Andrew Cattanach
Booktopia
booktopiaadministration
John Purcell, The Booktopia Book Guru
booktopiaguestblogger
Haylee Nash
hayleys2013
Toni Whitmont
Booktopia’s Editorial Director Caroline Baum lets us in on her amazing bookish US adventure
Good to see Anna Funder settled in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in a street that feels like something out of Henry James. It was used to shoot a TV adaptation of Dickens’ A Winter’s Tale a few months ago, and they laid down fake snow. Each house has an individual gas lamp in its front yard. I have no idea why, but it certainly creates a special ambiance.
Caroline with Jackie Collins
A few days later, I went to Soho to hear current NY It Girl Rachel Kushner talk about her latest novel The Flamethrowers, which is getting rave reviews. In its, she writes about motorcycles, contemporary art and Italian terrorism. Apparently it’s a bold ambitious book, and Jonathan Franzen is a fan. There was packed house for this midweek event on a cold night. Standing room only in fact. Kushner, who is droll and cool, was in conversation with fellow author, Joshua Ferris who told such a long personal anecdote to open the event that I thought oh no, he’s never going to ask her a question, but eventually, he got round to a few and she had the confidence to go where she wanted to go. So now that book is on my Must Read list.
I went to meet with Elizabeth Strout, who won the Pulitzer for her novel Olive Kitteridge. She lives right down on the Hudson at FDR drive, and her new book The Burgess Boys is all about two brothers from Maine, both of them lawyers, but that’s where the similarities end. I’ll be writing about her for The Sydney Morning Herald in a month or so.
In San Francisco, I just had to go and see City Lights, the legendary bookshop where Ferlinghetti, Kerouac, Ginsberg and the Beat Generation hung out in the sixties. There, I became entranced by a blonde in a green synthetic fur hat. Her partner wore a headpiece in the shape of Nemo the fish but I could not photograph him unobtrusively whereas she was unaware, sitting and reading amongst the bookcases.
When we set out for Big Sur, we drove along the edge of Steinbeck country, near the town of Salinas, where John Steinbeck grew up and which now houses a scholarly research centre with public displays dedicated to the author’s life. The land around Salinas is close to the sea but fertile, a patchwork of fields of peas, strawberries and tall artichokes (Trivia: Marilyn Monroe was once crowned queen at the local artichoke fair.)
The view from Luke Davies porch in LA
Sadly, Steinbeck’s house is only open to the public from the month of June onwards so we pushed on to Big Sur, along the majestic wild coast. I had no idea it was a place that many writers had loved, including Hunter S. Thompson, Richard Brautigan and Henry Miller, purveyor of explicit sex in books like Sexus, lover of Anais Nin, and others. The area boasts a Henry Miller Library which is pretty disappointing when you get there, it’s just a hippie compound with a bookshop in it, but there’s noting authentic about the place. A sign at the door confesses that the house never belonged to Miller.
And so on to LA, where what else would you do to get a flavour of the glamour but go and visit Jackie Collins, which is exactly what I did. She lives in Beverly Hills of course and has a new book out in September, which is when she will be visiting Perth and Sydney, so watch out for that faux leopard! I’ll let you know when my interview with her will come out but in the meantime here is a snap of us together in her very smart library.
By way of contrast, I was going to call on poet and novelist Luke Davies, but our schedules got tangled and I ended up sitting on the rocking horse on his porch while he was out doing errands. It was a nice rocking chair, looking out on to a quiet street on the edge of Korea town and lined with those ludicrously tall palm trees, as you can see in this snap. Luke will be back in Australia for SWF 2013 to launch a new collection of his poetry.
_______________________
Caroline Baum is Booktopia’s Editorial Director.
She has worked as founding editor of Good Reading magazine, features editor for Vogue, presenter of ABC TV’s popular bookshow, Between the Lines, and Foxtel’s Talking Books, and as an executive producer with ABC Radio National.
You can follow her on twitter at @mscarobaum
Filed under: Book Recommendations, Book Talk, Caroline Baum | Tagged: Caroline Baum | Leave a Comment »
So I’m in New York flicking through the show listings in Time Out when an off-Broadway musical catches my eye. Its called Cuff Me, which also works when you say the first word backwards.
There is a cast of four, two men, two women (Tina Jensen, who plays our heroine’s friend Kate and her inner goddess was outstandingly energetic in her broad lewdness) and they are hugely competent singers and movers, as you’d expect in this city and while the lyrics are not consistently sharp in their savagery they are very adult, explicit and completely trash the book.
Booktopia’s
New Year’s Reading Resolutions
