Monday, December 22, 2008

Favorite book of 2008







It was a close tussle between Adiga's The White Tiger and Helen Garner's The Spare Room, but I have to give it to Garner.

In a mesmerising, seemingly quotidian but bile inducing personal narrative Garner creates perhaps the most appalling female figure in Australian literature - the grasping, insinuating, oxygen-sucking Nicola.

God, she's awful!

Buy it and read it over Xmas, and pray to god someone remotely like Nicola never comes into your life.

In non-fiction the prize definitely goes to A.A Gill's Table Talk. Gill is the restaurant critic and food writer for Britain's The Sunday Times and Tatler. The writing is fierce and wild, and blisteringly enlivening. It's just marvellous.

Browse through it in a good independent bookshop (the others won't have it) and read the piece on Starbucks. You'll then understand why that chain is going under. Then read the chapter on America and browsers around you will look at your body shaking and wonder.

I guarantee you'll buy the book and devour it!



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