Blog Archives
Happy (reading) trails
I’ve been hovering at the edges of the MWF team for a few years now, sitting on the programming committee (and yes, it’s as fun as it sounds). So, it’s great to become an official staffer this year, as the festival’s social media manager and an itinerant blogger.
What can you expect from me as a blogger? Well, my interests are pretty broad – when I’m not reading for work (which includes roles as books editor at The Big Issue, a regular reviewer for The Age and other outlets, and associate editor of Kill Your Darlings) I tend to follow reading trails. You know, where one book somehow leads to another, and an element of that leads to the next, and so on. In the past, those trails have varied from a thing for comic writing (Sloane Crosley, David Sedaris, Adam Gopnik, Michaela McGuire) to a series of Palestinian memoirs (sparked by Ghada Karmi’s amazing In Search of Fatima), to reading all the backlist of a recently discovered fiction author.
Ten years ago, when I was newly emerged from at-home motherhood and combining working in a bookshop with a university degree in media and politics, my trail was mostly political. I spent my first month of the job reading books on Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers, a subject that seemed to just be coming to the public consciousness. (Though, of course, it may just have been me who was new to it.)
Then, just a month into my new job, on September 11 2001, the World Trade Centre was attacked. Suddenly, everyone wanted to know about the situation in Afghanistan, a place most of us hadn’t much thought about, about this mysterious group called the Taliban that were behind the attacks; and the religion of Islam. My job was in the special orders department of my bookshop and I spent my days mostly tracking obscure books on these subjects, for customers hungry for information about what was going on in the world. I was drawn in, too.
Unsurprisingly, this year, on the eve of the ten-year anniversary of the September 11 World Trade Centre attacks, the festival will be exploring the aftermath of these events, as well as reflecting on the circumstances that led up to them. I suspect I’m about to pick up an old reading trail, or at least follow it through the festival’s discussions.
Maybe there’s something in the ten-year cycle, because another key strand of the festival’s political programming this year will be immigration. I guess it’s a subject that’s never gone away, though it seems to have re-emerged as a political hot potato and urgent topic for public conversation right now, with the Gillard government’s Malaysia ‘solution’, following the failure of the East Timor ‘solution’.
It’s another trail I’ve picked up again this week, reading Maria Tumarkin’s beautifully insightful essay in the current Meanjin, on the failure of our collective moral imagination when it comes to Australian attitudes towards refugees. She suggests – with reference to the hugely popular memoirs of Ahn Do and Alice Pung, the fiction of Nam Le and Arnold Zable, and Shaun Tan’s The Arrival – that stories could be vital in creating much-needed empathy for those new to our shores, no matter their mode of arrival. She writes: ‘ We need stories that help us imagine how it is to make a life in a place that may be a thousand times safer, a thousand times kinder, than the place you just left, but is still, at the beginning at least, viciously foreign.’
Do you follow reading trails, or do you work your way through a bedside table pile? (Or do you have no method at all?) If you do have your own reading trails, what are some of the trails you’ve recently followed?