This week, during the last Bookworld drinking session, we started discussing our favourite books. Having worked ‘in books’ for so long and coming from a literary-loving family, it’s easy to forget that not everyone adores stories the way that I do.Listening as others effused about their favourites: retelling magical travelling moments, formative teenage memories and heartbreaking first loves… it made me want to read them all and experience them as my colleagues had. I thought about the dozens of favourite books I had read, and I wanted to write about them before I forget and they just became paper on the shelf. Here are four, but of course, the list is much longer.
Holding the Man – Timothy Conigrave
Years ago when I was still an undergrad, I studied a subject called ‘Diaries, Journals and Autobiographies’ as part of my Creative Writing major. The lecturer was remarkable and absolutely pivotal to my future, but it was the recommendation from a staff member at Readings in Carlton that really influenced me. As part of the reading, we had to go to our local bookshop and pick up five diaries, journals or autobiographies. I asked the staff for their recommendations and one of them handed me Holding the Man.I read Timothy Conigrave’s biography in one sitting and was left heartbroken by their entwined lives. I felt unabashed joy when Tim and John fell in love, completely understood when and why they needed to be apart, then complete devastation when John was diagnosed with HIV. The scene on his deathbed, with Tim allowed no access, still brings a desperate tear to my eye.At the time I naively believed that we were all equal and that this was the lucky country. I was involved with Amnesty International at a young age, but I thought that injustice and prejudice happened to people in other countries, that didn’t have the opportunities we did. Holding the Man showed me how wrong I was, and then, as now, I am determined to ensure that none of my friends feel the way that Tim and John were made to by their family and some of their friends. This book truly showed me the power of words and it was because of this that I was determined to work with them and introduce others to their life-changing ways.Tales from Outer Suburbia – Shaun Tan
This book of short stories took me some time to devour, as I wanted to savour each one; with all Shaun Tan books, there is so much beauty and poignancy to each story. The tale that had the most impact though was The Water Buffalo. It’s a beautiful one-page tale of a water buffalo that lived in a field and was mostly ignored until he disappeared, which was a shame, as he always knew the right way to direct people to find what they didn’t know they needed. The painting that corresponded to the story hung in my loungeroom not so long ago, and every time I looked at it I knew the Water Buffalo was imploring me to leave, I just didn’t want to listen. Eventually I could no longer ignore him and I packed up my things and moved on to a new life. Now the Water Buffalo hangs over my head, constantly directing me towards a happier and more successful future that, until recently, I didn’t dream about.Winnie-the-Pooh Poetry – A.A. Milne
I learnt to read with A.A.Milne’s poetry, and since then it’s been a constant in my life: I recited poems when I fell in love and when I grieved over death.Growing up, my mum and grandma would read the poems aloud to my brother and I and the words would come alive off the page. They put on voices and kept in character until we’d be in fits of giggles or pensively imagining the lives that lay ahead of us. My copies now are dusty, dogearned, yellowed and just as loved as they were then. Whenever something of note happens in my life, I pull out his collection of poetry and always find something to reassure me.The Stories of Eva Luna – Isabel Allende“In the final instant we glimpsed absolute solitude, each lost in a blazing chasm, but soon we returned from the far side of that fire to find ourselves embraced amid a riot of pillows beneath white mosquito netting. I brushed your hair back to look into your eyes. Sometimes you sat beside me, your legs pulled up to your chin and your silk shawl over one shoulder in the silence of the night that had barely begun. That is how I remember you, in stillness.You think in words; for you, language is an inexhaustible thread you weave as if life were created as you tell it. I think in the frozen images of a photograph. Not an image on a plate, but one traced by a fine pen, a small and perfect memory with the soft volumes and warm colours of a Renaissance painting, like an intention captured on grainy paper or cloth....Then the quiet symmetry of the picture is broken and I hear voices very close to my ear.‘Tell me a story,’ I say to you.‘What about?’‘Tell me a story you have never told anyone before. Make it up for me.’
On reflection, many of the stories that have changed me are about inequalities and injustices – Another Country by James Baldwin, The Arrival by Shaun Tan and Zeitoun by Dave Eggers – or serve as inspiration to always strive for more – The Little Prince by Antonie de Saint-Exupery, The Lover’s Dictionary by David Levithan and Unspeakable Things by Laurie Penny. Books aren’t so much the words on the page, but rather how the story comes alive in your own life. Our favourite books all have to be explained within the context of the moments when we enjoyed them. It is because of this that books will never die: as long as there’s life, there are stories. With only two weeks left ‘in books’, this is a reassuring thought for both myself and the future of books.