Five Cosy Classics for Christmas Reading

If you are an Australian like me you probably aren’t looking to curl up next to a roaring fire with a good book and a blanket this Christmas. Luckily for us there’s many sunny-weather ways to get cosy with the classics; from slathering yourself in sunscreen and lying out on the deck with a copy of ‘Saving Francesca’ in the morning to cuddling up with your own little Snugglepot and Cuddlepie at night. Here’s a list of five cosy classics for you to enjoy during this holiday season.

Dog Songs

Mary Oliver

If you need a quiet moment between festivities and large meals, this book is a wonderful way to step inside someone else’s head for a few moments. Oliver’s verses meditate on simple joys and personal connections, and her love for life radiates through the page. Gratitude, love, and togetherness are all strong themes, so it’s also a wonderful way to think about how much you love your family while you all take a bit of a breather from talking to each other.

Christmas Days

Jeanette Winterson

At times hilarious, at others heartbreaking, ‘Christmas Days’ is a collection of short stories that captures the spirit of holidays: often chaotic, sometimes combative, and always full of love. The variety of genres means that any of your friends and relatives who pick this book up off the coffee table will find at least one story that interests them, and the unique and energetic writing will likely inspire some fun conversations over lunch.

White Teeth

Zadie Smith

If you’re not up for some heavy themes in your holiday reading, you might want to give this book a pass until January. While it contains potentially triggering topics like suicide and racial and class divides, White Teeth is a deeply compelling story that interrogates traditions and family pressures while embracing the love and connection that tie friends and families together. Smith skillfully entwines humour with tragedy and elevates the sordid and difficult-to-read plot details into a clever reflection of everyday life, creating a read that somehow manages to be both enjoyable and devastating.

The Summer I Turned Pretty

Jenny Han

If you love Young Adult fiction and want some lighthearted reading, give this book a gander. Centred around a girl who views her life between summers as a stasis period, The Summer I Turned Pretty captures both the magic of holidays for the young and the growing pains that occur as you move towards adulthood. Belly’s relationship with her mother and her friends shines strong throughout the book, creating a loving and realistic backdrop to her teenage turmoil. A perfect afternoon read while you digest that huge Christmas lunch.

Merry Christmas, and Happy Reading!

Once more, with feeling

How to start writing about one of the most famous books in literature without it sounding like an English essay? I suppose not spending precious moments deconstructing the text. It’s been done a thousand times over! With all the energy spent on analysing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, it’s a wonder the book itself doesn’t jump off the shelf screaming ‘IT’S ALIVE'!’".

That’s not to say it shouldn’t have been or continue to be scrutinised with the intensity of a 4th year anatomy student. But we, or at least, I am not a scientist. I am a reader who prefers to explore feeling. How did a book make me feel? What emotions were provoked by the writing?

Over the years Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has made me feel inspired, furious, envious (who could ever match that originality?!). It made me fall in love with poetic writing laced with multiple meanings. It made me laugh (Gene Wilder’s Young Frankenstein is one of my favourite films of all time). It showed me that even horror can be beautiful, and that the idea of good and evil is complex and undefined. That judgement of difference is weak and that above all, empathy is the most important aspect of humanity.

All this from a story about a 19th Century, obsessed, arguably hysterical male doctor? A story about the very embodiment of Gothic era masculinity? A story, a work of art, written by a woman of such a uniquely creative mind living in the biggest cliche of our lives - a man’s world. Even the monster is named after a man. Did Mary Shelley feel that same anger as the monster did when her book was published without her own name? Did she tremble in the years that followed as her life echoed her story?

Though on the surface Frankenstein is a story about men (and I am not the first to debate whether that God-like feat accomplished by Dr Frankenstein was the ego rubbing that led to the novel’s popularity), it’s impossible to ignore the multifaceted prose and history that contribute to it being an intensely Feminist work. Mary Shelley was, after all, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft. Could this work be her monster? Her creation, sewn together from the pieces of furious ideological thinking her mother left her?

Frankenstein is an emotional, tactile novel. You read it and sense the icy finger of lonely desolation on your nape. A women, almost alone in a thundering Swiss cabin. You can taste the bitterness of rejection and paranoia. To be in love with a man like Percy Shelley! But in reading Frankenstein, you also experience the warmth of birth and love. The pleasure of the acquisition of knowledge. The sublime feeling of reading what truly is a work of art - the words of a woman of incredible talent. To me, Frankenstein is the greatest example of classic English Literature. The layers and nuance mean that it reads differently each time it is approached. It was, and in many ways still is, way ahead of its time in content and technique. It’s political, allegorical, thrilling, intelligent and quite simply, beautiful. It made me feel something. It made me feel everything.

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Blog post written by Sophia Vassie of Bin Chicken Books, which you can follow on Instagram and Facebook.

Review - The Thirty-Nine Steps

Thanks to Kimberley for this guest review of our August Classic!

“Contrary to general belief, I was not a murderer, but I had become an unholy liar, a shameless imposter, and a highwayman with a marked taste for expensive motor cars”

Richard Hannay has just returned to England after years in South Africa and is thoroughly bored with his life in London. But then a murder is committed in his flat, just days after a chance encounter with an American who had told him about an assassination plot which could have dire international consequences. An obvious suspect for the police and an easy target for the killers, Hannay goes on the run in his native Scotland where he will need all his courage and ingenuity to stay one step ahead of his pursuers.

The Thirty-Nine Steps is not a book I would have picked up at a store and brought home with me, if I’m being truly honest. However, since I had the opportunity to read it, I’m actually really grateful I did. This is a short classic novel that packs a punch, it felt like I was on the run the entire time with Hannay as it never really lets up.

Reading the Thirty-Nine Steps is fun and exciting, which is what I was hoping for out of a mad chase throughout the English countryside. Watching Hannay escaping time and time again until a thrilling confrontation and conclusion is quite exhilarating when you allow yourself to be caught up in it, which I was.

There’s reverse psychology, the usurping of identities, and the classic case of lost evidence to keep things exciting. No longer bored of London life, he’s certainly found some much needed entertainment as Hannay pretends to be a milkman, a lower class burn on the train, and a few other identities that he honestly has way too much fun with. He meets plenty of gullible people who never seem to question him too hard and who happen to be the people he needs - talk about the right place, right time.

The novel is set pre-World War I and I think it would have been quite a thrilling adventure in its day. While I can understand that some of the concepts are a little outdated and perhaps that could be a distraction from the excitement of the story for some, I found it a great little read.

Review - It's Raining in Mango

It’s Raining in Mango is a family epic, spanning several generations of one family and their lives in Far North Queensland. Their stories are told in vignettes, and we’re left to fill in the gaps. The novel tackles so many themes and issues - there’s lots to talk about!

Chronologically, the story begins with Cornelius Laffey and his two attempts to build a life in North Queensland in the mid 1800s. The first attempt ends rather quickly when his unpopular journalistic opinions about the treatment of the local Indigenous people see him driven out of town. The second attempt involves dragging his wife and children from Sydney, and begins four generations of Laffey family stories in, and around, the fictional towns of Reeftown and Mango.

To be honest, this novel was difficult to get into. It was originally written as a series of short stories and I think it shows. The stories, contained in themselves, overlap and leave gaps in the larger story. I thought the choice to begin with a list of characters and their deaths was curious, but I found myself referring back to it throughout the novel. I believe that the introductory chapter was written when the stories were collected together and I found it quite confusing the first time around. Re-reading it for this review, the introduction has actually helped to fill in gaps and link the stories, and I enjoyed it much more now that I’m familiar with the characters.

However, as linked short stories, this book is full of gems. I loved the unique perspectives and voices of each of the characters, their desires and flaws clearly on display. Some standout stories included Jessica Olive letting rip at the visiting priest and his misogyny, and the tale of a brothel in a flood. Some other stories made me feel distinctly uncomfortable, but that's something I appreciate in short stories in particular, as their length gives more space to pause and think through my discomfort.

Various stories tackle issues of sexism, racism and homophobia. The more Indigenous voices I read, the more wary I become of white authors writing about colonisation and the interactions between Europeans and First Nations peoples. However, given that this book was written in the 80s, it was refreshingly blunt about the horrific attitudes and actions of white settlers. Our main characters stand apart from their neighbours in their attitude toward the Indigenous people, but they still carry a lack of understanding of a non-European way of life.

I happen to be reading Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray by Anita Heiss as I’m writing this review. It has been interesting to compare the two novels. They’re both set in colonial Australia (though different parts of the country), but where It’s Raining in Mango is written by a white author about a white family, Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray is written by an Indigenous author with an Indigenous protagonist. Both stories have a mix of horribly racist and then generally-well-meaning-but-still-a-product-of-their-racist-times characters, but we’re given a much richer story of the life and culture of the First Nations people by Dr Heiss. In fairness, Astley’s novel is centred on the white family and she does a fair job of portraying the Indigenous side characters, but I have certainly enjoyed the non-white perspective of colonial Australia from Dr Heiss. (Sidenote: if you’ve not read Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray, I highly recommend it!).

All in all, I enjoyed reading It’s Raining in Mango, but I think I recommend re-reading the introduction after you’ve finished the book, to clear up a lot of confusion!

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It’s Raining in Mango featured in the July 2021 Classic parcel. Past parcels are available for purchase here. Subscribe for next month’s parcel here.