Reading
I gave up on Soul Mountain. I don’t give up on many books, and I know it’s terrible, but I just didn’t care about our narrator – in the first, second or third person.
So I came, finally, to Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller, which I have meant to read for years. The first half had me, I’m sure, reading with mouth agape, it’s just so gob-smackingly fine. Now it’s gone all silly and annoyingly postmodern. Surely it’ll come right.
But in the meantime I’ve got my grubby little hands on Hilary Mantel’s Booker-winning Wolf Hall. God, she’s good. If A Place of Greater Safety is one of the best historical novels ever written, this may well come close. Philippa Gregory, read it and weep – even better, read it and vow never to write that crappy Tudor trash ever again.
Next up, Antony Beevor on The Battle for Spain.

Listening
To the new Madonna greatest hits album, over and over, and it’s not even me playing it.

Eating
Broad beans, rocket and beetroot fresh from the garden.

Watching
Rain. At last.
Oh and Drew Barrymore movies.

Sandi Toksvig on the real-life heroines that have inspired her (in The Guardian):

The niece of the great Mongol leader, Kubla Khan, Princess Khutulun was described by Marco Polo as the greatest warrior in Khan’s army. She told her uncle she would marry any man who could wrestle her and win. If they lost they had to give her 100 horses. She died unmarried with 10,000 horses.

Reading
The Letters of Evelyn Waugh and Diana Cooper, which were, of course, delightful but also rather poignant towards the end. It’s fascinating to read his earlier letters through the prism of Brideshead Revisited and see the young Charles Ryder taking shape. (He wrote Brideshead in four months – now doesn’t that put us all to shame?)
Lady’s Maid, by Margaret Forster, a novel in the voice of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s maid, Wilson. It started promisingly but went on and on until I was almost desperate for poor Elizabeth to drop off the twig. (Now there’s a story that could do with a new movie treatment. So long as Brad Pitt wasn’t cast as Robert. Perhaps it could be a Fiennes of some sort. And for God’s sake don’t let Gwyneth anywhere near it.)
Now I’m reading Soul Mountain, by Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian. I’m surprised by regular jarring cliches, but assume it’s the translation. And now I know who to blame for that rash of second-person narrative of a couple of years ago.

Watching
The second series of Mad Men on DVD.
I love a cuff link.

Stephen Fry in America
I love a charming gay eccentric genius.

Oh and did I mention how brilliant Blessed is?

Writing
The dramatic horseback race across 17th century Italy, by a girl who hates ships (now there’s a turn up for the books).

Lying
On a beach in north Queensland.

Gardening
But I won’t bang on about that here: go there instead.

… that everything is just so interesting.
For the current book, I started off – years ago now, I’m embarrassed to say – with a draft based on admittedly sketchy research about the Jewish community in Amsterdam in the 17th century, went on to river routes of Germany, how an Auto de Fe was conducted and the mechanics of an early printing press. I used information I already knew – or thought I knew – about the Inquisition and Reformation, and the Index of Forbidden Books, and Venice and read, well, even more stuff.
My pattern seems to be that I only start writing about a setting or time about which I already vaguely know, even if my memory is not that sharp. Then I do need to research a certain amount to get the context right, but the first draft is more about character and plot than the delightful distractions of detail.
Now I’m redrafting it and adjusting my historical timelines a little, and I’ve decided I really can’t go any further without a refresher on Descartes and Locke (it’s now 20 years since my Philosophy major and what I’ve forgotten in that time would fill more pages than I’m actually writing), and delving into astronomical discoveries, and then I end up flicking through long-forgotten books about Gallileo or Bruno and wondering how to make a poultice for boils.
Of course there’s the re-reading histories of the English Civil War, and poring over maps of ancient cities or histories of costume, and retracing my early and sketchy research tracks rather more thoroughly.
You do all that, and then a huge portion of it you cast aside, so the reader never notices it. Although they do if you get anything wrong, which is one very good reason for doing it in the first place.
I’m sure it must be a great deal easier to write vampire novels.
Umberto Eco wrote (in Postscript to The Name of The Rose) that to tell a story, “you must first of all construct a world, furnished as much as possible, down to the slightest detail”.
And also it’s fun.

Writers Festival in Melbourne: Bernhard Schlink brilliant last night and Antony Beevor (all hail) on D-Day tonight.
But I do wonder:
1. Where do all those black berets live for the rest of the year?
2. Why, O why, do they let people ask questions? One in five is halfway reasonable – the rest are incoherent, lame, bloody obvious if you had either read the author’s books or listened to a word he or she has just said, or self-serving claptrap. Almost all are impossible to answer. You! Vainglorious moron! Step away from the microphone. Perhaps we could have a seven-second delay button. In my hand.
3. Is there no apostrophe in “writers’ festival” any more?

Last Saturday night I went to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, came home and collapsed straight into bed and didn’t get up again.
It’s been strange. First day or so I was quite feverish and demented so I didn’t do anything at all except mutter like a nutter and cough. Then the pig pox turned into something else and I’m not sure which was worse.
I looked like a zombie, because the infection was in my eyes and my eyeballs were a fetching crimson, so if anyone had seen my staggering around in my pyjamas they might have called the SES. Or Buffy.
Luckily nobody was here. My girlfriend was in NZ and all she got from me was a sort of rusty squawk over Skype.
I’ve been in some kind of twilight zone – missed my nephew’s birthday, the glamorous premiere of my friend’s brilliant film [trailer here], the delivery of my brand new laptop, Geelong beating Hawthorn by a point, and about a million meetings at work.
Hours, days (eight so far), just vanished without trace.
Couldn’t read or watch anything I hadn’t already read or seen, which resulted in an awful lot of Harry Potter and Broadway musical rehashing, which in turn resulted in some fairly bizarre dreams (Hermione Granger in jail with Roxie Hart … or something). Couldn’t even read the newspaper. After a few days I have graduated to watching crap on YouTube, which, due to the constant buffering on our wireless connection, just about matches the pace of my brain.
All very odd. As if the brain needed to just stop.
If only it could do so without tearing out the lungs and throat as justification for lying down – speaking of which, I urgently need to go back to bed. Pathetic.

Writing
Or rather rewriting my book for young readers set during the Counter-Reformation.
(And clearly not writing on this blog)

Reading
Harry Potter again, from start to finish, because I saw a trailer for Half-Blood Prince and got a little too excited for my age.
Doctorow’s The March – brilliant, of course, but not Ragtime. I know that’s unfair, but that’s what happens to people who write one of the great books of the 20th century.
Michael Dirda’s Book by Book, which was a complete waste of my time, his publisher’s ink, paper, and over-enthusiastic cover blurbs. Read like an undergraduate blog.

Watching
Tenko on DVD. Remember that?
The Lemon Tree

Waiting for
The Blessed premiere at the Melbourne Film Festival

Take the Quiz here!

Woke up this morning to a sky of mist, all along the river valley, and now it’s rolling in again.

So I finally got around to reading How Proust Can Change Your Life.
I know. I know. A decade later than everyone else. What’s your point?
But I really never seem to be as impressed by Alain de Botton as other people. The Consolation of Philosophy was fine, so far as pop philosophy goes, but his self-referential style sometimes makes me squirm. I actively disliked The Art of Travel.
By the time we get to read the more recent releases (Status Anxiety, or whatever it was, and The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work) there has been so much hype and endless exclusive interviews, there’s little left to actually learn or absorb from his writing.
I don’t get it.
If I’m in the mood for a quick dip I’d much rather read A C Grayling. Or the originals. Or even Monty Python (“Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle”, from memory) which, let’s face it, can provide just as much consolation in certain situations as Boethius.
Equally hilarious, albeit unintentionally, is Fromelles, by Patrick Lindsay. I’m alternating between reading it with glee and throwing it in a corner and trying to forget I ever started it.
And don’t go accusing me of being unAustralian or spitting on the graves of our poor dead Digger ancestors. It’s simply a poorly written book.
The only way to read it, I’ve decided, is to actively engage with its most maddening fault: that is, play Count the Cliche.
Pick a page – any page. Here are a few from a single paragraph on page 2, for example:
“two armies faced each other locked in a death struggle” (that might count as two)
“hunkered down”
“young men, brimming with promise and potential”
“show no outward fear, but their eyes betray them”
“the air is foul with cordite”
“you can feel it in your bones”
“moment of truth”
“pent-up kinetic energy”
“straining like dogs on the lead”
“count the minutes”
“taste of battle”
“invincibility of youth”
“prove his manhood”
And as a special bonus, that’s all in randomly alternating first and second person.
Then there’s a History Channel-style outline of World War 1, complete with the usual (and again cliched) outraged editorialising about Haig et al.
Oh it’s fabulous.
I really wish I could get to the bit where they start researching and digging for what will no doubt be “the forgotten Anzacs”. But I’m not sure I can last that long.