Instead of reviewing every book I've read, I will be choosing one book I read each month to feature. I read three books in January, but I felt none of them were worthy of an entire post. I only read two books in February and the one I have chosen is a book that's exciting and interesting. You might ask why my reading pace has slowed down since last year. It's because I am reading some of thickest books on my waiting list, which has slowed down my pace of total books read. But that's OK, because the books I'm reading have great depth.
February's Book of the Month: New Australian Fiction 2022, edited by Suzy Garcia (*** 1/2)
I purchased this book while in Sydney last month. While traveling through Australia, I saw many sites, natural wonders, buildings, museums, and tourist attractions. What I sometimes miss during my travels are meaningful contacts with people. I do engage in superficial interactions with hotel workers, wait staff, and tour guides, but seldom have meaningful conversations with people.
I did have a fascinating conversation in front of the IGA grocery store at Uluru with a group of indigenous people who drove six hours round trip each day from their home in a tiny outpost with no tourists, so they could sit on the concrete sidewalk outside the store and attempt to sell their paintings to the fairly large number of tourists passing by the IGA. And I chatted with three women from Jakarta who worked in three different gift shops in my hotel complex. It was interesting to learn how they each happened to find themselves in the desolate Outback. But still, it's not much interpersonal interaction.
That where this anthology of short stories comes in. It might seem paradoxical that you can get a sense of a nation's people from reading a collection of fiction, but stories, whether they are literally true or not, are an incredible medium for really learning the truth of a place. New Australian Fiction 2022 serves well in this role, providing the reader with an extraordinarily diverse human perspective on Australia today.
All the stories are interesting and many are wildly creative and a few are experimental, created by a group of writers of various backgrounds. A few of the most noteworthy stories:
*Oxygen, by Jasmin McGaughey, chronicles the despair of a young black woman encountering subtle, yet nefarious racism, in her new workplace.
*The Yarn Bird, by Jacqui Davis, is the tale of a mother and her daughter recovering from the death of another family member as they cope with an out-of-control bush fire in parched Australia that's headed inevitably toward their house.
*The Spirit Realm, by Bobuq Sayed tells the story of an Islamic family in Perth, confronting a strange phenomenon in their house: all their possessions are gradually disappearing. Could it be a djinn (an invisible spirit) that has taken over their house? Or is it something even more sinister?
Reading this entire book, we are given a picture of a broad cross-section of Australians, especially those whose voices might be unheard in general society. By the time I finished, I felt as though I had a much stronger sense of Australia, that really supplemented my very limited wanderings through the country.
New Australian Fiction 2022 is a wonderful book, but I understand it might not match up with where you are in the world. I think the larger point I'm trying to make is that short story anthologies of wherever you are, or are traveling, can be a fantastic way to gather insight and understanding of another culture or place. I've started this practice (for example, the anthology of Cambodian fiction I read after I visited there was also an amazing source of insight) and recommend this practice as a way to gain even more from your travels.
Here are the other books I've read the past two months.
January
*The Book of Form and Emptiness, by Ruth Ozeki (***) Interesting book and winner of the 2022 Women's Book Award, but at 523 pages it's a bit overstuffed for me.
*A Bookstore in Algiers, by Kaouther Adimi (*** 1/2) The fascinating history of Algeria as imagined through the story of the most-incredible bookstore in Algiers where Camus even roamed.
*A Pale View of Hills, by Kazuo Ichiguro (***) The first novel of the Nobel Prize winning author examines the suicide of the narrator's daughter, but we never figure out what happened because the narrator is so unreliable, perhaps mentally ill.
February
*Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami (*** 1/2) A story of an ill-fated college romance and lives overwhelmed by sorrow--and an extremely inconclusive ending.
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