50 books you can't put down

Each year, “Books Alive” produces a handy guide booklet: “50 books you can’t put down”. It is a promotion of books and reading, and during the month of September, participating bookshops give away a specially commissioned book to anyone who buys one of the 50 books in the guide. The 50 books chosen for the guide are always an interesting mix of humour, crime, biography, history, and some children’s books. The books selected for this year’s “50 books you can’t put down” are as varied as ever; here is a taste of two of them.

The first is “How to break your own heart” by Maggie Alderson. In Australia, we probably know Maggie best from the column she has written for ten years in the Sydney Morning Herald’s “Good Weekend” magazine. She has been an award winning magazine editor and now lives in the UK. On her webpage she says that “How to break your own heart” is “the story of Amelia who is happily married to handsome, funny, loving Ed. So if she’s happy, you might ask, what’s the story? Well, Ed’s a daydream Mr Right on paper, but there’s just one rather major problem. He doesn’t want to have a baby. With her 37th birthday looming, Amelia is beginning to panic and when her dashing teenage sweetheart, Joseph, suddenly reappears in her life, and her best friend, Kiki, starts making mischief- things get very complicated, very quickly.” Maggie Alderson says this is a story close to her heart, because she was the woman “who found out at the age of 36 that your fertility goes down in a black ski run gradient at 37.”

Interestingly, this book was published in Australia 8 months before it was published in the UK; because her publishers identify Maggie Alderson as a “summer author”. In her blog, Alderson says she is very happy with this tag “because I like to think of my books as something you would reach for when you have a bit of time for yourself – such as stretching out on a pool side lounger, or settling into a flight to somewhere sandy and salty.” Sounds good to me!

On an utterly different note, “1788; the brutal truth of the first fleet” by David Hill was also selected for inclusion in the “50 books”. This book was reviewed by Cassandra Prybus on October 1, 2008 in “The Australian” newspaper (http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,24392857-25132,00.html). Prybus wrote that histories of the First Fleet have usually started in England and then jumped to Port Jackson, “as if the eight months in between were some limbo where history and life experience was suspended until the settlers touched terra firma once more”.

Prybus contrasted this to works by historians about the colonisation of America, and about the slave trade, where the voyage, with all its hardships and deprivations, is seen as a critical part of the formation of the character of the travellers, whether colonists or slaves. Prybus hoped that “1788” would remedy this, but she was very disappointed. She was scathing in her review of this book; and contrasted it with “The Commonwealth of Thieves” by Tom Keneally (2005): “as a foundation narrative for the popular market, Keneally's is as good as you would want”. Prybus also stated: “Robert Hughes's The Fatal Shore (1987) is a masterpiece, while Sian Rees's The Floating Brothel (2001) comes close to being the kind of book on early Australia that I want to read. Good popular history, like that of Hughes and Rees (both initiated overseas), is informed by the best scholarship and pushes readers beyond what they learned in school.” Ouch!

The Library has all of these books, as well as “1788”. Whether “1788” deserved to be included in this year’s “50 books” guide will make for some interesting discussion in the future! The guide is available from the Library or at www.booksalive.com.