The best Australian science fiction, fantasy and horror of 2009 have been announced from Aurealis Awards. For those who are fans of these genres will be able to find some titles that are available from Parramatta City Library.

Best science fiction novel

Wonders of a Godless World by Andrew McGahan

Best fantasy novel

Magician’s Apprentice by Trudi Canavan

Best horror novel

Red queen by Honey Brown

Best Collection

Oceanic by Greg Egan

Best illustated book/graphic novel

Scarygirl by Nathan Jurevicius

Best young adult novel

Leviathan Trilogy: Book One by Scott Westerfeld

Best children’s (8-12 years) novel

A Ghost in My Suitcase by Gabrielle Wang

Best children’s (8-12 years)
short fiction/illustrated work/picture book

Victor’s Challenge by Pamela Freeman (author), Kim Gamble (illustrator)

It’s quite interesting to see what Australian novels that our Australians would like to read. Here is the top ten among 290 titles nominated from ‘Australian Book Review Fan Poll’ along with some comments. All titles are available at Parramatta City Library.

1 – Cloudstreet by Tim Winton – ‘Tim winton’s books attract international kudos, prestigious awards and massive sales.’

2 – The fortunes of Richard Mahony by Henry Handel Richardson – his trilogy – Australia Felix (1917), The way home (1925) and Ultime thule (1929), first collected in 1930, is one of the true epics of our literature.

3 – Voss by Patrick White – Patrick White, Australia’s first Nobel Laureate for Literature, dominated Australian literature from the 1950s to his death in 1990.

4 – Breath by Tim Winton – Author’s mind and most recent novel, won him his fourth Miles Franklin Award, explores themes of Friendship, risk-talking and the sea.

5 – Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey – Peter Carey’s third novel, published in 1988, won the Miles Franklin Award and the Booker Prize and was subsequently filmed.

6 – My brother Jack by George Johnston – George Johnston’s fifteenth novel, published in 1964, opened his semi-autobigraphical trilogy, and won the miles Franklin Award. His second wife, Charmian Clift, adapted it for television.

7 – The secret river by Kate Grenville – Kate Grenville’s sixth novel and won the Commonwealth Prize for Literature Award.

8 – Eucalyptus by Murray Bail – Murray Bail’s third novel, published in 1998, won the Miles Franklin Award. Among the favoured novelists, Bail’s oeuvre is perhaps the smallest and most original.

9 – The man who loved children by Christina Stead – Christiina Stead’s masterpiece, published in 1940 and long neglected, invites comparisons with the greatest novels of the twentieth century, Faulker’s among them.

10 – The tree of man by Patrick White – his fourth novel, published in 1955, two years before Voss, concerns the lives of Stan and Amy Parker from the 1880s to the 1930s.

11 – My brilliant career by Miles Franklin

12 – Monkey grip by Helen Garner

13 – Dirt music by Tim Winton

14 – The vivisector by Patrick White

15 – Picnic at hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay

16 – Remembering Babylon by David Malouf

17 – For the term of his natural life by Marcus Clarke

18 – The merry-go-round in the sea by Randolph Stow

19 – Carpentaria by Alexis Wright

20 – The slap by Christos Tsiolkas

The Last Thursday Reading Group had its first meeting of 2010. Members discussed the book ‘The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society’ by Mary Ann Shaffer.

It’s a book set in WWII in Guernsey Islands. During German Occupation, the islanders established a literary group to support each other in the most difficult time. When popular author Juliet makes friendship and frequent correspondence with the islanders, the stories are told.

The reading group mostly enjoyed reading the book. They felt the book was interesting, but sometime it was hard to get into it without background information about the islands.

What more interesting was the development of friendship between the islanders and Juliet and appreciation of human spirit in this rather hard time.

The coming lunch hour author talk will be held on the 1st Wednesday of February, from 1 pm at Parramatta City Library and Sharyn Killens will talk about her book ‘The inconvenient child‘.

Born to a blonde white Australian mother and a black American serviceman father in 1948, during a time when what society thought, mattered, Sharyn Killens was the Inconvenient Child.

Placed in neglectful foster care at birth, at 19 months old, baby Sharyn was rescued by visiting African American champion boxer Freddie Dawson and taken to live in a ‘party house’ in Sydney’s red light district of Kings Cross. But at age five, her absent elegant mother abandoned her in a convent–orphanage, where she suffered years of abuse at the hands of a cruel nun.

By fifteen, as a runaway teenager on the streets of Kings Cross, she was arrested and sentenced to notorious Parramatta Girls Home; a reformatory where girls were stripped of their dignity and punished frequently. She was then transferred to Hay Girls Institution; an experimental disciplinary centre – in truth, a hard labor prison for young girls.

Throughout, her solace was her love of music and her burning ambition to become a singer as she battled for her mother’s love and approval, and her black American father’s denied identity.

Sharyn has become a popular singer and an established entertainer later on. She went to America to search her roots. She has written her life stories in her book ‘The inconvenient child‘ which was published last year and available for loan at Parramatta City Library. Sharyn’s author talk will certainly be a very interesting one.

Title: The Men Who Stare at Goats

Author: Jon Ronson

Golda’s Pick
Walking through walls, reading minds, turning invisible, it all sounds like something out of Harry Potter. Well this is no tale of fiction or magic. Attempting these feats were the really life pursuits of some of the most powerful military men in the US Army. 

Jon Ronson is a journalist with the amazing ability to extract the most interesting and often hilarious details about the little know military unit called the First Earth Battalion. From its early beginnings in the 1979 to the implications this unit has had on the way the War of Terror has been fought, Ronson traverses the history of this ‘special’ military unit and the characters that it has attracted over its three decade history.  

I really enjoy this type of non-fiction; quirky, irreverent and fascinating. Ronson is a master of research, digging up the most interesting details from the past and utilising the immense trust he managed to develop in those he interviewed. What is most impressive is the respect and real affection Ronson demonstrates towards the people he interviews and whose stories help make this book so captivating. It is very easy to be cynical and poke fun at the people in stories such as this but what Ronson is able to capture is the ideology behind this movement which can only be described as charmingly hopeful. He shows that despite having some of the most horrific implications, the men who stared at goats were visionaries who dared to image a different future for the US Army.