2008 books

“...practices which had long been abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years – imprisonment without trial, the use of torture to extract confessions... – not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.”

2) George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949   (RE-READ)
When reading Nineteen Eighty-Four as a teenager in the late 1970s I interpreted it (perhaps naïvely) as a useful piece of socialist political science fiction and little more, a somewhat far-fetched thought experiment though clearly a proverbial canary in the coal mine for the British political intelligentsia. Instead the intervening years seem to have brought us considerably closer to too many aspects of Orwell's vision, particularly with respect to surveillance in the UK and the conduct of political hypocrisies on a global scale. As a warning Nineteen Eighty-Four continues to serve the Western world very well indeed, and one wishes Russian and Chinese literature could have come up with equally potent fables of their own that would have had a similarly enlightening effect on their own populations and a restraining effect on their leaders. The intervening sixty years since it was written have often resonated with sentences and passages from this book that could be read as historical fact in parts of the world – the excesses of Russian and Chinese communism particularly, the former which Orwell feared English Socialism had a real danger of resembling – or echoes of the world's present nervous condition, in which realities are habitually fabricated for entire populations in a way that would horrify our ancestors. Necessarily (and thankfully) extreme, it has inevitably become one of the defining books of the twentieth century, and with the invention of Newspeak has also made a useful and indelible stamp on the English language and conceptual thought everywhere. Doubleplusgood.

2008 books

3) Tim Winton, Blueback, 1997
Are there any Australians who haven't actually read this yet? In the waters of the reefs near his Queensland home, 10 year-old Abel Jackson encounters an old grouper, a creature that inspires his sense of wonder and who becomes a 'friend' he keeps returning to as he passes through school, university and out into the world as a marine biologist. Blueback is a pearl-like fable for kids and adults; Winton doesn't put a foot wrong, and he pitches a well-aimed ecological message to wake people up to Australia's natural heritage that is both taken for granted and casually endangered. A great place to start reading Tim Winton, it reminded me of Peter Benchley's The Girl of the Sea of Cortez in its intent, only this is far better.

2008 books

4) Sōseki Natsume, The 210th Day, 1915
Two old friends, Kei and Roku, decide to walk up Mount Aso, a rumbling volcano that is actively spitting out smoke and dust. It's nothing more than a slightly mad and comic adventure, and one that offers no point other than to provide the lively exchanges of banter as they cajole each other into not chickening out. Sōseki was a giant of Japanese literature, in his time of the same stature as Dickens in England, and of his fourteen novels only a handful are currently in print in English of which this is an entirely new addition. The 210th Day is considered a rather slight work for him, being composed almost entirely of fast and snappy dialogue, but that's precisely why it's so vital and engaging. Very enjoyable.