It’s lucky that I’m usually a pretty dilatory blogger. If I blogged about everything straight after I read it, I wouldn’t have anything to write about during the run-up to the Emerging Writers’ Festival. I’m currently preparing to launch 16 books at the 15 Minutes of Fame book launches, so I’ve been reading, yo, but this ain’t no spoiler zone. Instead, you may have noticed that I’m trawling through the books I read over the summer (a noticeably long time ago now – brrrrrr).

When I’m in need of a gear switch, I often read YA, so Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games was the first book I cracked open at the airport. Needless to say, its action-themed front cover brought me plenty of ribbing from my (serious, boring, closed-minded, God I need new) friends. And truly, in their defence, actually, I hate this cover and much prefer the stark US cover, whose golden bird struck in the tail feathers with an arrow is a far more powerful image.

The Hunger Games is set in a dystopic future North America, now called Panem, which is divided into twelve Districts and the ruling Capitol. In punishment for having risen against the oppressive government, the twelve Districts are each forced to select two of its children every year to participate as ‘tributes’ in The Hunger Games, a televised survival contest from which only one child will emerge alive.

Katniss Everdeen is a sixteen-year-old girl who lives in the worst part of District 12 – nicknamed the Seam. Her mother is severely depressed and barely functional, so it’s up to Katniss to support them and her 12-year-old sister Primrose by selling the fruits of her illegal hunting and gathering. Hardened and rational about her chances of being chosen as one of District 12’s tributes, Katniss is aghast when Primrose’s name is drawn, and in a radical and long-unseen gesture, volunteers herself instead.

Published in 2008 (the final book in the trilogy, Mockingjay, is due out in a matter of months), The Hunger Games is definitely a book of its time. While its reality television setting has the potential to seem cringeworthy and too ‘now’, Collins investigates its moral conflicts thoughtfully. In particular, she portrays with vividness the complicity of regular people in grotesque societal practices. Heartbreaking, too, is the class divide that Collins has posed in Panem – children can barter another entry in the name draw for a portion of food, which inevitably means that the children of the wealthy are much safer than those who are struggling.

Of course, none of this would work if the characterisation was weak, and Collins has a winning protagonist in Katniss. This teenager is an Andromeda figure without the promise of a Perseus, but fortunately, she’s also a heroine in no need of a saviour. Katniss defies the role of sacrificial lamb to her people’s powerlessness, and plays the game by her own terms. She’s canny but compassionate, and her humanity is something she refuses to trade for her mere life.

There are a couple of places where the dialogue is too glossy, and the darkness underpinning the book’s concept occasionally – and a bit oddly – disappears, but The Hunger Games is still engrossing and rich. It’s impossible not to feel that The Games are but a small part of a much larger and more oppressive system, and Katniss’s major rebellion at the book’s end promises that the scope of the sequel, Catching Fire, will explore this greater territory. Can’t wait.

I know this is cheating, but here’s my review of Andrew Porter’s short story collection, The Theory of Light and Matter, at Killings. Sorry to be so stingy on value, but I’m reeling this week from having been told I look like Poh.

Let’s talk about my Too Early Introduction To Tim Winton. When I was a wee tacker with no friends and a constant seat at the library, my parents and teachers often encouraged me to expand my readerly repertoire. As a result, I had a lot of incoming recommendations – one teacher recommended that I read Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, though I must have felt that the rural lives of Gabriel Oak and Bathsheba Everdene (really??) weren’t quite up to my standards, as I’ve never read it.

Whether I took to the recommended book or not was pretty unpredictable. My favourite read was Jane Eyre, and it remains so to this day, despite its being an exemplar of the Possibly Crazy White Oppressor’s Simultaneous Despoliation of the Dignity Of Females From Conquered Races And The Lower Classes genre. But when I tried reading Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet on the shelves at home, I was so displeased with what it offered that I didn’t finish it.

So, however unfair it may be to Mr Winton, I’ve kind of nursed ill feeling towards him since then – more than half my life. Perhaps I wasn’t ready for Cloudstreet then, and I’m certainly not opposed to trying again in future. Occasionally, I have considered a dip into the Winton oeuvre, but every time I thought about it, I’d think of reasons not to go ahead. For example, not so long ago, a couple of my friends attempted to read Cloudstreet, and found it incredibly hard to get through. Nevertheless, I’m not one to ever say never, so I read Breath when I was on holiday in Sri Lanka.

Although it seems that I am gratuitously mentioning my tropical sojourn every time I draw digital breath, I feel like the setting of the ‘I Finally Give Tim Winton Another Go’ melodrama was important. It’s not that I’m so literal as to think a beachside location is integral to appreciating Breath. But interspersing my reading stints with the occasional surrender to tiny but powerful waves, on a shoreline tremendous with whiteness, lent another dimension to my experience of Breath’s grace and power.

Breath opens with Bruce Pike roaring up the road with another paramedic to a house where a seventeen-year-old kid has died of asphyxiation. Jodie, Bruce’s colleague, assumes that the teenager has committed suicide. Bruce knows better; he may be ‘arrogant, aloof, sexist, bad communicator, gung-ho’, but he knows what young Aaron’s motivations were, just like they his own. Once, Bruce – Pikelet – was a kid from Sawyer, ‘a town of millers and loggers and dairy farmers’. But then he chanced to follow his mate, Loonie, clinging gamely one day to the tie-rail of a flatbed truck, and he saw the ocean.

Pikelet’s first glimpse of the surf and its inhabitants haunts him: ‘How strange it was to see men do something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant’. Pursuing the surf swallows up his time, and his fledgling adult identity: to follow the surf is to defy his father, who is petrified of the open water. Pikelet and Loonie get their start with a motley group of surfers, before they succeed to the mentorship of Sando, a ‘huge, bearded, coiled-up presence’, whose ability in the surf is unparalleled in their small acquaintance. Before long Pikelet and Loonie are striving to the heights that Sando sets them, and competing against each other for his regard and the wildest wave.

What blew me away was the sheer physicality of Winton’s ocean. I’ve never felt more terrified and awed and seduced by a description as I have when reading Winton’s Old Smoky, the wave that baptises the boys as local surfing mavericks, and the Nautilus, a notorious wave that taunts Pikelet and Loonie with its unpredictability and danger. Breath parses the surf in straightforward poetry, from Old Smoky’s immense ’sound of sheetmetal shearing itself to pieces’ to the gentler water’s ‘cauls of fizz and light’, which accompany the surfer who’s taken on the impossible and won. I’ve never seen surf like that, but I’m pretty sure I will always be able to call to my mind’s eye the spectacle of thousands of cubic metres’ worth of spine-snapping water curving in a wall towards a person, tiny on a board of fibreglass and foam.

In some ways, the novel’s structure is but a viable vehicle for the absolute, unbiddable presence of the water. Something that I read about Tim Winton and Breath, long before I ever read the book, is James Ley’s comment that ‘Winton is a high symbolist working in a realist mode’. I came across this quote at Kerryn Goldsworthy’s blog, and it stayed with me for two years. Ley’s comment deeply affected the way I read the book. Aspects of the novel feel like they are in service of the novel’s focal symbol, the breath, including Pikelet’s sexual relationship with Sando’s wife, Eva, who herself seems merely perfunctory at times.

Nevertheless, what a way to shirk any indifference I felt about a writer many consider Australia’s finest. Good to meet you again, Tim.

When I read Indignation over the summer, I really enjoyed it. But I wouldn’t have read it unless my boyfriend hadn’t been given it by an Icelandic friend he’d met in Tanzania and if I hadn’t been on holiday in paradisiac Sri Lanka, which was satisfying my hunger for hammocks and beers so generously that all I could do was read the books I’d brought and then everyone else’s. Despite appearances, I’m not trying to flaunt my bourgie lifestyle – only point out how improbable and extreme were the circumstances of reading only my second ever Roth tome. Whatever, you like holidays too.

My first Philip Roth experience was with Goodbye, Columbus. I know a lot of people who love that book, but I wasn’t struck by any gigantic lightning bolts by any means. I’m a bit puzzled now, looking at the Wikipedia summary (yes, okay, whatever, I am lazy), about why I don’t remember Goodbye, Columbus more fondly. Some of those later stories sound pretty interesting. But, with reference to the first, titular, story, I can pretty easily explain why I’ve been so reluctant to dive into the Roth oeuvre since then. I guess I don’t really care about classism if the concerns are expressed predominantly within the context of wanting to screw a lady whom society deems inappropriate for you. So, that story kind of stuck in my head, but not in a good way.

A little while back, I expressed my reluctance to choose another Roth to read – mostly because I perceived that his oeuvre was uneven – at Lydia Kiesling’s blog (she now writes for The Millions), to which she replied: ‘Norman Mailer and Philip Roth both belong to my American Post-War Masculine Bermuda Triangle of Doom.’ Which also stuck in my head. How am I supposed to pick a safe harbour in a Triangle of Doom?

But I read this ‘Pulling a Roth’ post in the Wheeler Centre’s Dailies the other week, and it refers to comments Roth made in his Paris Review interview:

It’s all one book you write anyway. At night you dream six dreams. But are they six dreams? One dream prefigures or anticipates the next, or somehow concludes what hasn’t yet even been fully dreamed. Then comes the next dream, the corrective of the dream before—the alternative dream, the antidote dream—enlarging upon it, or laughing at it, or contradicting it, or trying just to get the dream dreamed right. You can go on trying all night long.

…the effects of which are basically ‘I’ve been writing the same novel…28 times.’

I thought again of Indignation, though many months have passed since I read it, and despite the similarities between it and ‘Goodbye, Columbus’, I remembered it with a small glow. (Of course, I was also recalling with warmth my rope bed swinging between coconut palms.) I think half of our holidaying companions read Indignation during those weeks, and we all really liked it.

Indignation is the first-person story of Marcus Messner, the son of a butcher and his wife. Marcus is a pretty good kid who gets excellent grades at school and helps out at the shop but is nevertheless being slowly alienated by his father’s increasingly pathological worrying. So he jumps ship to a small liberal arts college called Winesburg, where he is subjected to all the usual outsider traumas: frat boys shouting ‘Hey, Jew! Over here!’ and a roommate who has an almost demonic lack of regard for him.

But Winesburg is also, of course, the stage for Markie’s big love story, ‘the beauticious Olivia’. And here again the nauseating lusty affection for what a disgruntled Tim Rutten, writing in the LA Times, called ‘the requisite inappropriate shiksa’. I’ve heard a lot about Roth’s uncomfortably one-dimensional, gazed-upon women. But Indignation’s ridiculous affair worked for me, for a few reasons. One: sure, Olivia is mentally ill and is given short shrift as a character. But Messner’s obsessive fantasising is so feckless that it’s horribly sad to witness, especially in conjunction with his other foibles. I realise that if you’d read more than one other of Roth’s 28 books, Messner’s hopeless, useless, obsessive erotic thrall (that’s Rutten again, paraphrased) wouldn’t just be Chinese Water Torture drop #2, but something progressively worse than that. But Messner is an emotional infant, and his love for Olivia makes that clear.

Second, Messner’s über pathetic romance-stimulated body and thoughts are exploding against the backdrop of the Korean War, which is in its second year. Messner, the butcher’s son, is all too aware of what carnage is like: ‘I grew up with blood and grease and knife sharpeners and slicing machines and amputated fingers or missing parts of fingers on the hands of my three uncles as well as my father—and I never got used to it and I never liked it.’ His academic strivings are an attempt to put a gulf between himself and the violent visceral promise of war, and similarly, Messner’s self-imposed sexual deadline becomes more urgent in the threat of being drafted: ‘I was determined to have intercourse before I died.’

{Don’t read the next paragraph if you object to details that are arguably spoiler material.}

Christopher Hitchens was pretty scathing about this whole tra-la: ‘The ordinariness of the prose here (“trammels holding sway” and all that) is matched by the familiarity of the Eros/Thanatos dialectic.’ But for my part, I was relieved to see Roth’s sexual foregrounding anchored by some pathos in Indignation; though Messner is a terribly weird and self-indulgent unit, his defiance of school norms and his bleating anxiety are just sympathetic enough. This makes the novel’s framing conceit (revealed partway through the book) an effective one – Messner’s in hospital, deeply injured, and is narrating the events of his short life under morphine’s potent sway.

I do find it, in theory, an infuriating proposition that any author might consider each novel an improved iteration of the successive ones. However, late Roth in my case was a far more rewarding experience than early Roth. Indignation puts Roth’s usual ingredients together to create an effective novel; he even manages to make masturbation kind of poignant. Did I just say that? Hmmmm.

The last time I read a book that made me cry, well, I never said I wanted to read a book that would make me cry, did I, what I said was I wanted to read a book about a place where everyone can hear what other people think and so you never have time alone, everyone knows everything about you, and you can hear what animals think (and what dogs have to say isn’t very interesting, they want to poo and eat all the time).

I guess in some ways, what I wanted was what I got, cuz The Knife of Never Letting Go is about a place called Prentisstown where there aren’t any women, the whole populashun is made up of men, and they can all hear each other’s thoughts in a loud jangly Noise that crawls across the book’s pages in funny fonts that I’d try to show you if I knew how. There are only 147 people in Prentisstown and they’re all waiting for some reason for young Todd Hewitt, the last of the kids, to become a man.

Cuz there’s a secret hiding, even in the Noise of the town, that Todd knows is dangerous cuz one day Ben and Cillian, the only family he knows, tell him to get out of Prentisstown and Todd’s shocked, he hadn’t even known there was anywhere else but Prentisstown in the world, and so off he goes with his dog Manchee (‘Poo, Todd. Poo. Poo’).

But being able to hear other people’s thoughts is just a type of power, and we all know that where there’s power there’s someone who wants all of it, so before long the people of Prentisstown are searching for him, searching through all of a world we find out is just a new version of the one we know, and there’s preshus few places to hide when people know what your thoughts sounds like, have heard them every day of your life since you were born.

I love this book. I love the way the writer uses the Noise to show the best and worst parts of everybody, from the keening love of a child whose Noise just says daddy daddy daddy to the clamour of the Noise of hundreds of men drowning in sorrow and regret and confushun and remorse, and best of all I love the heartbreaking and thoughtless loyalty of Manchee and I love the way secrets become so powerfully difficult in Noise and yet The Knife of Never Letting Go is about hope, it’s about how tho’ we as individuals and as humanity have made mistakes how it’s worth every terrible fight to fix them.

And then there’s the cliffhanger, which is something else.

I have been in a Walker Books-induced frenzy lately. First I discovered that Patrick Ness had come and gone from our shores without calling me – The Knife of Never Letting Go, the first book in his Chaos Walking trilogy, is one of the saddest, most wonderful things I’ve read lately – and now I have discovered Mo Willems.

Mo Willems, you see, used to be a writer and animator on Sesame Street. (It seems silly to italicise that, but there you are.) And now he writes and illustrates incredible picture books. The ones I have (a present from Maddie) are from two series: I Will Surprise My Friend! from the Elephant & Piggie books, and Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, featuring a psychotic pigeon that could do with some of Nurse Ratched’s tender ministrations.

These books are seriously cult. They hit the New York Times bestseller list. And it’s easy to see why. Kids must love – and see themselves in – the cheeky humour in these stories. The Pigeon, who spends the whole book begging you to let him drive a big blue bus, tries to slip you a fiver, and says: ‘I bet your mum would let me.’ And adults, the purchasers, must respond to the simple, clean drawings with delight – I’ve already read them both three times.

Elephant Gerald and Piggie are hyper-expressive: when Elephant thinks Piggie has gone missing, his face crumples into a Charlie Brown-style pencil squiggle. But not only that – his trunk slumps right down over his face and his brow creases up like a prune. When Pigeon finally loses it, there are feathers strewn everywhere, and his lidded eye leaves you in no doubt of his disdain for you.

There’s hardly any text in these books – a line per page or two. But the personalities of the characters are bright and clear. When Piggie and Gerald lose track of each other, Gerald gets worried that something has happened to his friend Piggie: perhaps a huge bird has got her in its claws! Or maybe she’s about to get eaten by a monster with giant teeth! And what is Piggie thinking? ‘I am hungry for lunch.’

The good news? I’ll be conducting the final HELLO INTERN interview with Aileen Lord, book design intern at Walker Books. The bad news? There are like a bazillion of these books, and I have a feeling I’m going to have to buy all of them.

A couple of years ago, I was sitting on a train, and I felt something brush against my leg. At first, I thought it was merely an accidental brush, the kind of irritation that public transport regularly affords its sufferers. But it happened again after I moved a little distance from the man sitting next to me, and again after I had put a hand’s span between us. I was sure that it wasn’t a mistake, that the man had gotten his jollies from touching me even though I didn’t want him to, and I took a long and glaring look at him. Once he realised I was on to his disgusting game, he sprinted off the train at the next station. I was grossed out and indignant, and I was determined to report the incident to the police.

At the police station, the officer asked me if I would be willing to assist an artist to put an Identikit image together. I thought I could recall his face pretty clearly, so I agreed. At first, the artist showed me some pictures of men who fit the profile I’d briefly described, but I knew for certain that my assailant hadn’t been any of the men pictured. Then, the artist began to ask me about individual facial features: what did his eyes look like? His nose? His mouth? As I opened my mouth to describe the man’s face, I felt my recall of his face melt away in my mind. I was utterly bewildered. What had happened to my memory?

Malcolm Gladwell’s 2005 book Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking is a book about what Gladwell calls ‘rapid cognition’, and how it is often more powerful and useful than extended thought processes. Gladwell is a bestselling author known for his obsessive interest in and ability to identify particular universal cathexes. In Outliers, he attempted to make less ‘crude’ our understanding of how people become ‘so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August’. The Tipping Point was the result of a fascination with ‘the sudden drop in crime in New York City – and that fascination grew to an interest in the whole idea of epidemics and epidemic processes’.

As mentioned above, in Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, the first of Gladwell’s books I have read – Gladwell’s project is to explain how we make snap decisions, and that first impressions can be better than the ones we cultivate after long thought. Who wouldn’t find that fascinating? Though we, as humans, pride ourselves on our capacity for logical thought, there is something seductive about the idea that we are naturally preternatural, that our brains are so disposed to correct decision making that we don’t need time to improve our decisions.

In order to illustrate his thesis, Gladwell kicks the book off with a real-life story about a kouros, or Greek statue of a nude male, acquired by California’s J. Paul Getty museum.  The Getty inquired after the bona fides of the statue, comparing its features with other examples from the age, checking out the identity of the art dealer and inviting a geologist to ascertain the age of the materials used in the artwork. Satisfied with the authenticity of the kouros, the museum agreed to acquire it. However, when the Getty’s curator mentioned this while unveiling the statue for Evelyn Harrison, an expert on Greek sculpture, Harrison said, ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ How did she know what other experts couldn’t – that the statue was a fake?

Although the statue example is arguably as much a cautionary tale as a paean to the capacity of the human mind to make accurate decisions in a short time – just ask more experts next time, Getty! – it’s a great example that sets instinctive reactions against long processes. Of course, it’s not as simple as just this dichotomy, and in Blink, Gladwell also investigates a few different elements of swift decision making processes, including their vulnerability to error. One example of this vulnerability is what Gladwell calls ‘the Warren Harding error’, named after ‘one of the worst presidents in American history’. How was he elected? ‘Why, the son of a bitch looks like a senator’. That is, Gladwell claims, we all have biases that are unacknowledged and difficult to dislodge, including unconscious biases for people who are tall, for instance, or biases against minorities or women. In addition, as with Harrison’s ‘instinctive’ reaction to the statue, training can enhance the snap decisions we are able to make through honing in on the important information and discarding the dross.

Gladwell is talented at picking vividly illustrative examples and studies to support his points, though the book occasionally assumes an authority that it is perhaps too bare bones to really deserve. Nevertheless, there’s no doubt that Blink was so popular because it’s so accessible, and so pedagogical – I walked away from this book with a strong feeling of having learned something without having done much work. The insight earned from reading this book, however, is not illusory, and is often immediately awarded, because decision making is so integral to everyday experience for most of us. For instance, while reading the section about creating successful structure for spontaneous decisions, I quickly designated the ‘brain melt’ I experienced at the police station as the result of ‘verbal shadowing’, which occurs when the left hemisphere – which thinks in words – displaces the visual memories collected in the right hemisphere. This explains the ‘lucky’ and timely decisions we sometimes make based on visual information without having kicked off a verbal thought process, such as in Blink‘s case of a fireman who ordered everyone out of a building seconds before the floor of a building ignited.

Our brains are magnificent organs, and while they sometimes fail us, they often fizz and pop away without our having any conception of how they work. But just as we can learn by storing facts and details, we can turn our thinking faculties upon the very part of us that enable us to do those things. Blink is a wonderfully narrative-driven exploration of a particular set of the brain’s strange but beneficial functions. But while Blink does much to explain the seemingly mysterious process of correct and swift decision making, it does not make that process less interesting; rather, it replaces the sense that some of us are special or have a sixth sense, with a healthful dose of that old medicine, ‘knowledge is power’.