Quinkana fortirostrum

I'll keep books and movies to separate posts from here on. Here are:

BOOKS 2015

B1. Glued to the Box, Clive James.
B2. Monsieur Linh and His Child, Philippe Claudel (tr. Euan Cameron).
B2a. Sabine's Notebook, Nick Bantock.
B2b. The Golden Mean, Nick Bantock.
B3. The Gryphon, Nick Bantock.
B4. Remainder, Tom McCarthy.
B4a. Tintin and the Secret of Literature, Tom McCarthy.
B5. One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses, Lucy Corin.
B5a. C, Tom McCarthy.
B6. The Greatest Movies You'll Never See, Simon Braund (ed).
B7. The Shawshank Redemption, Mark Kermode.
B8. In the Memorial Room, Janet Frame.
B9. If You Like Monty Python... Here are Over 200 Movies, TV Shows, and Other Oddities that You will Love, Zack Handlen.
B10. 'Well, I heard it on the Radio and I saw it on the Television...', Marcia Langton.
B11. World Film Locations: Melbourne, Neil Mitchell (ed).
B12. The Barry McKenzie Movies, Tony Moore.
B13. Khaki and Green: With the Australian Army at Home and Overseas, "the Editors" (eds).
B14. The Bogan Delusion, David Nichols.
B15. Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture, Alice Echols.
B16. Loops, Issue 02, Lee Blackstone and Richard King (eds).
B17. Spaceballs: the Book, Jovial Bob Stine.
B18. The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013, Dave Eggers (ed).
B19. The Metamorphoses of Tintin, or Tintin for Adults, Jean-Marie Apostolidès (tr. Jocelyn Hoy).
B20. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Jeanette Winterson.
B20a. Are We Alone?: Implications of the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life, Paul Davies.
B21. The Outsider, Albert Camus (tr. Stuart Gilbert).
B22. Absolutely Fabulous 2, Jennifer Saunders.
B23. The Book of Strange New Things, Michel Faber.
B24. The Vivisector, Patrick White.
B25. The Boat, Nam Le.
B26. So, Anyway..., John Cleese.
B27. Ben Baker's Comedy Cash-In Book Book, Ben Baker.
B28. The Burst of Creamup , TVCream (eds).
B29. Drop Out!, Robin Farquharson.
B30. The Comedy Company Holiday Book, D MacLeod, I McFadden, M Fahey, G Robbins, P Herbert.
B31. Patrick White: A General Introduction, Ingmar Bjorksten (tr. Stanley Gerson).
B32. The Idea of Japan: Western Images, Western Myths, Ian Littlewood.
B33. Kill Your Darlings Issue 3 October 2010, Rebecca Starford (ed).
B34. Oranges are not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson.
B35. The Pleasure of my Company, Steve Martin.
B36. Glyph, Percival Everett.
B37. Sally Heathcote: Suffragette, M Talbot, K Charlesworth & B Talbot.
B38. The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro.
B39. The Games, John Clarke and Ross Stevenson.
B40. The Chaser Annual 2008, R Cooke, S Cubis, D Knight, C Licciardello, J Morrow, C Reucassel et al.
B41. Good News Week, Ian Simmons (ed).
B42. Ragworts, Bill Drummond.
B43. The Wordy Shipmates, Sarah Vowell.
B44. The Internet Police: How Crime went Online, and the Cops Followed, Nate Anderson.
B45. The Book of Jokes, Momus.
B46. Guanxi (The art of relationships): Microsoft, China, and Bill Gates's Plan to Win the Road Ahead, Robert Buderi and Gregory T. Huang.
B47. The Unknown Terrorist, Richard Flanagan.
B48. Leaving Paradis: My Expat Adventure and Other Stories, Sonia Harford.
B49. It is Written, Baby, Dave Graney.
B50. Peter Carey, Graham Huggan.
B51. Hatchet Job: Love Movies, Hate Critics, Mark Kermode.
B52. To the Is-Land, Janet Frame.
B52a. A Letter to Our Son, Peter Carey.
B53. The Go-Betweens, David Nicholls.
B54. Moving Tigers, Bob Franklin.
B55. The Bedroom Philosopher Diaries, Justin Heazlewood.
B56. The Truth, Michael Palin.
B57. An American in Oz, Sara James.
B58. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future..., Michael J. Fox.
B59. Ethel & Ernest: A True Story, Raymond Briggs.
B60. The Last Interview and Other Conversations, David Foster Wallace.
B61. You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles, Peter Doggett.
B62. The Eye of the Storm, Patrick White.
B63. A Poke in the Eye (With a Sharp Stick), Graham McCann (ed).
B64. The Curfew Tower is Many Things, Bill Drummond (ed).
B65. Imajine, Claudel Casseus.
B66. A Nice Night's Entertainment, Barry Humphries.
B67. Their Lips Talk of Mischief, Alan Warner.
B67a. Falling Towards England, Clive James.
B68. The Cockatoos, Patrick White.
B68a. Peter Carey, Bruce Woodcock.
B69. The Revolt of the Pendulum: Essays 2005 - 2008, Clive James.
B70. The Diaries of Donald Friend, Volume 1, Anne Gray (ed).
B71. Grand Days, Frank Moorhouse.
B72. The Bodysurfers, Robert Drewe.
B73. The Museum at Purgatory, Nick Bantock.
B74. Ogf, Keith Smith.
B75. Bliss: the Screenplay, Peter Carey and Ray Lawrence.
B76. Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead, Rick Meyerowitz.
B77. Science... For Her!, Megan Amram.
B78. The Poems of Ern Malley, Ern Malley (commentaries by Max Harris and Joanna Murray-Smith).
B79. Roald Dahl, Ann Alston and Catherine Butler (eds).
B80. A Fringe of Leaves, Patrick White.
B81. Papua New Guinea: Black Unity or Black Chaos?, Hank Nelson.
B82. The Further Tale of Peter Rabbit, Emma Thompson.
B83. The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorised History, John Ortved.
B84. The Adventures of Hergé, J-L Bocquet, J-L Frontal and S Barthélémy (tr. H Dascher).
B85. A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees, Yoshida Kenko (tr. M McKinney).
B86. These Things Happen, Greg Fleet.
B86a. How I Escaped My Certain Fate: the Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian, Stewart Lee.
B87. Slade House, David Mitchell.
B88. The Diaries of Donald Friend, Volume 2, Paul Hetherington (ed).
B89. Stories of Manhood: Journeys in to the hidden hearts of men, Steve Biddulph (ed).
B90. The Peacocks and the Bourgeoisie: Patrick White's Shorter Fiction, David Myers.
B91. Big Toys, Patrick White.
B92. Brilliant Creatures, Clive James.
B93. Hillendiana, Donald Friend.
B94. From the Fatherland, with Love, Ryu Murakami (trs. R McCarthy, C De Wolf, G Tapley Takemori)
B95. Heat 13: Harper's Gold, Ivor Indyk (ed).
B96. Crazy Like Us: The Globalisation of the Western Mind, Ethan Watters.
B97. Wake in Fright, Kenneth Cook.
B98. A Wild Ass of a Man, Barry Oakley.
B99. Martini: A Memoir, Frank Moorhouse.
B100. Ayoade on Ayoade: a cinematic odyssey, Richard Ayoade.

The backbone of 2015's reading was working my way through late-period Patrick White while reading the diaries of Donald Friend. This heavy-going trammell through mid-20th century gay Australia needed frequent levity so there's a lot of light entertainment interspersed throughout - comedy scripts and funny books I leapt at during breaks from Friend's friends or White's characters drinking endless cups of pink tea and eating bread and dripping in dreary North Sydney rooming-houses.

The two books by David Nichols were picked up separately and looked interesting (one a history of the band The Go-Betweens, one a polemic about class in Australia) - it wasn't until months later, seeing them on my bookshelf, that I realised they were written by the same man.

Michel Faber's "The Book of Strange New Things" was my favourite (only?) new Australian novel, but Kazuo Ishiguro's "The Buried Giant" was my favourite new novel of the year. At time of writing (2018), "The Buried Giant" is probably still the strongest contender for my favourite novel of 2010-2020.

When I met Y back in 2003 she often mentioned a favourite book by Ryu Murakami which she called "The World in Five Minutes From Now". Unfortunately this book has never been translated into English. I subsequently avoided Ryu Murakami because it is apparent that only his more violent and disturbing novels have been translated in to English, with the more imaginative ones left in Japanese only - hey, violent and disturbing is fine, but I didn't want to get the wrong impression of his writing. However, "From the Fatherland, with Love" (written in 2004 while I was living in Japan) finally came out in English and the Japanese version was available at the Melbourne City library. So Y and I read the book simultaneously in two different languages, which was fun. In a conceit that would probably result in lawsuits in an English-language novel, the entire book is set in and around an identifiably real hotel in Fukuoka which is suddenly occupied by a hostile army, so you can put the book down, fire up Google Earth, and become intimately acquainted with the bushes full of snipers by the hotel's rear steps. Amazingly this book had three translators - I presume because of its length - and because the book was set in the future (published 2005, set in early-to-mid 2011) but not published in English until 2013, you get a strange alternative Japan in which 11 March 2011 ticks over without any fuss at all. 

The ventures into Frank Moorhouse and Barry Oakley are part of an effort to read the contemporaries of Peter Carey.

The Stewart Lee re-read came from having just finished Greg Fleet's autobiography. Somewhere there is a fascinating novel to be written based on when Lee and Fleet shared a flat in Edinburgh, or bummed around in Melbourne together.