Australian book publishers Text Publishing have recently launched the Read & Breathe campaign to help in the fight against coronavirus. Until 31 May 2020, every time you buy a book published by Text Publishing and email them the receipt, they will donate $1 to the Royal Melbourne Hospital, one of five global WHO Collaborating Centres for Research on Influenza.
One of Text’s latest books is Grandmothers, an anthology of essays by twenty-four Australian women, edited by Helen Elliott, about the many aspects of being a grandmother in the 21st century. Today, we have eight contributors from Grandmothers on the blog to share about the books they’ve been reading and loving lately. Read on!
Glenda Guest
The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel is a fearsome-looking brick with a cast of thousands living in Tudor England. It is an engrossing read, but to avoid serious wrist injury from holding TM&TL, I am dipping in and out of Marilynne Robinson’s essays What are we Doing Here?. This collection is very American-centric and I disagree with much of what she posits, but keep on. I have an old friend on standby for when I need to return to Australia: Kim Scott’s marvellous Benang, a tour de force of literature if there ever was one.
Carol Raye
Three gorgeous reads I thoroughly enjoyed:
1) The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray
This is a riveting book where Murray examines some of our most divisive issues: sexuality, gender, technology and race. A masterfully argued and fiercely provocative book that reveals the astonishing new culture wars now playing out in our workplaces, universities, schools, homes and identity politics. He ends with an impassioned call for free speech, shared common values and sanity in an age of mass hysteria. A must read.
2) Landmarks by Robert MacFarlane
A world away from Murray’s book, into the world of nature and its beauty and simplicity, which so often we don’t even notice as we rush around in our lives. I loved it: a beautiful breath of fresh air among the hills of Britain.
3) This Chair Rocks by Ashton Applewhite
As I am now 97 years old, I was intrigued by this activist who is fighting against any stereotyping or discrimination on grounds of age, old or young. Interesting and amusing, but a difficult task. Well worth a try and she certainly presents a new perspective on an old problem.
Judith Brett
I’m reading Gary Disher’s Bitter Wash Road, set south of the Flinders Rangers, in Burra and surrounds. For the past two years my husband and I drove through the area on our way to the Oodnadatta track and on to our four- week stint as volunteer literacy tutors at a remote indigenous school in the NT. We were hoping to do it again this year. Instead I am visualising the landscape and the Burra town square through Disher’s prose. And there is the sequel Peace to look forward to.
Next on the list is Leo Tolstoy’s The Cossacks, for my classics book club meeting on Zoom, about a young aristocrat who enlists in the army and is sent to a Cossack village on the Russian frontier. I have already listened to the audio version – on one of the long drives to the NT – and found it transporting. And then, if I’m starting to feel a bit sorry for myself in my restricted life, I will read Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and be thankful for modern medicine and clean water.
Ramona Koval
I’m reading Thinking, Fast and Slow By Daniel Kahneman, which tells of two systems of thought in the human mind. The first tends to impressionistic, metaphorical thinking and runs all the time. The second requires concentration and “nutting things out”, and we have to turn it on deliberately. It’s about what we think we know and how deluded we are. Then, I am reading to grandchildren via skype – the saddest most lovely Oscar Wilde story The Happy Prince (while censoring boring, long-winded and occasionally antisemitic bits) and Green Eggs and Ham by Dr Seuss.
Jenny Macklin
I’ve just finished Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo.Yes a brilliant book about feminism and race but also about the complexities of so many different relationships, friends, parents and children across many generations. I also recommend Tara Westover’s Educated, a gruelling and devastating story of family life in Ohio. The memoir is dominated by the author’s experience of abuse and her urge for education as a way to save her life. It’s a very different family life in The Dutch House by Ann Patchett ,which beautifully weaves together the lives of a sister and brother in Philadelphia. And Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton is my latest favourite Australian novel: the love of brothers in the toughest of family life.
Helen Elliott
I am currently blown away by the Korean best-seller – over a million copies in South Korea alone – Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo, translated by Jamie Chang (Scribner). Short, intense and distilled, it charts with utter calmness the life of Kim Jiyoung, a pleasant, agreeable girl, typical of her time. Cho Nam-Joo reveals every nuance of the weight of patriarchal life, from her younger brother getting all the attention and the single room in the house, from the assumption that she and her sister will do the housework, while her brother is expected to do nothing but be a boy, and be doted on, when she is bullied at school and blamed for being “pretty”, to her struggle to get an education and to do something she enjoys. She finally has a baby, gives up the job she enjoys and, at 33, has a breakdown. This is where this brilliant novel begins. It is easy to say that Korean life is nothing like ours, but the similarities, the subtleties of gendered behaviour, are chilling. This book started the Korean Me Too movement. Read it and understand why.
Katherine Hattam
My reading choices are from contemporary fiction, non-fiction and books about art. I just finished Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, a contemporary revisiting of the gender fluidity found in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Jenny Offill’s Weather is also a pleasure to read. But what will stay with me is Entwined, by Joyce Wallace Scott, a traditional biography/autobiography of an extraordinary artist, the author’s twin sister Judith Scott. Joyce tells the story of Judith, born deaf and mute, and their intensely close childhood, which was devastatingly interrupted when Judith was sent to an institution. Years later, Joyce retrieved her sister and helped her find her way as an artist. Judith Scott is now represented in the National Gallery in Washington and many other galleries. I saw an unforgettable solo exhibition of hers at the Brooklyn Museum. So my reading is often connected to my looking .
Alison Lester
What I’ve read lately: This is Happiness by Niall Williams – loved this, I couldn’t skip a word. Plus American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins, Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout and some Scandinavian crime.
—Grandmothers: Essays by 21st Century Grandmothers (Text Pulishing) is out now.
Grandmothers
Essays by 21st Century Grandmothers
An anthology of essays by twenty-four Australian women, edited by Helen Elliott, about the many aspects of being a grandmother in the 21st century.
It seems so different from the experience we had of our grandmothers. Although perhaps the human essential, love, hasn't shifted much? In thoughtful, provoking, uncompromising writing, a broad range of women reflect on vastly diverse experiences...
14 books to make a difference from Text Publishing 
Read an extract by Jane Caro from Grandmothers
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