David Vann

Well may we say…

I’m feeling quite emotional today. I’m thousands of kilometres from my darling wife who is juggling work, the house, the kids and a severe illness in her family.

And today as I sat on the exercise bike in the hotel gym (you the know, the ones with a TV built in so you can torture your mind while you torture your body), I saw the ‘breaking news’ headline that former Australian Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, had died.

For those of you unlucky enough not to be Australian (sorry, the only time you’ll catch me being patriotic), Gough is probably the most iconic Australian politician in our country’s relative short history.  The title of this post references his most famous speech after being controversially dismissed from office.

While his government will be remembered for many mistakes, especially economic, in three short reformist years in the early ’70s as Prime Minister he: eliminated military conscription; got Australia out of the Vietnam War; abolished the death penalty; implemented universal health care and free university education; began the process of recognising Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander peoples as the traditional owners of the land; enacted the Racial Discrimination Act; made legislative changes to ensure equal pay for women; and refocused Australia as part of the world and part of Asia, not an outpost of a long-dead colonial European empire.

I have a lump in my throat just writing about it.

It is because of him and a few rare politicians like him in my lifetime that I became politically aware, studied politics at school and involved myself in student politics while at university.

This then got me thinking about how books can so easily tap in to the deepest recesses of our emotions and not only trigger powerful emotional responses, but also inspire us to act; to make a change in our lives or those around us.

Tuesday’s with Morrie by Mitch Albom was an example for me as I read it when my son was very young and it laid out what is important in life in a way that inspired me to want to teach to my children. Other books ring like poetry sending our emotions soaring; perhaps bizarrely, one book that did this for me was a graphic novel called Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, by Chris Ware … truly extraordinary.

Other books tap in to darker emotions that make us: frustrated, angry or confused (The Magus, John Fowles), titillated (Money, Martin Amis; The Dice Man, Luke Rhinehart); deeply, deeply depressed (The Tartar Steppe, Dino Buzzati) or just shocked (Legend of a Suicide, David Vann).

The one author who has tapped in to my deep primal beliefs more than any other is GK Chesterton, through his essays, philosophical writing (Orthodoxy), criticism (What’s Wrong With the World).

It is obviously different for everyone, but what is it about these books that trigger such strong emotions?

On one level you could argue it is an author’s cynicism. There are some clever tricks they can use to trigger emotional responses, and they cynically deliberately employ these to masterful effect. Perhaps I am being too cynical.

It could be that we intuitively choose books because we know they will trigger a response, a response we’re craving. On the other-hand some writers, like song writers, painters, choreographers and dancers have a talent for writing stories that engage us so deeply we lay ourselves open to experiencing emotions we usually tuck away from the world as part of our normal daily lives.

So here’s to the memory of an optimistic leader and the memories of books that let us experience life more fully.

You can judge a book by its cover

I love books.  They are an important part of my life.  And I hate bad books … may be a little more passionately than the average person perhaps. And I reckon I’ve stumbled on to a great way of easily avoiding really crap books.

Around 5-10 years ago I started to notice that certain books attracted me time and time again.  I found myself being drawn to these books like iron filings to a magnet or my son to mischief, or whatever other metaphor you might choose to use.  I’ve tried to break the habit to avoid the risk of reading some clone of a book I had read previously, but I just can’t help myself; and it has absolutely nothing to do with the story, genre, author, book reviews or recommendations.

I have come to realise that a sure fire way of choosing a great book is to choose it purely by the cover (or the title).

I know it’s superficial, but I am absolutely convinced I’m right.  Perhaps I am superficial but all you have to do is go into one of the big chain book stores (if there is still one near you) or online to see the range of covers available and you will start to get the idea – Jackie Collins vs. Haruki Murakami; Stephen King vs. Peter Carey; or Mills & Boon vs. Penguin Classics.

Obviously a lot of marketing effort goes into making sure books attract people to buy them … but it has to be more than that.  The conclusion I have come to is that the cover of the book is a reflection of how much the publisher(s) has fallen in love with the story – they have gone out of their way to make sure the design is as high quality as the story; the story deserves a cover where just as much effort has gone into getting it right as went into getting the story right.  They care enough to pay a real designer or artist, rather than a marketer, to use the story as inspiration for the creation of a unique work of art; a visualisation of the story in images rather than words.

The title of a book is just as good a guide, and a great title often goes hand-in-hand with a a great cover, which I hypothesise goes hand in hand with a great book.  How could you not buy Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (Torday), The Man Who Was Thursday (Chesterton), A Confederacy of Dunces (Toole), Tuesdays with Morrie (Albom), The Devil and Miss Prym (Coelho), A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (Lewycka), The Idiot (Dostoyevsky), A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In (Magnus Mills), Legend of a Suicide (Vann), From the Mouth of the Whale (Sjón), A Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Murakmi).  A real mix of genres, themes and eras, but all spine-tingling great books.

In fact the inspiration for the name of this blog is my favourite book title of all time, But Soft: We Are Observed by Hilaire Belloc. In five simple words it conveys so many layers of meaning, even if, by today’s standards, the phrasing is a little anachronistic (it was written in 1928). It’s almost atmospheric; I can’t say it without whispering it: imagining myself in a dark room of a quiet house, my pulse starting to race in the realisation I may have been discovered. And when was the last time you saw punctuation in the title of a book? The only other one I have on my bookshelf is They Shoot Horses Don’t They? by Horace McCoy.  The use of the colon shows just how powerful grammatical devices can be.  It forces the reader to think about the title, to look ahead, wondering why we have to be careful or quiet, who “we” is and who has observed us. It lays down a challenge to a prospective reader – I dare you to not pick me up and start reading. I love it.

So have a think about how you buy books and next time you’re in a book shop, or more likely, scanning Book Depository or Amazon, don’t fight your intuition, be superficial and let the cover or the title choose you.