books
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but don’t take my word for it, what do I know? Read the book and the close reading archive. ↩︎
- What is the real work of serendipity?
- A library of good neighbours
- The Dewey Decimal System pigeonholes all knowledge, like cells in a prison
The cat is characteristically ecstatic to see that the proofs of the new book have arrived. Not long now before it’s published!
#amwriting #booklaunch #comingsoon #nonfiction
As Alan Jacobs says, reading more books and reading books more - they’re not the same thing.
I designed a book in three and a half hours
A while ago, well, quite a long while ago, I designed a book in three and a half hours. Fun, yes, but it wasn’t very publishable.
Now, years later, I’ve finally got round to updating and redesigning the whole thing.
Yes, I’m still writing slowly but I’m excited to say it will soon be available for sale - so watch this space for more information.
Worth repeating and re-repeating:
“the evidence shows that regularising migration is a positive-sum game, in economic, social and security terms.”
A definitive study of a hotly debated phenomenon: migration into Europe and America, its socioeconomic impacts, and the eternal policy efforts to stop the inevitable.
#migration
A search for meaning in the palace of lost memories: Thoughts on Piranesi, a novel by Susanna Clarke
Susanna Clarke’s novel Piranesi has got me thinking about memory, identity, the fallibility of writing, and the paradox that intrinsic value might be created rather than found
Finished reading: This Is Happiness by Niall Williams 📚
A shaggy dog story in the best possible sense. I re-read several passages to try to work out how the author achieved his almost magical prose. Friends who read it said they felt not much happened. I felt not much happened, miraculously.
Daniel Wisser’s notecards as art and archive
Daniel Wisser’s exhibition in Vienna features 60 index cards with sketches of stories displayed in a note box (Zettelkasten).
Have you ever read a book by mistake?
Confession time: a mistaken identity led to the discovery of Cynthia Ozick’s novel The Messiah of Stockholm, which I enjoyed despite initially confusing it with a work by Ruth Ozeki.
Well the book arrived this morning. Now I really am publishing slowly!
Publishing slowly
I’m writing so slowly that you might be wondering if I’m ever going to get anything published.
Well wonder no more. I’m happy to say extracts of my memoir, ‘The Green Island Notebook’ are published in the anthology Destinations & Detours: New Australian Writing.
Published by Detour Editions, the collection launches here in Sydney on Sunday 2nd March 2025, and if you happen to be in the vicinity, I’d be delighted to meet you in person.
Book Launch 2pm, Sunday 2nd March, at Randwick Literary Institute, 60 Clovelly Road, Randwick NSW
Watch out too for news of how you can get your hands on a copy, wherever in the world you find yourself.
And this isn’t the only news on the publishing front. I’ll be sharing details of some further publishing adventures very soon.
But don’t worry, whatever happens, I’ll still be writing slowly.
Update: Oh look, I wrote another book: Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters.
Randwick Literary Institute, the venue for our book launch, celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2025. Here it is in 1957, and it hasn’t changed much since then:
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To care is to disobey
The book Pirate Care discusses how the act of caring for others has been criminalized, and it advocates for a grassroots political practice of solidarity against oppressive legal measures.
Read better, read closer
For anyone seeking clues on better techniques for reading, Scott Newstok, author of How to Think Like Shakespeare, has created a marvelous resource: a close reading archive. Here is where all your close reading questions will be answered, including, what is it? how do you do it? what have people done with it? and does it have a future in a digital age?
Close reading is one of those two-word phrases that seem to take on a life of their own. Anyone connected to the humanities has probably heard of it, but it’s not necessarily well understood. Is it finished? Apparently not. Not at all.
Professor Newstok’s close reading archive is an openly available companion to John Guillory’s cultural history, On Close Reading, published January 2025.
Newstok is also editor of a book on Montaigne’s view of teaching, which is how I discovered Gustave Flaubert’s endorsement of what might perhaps be seen as a kind of close reading avant la lettre1:
“Read Montaigne, read him slowly, carefully! He will calm you . . . Read him from one end to the other, and, when you have finished, try again . . . But do not read, as children read, for fun, or as the ambitious read, to instruct you. No. Read to live.”
Now consider: three ways to make notes while reading.
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Notemaking helps you remember - and helps you forget
Do we really need to remember everything?
This is the question posed by Lewis Hyde’s memorable book, A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past 📚
He says:
“Every act of memory is an act of forgetting. The tree of memory set its roots in blood. To secure an ideal, surround it with a moat of forgetfulness. To study the self is to forget the self. In forgetting lies the liquefaction of time. The Furies bloat the present with the undigested past. “Memory and oblivion, we call that imagination.” We dream in order to forget.” ― Lewis Hyde, A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past
Forgetting is the essence of what makes us human
The subtitle of Joshua Foer’s book, Moonwalking with Einstein, promotes the art and science of ‘remembering everything’. Yet Foer accepts that forgetting is an essential aspect of memory. He quotes the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges:
“It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. “To think,” Borges writes, “is to forget.” – Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
A System for Writing by Bob Doto
“The note you just took has yet to realize its potential.” - Bob Doto
Another ‘Zettelkasten primer’ won’t be needed for some time, since this one is direct, concise, thorough and strongly practical.
📚A System for Writing by Bob Doto is out!
Why not let your reading be a smorgasbord of serendipity?
Yes indeed, why not let your reading be a smorgasbord of serendipity?
Here’s Anna Funder, author of Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, on working at the University of Melbourne English Department library as a student:
“It sounds prehistoric now, but I sat at the front desk, typing out index cards for new acquisitions or requests from staff for books or journals — anything from the latest novel, to psychoanalysis, poetry or medieval studies. I read things that had nothing to do with my studies: a smorgasbord of serendipity. Despite my time there, I have never understood the Dewey decimal system: how can numbers tell you what a book is, to a decimal point?” - Every book you could want and many more
My take on this?
HEAJ:Mundaneum by Marc Wathieu is licensed under CC BY 2.0
🐙 Octopus intelligence is intriguing. Having read Ray Naylor’s The Mountain in the Sea 📚, I now want to try Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life by Peter Godfrey-Smith. I’d also like to read Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which has a somewhat similar theme.
Finished reading: Ian Gentle: The Found Line, edited by David Roach 📚
I’ve posted about this interesting artist previously, because I loved The Gentle Project.
Finished reading: Always Will Be by Mykaela Saunders 📚
These short stories are set entirely in Australia’s Tweed region, but they range over a vast time-frame: from the more-or-less present to the far distant future. I loved the tough optimism. Always will be Aboriginal land - an ideal sci-fi theme.
Finished reading: Orbital by Samantha Harvey 📚
This reads curiously well alongside To be Taught, if Fortunate. Both describe spaceflight in mundane but compelling detail. Harvey is the stronger writer, but Chambers has the stronger story. Both are writing, for want of a better term, space pastoral.
Finished reading: To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers 📚My backlog of sci-fi reading is getting a little smaller.