David Malouf's "Remembering Babylon" (1993)

I really enjoyed this novel's beautiful language. Malouf brings the Australian environment alive, from the buzzing teeming insect life to the soil and the people that live off it. This is a novel that is very much alive, brimming with sweat and heat. It's also a work about isolation and the human spirit. I really felt the isolation of Australia compared with the home of Europe, which is ironic given that I'm a New Zealander and for me Australia is a close neighbour. It brought home to me how courageous the early settlers were to reach out across the entire world and to move to such an alien land.

Sadly the feelings of alien-ness can become alienation and fear of difference. The indigenous people of Australia suffered (and still suffer) for their alien-ness. Yet they are at home in the land, it is their Eden as one character describes it. This character goes out and tries to understand and engage with the alien wildness of this new country, but his botanical knowledge is rebuffed and what is upheld is the ability to cast Australia in a mould of Europe with ripe soft peaches and asparagus. The settlers don't want to lose their life that they knew. You can see why this is, the vast unknown must have been overwhelming. How does the human mind process so many unknowns?

William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" (1930)

I hate Anse Bundren. I finished this novel and that's what I thought, how much I hate Anse Bundren. His selfishness drives the whole novel in a place and time where men worked women to death. Of course his wife Addie wasn't lovable either, but I understood Addie. She just wanted to be alone and at peace. Why she married Anse though, that is never really explained and in some ways seems out of character for a school teacher who hated children to choose marriage which meant bearing children.

I don't think this is my favorite of Faulkner's, I preferred Absalom Absalom, but I am glad I've read this book.

Toni Morrison's "Tar Baby" (1981)

I really enjoyed reading this book because it presented cultures that were so different to mine and yet I was still able to empathise with the characters. I also enjoyed the mystical/mythical aspects of the work, although that might not be for everyone. This is a story that has remained with me because I cared about the people in it, and the way that it dealt with acts of evil committed by complicated people who were at their core not evil themselves. It shows how we can hurt the ones we love and take advantage of them and that sometimes, redemption is just plain refused.

John Wyndham's "Survival" (1952)

Shudder. This was one creepy story. Just oooer... I can't give to much a way because I don't want to spoil the ending if you haven't read it, but just... Oooer. It's fine vintage sci-fi too with rockets to Mars for mining the planet and a ship captain like a salty space dog.

Edith Wharton's "The Reef" (1912)

I listened to this on BBC Radio 7. Frankly it depressed me somewhat with its constrained morality and manners. It was however beautiful writing and a study into the finer life of the upper class where vulgarity and emotion was forbidden. On the other hand for a modern woman it was frustrating to see how rigid society was, and how the characters failed to communicate their deepest selves barely only skimming it themselves. Still we are talking about a society that corseted women into alien shapes physically, so why not expect that to happen with women's souls as well.