He Is Worthy by Lisa Henry.

He Is Worthy by Lisa Henry (2012, 90 pages)

Set in Rome in  68 AD during the reign of Nero, focuses on two men, two as unequal as can be men who come to love each other.    One of the men is a close friend of Nero (a very perilous position), the other a recently captured slave  from the Teutenberg region of Germany who had the extreme bad luck to be the kind of young man that Nero and others in his court enjoy using sexually, often sacrificing them to their gods when they tire of them.

Nero's friend Senna, if that is the right word for their relationship, has a special job, whenever the Emperor has turned against a high ranking Roman it is his place to tell them it is time to kill themselves.   Aenor is a new slave who has been brutalized and humiliated for the amusement of Nero and his sycophants.   Senna decides to use the slave, who can get close to Nero during sex, to assassinate him.    It is a suicide mission for both but neither cares.   Senna, once a man of character, hates Nero so much and feels a great sense of shame and the slave would rather die than live on as a sex toy so both agree to give their lives in this plot on the life of Nero.   Neither can quite trust the other.


He Is Worthy does a good job of letting us imagine how horrible it was to be a male pleasure slave in Rome, not a job with a lot of long term prospects.  Contrary to the movies, it did not involve servicing the needs of beautiful female aristocrats.   The sexual abuse of the slave is very graphically described.   If this were a movie it would be X-rated.   We also see how feared the Roman soldiers were by the ordinary citizens and how dangerous Rome was after dark.

The two men fall in love, or what passes for it in the world they live in.   The ending is one we might have hoped for.

I would classify this as a good  read.   It is not that long and it will keep your attention.   It is not for those who do not like X-rated descriptions of gay sex, including rape.   If you enjoyed, as I did, the HBO series, Rome, I think you will enjoy this book.

Lisa Henry is a very good prose stylist.

"I quite enjoyed this book!"
Carmilla

In the interests of full disclosure, I received a free copy of this book.

You can learn more about Lisa Henry and her work on her blog

rereadinglives.blogspot.com

Lisa likes to tell stories, mostly with hot guys and happily ever afters.

Lisa lives in tropical North Queensland, Australia. She doesn’t know why, because she hates the heat, but she suspects she’s too lazy to move. She spends half her time slaving away as a government minion, and the other half plotting her escape.

She attended university at sixteen, not because she was a child prodigy or anything, but because of a mix-up between international school systems early in life. She studied History and English, neither of them very thoroughly. 

She shares her house a log-suffering partner, too many cats, a dog, a green tree frog that swims in the toilet, and as many possums as can break in every night. This is not how she imagined life as a grown-up.

Lisa likes to tell stories, mostly with hot guys and happily ever afters.

Lisa lives in tropical North Queensland, Australia. She doesn’t know why, because she hates the heat, but she suspects she’s too lazy to move. She spends half her time slaving away as a government minion, and the other half plotting her escape.

She attended university at sixteen, not because she was a child prodigy or anything, but because of a mix-up between international school systems early in life. She studied History and English, neither of them very thoroughly. 

She shares her house a log-suffering partner, too many cats, a dog, a green tree frog that swims in the toilet, and as many possums as can break in every night. This is not how she imagined life as a grown-up.

Lisa likes to tell stories, mostly with hot guys and happily ever afters.

Lisa lives in tropical North Queensland, Australia. She doesn’t know why, because she hates the heat, but she suspects she’s too lazy to move. She spends half her time slaving away as a government minion, and the other half plotting her escape.

She attended university at sixteen, not because she was a child prodigy or anything, but because of a mix-up between international school systems early in life. She studied History and English, neither of them very thoroughly. 

She shares her house a log-suffering partner, too many cats, a dog, a green tree frog that swims in the toilet, and as many possums as can break in every night. This is not how she imagined life as a grown-up.

You can find Lisa’s blog at w

Consumption: A Novel by G. S. Johnson

Consumption:   A Novel by G. S. Johnson (2011, 197 pages-Kindle edition)

Long Term Friendships Between Men and Women

High Adventure in Hong Kong and Sydney

A few days ago I read a historical work of fiction set in Hong Kong in the 1940s during the Japanese occupation.    I have now been lucky enough to read a very exciting beautifully written work, Consumption:  A Novel by G. S. Johnson (Australia) set in Hong Kong and Sydney in the 1990s.     I have spent some time in Hong Kong (only about 1.5 hours away by air from us) so that draws me to books set there.

Consumption:  A Novel is a very intense plot driver work with very believable characters as its leads.   The  human interest of the story revolves around a man and a woman who as children were as close as brother and sister.    They are separated  for a long time but they eventually begin a romance.   We see the extreme difficulty of doing this especially for two such very different people as the ones we find in Consumption:  A Novel.   The male lead is an interior director to the rich and famous or infamous in Hong Kong.    The female lead has just ended a long term relationship.    The woman wants to simplify her life but the man's just keeps getting more and more twisted.

There are lots of exciting plot descriptions.   The two cities come alive for us.   The characters in this work are faced with difficult moral decisions.  Some seem to decide well, others may not win your approval.

One thing you will for sure not be reading Consumption:  A Novel  is bored.   I found it an exciting escape from the everyday world read.

I was provided a free E Book by the author.

You can learn more about the book at the author's web page

Mel u

Short Stories by two great New South Wales, Australian Authors-Henry Lawson and Andrew 'Banjo' Paterson

"The Dog" by Andrew (Banjo) Paterson -1917-9 pages

"The Drover's Wife" by Henry Lawson 1892-7 pages

The Reading Life Outback Tales Project

                                                            

Two Wonderful Stories from New South Wales

One of the best things about my new found interest in the short story is that it has allowed me to discover some great new to me writers without making the     larger commitment to read a novel.    This week I read my first works by two authors from New South Wales Australia, Henry Lawson (at the left above) and Andrew Paterson.   I really enjoyed at admired their stories.   

Henry Lawson (1867 to 1922-New South Wales, Australia) is considered one of the very first Australian authors to write about life in "The Bush" or "The Outback"  in a realistic fashion.    His mother was a well known advocate of women's rights in Australia.   His father was an immigrant from Norway who came to find gold.    At 14 Lawson lost his hearing (he never regained it).   He married a prominent Australian Socialist but his marriage was not happy.   His writing style is laconic, has a dry wit and a keen eye for small details.    He celebrates the hero in the ordinary person struggling against the hardships of country life.    His most famous short story is "The Drover's Wife", first published in 1892.   (A drover is one employed in driving large herds of cattle or sheep to the market.  In Australia as in the American west it often involved being away from home for months.)    The story focuses on the wife of a drover whose husband has been away for months.   She is left with their children and a great  dog to run the family farm in the bush country.    Lawson does not really tell us as lot about her, rather he shows us what her life is like.   The main focus of the story is on the efforts of the wife and her dog to protect the family from a dangerous snake that has crawled under their house.   Lawson's description of the life of the wife is perfect:

She is not a coward, but recent events have shaken her nerves. A little son of her brother-in-law was lately bitten by a snake, and died. Besides, she has not heard from her husband for six months, and is anxious about him.

     He was a drover, and started squatting here when they were married. The drought of 18-- ruined him. He had to sacrifice the remnant of his flock and go droving again. He intends to move his family into the nearest town when he comes back, and, in the meantime, his brother, who keeps a shanty on the main road, comes over about once a month with provisions. 

     She is used to being left alone. She once lived like this for eighteen months. As a girl she built the usual castles in the air; but all her girlish hopes and aspirations have long been dead. 

The story is exciting, real and kept my interest to the end.    I hope I will be forgiven this but as I was reading this story I imagined Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence and Crocodile  Dundee having a drink together and finding they all liked the work of Henry Lawson.   At his death Lawson was given a state funeral.   "The Dover's Wife" can be read at East of the Web: Short Stories


Andrew (Banjo) Paterson (1864 to 1941-New South Wales, Australia) is best remembered as the author of the unofficial Australia national anthem,  Waltzing Matilda.  Like Henry Lawson Paterson wrote stories about the lives of people in the outback, the bush country of Australia.   "The Dog", notice both stories partially center on outback working dogs, was  first published in 1917.    Paterson grew up in the outback and attended rural schools.   In time he became licensed as a solicitor with a law firm.   Paterson wrote poetry as an avocation and broke into print when one of his poems was published in a newspaper.   Paterson was an ardent supported of independence for Australia.   He became a war correspondent during the Boer Wars in South Africa (1899) and this brought him his first measure of fame.   He served in France in WWI as an ambulance driver.   Upon his return he began to writer stories, songs and poems and is so highly regarded in his native country that his picture is on the Australian ten dollar bill.


The style of "The Dog" has more of a self consciously literary feel to it than Lawson's "The Drover's Wife".    "The Dog" is kind of a paean to the Australian working dog.   Neither writer has any time for pomp or pomposity.   Both right in a straight forward easy to follow fashion.   Here is a sample of the prose of Paterson:

The dog is a member of society who likes to have his day's work, and who does it more conscientiously than most human beings. A dog always looks as if he ought to have a pipe in his mouth and a black bag for his lunch, and then he would go quite happily to office every day.

A dog without work is like a man without work, a nuisance to himself and everybody else. People who live about town, and keep a dog to give the children hydatids and to keep the neighbours awake at night, imagine that the animal is fulfilling his destiny. All town dogs, fancy dogs, show dogs, lap-dogs, and other dogs with no work to do, should be abolished; it is only in the country that a dog has any justification for his existence

 "The Dog" can be read at Classicreader.com.


I enjoyed both of these short stories a lot and hope to read more works by Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson in the coming years.   



Mel u

"Cardboard:A Woman Left for Dead" by Fiona Place

Cardboard: A Woman Left for Dead by Fiona Place (386 pages, 2010-second edition)

When Fiona Place contacted me and offered me a free copy of her book I was flattered and happy to get a free book.    Of course before I accepted the book I studied the title on Goodreads.com and Amazon.com to see if it was fair of me to accept the  book and if it  might be worth my time.   Over all the rating are quite high.   I discovered the first edition of the book (1989) won the Australian National Book Council Award for best book by a new writer.

Cardboard is narrated in the first person by Lucy, the main  character of the work.    She suffers from anorexia, an extreme aversion to food.  ( I will admit this is a hard disease for me to relate to as I love food.)

 As I read on in Cardboard I came to realize Place was intentionally  making brilliant use of a hard for most of us to understand disease (or psychological problem-semantic issues here)  as a metaphor for the effects that the inability to be in control off our lives can have on our ability to accept the pleasures of the human condition.     The writing is done in a very conscious of itself manner and its role in relaying the story manner blends elegantly with the themes of the book.   

As the story opens Lucy is on a tour.   She gets weaker and weaker as she refuses to eat.   The tour leader leaves her in a hotel in country where she does not speak the language.   Lucy returns to a country that speaks her language and ends up in the hospital.   The doctors are at a loss to explain the cause or discover a cure for her illness.   At first Lucy comes to see her essence as that of a "sick person".    Some of the doctors and nurses are very professional, some are uncaring and seem immune to the feelings of their patients.    The novel then begins to show us why Lucy has the issues she does.  I began to feel real pride in Lucy as she embarked on the solution to her problem, a problem she could only really solve herself.   It is also a very perceptive study of the ways hospitals control and regard their patients, especially those with diesease that annoy or bore the hospital staff.    It was a pleasure to see Lucy grow and become empowered.   

Some of the novel is written as the near stream of consciousness of Lucy.   Part of the novel is in verse.   In a memo in the novel from an imminent authority on the causes of anorexia it is suggested that it may have its roots in the inability of the sufferers to pick up double meanings in language.     It is this idea that is in play in the many experimental uses of language by Place.   As Lucy begins the process of healing, the language of the book becomes less childlike and admits of more nuances of interpretation.    

On Fiona Place's web page you can learn a lot more  about her and her work.  

Mel u

"People of the Book" by Geraldine Brooks

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks (2008, 449 pages)   





People of the Book is about the attempt by a skilled book conservator, Hanna Heath from Australia to preserve in as pristine a condition as possible a very famous mauscript which gives the history of people of the Jewish faith in Sarajevo during the middle ages. Sarajevo is under near war conditions at the time. Part of her job is  to trace the history of the illuminated book, to find out as much as she can about where the book has been in the last 500 years or so. In her examination of the book she notices an insect wing, a wine stain, a cat hair and a saltwater stain. From these clues she is able to reconstruct the paths the book has taken all over Europe. The story line then goes into a narrative about other people who have had the book. We go back to Sarajevo in 1940 and see the heroic efforts it required to keep the Nazis from burning the book   I confess I did not know that the Nazis had employed a large number of people lead by "art experts" to seek out and destroy Jewish artifacts. Thousands of amazing old books were burned. We go back to Vienna in 1894, portrayed as a period of decadence. Each "flash back" section of the book is interleaved with current events in Hanna's effort to conserve and understand the book. We also see her interactions with museum directors, other book conservators and her very brilliant neurosurgeon Mother. Her mother looks on Hanna's profession as a waste of brain power. We also get to know about and see some of Hanna's love live. We go to Vienna in 1609. We go inside a harem in Seville in 1480.

Along the way we learn a lot about the art of book conservation. We learn how illuminated books were made. I was fascinated by the account of how the hairs of Persian Cats had a role to play in the creation of the Sarajevo Haggadah. ( I do not know if these and other details are correct but they sounded plausible throughout.) She makes skillfull use of historical detail. The level of research goes way beyond simply watching a couple of History Channel programs.

Some of the "flash back" sections did seem to go on a bit long. At times I sort of wished the character of the mother could be deleted as it did not add much to the story and was kind of a distraction. At times I also felt Hanna's quarrel with her mother sort of humanized her a bit so it was not a big negative for me.

People of the Book tells us some things about the reading life of those who collect books as artifacts. People read to get historical information to help them appreciate books as art objects. They feel a continuity with other owners of old books.

When I read of Hanna's attempt to trace the previous owners of the book I could not help but recall when a few years ago I found in a second hand book store a large number of the early volumes of the Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence. A number of the books were over 50 years old. They had a lot of character. To me they were beautiful. On the inside cover of each of the twenty or so books was written, in what looked like a very old hand, the letter numbers that a previous owner of the book had liked most. I still wonder who that might have been. I imagine the person treasured those books for many years then one day somebody took them to a second hand book store. The book store clerk told me they had been on the shelve there for many years. As I left the store I saw her call the manager over to point out the person who for some clearly senseless reason had at last bought these books.

People of the Book is entertaining, makes good use of historical research and teaches us a lot of things we might not know too much about. The author has written two other historical novels, for one of which she got a Pulitzer prize.
Mel u

"Getting the Girl" by Markus Zusak- A start of a reading life?

Getting the Girl is the second of Markus Zusak's four books. The Book Thief and I Am the Messenger deal directly with reading life issues. I love both of these books. Getting the Girl is more a young adult book than his subsequent works. It is very worth reading to see how rapidly Zusak is developing as a writer and it is a good tale of teen age angst and sibling issues between brothers.

There is no mention of reading and books directly in Getting the Girl. To me it is clear that the lead character
Cameron has the potential to develop into a serious reader. Throughout the book at the end of every chapter are notes in a hand written style font that show the thoughts of Cameron.

But sometimes I stand on the rooftop of my existence, arms stretched out, begging for more.

That's when the stories show up for me.

They find me all the time.

They're made of footsteps not only to the girl, but to me. They are made of hunger and desire and trying to live decent. They only trouble is, I don't know which of those stories come first.

Maybe they all just merge into one.

We'll see, I guess.

I'll let you know when I decide.

To me Cameron will grow into Ed in I am the Messenger and  Ed's reading life forefather, Ishmael. He will use his books to rise above the world and to   sink below ordinary life.



I will read Markus's Zusak's first book Fighting Ruben Wolfe before the year is over. It is sometimes interesting to read an author's work in reverse order as it makes you very conscious of his or her development


Mel u

I AmThe Messenger by Marcus Zusak-a warning tale about the reading life

Cover of I Am the Messenger

I Am The Messenger by Markus Zusak


After loving "The Book Thief" by Markus Zusak I was very happy to find another of his books, I Am The Messenger, in a local book store. The books central character and narrator is a nineteen year old cab driver named Ed who lives in a shack with an old dog named Doorman.

"no real career.
No respect in the community.
Nothing"
Like The Book Thief there is a lot in I AmThe Messenger". The book shows us, among other things, how a reading centered life can lead us away from the world. We can decide for ourselves if this is a rationale for lack of worldly success or a rising above it. This may well seem strange to most readers but Ed kind of brought to my mind Ishmael of Moby Dick. In the opening pages of Moby Dick Ishmael talks about why his lack of worldly success means nothing in the grander scheme of things. He speaks like a man who has read deeply into lots of deep books. Way more than a whaler should have. His reading has left him fixed on a deeper reality and he can retreat at any time into his books. He is also a man who has no possessions, no family, no life on shore. Did the reading life protect Ishmael or elevate him or did it in part lead him to have nothing? In "I Am The Messenger" we can see the same thing starting to happen to Ed.

"I was reading when I should have been doing math and the rest of it"
"Have you ever noticed that idiots have a lot of friends"
"I have read Ulysses and half of Shakespeare. But I am still hopeless, useless and practically pointless"
"A man like me thinks too much"
"I think his real name is Henry Dickens. No relation to Charles"
"I have read Joyce and Dickens and Conrad"
"Only in today's sick society can a man be persecuted for reading too many books"
"I didn't know words could be so heavy".

As the book progresses we see Ed Receiving a series of message in the form of playing cards. These cards give him instructions to intervene in the lives of those around him. Some he knows some he does not. The story develops as Ed tries to carry out these mysterious instructions. I do not want to give away to much of the plot as it is very inventive and a fun read. As the book ends we begin to wonder if Ed will one day be an old man in a shack surrounded by his books, maybe the only real constant in his life. We wonder if the books will keep him in the shack
or will they show him a shack is as good as a palace in the end. Like Ishmael floating on a coffin will Ed float through life in his cab? The reading life helps Ed see through the vanity of life (just like my own brings up to me the echo of Samuel Johnson) and at the same time gives him his excuse to live out his life in a shack.

I Am The Messenger is also a neat love story and a buddy book and has a lot of action scenes. I learned some Aussie slang from it. The book can tell us a lot about the reading life and it is also a bit of a warning.

I totally liked "I Am The Messenger" (2002-357 pages). It is a lot of fun and makes me hope Markus Zusak will write a lot more books. I have his first two books on my Amazon wish list.

"The Book Thief" by Markus Zusak-a wonderful account of a reading life

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

This is a wonderful book. It has won a host of prizes and been praised in the print media and in numerous book blogs. It is classified as a young adult book but please do not be put off by this. It is written in a way that will for sure appeal to age 10 or so up readers. Over all the vocabulary and sentence structure are not difficult. You will learn a few new German words along the way but that is ok. The production quality of the book is great, easy to read with at times changing type face. There is even a book within a book.

"The Book Thief" shows us a lot about the reading life, how a love and obsession with reading effects the main Character Leisel and those around her. There is an old saying about deep books-"The book reads you at the same time you read it". The narrator of the book is Death. This is a daring conceit pulled off perfectly. I even came to Like Death and felt in sympathy with him at times. The book is told in a time and place of great evil. You know it is there, you cant forget it but it does not get in the way. Leisel gets her first book, "The Grave Digger's Handbook" by stealing it, hence the book title. Leisel and her step father bond from reading the books she steals. One of the seemingly very unsympathetic characters in the book is the Mayor's wife. Not wanting to add any spoilers, Leisel and the Mayor's wife end up bonding over books in a very unexpected way. We see Leisel begin to see the humanity in other people through her reading of the books she steals. As you would guess, some very sad things occur in this book but some wonderful things also.

Least we think the effects of the reading life are all wonderful we can see in "The Book Thief" that it is not. One can be into the reading life-seeing life via the prism of the effect of the books we read on us by reading 1000s of books or by reading one book as the supreme clue to all things. In the world of "The Book Thief" for far too many people that meant "Mein Kampf", not flat out evil people but people who might have read only one book in their life are guided by it. Even if they cant read it, they carry it around and pretend to read it. So there maybe another idea at work here, maybe the book thief is really Mein Kampf and the millions of lives stolen by the ideas in it, lives of those loved the book as much or more than anyone else. Maybe reading 100s of books stops the power of one book.


Mel u