucy Maud Montgomery was a kindred spirit because I loved her books so much. I was humbled and teary at being in a place I’d dreamed of all my life. I even re-read the books, and some others, and felt that despair of being left out when I finished them. I left a little posy on her grave and thanked her for the joy she has brought me over the years.

Carrots!

To read about our journey, start from the beginning, or you can go on to Cape Breton.