Anyhoo, Bernice has gone to the trouble of making another list for a meme. It's called
Bernice's Bounty of Books: The Ozstralyan Way
Same rules: bold for read, italic for started/not finished/bits read. I won't do so well this time, but I'm still going to try...
- Fortunes of Richard Mahony - Henry Handel Richardson
- The Reading Group - Amanda Lohrey
- Coonardoo - Katherine Susannah Pritchard
- Dog Rock - David Foster
- The Transit of Venus - Shirley Hazard
- Voss - PW
- Children's Bach - Helen Garner
- Reports from a Wild Country - Deborah Bird Rose
- Jack and Jill - Helen Hodgman
- Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines - David Unaipon
- Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow - M Barnard Eldershaw
- Carpentaria - Alexis Wright
- The Little Company - Eleanor Dark
- For the Term of His Natural Life - Marcus Clarke
- Tourmaline - Randolph Stow
- My Brilliant Career - Miles Franklin
- Peel Me a Lotus - Charmaine Clift
- The Acolyte - Thea Astley
- Cicada Gambit - Martin Johnston
- Fat Man in History - Peter Carey
- Seven Poor Men of Sydney - Christina Stead
- The Magic Pudding - Norman Lindsay
- Cloudstreet - Tim Winton
- Tirra Lirra by the River - Jessica Anderson
- Exiles at Home - Drusilla Modjeska
- Harp in the South - Ruth Park
- Letty Fox: Her Luck - Christina Stead
- Mr Scobie's Riddle - Elizabeth Jolley
- Eucalyptus - Murray Bail
- The Pea Pickers - Eve Langley
- From Little Things, Big Things Grow - Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly
- Merry Go Round in the Sea - Randolph Stow
- The Female Eunuch - Germaine Greer
- Come in Spinner - Dymphna Cusack and Florance James
- The Blue Plateau - Mark Tredinnick
- Lillian's Story - Kate Grenville
- Me, Antman and Fleabag - Gayle Kennedy
- Johnno - David Malouf
- Because a White Man'll Never Do It - Kevin Gilbert
- The Commandant - Jessica Anderson
- Just Relations - Rodney Hall
- A Difficult Young Man - Martin Boyd
- The Albatross Muff - Barbara Hanrahan
- Power Without Glory - Frank Hardy
- Pioneers on Parade - Dymphna Cusack & Miles Franklin
- City of Women - David Ireland
- Mother, I'm Rooted - Kate Jennings
- Five Bells - Kenneth Slessor
- My Brother Jack - George Johnston
- The Year of Living Dangerously - Christopher Koch
- Careful, He Might Hear You - Sumner Locke Elliot
- Fringe of Leaves - PW
- Death of A River Guide - Richard Flanagan
- The Spare Room - Helen Garner
- The Glade within the Grove - David Foster
- Mr Darwin's Shooter - Roger McDonald
- Bush Studies - Barbara Baynton
- The Electric Beach - James McQueen
- Beware of the Dog - Peter Corris
- I Can Jump Puddles - Alan Marshall
- A Million Wild Acres - Eric Rolls
- The Plains - Gerald Murnane
- Diary of a Wombat - Jackie French
- Nice Try - Shane Maloney
- Two Weeks with the Queen - Morris Gleitzman
- Paper Nautilus - Nicholas Jose
- The Lost Dog - Michelle de Kretser (heh)
- A Mother's Disgrace - Robert Dessaix
- The Seal Woman - Beverley Farmer
- Collected Poems - Gwen Harwood
- Maestro - Peter Goldsworthy
- A Long time Dying - Olga Masters
- Benang - Kim Scott
- The Lyre in the Pawnshop - Fay Zwicky
- I for Isobel - Amy Witting
- The Persimmon Tree and other stories - Marjorie Barnard
- Moscow Trefoil - David Campbell and Rosemary Dobson
- Caught in the Draft - Veronica Brady
- Weevils in the Flour - Wendy Lowenstein
- Vertigo - Amanda Lohrey
- Sugar Heaven - Jean Devanney
- Sorry - Gail Jones
- The Twyborn Affair - PW
- The Cry for the Dead - Judith Wright
- Schindler's Ark- Thomas Keneally
- Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living - Carrie Tiffany
- What a Piece of Work - Dorothy Porter
- Bobbin Up - Dorothy Hewett
- The Drowner - Robert Drewe
- Blue Skies - Helen Hodgman
- Ride on Stranger - Kylie Tennant
- Radiance - Louis Nowra
- Aunts Up the Cross - Robyn Dalton
- The Slap - Christos Tsiolkas
- My Place - Nadia Wheatley
- White Man Got No Dreaming - WEH Stanner
- The Drover's Wife - Henry Lawson
- Tasmania by Road and Track - E T Emmett
- The Aunt's Story - PW
- Come Back Peter - Joan Woodberry
There's a few I'd change or add. Like
The Sound of One Hand Clapping by Richard Flanagan (although he's there, with a book I haven't read)
Gilgamesh by Joan London
and (this may be howled down) Monkey Grip by Helen Garner?
Although we could debate all day whether this is supposed to be a list of things every Australia SHOULD read, or a top 100 of what Australians HAVE read (which is what I think the BBC list is). Which would make quite a different list, methinks, stuffed with Bryce and Tim and Colleen.
How did you go?
15 comments:
nope
I'll hang out for the bestest ever oztrayliun music list...... I'm confident I'd score better score with that one....
oh, but where is the book thief?
otherwise, i agree - what we have read and what we should read are quite different beasts.
I'd missed the point about the BBC list being books people had read. In which case, where were the Ruth Rendells and Agatha Christie titles by the truckloads?
I wasn't thinking so much about a Bloom canon as about those books that you knew had shifted your head space, or had been about bold experiments as writers. So for Garner, Children's Bach may crash and burn but by fuck she also soared, whereas I found Monkey Grip more reportage and not that well written. The Spare Room is just simply a masterpiece.
I'd argue Flanagan is the reverse - River Guide is the bumpy but really interesting first novel; One Hand too self-aware for my tastes.
And you're right about Joan London. Forgot Susan Hampton's Surly Girls as well.
Badly! But, like yourself, I've read others by some of these authors and think some good uns have been missed.
I'd read 11. Australian book based courses at Uni will help boost the numbers... I wonder if the list should just be of authors somehow? Never read Riverguide but love Richard Flanagan's voice - I thought Wanting was lovely.
A great list tho! Something to muse over next time I am looking for something to read.
bugger all. *sigh* I'd add D'Arcy Niland, Sally Morgan, Colin Thiele, HF Brinsmead, in some form or other...I got really into all those childrens' authors that went out of fashion. Ivan Southall, Eleanor Spence, there were lots at Lifeline a few years ago as school libraries cleared them out in favour of cooler new things, so I got lots.
Door bitch sez "reedi"
No Mary Grant Bruce? Oh, no. Also Midnite by Randolph Stow should be in there.
I dunno - these lists bring out a nasty competitive streak in me, but they're so spurious and personal really, though it's interesting to argue what should be on. I think we should go the High Fidelity way and just work out our own top 5 or ten or whatever (and what if you're so old/forgetful/unimpressed by the book that you can't remember if you've read it or not?)
I'm a bit shocked that I'd read so many on the BBC list and so few of the Oz lot, maybe 20 or so. Like others I'd read other books by same authors and would like to see some children's books there. And I'm sure my memory is so bad that I'm missing some I've read - doesn't mean they're not memorable, just that my memory is unreliable.
About 10ish for me. I have most of Tim Winton's stuff. My first thought what was missing was " A Town Like Alice" then i googled it. Neville Shute was English newly moved to Oz...Does that count?
Arther Upfield's Boney series?...probably not great literature but fun.
I love the Drover's Wife.
I had similar thoughts about the BBC list, plus I mistrust anything that starts with a line like that about only reading so many ...
Even so I've read 61 of the BBC list and only 8 of the Oztralyan list (the BBC version I saw didn't have the italic option). Must lift my game!
Oh dear, oh dear... I've read precisely two, and seen the film of another! That takes me down a peg, doesn't it? Not so smug now! Sara x
Eight. At least three of those were PW though.
I haven't read a single one of them, though I do a decent 65 of the BBC list. (Which is heavily weighted toward kids classics and school requirements, so anyone making it through to graduation must surely have been confronted with a minimum.)
Is there a handful you'd particularly recommend?
This wonderful list has sent me into a tirra lirra kind of rapture with one hand tapping the eucalyptus tree outside my window while searching for Alex Miller. Thank you.
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