Untwisted

Coincidentally, not long before I spotted Paul Jenning's Untwisted: The Story of My Life on the Allen & Unwin shelves (wow, I really did score, didn't I), it was recommended by my friend Kirsty Murray. It's a fabulous read, a candid, funny and often moving account of Jennings' background and career.

Paul Jennings didn't start writing for children until he was forty years old. Before then, he had an extraordinary career as a teacher and education lecturer, often taking on students with physical or mental difficulties, and teaching youth offenders at what was then called Turana. With his quirky, hilarious short stories and particularly after the huge success of the ABC kids' show, Round the Twist, Jennings found himself rich and famous, and able to indulge himself by buying lots of vintage cars and fairytale cottages in the mountains. However, he is equally frank about his own struggles with mental health and the toll that his ups and downs took on his relationships.

Untwisted is compulsively readable. Jennings is a master craftsman of the art of the plot twist, foreshadowing and the clever set-up, and this makes the story of his own life a real page-turner. I must admit that his stories never had a lot of appeal for me, but my kids loved them, and Round the Twist is of course a classic. I now have a fresh respect and admiration for this national treasure of Australian children's literature. 

Crampton Hodnet

Finally published in 1980 after Barbara Pym's career revival, Crampton Hodnet was actually written in the 1930s and put aside because of the war. I think it was Pym's very first novel, and it contains all the classic Pym ingredients -- spinsters and widows, busy with good works, clergymen, foolish academics and young women who are way too good for them. It's set in North Oxford, which I'm acquainted with through Penelope Lively's The House in Norham Gardens, where much is made of the tall dark brooding house. The house where Miss Doggett and Jessie Morrow live is described as 'ugly,' and from the cover, it's definitely the same kind of house!

What I especially love about Barbara Pym is that, at the end of the day, nothing much actually happens. Even grand schemes of elopement fizzle out; people somehow find themselves embroiled in love affairs without actually feeling that keen; misunderstandings abound; proposals of marriage are made and dismissed almost in the same breath. If Quartet in Autumn was melancholic, Crampton Hodnet is bursting with low-key joy. It's very funny and I laughed out loud a couple of times, whereas Pym's novels usually provoke a wry smile.

Wolf on the Fold

 

Wolf on the Fold by Judith Clarke was another pick-up from the Allen & Unwin clearout. I only discovered Judith Clarke's writing a few years ago, but she was a deeply admired and prize-winning author. Wolf on the Fold won the CBCA Book of the Year in 2001, just as I was starting out on my own publication journey. It's not really a novel, but a set of short stories linking generations of one family, from 1935 to 2002. Characters weave in and out; sometimes the family members are not even the centre of the story, but just appears on the margins.

Wolf on the Fold is a beautiful and sad book, and beautifully written, but I doubt very much if any young adult reader would pick it up today. It mixes history and politics, but seen through the lens of the personal, and brings into sharp focus the idea of 'family stories,' those well-polished anecdotes that every family has, sometimes only one or two lines, that ends up defining an ancestor or a generation forever in the family memory. One of the stories is set in Jerusalem, around the time of the Gulf War, which was a shocking reminder of the ceaseless history of bloodshed in that region.

All the children in these stories are confronted with the harshness of the adult world, whether in the form of poverty, war, murderous intent, racism, or institutional cruelty, and they each find their own way of dealing with it. I suppose each story is a stepping stone toward maturity. Because of this, I think Wolf on the Fold works better as a reflective adult book than as a YA novel.

 

In My Time of Dying

Those of you who have been following my reading journey will realise that there is no way I could ignore a book with this title. In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife is not written by a would-be medium or someone claiming psychic powers or the ability to commune with spirits. Sebastian Junger is a hard-nosed journalist, a war correspondent, who has had many encounters with death and near-death, his own and other people's. But the incident that inspired this book was a medical emergency, an abdominal aneurysm that very nearly killed him.

During the moments when Junger was hovering on the border between life and death, he saw something totally unexpected: his dead father, who was a rational, logical scientist and if anything even more hard-nosed than his son. Junger's blow-by-blow account of his medical experience is utterly gripping, and takes up the first half of the book. The second half is devoted to his struggle to understand why he might have seen his father, and takes him into the arcane reaches of quantum theory, the definition of consciousness, and others' accounts of their own near-death experiences, to conclude that perhaps consciousness is woven into the very fabric of the universe, and that we really do rejoin something larger than ourselves when we die. It's a controversial, but (to me) very appealing proposition. I'm certain there is more to reality than our puny brains can comprehend, and it's always seemed the height of arrogance to assume that we could.

Weirdly, just after reading In My Time of Dying, I read Paul Jennings' life story, Untwisted, in which he recounts his own near-death experience, when he saw a cavern filled with people eating and laughing and enjoying themselves, and was drawn to a tunnel that exuded feelings of bliss and tranquillity. He says he hopes when his time does come, that tunnel is still there. Jennings' mother also saw a vision of her sister at the moment of her death, half a world away. Junger argues that there might be biological reasons for many near-death phenomena, but the one that is most difficult to explain is these visions of the dead. I do wonder what is going on; maybe one day I'll find out.
 

Maggot Moon

Sally Gardner's Maggot Moon was another acquisition from the Allen & Unwin shelves. It was much awarded when it came out in the UK in 2012, picking up the Carnegie Medal and the Costa Book Award. It's set in an alternate reality, where it seems the Nazis (the 'Motherland') won the Second World War and took over Britain, and now are staging a fake moon landing which fifteen year old Standish discovers.

Gardner, who is herself dyslexic, writes from Standish's viewpoint with mixed metaphors, malapropisms and other confusions of language -- I suspect this feat is what garnered so much admiration from critics. The story is packed with action and danger, and the climax is harrowing. Having said all that, this book was not for me. It's incredibly violent, with one of Standish's classmates being beaten to death by a teacher early in the book. Standish is fifteen, but his comprehension of events seems to come from a much younger child. In fact, that might be my main problem -- the plot and the story are definitely in dystopian YA territory, but the style and the voice seem to me to be pitched at middle grade level. Standish and Hector are close friends, but they build a cardboard rocket together and pretend to fly to the moon, which seems like something a pair of ten year olds might do rather than a couple of adolescent boys.

The chapters are extremely short and punchy, there are striking illustrations throughout, and the whole book seems designed to catch the attention of reluctant boy readers (maybe another reason why it was so highly awarded). But as a whole package, Maggot Moon just doesn't work for me.
 

A Sense of Story and A Sounding of Storytellers

 

A Sense of Story and A Sounding of Storytellers are not really two books, more like one and a half. A Sense of Story was published in 1971, featuring nineteen short essays about (then) contemporary children's authors, from the UK, the US and Australia. In 1979 came A Sounding of Storytellers, which contains fourteen essays, seven revised versions of pieces from the earlier book, and seven new ones.

John Rowe Townsend was himself a children's writer, and a thoughtful, interested and insightful critic. He names Philippa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden as a 'masterpiece'; he correctly points out Alan Garner's almost completely flat characters, but forgives him; he notes the currents of deep time slowly flowing beneath the surface of Rosemary Sutcliff's Roman novels. These collections showcase many of the favourite authors of my childhood; is it any wonder that, having picked up the second volume in a secondhand shop, I immediately ordered the first? I couldn't resist finding out what Townsend had to say about Joan Aiken, L.M. Boston, H.F. Brinsmead, Eleanor Estes, Madeleine L'Engle (he drily remarks that he can't like her Austin family as much as they like themselves!) and Patricia Wrightson.

There are also writers here I've never come across (mostly American), like Bill and Vera Cleaver, Virginia Hamilton and John Christopher. I'm also wondering why I've never read anything by Andre Norton. William Mayne, now disgraced and almost impossible to find as a result, appears in both books, long before his public downfall. Townsend also writes about his long-time partner, Jill Paton Walsh, with admirable objectivity. In many ways, these books were a meander down memory lane, and a very enjoyable one.

Small Things Like These

Claire Keegan's 2021 novella, Small Things Like These, was another book that cropped up in a high place during the Radio National book countdown. I've come to realise that most of the books that came in high on that list were books that had been made into films or TV series, which I guess raised their profile, but which has disappointed me slightly! (A notable exception to this observation is Richard Flanagan's Question 7, which I think would be impossible to film.) I wasn't aware of the film of Small Things Like These either, but now I'm tempted to check it out.

Keegan's book is barely even a novella, it's practically a long short story, only just over 100 pages (with generous spacing). However, it is, as Hilary Mantel claims on the cover, exquisite. It follows Bill Furlong, who runs a coal and timber yard, who's raised himself from 'nothing,' ie illegitimacy, and is now himself the father of five cherished daughters. He delivers coal to the convent on the hill, where behind locked doors unfortunate girls live as virtual slaves; he's haunted by what he witnesses, and ultimately finds it in his heart to show compassion to one of these poor outcasts. All this doesn't happen in medieval times, or even in the Victorian era -- we are in Ireland in the 1980s. But it's a time that might as well be hundreds of years ago, crushed by the iron fist of the church's power.

Claire Keegan packs a lot into her hundred pages. You could just about read it at a sitting; and you should.
 

Swallow's Dance

Another treasure from the Allen & Unwin shelves (I told you I did well). Swallow's Dance is the middle volume of Wendy Orr's Minoan trilogy, though the three books don't share any characters. I already have Dragonfly Song, but I hadn't read the other two in the series. All three books are written in a mix of free verse and prose.

Swallow's Dance centres on Leira, a young girl from the priestly caste who is on the verge of going through her Learning to become a woman and a priestess in her turn when disaster strikes -- a devastating earthquake destroys her city and injures her mother's mind. Leira, her now child-like mother and their elderly servant Nunu become a close unit, with Leira having to assume responsibility for providing for them all in a strange city where they are not welcome.

Wendy Orr was inspired to create Leira after noticing a very individual snub-nosed girl gathering saffron on an ancient wall fresco.

Poor Leira has to face many dangers and suffering, both physical and emotional, before her more hopeful ending, though all her troubles are certainly not over and she doesn't know what has happened to half her family. The worst tragedies happen off the page, so it's not too confronting for young readers, and Leira is a resourceful and determined heroine, though she does have periods of anxiety and terror. The Bronze Age background is fascinating, and there is beauty and joy as well as peril and sorrow in Leira's story. I really enjoyed Swallow's Dance, and what a great cover from Josh Durham (who also designed the cover of Crow Country).

The Seven

I'm embarrassed to admit that I'd never read any of Chris Hammer's bestselling crime fiction, though The Seven is number six (ha ha, six seven... iykyk...) This was another score from the Allen & Unwin offices, and my publisher saw me hesitating over it and urged me to take it, saying it was perfect holiday fiction and very readable, all of which turned out to be true. I really enjoyed The Seven and it will prompt me  seek out Hammer's previous novels.

Hammer pulls off a neat trick in The Seven, which is to run three parallel narratives: a current murder investigation (written in the present tense); events around the disappearance and probable murder of two young people in the 1990s (written in the past tense); and the story of the early history of the town of Yuwonderie, told through the letters of a young, well-educated Aboriginal woman. All these layers fold together to build a satisfying mystery, with interesting history and a cast of well-rounded characters. 

Hammer worked as a political journalist for decades before turning to fiction, which has given him both access to meaty plot substance, and a talent for economically sketching people. Terrific gifts for a crime writer. And extremely readable, to boot.
 

Puzzled

 

Another score from the Allen & Unwin book shelves. I love David Astle's columns about language in The Age, and I also hear his evening radio show from time to time, and I like him a lot. But his main claim to fame is as the notorious DA who sets the Friday cryptic crossword, also in The Age, which Melbourne people have long jokingly characterised as Don't Attempt. 

I like crosswords, I do one every day and two on Saturdays. But cryptics have always been beyond my comprehension. I was in awe of a fellow student at college who once tried patiently to explain to me how they worked -- and English wasn't even her first language. So in Puzzled I saw my chance for a crash course in the mysteries of cryptics once and for all.

Alas, after bravely wrestling with the whole book, I can only conclude that I don't have the right kind of brain for cryptic crosswords. Astle starts gently enough with anagrams and double meanings, but soon we're swimming in 'hybrids', 'manipulations' and '&lits' (or perhaps drowning!) Even with Astle holding my hand, I couldn't figure out most of these clues. Fortunately, the course in crossword solving is also interleaved with autobiographical episodes from David Astle's life, which are both entertaining and interesting and which helped me through the difficult patches. Puzzled is a beautifully constructed piece of work, but alas, I'm not much closer to mastering the mysteries than I was before -- my fault, not David Astle's!

Hexwood

 

I was very lucky a few weeks ago to visit my publishers, Allen and Unwin, who are moving from their long-time offices in East Melbourne, a lovely old Victorian terrace house opposite St Patrick's cathedral. They're just relocating around the corner, but it still meant packing up a LOT of books, and there were a few bookshelves of stuff they weren't going to take with them, which meant Free Books for visitors... Suffice to say I left with a big box of treasures!

 I pounced on this copy of Diana Wynne Jones' Hexwood immediately. I've read it before, years ago, but never snagged a copy of my own, and I remembered feeling completely bewildered by it. This time, I vowed, I'd make sense of it. 

Alas, I still feel, if not completely bewildered, certainly quite befuddled. The book seems to consist of about four different stories shoehorned into one narrative. Characters are not who they appear to be; they are not even who they think they are. Everyone is being manipulated by a reality-warping machine called the Bannus, which has run out of control in an obscure corner of Earth and is sucking more and more people into its sphere. As well as playing with identity, it's playing games with time, so characters change in age and events run out of order. It's a very difficult novel to get a handle on, and I suspect it would probably take the kind of dedicated multiple readings that young adolescents especially excel at to really grasp it.

I must say the plot made slightly more sense to me this time around. Maybe when I'm a very old lady and I've reread it a few more times, I'll understand exactly what's going on. Hexwood is the kind of book I admire, and it's obviously very clever, but I can't say that I love it.

A Smart Suit and White Gloves

This recent publication from Girls Gone By was a Christmas present to myself. Kay Whalley has put together a brilliant, funny and fascinating survey of career books for girls, mostly from the three decades after World War II, when job opportunities were opening up for women -- but not too far!

Teaching, nursing and secretarial jobs were the most popular options (though it's quite difficult to make secretarial jobs sound dramatically interesting), but these books were always careful to show that, whichever career path a girl chose, there would be plenty of eligible young men around, and it was taken for granted that the 'career' might occupy a few years after school or university, it would almost certainly come to an abrupt end after marriage. Home-making and child-rearing was assumed to be a woman's real life's work; a girl might train to be a nurse, but there was no point trying to be a doctor like her brother might.

There are excursions into more obscure areas, like floristry, television production (a new field) or even electronics, and some of these books really strike a blow for female independence. However, Whalley often fumes at the inherent sexism of some authors. She makes it clear how valuable these books are as social documents, providing details of everyday life and expectations that retrospective history books might miss. Whalley's plot summaries made me laugh out loud; we can usually tell who the heroine's future husband will be because he has a strong jaw and picks up her dropped books in a corridor. Fathers usually don't approve of spending money on training or educating their daughters; mothers might be more quietly supportive.

I can see myself collecting some of these titles for myself. A Smart Suit and White Gloves might have been a dangerous purchase!
 

Reading Round-up 2025

I read like an absolute fiend this last year -- 189 books in total. Books have always been my preferred escape method and I burrowed into them this last year for comfort and distraction. Perhaps it's no accident that I didn't do much writing! Or if I did, it didn't really lead anywhere -- yet. Fingers crossed for a more productive 2026 on that front.

Kids/YA v Adult

I read just over a third children's and young adult books, and about two thirds adult books. Last year I did less nostalgic mining of my bookshelves for old favourites, and made a conscious decision to read more new YA fiction, making my way through the Notables list of the CBCA awards, which led me to discover a lot of really good authors and books I probably wouldn't have found otherwise. I think I'll probably do the same again this year. One old favourite of the kids' books I did enjoy was Antonia Forest's The Player's Boy and The Players and the Rebels, the former of which I haven't read since high school -- it stood up very well!

Male v Female Authors

Quite a few more blokes in the mix in 2025! I discovered some new-to-me writers like Percival Everett and George Saunders, as well as James Rebanks and some YA Australian authors that, honestly, I might not have picked up if I wasn't reading my way through a list. A warning against my own prejudices.

 

Fiction v Non-Fiction

A little bit more fiction last year than the year before, I think, but still a pretty healthy proportion of non-fiction books.

 

Sources

 

Where would I be without my libraries? All the Notables YA books came from my local library, which bumped up that total. The secondhand category includes books from street libraries as well as bought from Brotherhood Books, secondhand books shops and op shop finds. I borrowed some books from friends and some from my daughters. New books is mostly gifts (some to myself!) I read far fewer books from my own shelves in 2025, and a lot of those were adult books: I revisited some high school favourites like The Leopard, A Month in the Country and I Heard the Owl Call My Name.

 

Author origin
 

Some significant changes from 2024 in this chart! I read fewer UK authors, and more American ones -- particularly surprising since I'm almost boycotting US culture at the moment in other fields. I also read a lot more Australian authors, thanks to the Notables challenge, plus a good proportion of First Nations authors. I also read one Irish book, three from New Zealand, two by Canadian authors, one Italian, and one with a mix of nationalities.

 

Highlights

I started a Helen Garner binge at the beginning of the year but didn't finish, thanks to the plethora of  other books jostling for my attention. But I will definitely reread more of her non-fiction this year. 

 

In fiction, I also binged on Curtis Sittenfeld, Barbara Pym and Eva Ibbotson, all delightful in very different ways. I'm loving the current crop of Regency/Austen era lady detective novels around at the moment -- more, please! Sarah Moss's Ghost Wall was a haunting miniature masterpiece.

 

In non-fiction, standouts for me were Kate Grenville's Unsettled and also Searching for the Secret River. I revelled in Ruth Park's autobiographies, Fishing in the Styx and A Fence Around the Cuckoo. John Higgs' history of Dr Who, Exterminate! Regenerate! was a deep pleasure to read.  Martin Flanagan's Question 7 took my breath away.

 

 

Pole to Pole

Happy New Year, everyone! Michael Palin's Pole to Pole was the last book I finished before we ticked over into 2026. It's taken me sooo long to read -- it's been my book-beside-the-bed for months and I stalled about two thirds of the way through. Pole to Pole is Palin's diary of the making of the BBC travel series of the same name, following Around the World in 80 Days, only this time travelling the globe from north to south, rather than circumnavigating (also this trip took about 150 days, rather than 80). It was followed by Full Circle, where he travelled around the Pacific Rim, a trip that took the best part of a year.

I'm actually not very good at reading in bed, but the diary format made it easy to knock off one entry every night, once I'd resolved to actually finish reading the bloody thing. The team's travel through Europe is relatively straightforward, but moving through Africa is much more complicated, skirting war zones and trying to avoid monsoon weather, aiming to meet up with a ship sailing for Antarctica. You have to admire the production team, who have to grapple with all kinds of unexpected obstacles, transport breakdowns, illnesses, and the ultimate last minute hiccup when the Antarctic-bound ship can't take them on board after all, requiring a scramble to organise a charter flight instead.

As always, Palin is witty, affable and observant company. This trip took place in 1991, just before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which would have led to them travelling through about five extra countries. Borders in Africa have also changed significantly in thirty five years, making Pole to Pole an even more interesting historical record.
 

Lincoln in the Bardo

I was scared to read Lincoln in the Bardo, even though I'd relished George Saunders' A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. Mind you, that book was a very different beast, a lively and insightful discussion of short stories by Russian masters. I'd heard that Lincoln was difficult, weird, experimental, incomprehensible. Google produced links like, are you intimidated to read Lincoln in the Bardo? what is the point of Lincoln in the Bardo? George Saunders explains how to read Lincoln in the Bardo... No wonder I was wary!

So actually reading Lincoln in the Bardo was a wonderful surprise. It's hugely readable, not that long, absorbing, thrilling, startling and moving -- not what I was expecting at all! It's composed of a chorus of voices, mostly of the dead, the remaining unsatisfied spirits of corpses sharing a graveyard where Lincoln's young son has been recently interred, including Lincoln's son himself. It's based on an apparently true incident where Abraham Lincoln visited the body of his son after his interment, which is terribly sad, and the book is sad, but it's also hilarious, jarring and joyful as we enter the consciousness of these ghosts and commune with them. They all, as ghosts do, have unfinished business, which is expressed physically in their distorted appearance -- perhaps floating and revolving like a compass needle, or growing extra eyes and hands, or discomfited by an enormous penis.

Lincoln in the Bardo is an extraordinary novel and I'm so glad I finally summoned up the courage to tackle it.  It was exciting to read, and I don't often get that feeling from novels anymore.