Summer Reading from the HerCanberra Team—Emma Macdonald’s top picks
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One of the random questions I often ask of people is to name me their top three books of all time.
It never fails to yield immediate insights into their personality, cuts through the rigmarole of small talk, and often leads to discoveries of new gems. For when a person lists three books that stand out above all others, they are showing you who they really are.
Of course, if you, dear reader, were to ask me to list my top three, I would writhe in discomfort. Because how does one narrow down a lifetime of books to just three? I know, I am a hypocrite, to ask of others what I find hard to produce myself.
Well, I have spent a few weeks mulling it over and have narrowed the field to the following. These are books that knocked me off my feet, books that I have loved for years (if not decades) and books written by authors who I have obsessively consumed (no one-hit wonders on my list). These are three books which stay with me always.
The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
I read this book as a young and insecure journalist who immediately wanted the main character, Quoyle, to succeed at his local paper where he is assigned to the rounds of car crashes and shipping movements (we all have to start somewhere…). He’s otherwise preoccupied with some rather dire personal circumstances including his parent’s joint suicide, and his abusive and cheating wife trying to sell their two daughters to the sex trade before being killed in a car accident and leaving Quoyle to raise them alone. Does all of that sound bleak? The dark humour of this beautiful tale melts the frozen landscape of the ice-crusted coastlines of Newfoundland where it is set and we hold our breath as Quoyle slowly builds a life of warmth and gentle purpose and emerges a hero (in the most understated and self-effacing way). Proulx won a Pulitzer for this novel and her writing evokes wry laughter and stinging tears, often within the same paragraph.
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
It’s hard to narrow my love of Kingsolver to just one book, but The Poisonwood Bible is her most epic and astounding work. It tells the tale of an American Baptist missionary family in the Congo during the late 1950s through the first-person accounts of the women (mother and four daughters). There are so many extraordinary facets to this novel including five wildly different personal voices, the detailed descriptions of the jungle which all but suffocates you with its dangers, the prosaic duties of raising a family despite living in said jungle, and the clever allegories around Christianity and colonialism. It’s a wild ride over three decades.
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Do I feel uncomfortable including this author in my top three? A little. History judges Hemingway harshly (a misogynist alcoholic who took his own life) but if I am honest, I find his writing as close to perfect as it gets. Hemingway was a journalist who stripped his sentences bare. His novel The Old Man and the Sea is a simple story of an old man catching a fish, and yet it also reveals the struggle of existence itself. A Moveable Feast is a memoir of Hemingway’s years establishing himself as a writer in 1920’s Paris. It was published posthumously and based on detailed diary entries he discovered in an old trunk more than 30 years after writing them. It is a feast of a book, describing his trails in journalism, near-constant poverty, and the joys of conversation with the literary lights of his time – almost always over a meal and bottle of wine. While Hemingway is hungry for success and for love, his memoir is also culinary, with food descriptions and meals detailed with delight. Finally, the book is a love letter to Paris, and widely considered the most romantic of all.
