Book project 2010: update # 19

Ooops, this post went up late and incomplete, but in my defence my internet was down all weekend and I was so excited to have it back last night I pressed "post" before I'd finished. It happens, right? Right?

Here is what I have been reading this fortnight...

My booky wook by Russell Brand

Sometime last year I dated an incredibly smart and serious academic who, somewhat improbably, introduced me to Russell Brand (figuratively). The comedian and TV presenter had previously only appeared on my radar as a tabloid figure, pictured looking shifty under headlines such as “Brand shagger of the year”. I’ve been intrigued and slightly attracted to him ever since (apparently that whole shaggy haired, eyeliner-wearing shtick works for me since I also think Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean is sizzlin’ hot). A former junkie and sex addict, outrageously flamboyant performer, and up-for-anything Essex boy, it’s really no surprise this autobiography is such an entertaining read. Yes, as the book seller at Rozelle markets said, Brand is a “obnoxious little tosser” (way to get sales, dude) but I enjoyed this book anyway.

The luminous life of Lilly Aphrodite by Beatrice Colin

Orphaned in scandalous circumstances, Lilly Aphrodite is in turns a half-starved and unloved waif, a fallen woman, a demure office girl, a glamorous silent movie star and a loving wife, yet most of all she is an enigma. This dark, seductive tale of loss and reinvention is set in Berlin in the early decades of the 20th Century and is a study of both the heady decadence and grinding poverty that categorised the period. Mesmerising stuff.






Truth by Peter Temple

After reading The Broken Shore a few weeks ago (see Book project 2010: update #16 I want to be able to say that I enjoyed this follow up which won the 2010 Miles Franklin prize but I got a little lost towards the end. The book is undeniably well written – Temple’s dialogue is brilliant – but I don’t have a clear picture of where all the characters fit in or how the myriad threads of the story came together. Hmmm, perhaps I shouldn’t have been reading it at the same time as...

After America by John Birmingham

Set four years after the first book in the series, Without Warning, which saw America as we know it destroyed by a mysterious “wave” of energy, this book is about the battle to rebuild, with the forces of “good” taking on a mixed bag of looters, pirates, religious extremists and political opportunists at every turn. Great fun!







The Chrysalids by John Wyndham

Whenever I pick up a Penguin Classic and read the blurb (“He just wanted a decent book to read... Not too much to ask was it? It was in 1935 when Allen Lane stood on a British railway platform...”) I always think I’ve read this book...

As it happens I have read this particular Penguin Classic before, but not to worry; I enjoyed this post-apocalyptic novel just as much this time as previously. What’s interesting is that this book was written in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, which both explains the context of the story and makes the key intellectual themes of the book (genetics, evolution, religious dogma, cultural relativism and generational change) all the more prescient. In this book Wyndham asks the question “what is the true form of mankind?”; a question that 50+ years later we don’t have an adequate answer for.