Reading Challenge Week 50 - A book by an author you haven’t read before.

The best part of any Reading Challenge or assignment is when you get to discover something new. New genres, new stories, new authors... It's all good.

So this week's challenge (a challenge we think is so good we're going to do something very special with it in 2019) was to read a book by an author you've never read before. We hope you found something new and exciting and different - even if it was something that has been around for ages.


Scott Dale read Carpentaria by Alexis Wright.

With on-and-off-and-on Owen (the tropical cyclone) out there in the Gulf of Carpentaria this week, it seemed a good time to finally take a look at Carpentaria by Alexis Wright (820A WRI(A) 1C CAR). I’ve been wanting to read this book for a long time and it’s the first of Alexis Wright’s books that I’ve read. This is an epic book and it does have a cyclone feature in the story.

Set in a fictional town of Desperance on the Gulf of Carpentaria, Wright takes us on an amazing journey and introduces us to some remarkable characters. This is not a straight narrative. Histories converge; the book’s present is connected to all times, to stories from the past and those happening now. And it is an exhilarating read.

There are moments of real tension and action as Will Phantom battles the mining corporation, dodging their traps, and fighting power with power. There are so many amazing moments in this book. Normal Phantom’s journey at sea with the storms is mesmerizing, as is Elias Smith’s appearance from the ocean, walking in to town from the sea with no past. There are corrupt police and a murderous mayor, a barman in love with a mermaid trapped in the timber of his bar, and then there’s Mozzie Fishman, and his spiritual wanderings.

This is a novel worth spending some time with. It’s unlike anything I’ve read before. I really recommend it.

Brenda Carter read The Happiness Effect: How Social Media is Driving a Generation To Appear Perfect at Any Cost, by Donna Freitas and Christian Smith.

I try always to appear positive/happy with anything attached to my real name.

How would you respond to this in a questionnaire?

In The Happiness Effect (ebook), the authors discover that 73% of American college students answered ‘yes’. They termed this phenomenon the “Happiness Effect”.

Because young people feel so pressured to post happy things on social media, most of what everyone sees on social media from their peers are happy things; as a result, they often feel inferior because they aren’t actually happy all the time. The book explores themes that emerge from this larger issue, including discussions of Facebook, Snapchat and Tinder, the importance of being ‘liked’,  bullying, posts about relationships, religion and politics, and the conflict between wanting to be free of social media and the fear of missing out.

The Happiness Effect also has implications for lecturers and career professionals. The message that a student’s public profile should be carefully crafted and curated to maintain a positive, successful  and non-controversial  persona can be exhausting and potentially damaging to implement.

The Happiness Effect is a timely ebook available 24/7. It’s evidence based but also very easy to read.

Sharon Bryan read A Single Man, by Christoper Isherwood.

I didn’t actually set out to read a book by Christopher Isherwood. As with all of my best finds, this was a random selection. While I was looking for something else on the shelf, I noticed the title of this book, A Single Man (820 ISH 1C SIN), and wondered if it was the same book that had been made into a movie starring Colin Firth a few years ago (it was). I haven’t seen the movie, but I read a review that described the book as being “unfilmable”, and I was intrigued.

Having read it, I think it really is unfilmable. I have no idea what was going through Tom Ford’s head when he decided to adapt the book for film. It’s one long ramble through a single day in a man’s life, and spends most of its time peering at what’s going on inside his head. It’s a bit judgy about it, too – you get the feeling Isherwood kind of regards his character, George, as a bit of a tosser.

I can’t work out whether I enjoyed the book or not. I found it mesmerising for the few hours it took me to read it, but in the end it was pointless and a bit annoying. George wakes up, and we follow him closely throughout the day – even joining him in the toilet, at one point. He’s still grieving for his lover, Jim, who died some undisclosed time ago in a car accident. At the beginning of the book you think Jim might have died recently, but by the end of it you get the impression several months might have passed.

The book is set (and written) during the early Sixties, and while George isn’t exactly closeted, there’s that element of the times in which he doesn’t explicitly talk about his sexuality. This colours (in an interesting way, not a negative way) his ramblings throughout the day. As the day progresses, he starts to wake up in another sense – he had been sleepwalking through his morning, working on automatic more often than not, but as he interacts with his students at college and his friend at dinner – and then finds himself getting stonking drunk with one of his students at a dive of a bar, he begins to see the possibility of a brighter, better tomorrow.

Which is a bit of a shame, really, because… well… I don’t want to tell you how it ends, I think you should experience that for yourself, but it is an existential novel from the Sixties. I thought it was a bit of a cop-out, to be honest. But in spite of the fact that I can’t figure out if I enjoyed the book or not, I’m glad I stumbled across it.