Lessons

So, here we are heading towards an end of year that promises a bumper crop of great reading, and some dry and warm weather. Looking forward to it. What I’m not looking forward to is relocating our Glebe bookshop for six months or more, post Christmas this year. It’s the downside of the wonderful renovation of the premises which will take place over the next year. Of course it will be beautiful once it’s all done, but there’s some pain in the interim. Thirty thousand plus books and their bookcases, and all the associated points of sale and hardware have to be relocated. And you won’t be surprised that it’s proving incredibly difficult to find alternative space. If any reader of this column has a bright suggestion, I’d be delighted to hear from you.

Some other very important news: Many, many of our Gleaner readers will be familiar with the splendid contributions of Morgan Smith. And of course many of you who have been in the Glebe shop over the decades, or attended our Events program around ten to fifteen years ago, will have known her. Those of you lucky enough to frequent our Dulwich Hill shop since it opened in 2010 will know her as the unforgettable manager of that store. Morgan has been a brilliant bookseller at Gleebooks on and off for forty years, barring her Dame Nellie Melba period when she was a screenwriter. Nobody at Gleebooks has been her equal in the noble practice of hand-selling her favourite books. And the proof of her sure touch has always been evident in the level of trust in her recommendations and in her excellent judgement of a book worth reading. She has always championed good Australian writing, worked tirelessly for what she believed in, and has never been less than totally engaged with her colleagues, her customers and her industry. We salute her, and hope she keeps to her promise to keep turning up when she can, and to keep reading and recommending.

And now on to some advance proofs on my “to read” shelves that you should look forward to: Limberlost by Robbie Arnott (October) is brilliant. Arnott writes beautifully and this historical fiction set in north western Tasmania during and after WW2, confirms him as a young writer of the first order.
Ian McEwan’s Lessons (September) has a deceptively simple title for what is a deeply complex and ambitious novel, one of McEwan’s best, I think. It’s not autobiographical, McEwan insists, but this long and thoroughly engrossing tale of one man’s life navigates the timeline of his own life. His narrator, Roland Baines, at some stage says “nothing is ever as you imagine it”, but across the vast panorama from the 1940s to the present day, that the narrative traverses, we are left with the strongest sense of the “lessons” that a life lived through such extraordinary times might leave us with. George Saunders, author of the utterly brilliant Lincoln in the Bardo , has a fresh volume of stories Liberation Day (October). Original, wry, subversive, disturbing, masterful. Read it.

More to come next month, don’t worry!