This post is part two of a list of books that I’ve come to think of as my favourites, most of which I read years ago. As these titles in particular reveal though, my relationship with them is complicated.

5. Pilgrim by Timothy Findley
Findley is one of Canada’s great contemporary authors. I have a vague memory of one of my bookshop colleagues recommending him to me. I do know that once I’d read one of his novels, I tracked down all his other books. I think they were too mature for me, in that they referenced aspects of history, literature and psychology that I was unfamiliar with. I struggled with them, and in hindsight I’m not sure why I persisted. Maybe because Findley convinced me that writing could be beautiful and powerful and mysterious. Pilgrim tells the story of an immortal man who, tired of living, comes under the treatment of Carl Jung; I found this juxtaposition of historical personalities and magical realism captivating.

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6. Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham
I’ll confess I haven’t read Maugham in years. I enjoyed his storytelling skills and ability to craft scenes and sentences, and went through a phase of reading many of his novels and short stories. This one has stuck with me. I think Of Human Bondage managed to convince me that despite all its challenges, life would be okay. But I think I also appreciated Maugham because, as a young and wildly under-educated person, I felt like I could grasp his writing (though in hindsight, this was only at a surface level). The novel follows a nine-year-old boy into adulthood, exploring the turns of fate he experiences, particularly in his efforts to establish himself in a career and a relationship. It’s considered Maugham’s masterpiece, although he never found critical success, despite his huge commercial popularity. His career in part was a commentary on the various ways of living an artistic life, as this New Yorker essay explores. But I had no context for Maugham’s life or his larger themes when I discovered him. I read what I liked, and what I thought I should read, as if in the cold, empty vacuum of space.

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7. Stasiland by Anna Funder
Living in Germany, Australian author Anna Funder interviewed former members of East Germany’s Stasi (secret police) and anti-Stasi organisations, and wove together stories of those lived experiences and their ongoing legacy. When I was writing early drafts of my book about Armenia, many people recommended Stasiland to me, and so I read it in the context of someone learning how to write. The people Funder meets and the stories she shares are fascinating. Her writing is equally powerful, in the way she positions herself in the story, the way she captures the feeling of a moment. I copied passages of the book by hand into a notebook to figure out how she fit her words and sentences together. My experience of reading it, in the context of the teaching myself to improve my own writing, was different than it would have been had I read it back in my contextless vacuum.

This is partly what I find so fascinating about books, that each reading experience is so personal, that we bring ourselves to the text, not in a holistic sense, but at a specific moment in time in our lives, and that shapes our reading of it.

My new book, How to Be Australian, is out on 1 June! You can pre-order it now from your local bookshop or any ebook retailer (outside Aus/NZ, Book Depository might be your only choice). Pre-ordering makes a difference – those orders help convince other stores to stock the book on its release.

Wishing you happy (if complicated) reading,
Ashley
xo

 

Recently, author Walter Mason asked me to share the covers of seven books on social media. The rules were no explanations, no reviews, just covers.

This drove me nuts. I love explanations. I love reviews!

So I’m reprising my seven books here. I chose these books because I consider them among my favourites, though the reasons for that are complicated. Most of them I read years ago, and only now, looking back, does it strike me that they’re almost entirely written by men.

This list is my usual eclectic mix of fiction and non-fiction, almost entirely contemporary. Are the books among your favourites as wide-ranging? Or do you stick to certain genres?

1. Calypso by David Sedaris

Sedaris is an American humorist, and I’m using Calypso as a stand-in for all his books, most of which are essay collections. I love them all. Calypso is his most recent, and most focused, centred around his family’s time at his vacation home, the Sea Section. There, he makes “one tiny, vexing realization: it’s impossible to take a vacation from yourself.” I came to Calypso familiar with Sedaris, his family and their quirks. Maybe this isn’t the book to start with. I’ll also confess I’ve never actually read any of his books. I’ve let him read them all to me in audiobook form, and he is as engaging a narrator as he is a writer. Not all of his essays land for me, but the ones that do haunt me, both for their comedy and for their gutting insights.

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2. Destiny Disrupted by Tamim Ansary

Born in Afghanistan, Ansary is a lifelong history scholar who wrote high school history textbooks in America. Here he crafts the story of Islam, from its origins through today, into a highly enjoyable read. His prose is lively and conversational, his insights valuable, and his love of history contagious. When people ask about my favourite book, this is the one I emphatically recommend. For someone like me who learned practically nothing about the Middle East growing up, Ansary provides invaluable context for understanding the world today. In his introduction, he notes that Destiny Disrupted is neither a textbook nor a thesis: “It’s more like what I’d tell you if we met in a coffeehouse and you said ‘What’s all this about a parallel world history?’”

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3.  Marshall McLuhan by Douglas Coupland

Coupland has been an acclaimed novelist since the publication of his first novel, Generation X, in 1991. In this biography of fellow Canadian and media theorist Marshall McLuhan, Coupland charts McLuhan’s rise to celebrity, subsequent fall from fame, and recent “comeback.” The publication of Understanding Media in 1964, which contains his famous McLuhanism “the medium is the message”, turned McLuhan into “the Super-Marshall of the 1960s”. At the height of his celebrity, he was “everywhere. He was hip and cool … Young people loved him. Talk shows were incomplete without him. … [He sailed on] Greek cruises with millionaires … and [earned] up to $25,000 for corporate speeches and seminars.” Coupland’s perspective as an artist focussed on the way technology changes culture enables him to provide insight into the relevance of McLuhan’s thinking today.

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4. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
Through high school and university, I worked in a secondhand bookshop. Instead of discovering and reading the new and latest bestselling authors, I read whatever came through our shop and struck my fancy. The title of Eggers’s debut work must have caught my attention. I’d never heard of him or the book, which meant I didn’t know it was a memoir of both his parents dying, of Eggers in his twenties raising his eight-year-old brother. I was also in my early twenties. It was the first time I was captivated by narrative voice as much as any aspect of the story, by the power of the narrator’s language to manipulate the reader through the reading experience.

This post became very long. I will share books 5 through 7 in the next one.