Reads to recommend

PDM left a comment yesterday, saying he reads two or three books a week, all year round.

I used to do that until I started blogging.

I have dozens of books on my to-read piles and I am planning to blog less and read more next year.

At this time of year I enjoy reading new, or at least new to me, books and also re-read old favourites.

Among the latter are Grievous Bodily by Craig Harrison, For Better, For Worse and For Lunch by Christina Hindhaugh and Cattleman by R.S. Porteous.

If you’ve got any good reads to recommend, please do.

Cattleman

Cattleman by R.S. Porteous tells the story of Ben McCready who is in hospital nearing the end of a long and full life.

As people come to visit him, his memory takes him back to the past from drover’s lad to one Queensland’s biggest landowners.

His is a story of adventure, and misadventure, trials and triumphs, sadness and success.

It traverses farming and family struggles, both World Wars, and does it well.

While set in the Australian outback, it’s a story that will resonate with anyone who loves the land and the people who work on it.

Cattleman was out of print for years but still comes up at secondhand book sales. It has recently been reprinted and is available at Outback Books.

The publisher told me of an outback butcher who told him he had owned only two books – the Bible and Cattleman, and named his sons after Ben’s!

P.S. If you can’t put Ben’s treatment of women and Aborigines in their historical perspective you might not enjoy this book.

If you’re unsure, it might help to remember this: * how to read authors of earlier times who expressed views or created characters that we find repugnant today

It’s as if we imagine an old book to be a time machine that brings the writer to us. We buy a book and take it home, and the writer appears before us, asking to be admitted into our company. If we find that the writer’s views are ethnocentric or sexist or racist, we reject the application, and we bar his or her entry into the present.

As the student had put it, “I don’t want anyone like that in my house”.

I think we’d all be better readers if we realized that it isn’t the writer who’s the time traveler. It’s the reader. When we pick up an old novel, we’re not bringing the novelist into our world and deciding whether he or she is enlightened enough to belong here; we’re journeying into the novelist’s world and taking a look around.

*Hat Tip: Not PC

 

 

Living and learning

In between the heroics and horrors of battles, Anzac soldiers faced the difficulty of every day life:

“They say ‘live and learn’. Well, if we live we’ll learn.”

They did. They learned to adapt themselves to desert conditions, to live on its meagre and obnoxious water supplies, to take advantage of its scant cover, to boil a mess-tinn or quartpot of tea on a handful of dry camel-bush twigs and to find their way with unerring accuracy across its undulating sandy wastes. They learned to shave and wash in a mess-tin of brackish water and go for weeks without the luxury of a bath. Bit by bit they developed an eye for the country, so that never again were they caught in a trap of their own making.

– From Cattleman by R.S. Porteous.