MJ Hyland is one of my 2009 obsessions. First reason: watch this SlowTV video to see why. Just two minutes will do. Are you back? That powerfully resonant voice, her dark lipstick, the way she described her third book, This Is How, as her ‘turd’ novel: Hyland has a kind of terrible, magnetic charisma. I’ve heard she only eats meat and chocolate. I’m terrified of her, and I’ve never even met her. Second reason: Carry Me Down, which is almost a perfect book.

I’ve written before about how I seem to be reading a lot of books that feature a child as the main character lately – Lindqvist’s Let the Right One in, Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Larbalestier’s Liar quickly come to mind. Carry Me Down is no different, with eleven-year-old John Egan’s tale beginning as follows:

It is January, a dark Sunday in winter, and I sit with my mother and father at the kitchen table. My father sits with his back to the table, his feet pressed against the wall, a book in his lap. My mother sits to my right and her book rests on the table. I sit close to her, and my chair, which faces the window, is near the heat of the range.

There is a pot of hot tea in the middle of the table and we each have a cup and plate. There are ham and turkey sandwiches on the plates and, if we want more to eat or drink, there is plenty. The pantry is full.

It’s an incomparable picture of familial equanimity, simple and affecting. If a child could feel this at ease and complete on a day of no import, perhaps the family described is like this every day. And if this is an ‘every day’, then it’s a warmly intellectual family: the cat’s name is Crito, and the book John’s father, Michael, is reading is called Phrenology and the Criminal Cranium. He is studying for a university entrance exam and plays word games with John at table, encouraging John to spar with him using the tales of Sisyphus and Tantalus.

Of course, it’s not long until these perfect elements shift and grate against one another. Helen, John’s mother, is changeable. She fends off and interrogates John as she might an adult: ‘You were staring again. You were staring at me’; or she is charming, engaged, fun — a delightful mother who tickles and tells stories. John’s grandmother is there too, or rather, the three Egans live with her, as Michael hasn’t been employed for three years. Michael himself is a gamble at the best of times. One day, he and John must drown the kittens Crito has borne. When John challenges his resolve (‘I knew you couldn’t kill them’), Michael takes one of the kittens in his hand and smashes its head on the bath, and then says he is not sad about what he has done. However, John knows that his father is lying.

John’s realisation precipitates not a readjustment of the way he sees his family, but an obsession with becoming a human lie detector. Obsession is a boon to any plot, but the way Hyland ascribes it to this young boy is both sympathetic and disturbing. John creates a journal called the Gol of Seil and records inside it every lie he witnesses. It’s a simple project that echoes the limits of his ability to understand the many societal roles of untruths, whether they are (in his taxonomy) major, minor or white. His attempt to control the emotional chaos that is bristling around him is touching and remarkably single-minded. As John Egan attempts to strip the people around him of his lies, so too does he strip his world of its protective buffers and linings, uprooting a thorn bush of a family that had well tangled itself across and into the ground. It’s riveting to read, and the results are severe to experience.

Carry Me Down uses deceptively simple language to uncover a fraught domestic world, one in which the players begin with a face for each other and us, through the child John; and another for other times and other places. I said at the outset that Carry Me Down is an ‘almost perfect’ novel, and these other lives evaporate a little towards the end, a little unnaturally. But there’s no denying the power and beauty of this novel. Read it and weep.

Or, ‘The most fan-girl post ever’.

I think I’m a bit in love with Amber Fresh. It’s partly not my fault; it’s partly the fact that she read me her poetry in a tiny church in Newcastle. Okay, other people were there too. And we didn’t actually meet. But essentially I spent the whole of the next day fretting about whether her book would be on sale at the TINA zine fair; and if not, whether Sean and Liz would be able to get me a copy; and if not, whether Sean and Liz would just hand Amber over to me in some kind of shady back-door deal.

No abduction was necessary in the end; Maddie bought me a copy and I read it pretty much straight away. But it just wasn’t the same. This year, I’ve seen a little bit of spoken word and poetry performance, which is extremely unusual for me. And though I’m not a galloping convert, I am now more alive than ever to the dynamism and alchemy of a poet reading their own work. In the case of Fresh’s informally confessional poetry, the authorial vocal transmutes what, on the page, can read like the simple expression of a naïf’s desires into the most charming seduction you’ve ever heard.

Of course, that’s not to say that the poems can’t be enjoyed on the page. Between You and Me is presented in seven parts, including a prologue, an intermission and an epilogue: an entire catalogue proposing that not just poems in isolation will pass between the poet and the reader. At first, the prologue seems to overturn the ‘me and you’ dichotomy suggested in the collection’s title: ‘there’s a thin little thread / between me and him’. But soon enough, the confessional ear is required again: ‘I had my first time ever being with a poet today’.

The poems in this collection range from short inquisitions:

They’re watching Twin Peaks again
the savages
Don’t they
know people
really do wrap each other in plastic?
(from ‘Savages’)

…to suburban religious adventures:

jesus is my homeboy
but mainly people don’t want to know

one night after i’d
talked to him for a
relatively long time
he sent me on a little
mission into the
city
(from ‘jesus is my homeboy’)

But by far the most significant focus of Fresh’s cathectic poetry is boys:

this boy i know used to work at coles
getting the trolleys and
putting them with the other trolleys
a couple of times i went to visit
him
i tried to look cute
but you know
like, nonchalantly cute
(from ‘A day at the office’)

Some poems are so caught up in a personal vocabulary that they can be alienating but, ultimately, Fresh’s poetry chides the listener to be close; and who can resist a steady flow of secrets?

I travel a lot, but I am crap at travel stories. You can ask anyone who knows me. I have done some of the most fun things in the world, and I can still make them sound boring. Wells Tower asked me what Dakar was like, and I said, ‘There are a lot of fancy ice-cream places’. It’s unfair that I get to travel, actually. They should only ever send born raconteurs overseas. But such is life.

Lisa Dempster, on the other hand, is a great travel writer. (She’s also a publisher, blogger and good value lady.) We invited her to talk about Neon Pilgrim on Textual Fantasies a few weeks back, and her publisher, Emily Clark from Aduki, sent us a copy as a thank you. No: thank you! It was exactly what I wanted to read at the exact time that I received it: a book with a heart as big as its endeavour.

I figure that the sweet spot in travel writing is enabling a reader to share the joy and pain of your journey, and Neon Pilgrim affords ample scope to partake in Lisa’s experience. Lisa lived in Japan as a schoolgirl, on the island of Shikoku, and promised herself that one day she would undertake the island’s 88 Temple pilgrimage, the henro michi. The memory of this promise resurfaced at a time when she needed it very much; a couple of years ago Lisa was depressed, withdrawn and unmotivated. One of those dark days, however, she came across a tale in a library book about a suicidal woman who walked herself well on the pilgrimage. It became very clear to Lisa what her next step would be.

I know Lisa well enough to know that she is honest, principled and passionate — all things that characterise Neon Pilgrim, her account of the 1200 kilometre pilgrimage. For those of you who might think that a journey designed to venerate an enlightened monk might be quite a nice form of low-impact exercise — it’s not. It sounds freaking hard. Not only was the physical effort of hiking mountains in summer so overwhelming that Lisa couldn’t keep her food down for the first ten days, but the sheer size of the enterprise — the distance, the loneliness, the self-intimacy — was enough to make her rethink her plans more than once. In addition, Lisa was undertaking the henro michi nojoku, or sleeping rough.

But the other side of such harshness and difficulty is, of course, grace. On her trek, Lisa was inspired by the spirit and ideals of Kōbō Daishi, the buddhist monk who achieved enlightenment on the track now followed by 150,000 people a year. The Daishi was what I think they call ‘ahead of his time’: a feminist, anti-class, pro-equality crusader. Above all, I was incredibly moved by the Shikoku natives’ generosity to pilgrims through the custom of settai, or gift giving. Settai is a way for those who haven’t the health, time or financial support to go on pilgrimage themselves; and by gifting a pilgrim with food, drink, accommodation (or even chiropractic services, as Lisa discovered), the giver is assisting the Daishi himself.

There were so many things I loved about this book. Having been to Japan, it was such a tonic to re-encounter my favourite things about it through someone else’s words; I was wretched for Lisa’s descriptions of Japanese food, from flame-grilled mochi (which I don’t even usually like) to the udon of the Sanuki province, which is so soft and silky you can swallow it without chewing. Also, while reading about Lisa’s interactions with her fellow pilgrims and Shikoku’s residents, my heart swelled to such a size that I didn’t know quite where to put it. Absolutely crowning my enjoyment of Neon Pilgrim, though, was that it stripped away my belief that you can’t still have an adventure in these superconnected and dangerous times. You can; it’s possible; how sublime that knowledge is.

FANTASY BOOK ALERT, etc.

The Whisper of Leaves tells the story of Kira, an adventurous, gold-eyed healer whose skills exceed any her people have seen before. One of the Tremen people descended from the peaceful Kasheron, Kira lives in Allogrenia, a beautiful, heavily wooded land divided into portions each associated with one of the Tremen’s eight clans. Kira’s people love the land’s bounty, and carefully keep the ways into it secret. But the Shargh, who are as violent as the Tremen are peaceful, find a way in. Arkendrin, brother of the deceased Shargh chief, seeks Kira, because he believes that she is the subject of an old prophecy that foretells the destruction of his people.

Allogrenia is extensively realised by Nikakis, and her affection for the Victorian landscape where she grew up and continues to work is obviously a big influence on how she created the world in her Kira books. The Tremen people are intimately familiar with the uses of all the plants and herbs that can be found in their lands, and the forest’s animals are often invoked to add colour to Nikakis’s descriptions.

The Whisper of Leaves is the first in a trilogy. Once I’ve read the first volume in a trilogy, I’m usually pretty eager to pick up the rest of the narrative thread in the remaining books. In this case, though, I doubt I will get straight to it. I did like the world and the characters, but the pacing of this book was a little off for me. It moved more slowly than I would have liked, and as a corollary, I rarely sustained the heady suspense that is the usual payoff for reading dramatic fantasy novels. It’s a bit longer than it needs to be, too, though that’s a usual quibble for me with fantasy books. But it’s a nice gentle read, which I appreciated when I was heavily hungover yesterday.

There’s a beautiful illustration depicting Allogrenia on the book’s website, and you can have a peek at sample chapters from each of the Kira books there, too.

Detailed depictions of Kneen’s sexual experiences are natural ingredients for this memoir: sex is as vital to Kneen as is breathing. Its purchase on her life, however, is sometimes a source of semantic confusion. ‘I’m not a sex addict,’ she says to Katherine, a friend who is trying to pin down the relevant terminology for Kneen’s outlook. But it’s not really the nouns that are important; it’s the verbs. Terms aside, Kneen is constantly sexually wishing and aware. While talking to Katherine in a café, she thinks ‘about how deeply she could reach inside me with those elegant hands’, and registers ‘the feminine beauty’ of a young Asian man who walks past.

Sexuality is something some of us have in more abundance than others, and Kneen’s descriptions of the strange interface between her sexual, ‘ugly’, desiring self and the rest of the world make for confronting reading. As natural as her sexual activities and thoughts are for Kneen, they are not always readily understood by others. Conversations with fellow drama students about sex come to a halt when she discloses how much she enjoys anal sex. And as eagerly as she approaches sexual encounters, she comes to realise that she has never said no, even to partners who take advantage of her body’s willingness in order to please themselves and to humiliate her. But there is a powerfully structured redemptive arc to this story, which sees Kneen finally embrace a new name and new wisdom with which to greet emotional curveballs like these.

I wouldn’t ever attempt to suggest that memoir be or do anything in particular. But in the case of Affection, what is proffered is both beautiful and pedagogical: it organises the author’s own prospect of her self into an illuminating narrative. To make sense of what one has learnt is a responsibility both lovely and grave, and Krissy Kneen has discharged her burden with brave honesty.

I have garlanded Tom Cho with that most sought-after of literary prizes: the suburban flower arrangement. Do you know what kind of books get this kind of treatment? Ones that I like.

My predisposition to love this book was cemented in two separate instances. First, I read ‘The Bodyguard’ in Black Inc.’s Best Australian Stories 2007 while I was away over the summer. It was, hands-down, my favourite story in the collection, a breathtakingly aware literary roleplay which begins: ‘Someone is stalking Whitney Houston and I have been hired to be her bodyguard.’ No more explanation than that; an assumption you’re familiar with 90s Hollywood tripe; impassive I-strewn narration: I was fully hooked, bro. Second, hoping Cho would do a reading, I went to the launch of Look Who’s Morphing at Hares and Hyenas about a month ago. Lucky me! He read ‘Aiyo!!! An evil group of ninjas is entering and destroying a call centre!!!’, a story which certainly puts the kibosh on the ‘no more than 40 exclamation marks per page’ rule (don’t try it at home, kids). Gold-star funny piece with, rightly, no hesitation or anxious explication about bringing little-valorised South-East Asian shibboleths to Australian literature.

I hesitate to call the works ‘short stories’ (Cho calls them ‘fictions’), because, as with ‘Aiyo!!!…’ the pieces lend themselves very well to performance, and given Cho’s background in spoken word, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them passed through that medium in their development. From ‘A Counting Rhyme’: ‘One, two, buckle my shoe. Two, one, steamed pork bun.’ Don’t want to annoy myself or you by trying to discuss the ‘traditional’ short story, but most of the pieces are short, and feature a first-person point of view. The pieces are also connected through their performativity of the personal, and the inevitability of play in that performance. Reinforcing this is the cover, with Cho’s eyes, framed by cliff-high quiff and leather jacket, gazing out over a neon-pink bleed on his cheek.

Having sobbed many guilty Asian-Australian tears over The Joy Luck Club when I was ten (okay, and Mulan when I was fifteen), I admit to having developed a hardness of heart towards ‘ethnic’ as a literary flavour: writing in that genre (as with other genres, of course) is often not distinct or sophisticated or complex or interesting, and I’m not as guilelessly interpellated by it as publishers would probably like. But Cho interrupts these cardboard cutout performative accounts of racial identity. His narrators’ identities are perpetually changing and fluid, and questioned by themselves and others. With irreverence, too — ‘Learning English’ begins like a typical migrant story but, madlib-like, veers off that road pretty quickly:

Australia is very different from my homeland. I was born and raised in a town called Rod Stewart. Back in those days, Rod Stewart was a very busy town. The major industries were David Hasselhoff and coal. I think it is hard for a non-migrant to understand just how difficult it is to learn a new language while adapting to life in a new country.

Cho doesn’t limit his inquiry to racial identity, extending it also to gender, sexual and even social identity. In ‘Pinocchio’, the protagonist attempts to justify his long absence to his girlfriend, Tara (Cho’s actual partner’s name) by claiming that he has only just managed to transform back from being one of Jim Henson’s muppets. Sure, it sounds silly, but it’s not too bad a metaphor for the lies we tell each other. This piece is a well-judged reminder that the concerns of morphing aren’t only for those who look or act most differently from the norm, but that everyone is every day prodding at the fabric of themselves.

There’s also a healthy amount of irreverence towards the seriousness with which people address these selves and choices. In ‘The Sound of Music’, erstwhile nun Maria asks Mother Superior: ‘Can who you like to “do” also be bound up in issues of who you are or want to be?’, after which the two women begin sharing their fantasies about the Fonz. You might have noticed that I think this book is hilarious, and in fact spurred me to multiple ‘let me read this to you’ moments. Cho selects a matter-of-fact tone in most of the stories, and it works really well. In particular, there’s a fantastic running joke about Chinese food that made me snicker each time it appeared.

If there is such a thing as classically postmodern, Look Who’s Morphing fits that description. It’s relentlessly intertextual, openly questioning and questing, and takes storytelling to absurdist yet never inhumane extremes. But it’s also inclusive and playful. Cho’s written identities defy the linear narratives of self imposed by technology, product lust, received knowledge and ancestry to emerge as shifting sands: the endless metaphors and similes for the self eventually resolving, not blurring, into the person.

A hypocritical by-the-way: there are lots of reviews about this book already, but try not to read too many of them, because lots of them quote highlights of the book, and the book’s not very long. Read them afterwards.

Verdict: the Fonz says yes.

I’ve read two books lately that haven’t been leisure reading. Last week I handled the proofs for a non-fiction book, which I won’t talk about yet because it won’t be published for a little while. It wasn’t anything blockbuster-sexy like Alice Pung’s Homeland Recipes or anything like that, but I consider it a socially important book, so I’m happy to have been involved with it. The other book was a book I reviewed for lip magazine, so I won’t write about it here either.

Should books I read for work count towards my yearly total? Don’t know. I guess so, since I have technically read them. There’s nothing in the rules which says that I have to pick my books voluntarily…hey! I make the rules. Anyhow, since I use this blog as an aide-memoire, here they are:

1. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (embargoed!)
2. A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean / Gary Buslik

I’m starting to feel strange about the idea of having a reading target. It was useful to have one last year because I had lost my habit of seizing most moments to read. But now that I’m a rehabilitated reader it seems redundant. Do you have targets?