24-05-2025
Writers, I'm on your side – now here's my list of complaints
Reading is my favourite hobby. What's not to like about it? It can be done sitting down and can be combined with other hobbies such as drinking a beer or patting the dog.
And, while unwilling to put myself forward to test the theory, I'm convinced it makes you smarter.
I'm a kindly reader, by which I mean 'largely undiscriminating'. I consider myself on the writer's side, wanting to cheer their endeavours in any project, however unlikely.
Yet, even with a forgiving reader, there are quibbles. With Sydney crammed with authors for the annual Sydney Writers' Festival, could I mention some ways they could do better?
Non-fiction books that go on too long
Long novels are terrific – you sink into the world of Proust, Doris Lessing or Anthony Powell and want the pleasure to never end. With non-fiction, I'm not so sure. I'm interested to know about the Norman Conquest, I really am, but do I need the six-volume, 5000-page account by Edward Augustus Freeman (as recently reviewed on The Rest is History podcast)? I'm interested, also, in Lyndon Baines Johnson, a consequential president whose biographer, Robert Caro, is considered a genius. But do I definitely want to read four volumes, with a combined 3000 pages, and a fifth still to come? With Caro endlessly extending his efforts – see the recent documentary Turn Every Page – there's the danger, for a slow reader, that the life could take longer to read than it took to live.
The fashion to eschew quote marks
Some of our arty novelists are dispensing with quotation marks. I'm sure there's a reason, although they have yet to whisper that reason into my trusting ear. In these novels, the characters still speak, and sometimes they think, and – if it's a first-person narrator – they often describe things, and into this lumpy soup wades the reader, unequipped with the usual tools for discerning whether actual speech is occurring. At some point – I imagine it was in 1689 or maybe 1723 – some genius printer thought up the quote mark as a useful concession to the reader. I don't believe this useful invention should be so casually thrown away. I'm on the side of writers! I really am! I'm just trying to understand what's going on!!!
