now i have to read:

• germs by richard wollheim – a passage of which is excerpted in john armstrong’s essay “the heart of desire” as an example of convincing writing about sexuality
• martin heidegger’s being and time - portrayed as having no small influence on how God was historically perceived in guy rundle’s “it’s too easy to say ‘god is dead’”
• anna funder’s stasiland – i was supposed to read it for a book club but i did not, and funder’s essay “the innocence manoeuvre” is an elegant, compassionate tackle of questions posed by the von donnersmarck film the lives of others
• the untouchable by john banville – inga clendinnen suggests this is a successful attempt at reaching the ‘poetic truth’ behind a malevolent historical figure
• the australia institute’s corporate paedophilia report
• definitely something by raimond gaita
• hazel rowley’s tete-a-tete: simone de beauvoir and jean-paul sartre, parts of whose information-gathering process are detailed in her essay
• lavengro by george borrow – a favourite text of the cherished tweed-wearing, hut-building character described in anne sedgley’s “in fealty to a professor”
• something by norman mailer though, because i still haven’t (see below)

but i do not want to read:

• norman mailer’s the castle in the forest: j.m. coetzee puts a good showing in the ring, arguing that the novel keeps the ‘infernal–banal’ paradox in play and condemning the circumstances that allowed hitler’s young impressionable mind to pursue his own education ‘in a state of total freedom’; but inga clendinnen is entertainingly, frustratedly persuasive in showing that arendt’s concept of the banality of evil has been hard done by here, and that ‘the devil made him do it’ is woefully inadequate as ‘poetic truth’

sunday nights have lately been a source of guilty pleasure. abc1 (or is it bbc1?) were running a jane austen made-for-tv bumper extravaganza. man, those were a good 3 weeks. the first one i saw was persuasion. i hadn’t read that, so i ordered a copy (but that’s a story for another day). i didn’t think i had read mansfield park, so i pulled it out to ‘prepare’ for the tv version. first, i found this copy. but i knew i had an older one somewhere, a mauve 99p type publication with a typeface so stout it makes courier new look like mary-kate olsen. that one had the 14-year old me’s signature inside, and various declarations as to the identity of my future husbands (i’m still waiting, darren hayes.) this made me pretty perplexed as to whether i had read it or not, and whether it would count for the year’s 50. a peruse of the first pages is usually a pretty good clue, but no moment of realization twinkled out at me. i’m going to count it, though, i make the rules. by the way, the editor should slap himself/herself on the wrist. there are whole lines left out of this version. i had to pick up the mauve disaster to fill in the gaps. shame shame!

i get high on jane austen. there was an article in the age about how the telemovies showed how trashy austen’s stories were, minus the dialogue of those 19th century broads and the men who dug them. well, duh. there wain’t no mills and boon around in the 1800s. mansfield park is ok in this respect, poor girl falls in love with her handsome and kind cousin, cousin falls in love with dainty rich little miss who moves down the road, many walks are had in groves, etc.

but this is probably my least favourite jane austen book. fanny price is so goddamn perky and perfect. it’s not a rare criticism, but her absolute capacity for forbearance, while clearly influenced by her contemporaries’ social mores, can get pretty painful. fanny’s love rival, mary crawford, is pretty and scintillating and fun. austen just has to do too much work to convince you that you shouldn’t be rooting for her. characters keep saying how pretty and necessary fanny is getting; still, it’s a bit hard to find her interesting. she kind of just sits there and goes ‘my cousin will never fall in love with me’.

even the eventually romantic ending shows how aware austen is of how dull and passive her main character is. she doesn’t deign to go into any detail about how the happy couple finally fall in love. it’s all put away quite neatly in a paragraph or two. which is probably quite sensible really, because as all us casanovas know, it’s all about the chase. but mansfield park is really more a case of the cat sitting in the middle of the circle, watching the mouse while it runs around showing its juicy tail. and then the mouse comes and sits on the cat’s lap and they watch doctor who.

the verdict: still bloody fun though.