NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Gulp, swallow
Brooke Boland
Upswell, $29.99
As she watched waves break, Brooke Boland mused that in the grand scheme of things, she was a speck of sand. “I was nothing. What did I want to do with this short nothing?” The question of how to live a purposeful life, how to care for those you love while finding creative fulfilment thrums beneath all these thoughtful, understated, elegiac essays. Her subject is the quotidian, the big and small events that comprise her days: sitting in silence with her sick father, trying to answer her young son’s questions about death, memories of her literary ambitions as a young writer before the responsibilities of motherhood intervened, party conversations about what it means to have a soulmate. Her marriage slowly cracks, her husband leaves. She wonders which is better, to sense what is coming or to stay in the dark. While shadowed by anxiety and yearning, the collection ends with a note of growing defiance and the glimmers of a new beginning.
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Swimming Sydney
Chris Baker
NewSouth, $32.99
When Chris Baker was a boy, he was entranced by the film The Swimmer – based on a short story by John Cheever – about a damaged middle-aged man who swims his way towards a “personal reckoning” through the suburban pools of his neighbourhood. Which pools would he visit, Baker wondered. After living half his life overseas, the siren song of Sydney’s sea baths, beaches and waterways brought him home. In these 52 tales of swims around Sydney over a year, he revisits childhood swimming haunts and memories, reflects on the Indigenous and colonial history of these places, and tells stories of daily rituals inseparable from the liquid element of the city. Essential to the immersive pleasure of this work is the natural beauty of the coastal and submarine environment. And for water lovers not familiar with Sydney’s many swim spots, this guide is an ideal introduction.
Why Do People Queue For Brunch?
Edited by Felicity Lewis
Allen & Unwin, $32.99
Why? What? How? Children get a free pass when it comes to asking questions. As adults, we never stop wondering but can be too embarrassed to ask. We think we ought to know, or fear asking a “dumb” question. The journalists behind this collection of explainers from The Age and Sydney Morning Herald have done the hard work for us, tackling both topical and perennial issues, from “is the moon for sale?” to seeming imponderables like “how do you make the right decisions in life?” As the title indicates, not all the explainers deal with heavy-duty subjects, although you might be surprised to learn that there is such a thing as “queueing theory” in mathematics. These articles can also help us determine whether our concerns or assumptions are well-founded. “The deep is like nature’s library,” says one expert in a piece on deep-sea mining. “We want to read it, not burn it down.”
The Museum of Lost and Fragile Things
Suzanne Joinson
The Indigo Press, $29.99
“I was at a car boot sale when it occurred to me that a family is a group of people living with a pile of stuff inside a house. Maybe, then, I could mend a broken family by replacing the things we had lost.” Looking back, Suzanne Joinson can see that her parents were ripe pickings for the Divine Light Mission cult. Anything that would transport them from the “industrial rust and spit” of their factory town. As devotees of the guru Maharaj Ji, they were told that possessions were evil. Joinson recalls the purges her parents conducted, dispensing with toys, clothes, umbrellas, VHS tapes, photographs. She keeps a list of these lost things, and they become talismans that guide her reconstruction of her childhood and its traumatic legacy. This vivid, unsettling memoir is distinguished by a striking lack of bitterness, exuding the manic energy of a child desperate to save those she loves.
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