OBAMA'S READING LIST
Oh for a political leader who reads and talks about literature as a natural, important part of life. Former NSW premier Bob Carr may have been the last. I was amused to see George Brandis reading bush poetry during a meeting but as Federal Arts Minister his public support for living Australian writers is begrudging - and shrinking financially. Tony Abbott, thanks for keeping the Prime Minister's Literary Awards cashed up, but how about showing us your summer reading list? Once again President Barack Obama issued the list of books he planned to read during his summer holiday on Martha's Vineyard and while it's appropriately all-American it is also intelligent, eclectic, topical but not narrowly political. The non-fiction is Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, an acclaimed new memoir about being a black American man, Washington: A Life by , and The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker writer's examination of human effect on the planet. The three novels, set in America, France and India in World War II, the 1950s and '60s, are All That Is by James Salter, who died this year after a late revival of admiration for his work, this year's Pulitzer Prize winner All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, and The Lowland, an immigration story by Jhumpa Lahiri, who is on the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities. Whoever chose the books, the list must help boost awareness and sales of the nation's literature. Let's hope the president actually read some of the 2000-plus pages between golf rounds.
Jhumpa Lahiri, author of The Lowland, an immigration story.Credit: ELENA SEIBERT
WHEN GRAEME MET MAXINE
Among the 14 stories in The Big Issue's new fiction edition is one by Graeme Simsion, which was inspired by a piece Maxine Beneba Clarke wrote about him for The Saturday Paper. The author of The Rosie Project has written The Life and Times of Greasy Joe, an echo of an autobiographical story he had told Clarke he wrote and abandoned at 21. Clarke also has a story, Orientation Day, in The Big Issue, about the injustice handed out to a boy on his sister's first day of school; he was the baby born in the story Hope in her award-winning collection Foreign Soil. As Clarke has tweeted, all this interconnection is "disturbingly meta". Also in the issue is S.J. Watson, whose first novel, Before I Go to Sleep, has sold more than 4 million copies and was filmed with Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth. Now Reese Witherspoon has bought rights to adapt Watson's second novel, Second Life, and Witherspoon has tweeted about enjoying the book. Buy The Big Issue for $6 from street vendors, who keep $3. Since 1996 the magazine's sales have helped change lives by putting more than $20 million into the pockets of homeless and disadvantaged people.
BOOKSHOP BAN ADDS INSULT TO INJURY
Kathy Lette wrote her latest novel, Courting Trouble, to highlight the injustice women often suffer in rape trials. Being Lette, she also cracks a few jokes in the story about a pioneering mother-and-daughter law firm. She has learnt that some bookshops in Britain, where she lives, have refused to stock the book because "it was inappropriate to be funny about rape". While some of Lette's puns should be banned, it is shocking that any bookshop would censor a well-intentioned novel, and when I asked Lette how many had done so she said, "It's lots of shops and has screwed sales".