Susannah Freymark


Giving a book is for life 

With Susannah Freymark

Giving a book is for life not just for Christmas. Life is too short to drink bad coffee, is the slogan on the purple Zentfeld umbrellas. The same principle applies to books. Life is short so read good books — there are so many.

I dream of spending days in a book-shop, staggering out drunk on words and carrying as many books as I can pile into my long arms. Books, books and more books.

I am the sort of person who smells books, a quick, discreet sniff of the pages, be it the thrill of a brand new book or the history of a well thumbed secondhand copy.

My bedside table is piled high with books waiting to be read. Frequently they topple over and I use the re-piling opportunity to touch each one and have a little browse. Books are an avid addiction.

Whatever questions I want answered I look for the solutions in a book.

It may be Edward De Bono’s logical thinking that helps me understand the structure of decision making or learning about grief in Raymond Carver’s A Small Good Thing.

The good ones stay with me and because there are so many good ones I don’t want to waste time on the badly written, poorly structured ones. A good read turns on my senses and imagination. It reaches places within me that are unsaid.

From the first memories of The Magic Faraway Tree, read by my sisters and then re-read countless times when I could do it for myself. Lost in the enchanted world, discovering the likes of pop biscuits and topsy-turvy land was a delight.

It led me to read every single one of the Enid Blyton’s books – oh the adventures I had lying on my bed reading about The Rocking Horse Mystery or The Six Bad Boys.

Animal stories particularly stayed with me, starting with Dr Dolittle fuelling my fantasy of talking to animals. It is only now re-reading some of the Dolittle series that I am aware of the blatant racism that Hugh Lofting portrayed in the story.

Born Free, Old Yella, Ring of Bright Water, are still some of my favourites — I was a sucker for these animal stories. I share them with my children now: ‘You must read this,’ I say and thrust a jaded copy of The Incredible Journey into their hands.

And we discover new ones like Thunderwith by Libby Hathorn. This was a book we all shared; first my daughter, then my son and then I read it aloud to the youngest.

We all cried at Lara’s despair for the strange, old dog that helped her to love her new family. Lara was in our midst for the time we were reading that book; we talked about her like an old friend.

‘The internet will kill the book,’ said the analysts, yet even with John Grisham releasing his latest book, chapter by chapter on the internet, we still want the hard copy that we can take anywhere and read anytime.

What books have impacted on people’s lives and changed their perceptions. Is it A Patch of Blue by Elizabeth Kata, Roots by Alex Hailey, anything by Shakespeare, An Evil Cradling by Brian Keenan?

Jill Eddington, director of the Byron Bay Writers Festival, chose the classic Return of the Native by Hardy.

Like many who chose a significant book she read it in her teens and it was her first foray into ‘adult’ literature. She remembered reading and re-reading the descriptions of the landscape, the relationship between man and nature and loving every word.

Max Ryan, a Byron Shire poet whose words often inspire me, made an unusual choice, Ridley Walker by Russel Hoban, a Canadian writer whose novel is written in pidgin English style.

Here’s the first sentence: On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadn’t ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to se none agen.

It is a futuristic story where it is always raining. Max says he chose this book because there is an unfailing sense of human spirit and a primordial poetry of place.

Others on the Byron Shire must-read list include; To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, The Shipping News by Annie Proulx, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, Winnie the Pooh, Children of Violence by Doris Lessing, Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway and The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck.

Leanne Benfield from Eureka, learnt her first lessons about social interaction from The Muddle-Headed Wombat by Ruth Park. Don’t underestimate the power of books. Their stories travel with you and become intermingled with your own.

I have an ulterior motive for extolling the joys of reading, Christmas is upon us again and I can’t think of a better present than a book. Buy one from independent booksellers like The Bookshop in Mullum, Abraxas Books or ABC Books in Byron.

Buy your child or a friend’s child a book such as The Whales Song, a graphic and poetic story or give them a book you loved as a child like Milly Molly Mandy or Journey to the Centre of the Earth. The reason these books last is because they are so damned good.

Giving a book is for life not just for Christmas. Enjoy your holiday reading – it could last a lifetime.

By Susannah Freymark, originally published in Here & Now magazine 2004.

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