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Sam van Zweden

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Salve

This morning I couldn’t World. I couldn’t Brain. I couldn’t force my mind into any one thing, I couldn’t be.

I wish this black dog weren’t chasing me,
I wish my life sung with symmetry,
But I’m ragged, I’m jagged, I’m hollow and haggard
And I fear it’s how I’ll always be.

After losing myself in tears for too long, I pushed myself into the world. I had a cupcake. And I took myself down to my local book shop. I had a good chat with the lady behind the counter. And I purchased two books with money I certainly don’t have.

The Best Australian Stories – A Ten Year Collection.
I’ve been eagerly waiting for this one since I heard it was happening, and just flicking through the contents pages I feel like the Black Inc crew have made some fantastic decisions of what to include. (My favourite Nam Le story is in there! Just can’t get enough.)

Room, by Emma Donoghue. I read an extract from this somewhere, though I can’t remember where… It really grabbed me. I’ve been looking for something exciting for my next Catalyst review, and I think this is it.

While I’m not quite Person yet, I feel like at least I have something I can put myself into as a distraction for the afternoon.

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Lazy Sunday Reading

It’s not a lazy Sunday for me; it’s a sped-up Sunday. I’m doing everything I’d do on a lazy Sunday, but I got up earlier and am doing it all a bit faster because I have to work later.

Part of this is reading. I’m reading Martin Amis’ Yellow Dog, and am very very very close to finished, but I’ve also been catching up on my Google Reader feed.

Some highlights, to make your Sunday more enjoyable:

– Jo Case has written an insightful review of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.
– Alec Patric at Verity La talks to Nathan Curnow about transferrable skill sets, whether these skill sets exist at all, and the ways in which novel writing resembles The Wizard of Oz.
– On the anniversary of the Black Saturday fires, Claire Zorn at Overland writes about bearing witness for the 173 lives lost that day.
– An interesting post on Virgule about their 2010 submission statistics. It makes me feel amazing for getting in there.
– Some big news for page seventeen, as editor Tiggy Johnson moves on. I owe a huge amount of thanks to page seventeen for accepting my first published short story, and Tiggy has been amazing, wonderful, supportive, and welcoming. I wish her the best of luck in whatever she moves onto next, and look forward to the reveal of the next page seventeen editor!

Enjoy!

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The Numbers: A Study in Reading Habits

Early last year, I did a little analysis of the numbers around my reading, inspired by a post of Chris Flynn’s. I thought it might be interesting to do the same sort of break-down of my reading for the whole of 2010.

Here goes:

30 men. 52 women. 1 combined.
22 Australian. 31 non-Australian.
1 literary journal*. 2 graphic novels. 7 non-fiction. 43 fiction.

I have to say, I’m surprised by how close the numbers are between men:women and Australian:non-Australian, I thought both these areas would be pretty highly skewed in favour of non-Australian men. There’s definitely room for improvement, to read more women, more Australian writing, but I’m pretty pleased with the effort for 2010.

Next year I’ll start counting literary journals and include that in my tally. My non-fiction:fiction count isn’t quite what I’d like it to be – I’ll be aiming to read more non-fiction in 2011.

*I read many, many more than 1 lit journal during 2010, but I only included KYD in my list. In 2011, lit journals that I’ve read cover-to-cover will be included in my count.

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