Reading Women can still be used as a source for books and reading. Check the What to Read Next category for a year’s worth of ideas and inspiration. Use the Search box to look for authors, titles and themes by keyword.

A word of warning: in 2013, the University of Adelaide Library will close its catalogue and move to a different system, so many of the links to our collection on this blog will cease to work. You can re-do your search for a particular title or author from the library’s home page.

Best Laugh-out-Loud Book (Non-fiction)

Unexpectedly, a psychology book! Cordelia Fine is a witty and clever writer, and her examination of the various kinds of self-delusion that we all practise is very, very funny. Look for the ‘Good Samaritan’ experiment that shows us up as less than saintly, in spite of good intentions. Highly recommended.

Most Ridiculous Murder Weapon (Crime Fiction)

This one was a re-reading, and it is still my favourite absurdity. The plot of Christie’s Towards Zero strains credulity in so many ways , it’s hard to know where to begin – but the deadly back-handed tennis stroke, with a racquet especially fitted with an iron knob (!), is as good a place as any. Several other ridiculous fictional murder weapons can be found here, in Murder by Toaster.

Best Pack-Up-And-Go Book

Travel writing at its best, Justin Marozzi’s The Way of Herodotus: travels with the man who invented history. A wonderful book, combining learning with humour and elegance, and leaving me keen to go back to the Mediterranean, and on to the East from there, as soon as possible.

Most Delicious Book

Easily Barbara Santich’s new book, reviewed here. Santich is a historian, an unpretentious foodie (yes, there is such a thing – just not enough of them!) and an excellent writer.

Best Book Club

Le Carmen in Paris, where readers meet in a bar housed in an opulent nineteenth century building. We need to recreate an atmosphere like this in the Barr Smith Library’s gorgeous Reading Room – we already have creative writers unofficially using it as a Writing Room, lets add to this!

Favourite eBook

Lots of competition from the wonderful ebooks around, but the Touch Press edition of The Wasteland, with all of its imaginative use of new technologies, has to be the winner. And it costs ( much) less than a bottle of French champagne – or the average print book!

Most Loved Library

Again, there are some great contenders out there – but I can’t go past the new library in Johannesburg, where the true value of libraries, our contribution to humanity, is enshrined.

Most Unreadable Book (2012)

Definitely Fifty Shades of Grey, a triumph of commercialism over intelligence if ever there was one. Calling it ‘mummy porn’ is insulting to mummies.

The Author Award (2012)

For the talented best-selling author who restored my faith in contemporary fiction, after my depressing encounter with Grey. Anna Funder is an accomplished author, and as Stephen Romei reported in The Australian ( Aug 18):

While All That I Am had sold 90,000 copies at the time of writing, which is Tim Winton territory, it is but a drop in the Fifty Shades ocean. Funder is mock rueful. ‘Yes, obviously I didn’t have enough sex, enough handcuffs.’

The Reader’s Award

Shared between Louise (for her contributions to the blog and her willingness to share her enthusiasm for reading), Ainsley (for her help with the NYR events and for her sense of humour) and Janette (for coming to every single event we organised, from the launch, to Children’s Books, to Chocolate and Champagne Readings.) Thank you to my favourite Reading Women.

Public libraries were the major participants in NYR, but a handful of university libraries joined in as well. Literacy is seen as a public and school library issue rather than an academic one, but we are all engaged in the ‘business’ of promoting the benefits and the joys of reading.

This is one of the issues that I will talk about at the New Librarians’ Symposium early next year, when I give a session on the role of the embedded academic librarian. Libraries are not flourishing in a rapidly-changing, Google-ized world. We need to be very sure of the core values of our profession as we face the 21st century and all the changes that this will bring.

Camille’s Bread won two awards in the year following its publication: the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal; it was also shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, one of Australia’s most prestigious literary prizes. Her 2006 novel, The Philosopher’s Doll received international recognition with a listing for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

The Barr Smith Library holds all of Lohrey’s novels in our Australian Literature collection (823A).

Margaret Atwood is a genuinely international author, in both her reputation and her themes. Her influence lies in her talent for fictionalizing great social and political concerns: human rights, feminism, environmentalism, the place of the family and the individual in society. Her characters are vivid and believable creations, ordinary people trapped in situations beyond their control – Offred in the cruel feminist dystopia of The Handmaid’s Tale, Jimmy in the environmental disaster of Oryx and Crake, Grace in the psychiatrist’s care in the prison of Alias Grace.

A major concern in Atwood’s work is the existence of human evil. She writes about this in the most intimate of contexts and relationships – marriage in The Robber Bride, children’s lives in Cat’s Eye, servants and masters in Alias Grace.  The harm that men and women do to one another escalates from the personal to the political as she examines the ways in which cruelty and viciousness at home flow on to the social life of communities.

For a complete list of Margaret Atwood’s writing, check this bibliography, and for a reasonable list of her ‘best books’, her most unmissable novels, start reading here. We hold all of her work in the Barr Smith Library.

Next year we will get the chance to read, see and hear an eclectic range of authors in Adelaide. Laura Kroetsch spoke about her ‘stars’: Dennis Lehane, Edward St Aubyn, a m homes and Tom Holland. She also mentioned themes like Biography, History (‘that attracts more men to Writers’ Week’), Kids’ Day and Food & Wine. Australian writers will include Tom Keneally, Geordie Williamson and Ramona Koval.

As you would expect in a director of a literary festival, Kroetsch is a passionate and dedicated reader. She has a personal library of ‘over 4,000′ volumes and usually reads between 2 and 5 books a week. Her comments on the art of reading well were enlightening: ‘Reading is as creative as writing – you’re doing imaginative work.’ Asked about the future of literature and reading, she suggested that ‘Gutenberg will win’, that books (print as well as electronic)  will continue to be part of 21st century lives.  She did question the viability of the bookshop’s role, however, particularly in Australia where we pay inflated prices for books (‘$60 for 2 books’, that’s ridiculous.’)

Her closing comment was a memorable one:

The love of reading … is an extra dimension of a love of life.

The CWA committee selects writers nominated by the membership. Nominees have to meet two essential criteria: first, their careers must be marked by sustained excellence, and second, they must have made a significant contribution to crime fiction published in the English language, whether originally or in translation. The award is made purely on merit without reference to age, gender or nationality. (1)

The Barr Smith Library holds the work of all of these authors: we have an excellent crime fiction  collection.

What makes this novel so memorable is its theme; A Thousand Acres is a modern, fictional re-working of King Lear.  The acres of land named in the title belong to Larry Cook, an ageing farmer with three daughters: Ginny, Rose and Caroline. The story of the old man’s division of his land is told by the eldest daughter, Ginny, representing Shakespeare’s Goneril in her abandonment of Caroline / Cordelia and her siding with Rose (Regan.)

With Ginny as narrator, the novel inevitably takes on a different cast to the Shakespearean play: this is a story that focusses on Lear’s daughters rather than on the king himself. The themes of generational conflict, patriarchy and power all have other implications when they are expressed by  women instead of men. Ginny is a finely-drawn character: a gentle, country-bred woman, she is loving, vulnerable and unused to standing up to her arrogant father. Her situation is the same as Goneril’s, but her character  and reactions could not be more different.

I have read A Thousand Acres several times now, and each time I get something new from Smiley’s powerful retelling of this archetypal story. It’s made me read and re-read King Lear, and think about the complexities of its themes and the significance of point of view in revealing a character’s inner life and motivations.

Easily worthy of America’s most significant literary prize, A Thousand Acres is one of the 20th century’s great novels – don’t miss the opportunity to read it if you haven’t done so already.