Ah. Two weeks of solid writing time stretches ahead.
Early morning beach walks. Decent espresso any time of the day. Cicadas in the ti-tree and chooks in the backyard. Lunch with a book in the sun. Me’shell NdegeOcello on continuous play through my headphones (“Just sit back, relax/Listen to the 8-track/I’ll dig you like an old soul record”). Writing. Although I’m getting rather hemmed in by books.
I don’t know where they all come from, these books. They follow me home like stray cats. It’s a mystery, honestly.
I left Australia with two boxes of books: essential references and half my reading pile. All the rest were packed into dozens more boxes and sit patiently in storage in Melbourne.
I worry about them. Maybe there’s a silverfish in my Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Maybe it’s too damp for poor old C.E.W. Bean. He’s been through enough. Perhaps a possum is nesting, as we speak, in a shredded box of travel narrative or Fiction B to C.
But there they are. And here I am. Every so often I feel a desperate need to look up something in The White Nile. Or read all the Aubrey books one more time. I’ve had to buy new copies of War and Peace, Tacitus and The Dam Busters because I’d left them behind. You just never know what you’ll need.
I accidentally bought another copy of The Victorians – when it arrived I thought it looked rather too familiar, and then remembered it was in the other half of the reading pile.
But perhaps they are somehow making their way over the Tasman, because in the two-and-a-half years I’ve been in NZ the original two boxes seem to have bred rather more offspring than you would have thought possible. There are three boxes sitting here in the study now, several piles on the floor and desk and three piles on the table and every shelf crammed. Perhaps I shouldn’t have bought the 1951 Encyclopaedia Britannica, but it’s so nice to have some kind of definitive answer on questions that have been bothering me (when was the last Auto de Fe, for example, or the spread of movable type through Europe). Not that I sit around idly worrying about such things – it’s research. Mostly.
Then there was the school book fair in Napier the other week. I picked up stacks of kids’ books, including a few I hadn’t been able to find anywhere (like Jill Paton Walsh’s Fireweed). The day before I’d been to a bookshop in search of Ronald Welch’s The Gauntlet. At the fair, there was the same bookseller, arms full of purchases, and on the top of her pile was dear old Ronald. She handed it over without even blinking, for me to buy instead.
“Found it!” Bless her.
(She was from The Little Bookshop, Latham St, Napier, and specialises in kids’ books: she does run a book finding service, but I don’t think it’s usually that fast.)
Normally I don’t buy ex-lib books, but somehow the familiar Dewey Decimal sticker on the spine of a much-thumbed Puffin makes it seem like an old friend.
Anyway, I’ve been threatened with divorce if I don’t get another bookcase soon. Things are getting serious. I’ll have to ban books from entering the house. Set up an x-ray machine at the front door. Tell the postie not to deliver anymore parcels.
In about six weeks’ time my own first book will be in the bookshops. I’m going to go into Whitcoulls and stare at it. Then I’m going up the road to Dymocks to stare at it. Then I might see if it’s in Borders.
I might even buy a copy. Just because I can.
We’ll let that one in the door.
But now I suppose I should go and write some more of the bloody things.

For many years, Lothian was one of Australia’s proudly independent publishers: among other things, they published a great many memorable children’s books.
Around Christmas, Lothian announced that it had been sold to Time Warner Books.
Another independent bites the dust, we all thought. Writers react cautiously to such announcements until the implication are clear. Sometimes it spells the end of a brave publishing heritage: the dearth of poetry published by major publishers is one indicator of that change.
But life’s hard for small publishers these days – in fact, any days – and some authors will argue that it’s much better dealing with a large house with a range of imprints and greater resources.
It’s certainly been proved possible to retain an independent style, even as part of a large company: British feminist press Virago, for example, has already been part of the Time Warner company for some years, and has had some of its greatest and most controversial successes in that time.
But back to Lothian: Time Warner Books division has now in turn been purchased by Hachette Livre, owner in NZ of Hodder Moa, and a range of worldwide imprints and an impressive backlist – mostly obtained through last year’s purchase of Hodder Headline.
Nobody’s complaining too much about Time Warner Books finding a home in a company committed to publishing. It had been looking for new owners for some time, and there’s no suggestion of mass retrenchment or backlist sell-offs. The US$537 million deal makes Hachette the first French publisher to move into the US market and the world’s third largest group, after Pearson and Bertelsmann. It will also be the biggest in the UK, with a share of 16 per cent compared to 14 per cent for Random House.
But Boyd Tonkin in The Independent raises the issue of the multifaceted nature of Hachette Livre which makes money from both the “pen and the sword”: book publishing and munitions. So The Kangaroo Who Couldn’t Hop is not just in the same house as Tipping the Velvet – you can get a three-for-one discount on a nuclear warhead too.
Tonkin urges Hachette Livre to give up the bomb and learn to love the book.
But perhaps even more interesting is this:

See A Week in Books

“A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
– Thomas Mann

Asked by the Royal Society of Literature to nominate his top 10 books for schoolchildren, Britain’s Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, has suggested Don Quixote, Ulysses, The Waste Land and Paradise Lost.
“Of course it’s a high ambition,” he told the Guardian. “But I see no intrinsic reason why children shouldn’t read these works. They are wonderful, profoundly democratic works of art, but because some of them have a reputation as difficult they are put in a box and called elitist.”
Former teacher JK Rowling’s suggestions seemed all (of course) terribly commonsensical – the sorts of books you hope that everyone is still reading at some point in their school life. But she doesn’t include any poetry at all.
Philip Pullman astonished me by choosing The Magic Pudding, beloved of all small Australians. He suggests, very sensibly, a range of myths, legends, fairytales, and ballads, but he’s rather keen on Coleridge, saying that it had been a “mesmerising” experience when a “wise and far-seeing teacher had, without explaining anything about it, read it aloud to my class when I was about seven”.
I remember it as unrelenting agony, in spite of a wonderful teacher. Same goes for Milton. And I was much older than seven. I think that’s a form of child abuse, myself.
Still, Pullman does admit: “Other writers have gone for the great works of western literature on their lists. I do think it’s a little bit ambitious to expect schoolchildren to read Don Quixote and Ulysses.”
Perhaps. Just a little bit.
Some will, of course. I don’t see any reason why a 16 or 17 year-old might not enjoy The Odyssey, if it was presented the right way. Ulysses I’m not so sure about. In fact, I’ve blocked out reading it altogether.
And I’m with Motion on all the poems, although I might have added Browning for a bit of drama.
I can still recall the days in Form Five I spent reading Prufrock (and I still remember most of it) and The Wasteland. It was life-altering. We had the enormous Norton Anthology of Poetry (Donne! Marvell! Owen! Auden! Langston Hughes!) thrown at us, and I found other stuff in there I’d never have seen otherwise.
I certainly read all of Motion’s list in either school or the first year of college (when I was 17) so it’s not impossible. For some.
But of course the problem with these kinds of lists is that everyone leaps to defend the lowest common denominator: I’m sure Andrew Motion wasn’t imagining six year-olds ploughing through Paradise Lost. The argument, surely, is that all children ought to be given access and encouragement to read the breadth of English (and other) literature, without being forced to endure classmates reading Don Quixote out loud every Wednesday afternoon for an entire term. That way lies oblivion – and possibly the opposite effect to the one desired.
In defiance, Carol Sarler comes out as “one of the great unread” in The Times:
“Motion’s own list included hurdles for children such as Homer’s Odyssey, Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady and James Joyce’s Ulysses … if we are to give Mr Motion the benefit of all doubt and believe that he honestly seeks and finds pleasure in, say, James Joyce, then I shall say this: if you want fewer adults such as me, not reading books at all, you need fewer adults like him, stuffing them up the noses of children.”
Perhaps if Motion had been asked to provide a list of the ten books most likely to encourage kids to read, and keep reading, he might have chosen differently. So, perhaps the question ought to have been: which classic, familiar books can introduce young readers to literature and history (and not turn them off reading forever)?
I also note that none of these books have been written after the 60s – surely something essential has been published in the last forty years? Which reminds me, my brother told me this anecdote about Joseph Heller:
A journalist asked him why he hadn’t ever written another book as good as Catch 22.
Heller replied, “Who has?”

Anyway, here are the lists:
JK Rowling
Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte«
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Roald Dahl
Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe
David Copperfield Charles Dickens
Hamlet William Shakespeare
To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee
Animal Farm George Orwell
The Tale of Two Bad Mice Beatrix Potter
The Catcher in the Rye JD Salinger
Catch-22 Joseph Heller

Philip Pullman
Finn Family Moomintroll Tove Jansson
Emil and the Detectives Erich Kastner
The Magic Pudding Norman Lindsay
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Where the Wild Things Are Maurice Sendak
‘The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens’ (or other good anonymous ballads)
First Book of Samuel, Chapter 17 (the story of David and Goliath)
Romeo and Juliet William Shakespeare
A good collection of myths and legends
A good collection of fairytales

Andrew Motion
The Odyssey Homer
Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes
Hamlet William Shakespeare
Paradise Lost John Milton
Lyrical Ballads Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth
Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte
Great Expectations Charles Dickens
Portrait of a Lady Henry James
Ulysses James Joyce
The Waste Land TS Eliot

Here’s mine (but I’ll change my mind in a few hours):
If This Is A Man
David Copperfield
Jane Eyre
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Pride and Prejudice
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Macbeth
The Little Prince
The Eagle of the Ninth
Smith

(For Australian or Kiwi kids, the lists would be slightly different)

Young adults ought to be able to read The Sheltering Sky, Brideshead Revisited, I, Claudius, and Ragtime.

Damn – now I’ll be making lists in my head all night.

Sarah Waters’ new historical novel, The Night Watch, bursts out of the Victorian footlights and into the blackout: it’s set in inner London, in the Blitz and the bleak years just after the war. Great reviews so far.
Rather perversely (pardon me) I haven’t bought or read it yet, because she’s coming to Auckland in a week or so and I’ll go hear her read. What I really want to do is sit down and pick her brains, because I’ve recently written something for kids set in the same place and time (weirdly enough called Firewatcher) and doing the research from the other side of the world is a much longer, slower process than it ought to be.
But enough about me. Jenny Turner’s review in LRB not only gives you an overview of Waters’ previous work, but it’s also a snappy piece of writing in itself:

I, who gasped out loud several times during the reading of the book in question, love this image: “The wonderful Fingersmith surely took the queer 19th-century pastiche as far as it could go. The tale is sensationally melodramatic: while composing it, Waters recalls rubbing her hands at her desk, cackling demonically at its sudden drops and turns.”
You can read the review in full here.

The other day I noticed a kid reading on the ferry. He was about 11 or 12, a normal-looking sporty kind of kid who likes cricket and has his own surfboard. His dad was talking to him, his sister poked him a few times. He didn’t even look up. He was so engrossed in his book that his dad had to force him to stand up when we docked. He kept reading all the way down the stairs and across the gangplank, his dad carefully watching his precarious progress.
But of course, we all know sporty boys don’t read. Do they?
So what was he reading?
Just Disgusting, by Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton.
I read my nephew’s copy of their Just Stupid at Christmas and it was pretty stupid. And cool and funny and even sometimes wise. They are wicked short stories, told by Andy as if he were a kid, about being rude and farting and picking your nose and picking on other kids and teasing your sister. And boys love them.
Griffiths has just been appointed an ambassador for this year’s Premier’s Reading Challenge in Victoria.
He’s probably best known for everyone’s favourite naughty titles, The Day My Bum Went Psycho and Bumageddon – The Final Pongflict. The Bad Book (also with Terry Denton) was banned by a handful of schools and bookshops.
“For a lot of kids, I think the key to the door to start reading is to make it fun,” Griffiths told The Age. “For some kids that will be humour, for some it will be fantasy adventure, but once you’re in, it doesn’t really matter how you got there.”
“I get letters from parents saying ‘my kid was not interested in reading or he didn’t read at all and then we found one of your books … and now he’s reading lots of different books’.”
The National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy report, released in December, showed that although Australian schoolchildren ranked in the top four in reading for OECD countries in 2003, 8 per cent of year 3 children and 11 per cent of year 5 and 7 children did not meet minimum national benchmarks. Results for indigenous children were even worse.
Griffiths said: “One thing that concerns me is that many primary schools don’t have a full-time librarian. That really horrifies me because someone has to be in touch with what’s going on with books and with the kids and be able to put the right book in the right hand at the right time. And I certainly think the research is in now on the benefits of 15 minutes of [parents] reading to a child a day.”
The annual Premier’s Reading Challenge encourages children from prep to year 9 to read 15 books (30 for prep to grade 2) by August 30. Ten of the books (20 for prep to grade 2) are to be from a recommended list of 3800 titles. The full list comes out this weekend. I bet The Day My Bum Went Psycho is on it.

“The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread … The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.”
– Susan Sontag

Apologies for the deafening silence the last couple of weeks. I’ve been commuting into town to earn my keep. But it was worth it: I got out on the water twice a day on the ferry, and the Auckland Anniversary Regatta a few weeks ago brought a flock of tall ships into port. Good old Soren Larsen was around for a while, and I felt sure that the Spirit visited us briefly. I recognise her profile. Now Windeward Bound, the brigantine that famously recreated Matthew Flinders’ epic voyage, is tied up at Princess Wharf. She (like Endeavour) looks frighteningly small to venture out into the Tasman, let alone halfway around the world.
As if that weren’t enough, one day I pounded around the corner to come face to bow with the QE2. She may no longer be the biggest ship in the world, but she’s still one of the most elegant, for my money, looking for all the world like a Cunard Deco poster. I shouted aloud in excitement. I’d only seen her once before, dwarfed by the Sydney Harbour Bridge, but she towered over the Hilton on the wharf. Six men were abseiling down that famous funnel, painting, like tiny Action Man figures.
The next day I heard her horn, sounding the departure – it was deafening, even all the way down at my office in Westhaven (about a twenty minute walk).
The following morning, her berth was taken by Aurora, a megalithic white office block of a ship: she accommodates 1,950 passengers, has an atrium with a “Lalique-style waterfall” and three swimming pools (including one with a sliding glass roof). The day after, the brand spanking new Diamond Princess arrived, all 116,000 tonnes of her. Both seemed even more monstrous than QE2, but less dignified.
The ferries turn and dock right next to the big ships so we get a tug’s-eye view of the hull.
My personal favourite is the relatively miniscule Clipper Odyssey, which looks like an elegant version of those wonderful coastal tramps that ploughed their way from Hong Kong to Vladivostok via Shanghai in the ’30s. I imagine Marlene Dietrich singing Brecht in the piano bar at cocktail hour.
I grew up watching ships come and go – “under the hook,” as they say in Port Melbourne. Nobody throws streamers anymore, which I’m sure is much better for the environment, but really rather sad.

A former diplomat and UN campaigner has won a prize for new UK children’s authors with her tale of an orphan living in Georgian London.
Julia Golding won the second £1,000 Ottakar’s Children’s Book Prize for her debut novel, The Diamond of Drury Lane, and hopes to reawaken interest in historical novels for children. “It’s a dream come true,” she told the Independent. Maybe now is the time for a historical children’s book. We’ve had a lot of fantasy.”
The book tells the story of Cat Royal, who was found on the steps of the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane in January 1780 by the theatre owner, Mr Sheridan.
Surprise, surprise – it has contemporary relevance. Julia Golding works for Oxfam, where she joined a UN campaign to reduce the number of arms in the Third World and their impact on children.
“We have so many cushions, such as the health service. There was none of that for my character, which is the situation facing many children today. Life is tough for most children around the world, and that’s how my characters found it.”
“I’m particularly interested in how people cope with historical moments in our life. I was thinking about the French Revolution and what was happening in London at that time, when to be outspoken could be a death sentence. It’s not intended to be didactic, but there’s a keen interest in politics which informed the book.”

I like her.

The shortlist also included:
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne (Random House)
Shakespeare’s Secret by Elise Broach (Walker)
The Quantum Prophecy by Michael Carroll (Harper Collins)
Gregor and the Rats of Underland by Suzanne Collins (Chicken House )
Jack Slater Monster Investigator by John Doghety (Random House)
Ralph the Magic Rabbit by Adam Frost (Macmillan)
The Lottery by Beth Goobie (Faber)
North Child by Edith Pattou (Usborne)
Spymice by Heather Vogel Frederick (Penguin)

“You are mistaken when you think that everything in the books ‘represents’ something in the world,” CS Lewis once wrote to a group of schoolchildren. “Things do that in The Pilgrim’s Progress but I’m not writing that way.”