nerd, nerd, glorious nerd.
1. What are you reading now?
Charles Kingsford-Smith and Those Magnificent Men by Peter Fitzsimons. I prefer his work on wartime experiences (Kokoda, Tobruk, etc.), but anything Fitzy writes makes me weak at the knees and this is no exception.
2. What is your favourite book?
At the moment, it’s Orwell’s 1984. Finished re-reading it last week, and it really is one of the few books that is different every time you read it. Plus I’m a sucker for anti-government conspiracy theories.
3. What is your earliest memory of books?
Browsing the dusty shelves of Richard’s Old Bookshop in Long Jetty and being thrilled that I was allowed to buy “as many books as I could carry.” Reading Roald Dahl on long car-trips to Melbourne. Oh, and being that weird kid in the playground at school who was reading instead of playing with the other children.
4. What is the book that changed your life?
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton. It was a light-bulb moment of writing so exquisite and perfect that it took my breath away; oh, so *this* is how literature is supposed to be!
5. Most over rated book?
Anything written by J.R.R Tolkien, or as I refer to him “the bastard who stole a day from my life with his trashy and awful excuse for a trilogy.”
Also, Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief. I really honestly tried to like it - everyone I’d spoken to had raved about it, and hating a Holocaust book seems both needlessly callous and the quickest way to turn everyone against you. It struck me as one of those books that tried to be smarter than it was; in its attempts to be poetic and profound, it results in annoying and sometimes truly awful massacres of language and style. Please, somebody, tell me what I’m missing here.
6. Best and worst film adaptation?
Best - To Kill A Mockingbird and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The choices of which have absolutely nothing to do with childhood crushes on both Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn. Honest. The Green Mile was also extraordinary.
Worst - The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Selfishly, because it was polar opposite to how I had imagined it for all these years.
7. How do you choose what book to read next?
Wandering aimlessly through bookshops and libraries, mostly. Also, I’m incredibly lucky to have parents (especially Dad) who are obsessed with reading, so the house is overflowing with books on every conceivable subject, making it easy to choose one at random.
8. How often do you abandon a book after you've started reading it?
Not at all, if I can avoid it. I learnt my lesson from when I was younger; I gave up on so many ‘boring’ books that I re-discovered later and adored. So no matter how tedious or awful, I’ll usually trudge through until the very end. (Except for fucking Twilight. Another lesson learnt from childhood: there are some authors who are irredeemable - namely, Tolkien and Meyers.)
9. Where do you read?
Everywhere and anywhere. I still have to be reminded by my mother that at extended family gatherings it is not appropriate to sneak off into a hidden corner and indulge in a little Tolstoy (which, given the nature of my extended family, seems grossly unfair.) More than once I’ve gone to sleepovers at friend’s houses only to browse their bookshelf and subsequently ignore the lot of them. Essentially, I’m that woman who reads while waiting in line at the bank.
10. What fictional character would you most like to be?
Toad from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. Pompous, lazy, conceited, self-centred, self-destructive, impulsive and disgustingly rich; in other words, the one that has all the fun.