As regular readers woud know I do regular reviews of books here on my writing site. Every writer should be an avid reader, and I enjoy sharing what I am reading with regular visitors to this site.

This time the review is a little different. Normally I would review books about writing, novels I’ve read or volumes of poetry. I have also reviewed children’s books, including picture books on occasions. (Click here to read more of my reviews.)

This review focusses on a Field Guide to the Birds of Colombia. As my long term readers would know, I also write articles about and post photos of Australian Birds on Trevor’s Birding site. I’m not going to write a new review of this book here. If you are interested in reading this review, click here.

Why Colombia?

This book was given as a special gift to a close family member who has close connections with Colombia. One day I hope to get to that fascinating country and do some birding. Of all the countries in the world, Colombia has more bird species than any other, with nearly 1800 different kinds. By way of comparison, Australia has about 800 different birds.

The fearsome flute players

I don’t often write about another of my passions – birding – on this site. But I do include book reviews here. I’ve just finished reading a fascinating book about Australian Magpies, one of our most recognisable and best loved birds.

The book is called “The fearsome flute players: Australian Magpies in our lives.” This is not a scientific thesis paper; it is written in an entertaining and engaging manner, incorporating hundreds of stories of ordinary people in South Australia telling their encounters with these wonderful birds.

I won’t give a full review here but rather refer you to Trevor’s Birding, another site I write so you can read an extensive review of this book.

Special Offer:

The publisher a special offer to readers of my birding site. Mention Trevor’s Birding when you order online and you will also receive a CD of 200 photos of South Australia, including some beautiful photos of scenery and water birds.

I strongly recommend this wonderful book.

Good reading – good writing.

Australian Magpie

Cover - Searching for the secret river

I have recently read Kate Grenville‘s historical novel The Secret River. You can read my review here.

Straight after finishing the novel I went on to read her follow up book Searching for the Secret River.

In this second book she goes into great detail about how she researched the novel. The story is based upon the life of her great-great-great grandfather, but she took the facts gleaned from family history and extensive research both in London and in Sydney over a five year period and transformed it into fiction. She has used fact as a broad brush in the hands of her imagination and the finished novel is brilliant. It gives the reader a much clearer view of life in the early years of settlement in the young Australian colony.

Searching for the Secret River is a fascinating expose on the thinking processes of one of our leading authors. Grenville takes us on a journey from the first inklings of an idea for a book through to the finished product. At first she was planning a non fiction book but she struck so many obstacles along the way that she changed tack completely, fictionalising it and letting her imagination run. I’m pleased she did.

While she does address some of the issues faced by all writers of fiction, this is not a handbook on writing. Sure, she does explain why she changed from first to third person, but generally it was the research that so intrigued her that she recounts in the first part of the book. Throughout she grapples with her attitudes, and those of the settlers, towards the Aboriginal people who would have lived in the Sydney area during the time in which she sets her novel. She was confronted by some very unsavoury discoveries. The reader of the novel is likewise confronted by some of the events of those days. Australian history is not always the clean, lovely accounts I read as a student many years ago.

While she has drawn from actual  historical records, her novel is not another version of history. ‘I was shameless in rifling through research for anything I could use,’ she writes, ‘wrenching it out of its place and adapting it for my own purposes… What I was writing wasn’t real, but it was as true as I could make it.‘ (Grenville p. 210)  She has been criticised for her (alleged)  misuse of history. I think she has achieved what most other writers struggle with – she has made history come alive for the reader.

Reference:

• Grenville, K, 2007, Searching for the Secret River. WF Howes, Leicester.

Simpson and Day Field Guide to the Birds of Australia 8th edition

Many of my readers here possibly do not know that I am a passionate birder. In fact, I write a very popular birding blog called Trevor’s Birding (click here). It is one of the most popular of its type with many hundreds of daily visitors. Heaps of photos too.

One of the essential tools of every birder (bird watcher) is a reliable field guide. These books illustrate each of the bird species found in a particular country or region. I have about 10 such books covering Australia, south east Asia, the Indian sub-continent and Europe.

In Australia we are blessed with a number of great field guides. With over 500,000 copies sold since the first edition in 1984, the Simpson and Day Field Guide to the Birds of Australia has proved to be one of the successful guides. Today sees the publication of a new, fully revised and updated 8th edition.

I’ve written an extensive review of this guide on my birding blog here.

The guide has been published by Penguin Books Australia.

In 1957 Mary Cundy, a young social worker in England, obeyed the call of God on her life and travelled to the mountainous country of Nepal. At this time very few outsiders had ever visited the country, let alone work there as a Christian missionary. For the next 33 years she served in remote parts of the country bringing medical help to the local people, even though she had no training in the field.

Scene from our lodge in Monjo, Nepal

She lived with the people in their villages in very poor and demanding conditions. She quickly started a dispensary, helping over 100 very ill people daily. She graphically describes the daily lives of the village people and the struggles she had coping with their medical needs, physical needs as well as making small inroads into their spiritual needs. As a Christian missionary, however, her work was frequently hampered by officialdom (it was forbidden at the time to proselytise), suspicion (the local witch doctors were very powerful) and mistrust (she was often the first non-Nepali person locals had seen).

This is a very encouraging book. Not only is it a good read, I found it amazing how God can take ordinary people like Mary, put them in impossible situations, and produce extraordinary lives.

As far as I can determine, this book is sadly no longer in print.

Reference:

• Cundy, M 1994, Better than the witch doctor, Monarch Publications, Crowborough, East Sussex.

Further reading:

• My travels in Nepal – links to my travel blog, includes many photos taken in Nepal.
• Writing a novel – a series of articles about how I went about writing my novel for children set in Nepal.

Ama Dablam, Nepal

In addition to reading many of his poems I also reread much of a biography about Les Murray. This book, Les Murray: a Life in Progress was written by Peter F. Alexander and was published in 2000. I picked up this volume from a remainder table in a large Sydney bookshop several years ago. It is fascinating reading.
It is little wonder that Murray writes with such passion. His childhood was extremely unhappy and the family struggled in poverty on a dairy farm near Taree in the mid north of New South Wales. His schooling was limited and his mother taught him to read before he attended school. He was a voracious reader with an incredible memory, matched only by his insatiable curiosity. All of these attributes have served him well throughout his poetic career as he draws on so many ideas from his reading for inclusion in his writing.

His mother died when he was only 12 and this sad event had a lasting effect upon both Les and his father. He wrote many poems about those tragic times later in life. When he attended Taree High School he was constantly bullied and ostracized. Again, this proved fertile ground for his poetic pursuits. Once Les commenced at Sydney University he began to blossom as a person and as a poet. He quickly established himself as an emerging poet. In fact, his writing took precedence over his studies; he hardly studied at all and took nearly a decade to complete his degree.

He tried various jobs which would help support his young family, but he never really enjoyed any of them. Eventually the proceeds from his books – he has had over 30 books of poetry published so far – plus income from various fellowships, awards and prizes went some of the way to providing for his family. Without the income from his wife’s teaching he would not have been about to continue his prolific output of writing over such a long period of time.

One aspect of Murray’s poetry I found difficult at first was the form that much of it takes. He uses rhyme sparingly, and when he uses it, he is not always consistent. Another interesting aspect of Murray’s poetry is the irregular metre of much of his poetry. If one is looking for a set metrical pattern in his poetry you will often be disappointed. There are exceptions, of course, and they are usually more noteworthy for its inclusion.

Because Murray grew up in rural New South Wales, he has drawn on his knowledge and many of his experiences of farm life for his poetry. I believe that Les Murray is the quintessential Australian landscape poet. Other poets may be able to capture the essence of the Australian landscape, but none have been able to do this on a consistent basis over such a length of time and in so many poems.

One of the strengths of his poetry is the process by which Murray incorporates the Australian fauna a flora in a natural, unforced way into his poetry. I believe that one of the strengths of the poetry of Les Murray is his ability to take everyday objects or incidents, and explore them in verse. Even the simplest thing – taking a shower – is material for his poetry.

Reference:

Alexander, Peter F. 2000. Les Murray: A Life in Progress. Oxford University Press, South Melbourne.

Further reading:

• Les Murray: a extensive archive of articles about Les Murray, including copies of many of his poems.

I don’t enjoy being that restricted but I rose to the challenge. I had to be very ruthless with my word count, cutting back to the bare bones of the story. On this occasion it was my lecturer imposing the restrictions and I would have been marked down if I’d gone over the word count. Editors of magazines are just as demanding. Often they only have space for 150 or 200 words, or less. If you don’t cut the extra words, they will. Then you might find important facts missing from the final article.

Anyway, I was reasonably pleased with the end result. I managed to keep within the word count too. The lecturer gave me a distinction, so she was pleased with it as well.

“The Way of the Wild Heart” written by John Eldredge. Published by Nelson Books.

I’ve just finished reading this interesting book. It has taken me quite a few months but that is another story. In the last few years I’ve read two other John Eldredge books, Wild at Heart and Waking the Dead. I would heartily recommend both books.

John has written these books to address a problem he has observed in modern western society: the lack of hero figures in the male the population. Boys are no longer allowed to be boys and men have grown into pale imitations of what they could – and should – be in society. Their masculinity has been – to put it crudely – emasculated. In his books he seeks to promote ways of correcting that imbalance. Throughout his works he also brings a Christian perspective to the reasons why this is so important. He believes it is crucial for men, and young men in particular, to develop strength of character so that they can contribute more effectively in an ever changing world.

John explains how he has taken his own boys, and other men and their sons, through adventures such as camping, canoeing, mountaineering, hunting and various other activities that test and develop character. While I find his love of hunting abhorrent I do acknowledge the principles behind what he is attempting to do as worthwhile. Many fathers these days are weak and ineffective in raising boys. Many boys are rebelling because they do not have an effective father figure, a hero if you like, whom they can admire and emulate.

To have written this within the Christian context is doubly pleasing. Families and churches are in desperate need of a correction that will bring about strong male leaders, men who will fulfill their God-given roles in society, not wishy-washy weaklings.

“But not many writers start out with dreams of becoming essayists. We want to be journalists, short story writers, novelists or even travel writers, but rare is the scribe who sets out to be an essayist. Personal essays happen by accident, when in the process of setting out to find stories, we end up finding ourselves. Every frustration, adulation, inclination, anguish or misery then becomes fodder for the personal essayist’s pen.” Mridu Khullar

Whether we call them essays, posts, articles or ramblings on the net is not the point. We are all writers, all trying to communicate our thoughts, ideas, experiences and whatever with whoever is listening or reading. This is the true wonder of blogging and the amazing power of the internet. It is so democratic; anyone can be a writer and can make connections with anyone else with access to the internet.

If, however, you do want to take the path of calling yourself an essayist, can I recommend the article I quoted from above. The link is below and the author writes about how she goes about writing the personal essay.

Links:

• Writing the personal essay by Mridu Khullar.
• Creative Nonfiction – more articles on non-fiction writing.

Against a Peacock Sky written by Monica Connell. Published by Penguin Books (Viking) in 1991.

Monica Connell grew up in Northern Ireland and is an anthropologist who went to live in a rural village in Nepal. She lived and worked for two years with a Nepali family, sharing their celebrations, their hardships, their food and their hard labour in the fields to provide a subsistence living. One family took her in, sharing their everyday lives on a very personal level with her, allowing her to virtually become one of the family.

Monica witnessed first hand the villagers’ way of life. She learned how to care for the animals, how to plant and harvest rice and the best way to hunt a boar. She relates the significance of their many religious ceremonies, beliefs and festivals. She relates – without any hint of being judgmental – the importance of various customs employed to appease the local gods in order to have a successful crop or produce healthy animals.

This is a fascinating account of life in rural Nepal as it has been for many centuries and had remained largely untouched by outside influences. Here and there in her narrative, however, there are hints of change in their somewhat cloistered existence. Outside pressures were beginning to show. For example, one young man finds work building roads in nearby India, and he leaves permanently. The old ways were beginning to change, and I suspect if the author returned to that village today there would be many more changes apparent.

I would suspect that this book is now out of print. I bought mine via the internet as a used copy after I had experienced a touch of Nepali life when I went to visit there in 2006. To read more of my impressions of life in Nepal, go to my Travel Blog, then go to the Contents on the sidebar, or click on several of the Categories, also on the sidebar.