A Book To Love: Favourite Guests of ABC TV's First Tuesday Book Club Share Their Most Loved Books

By Jennifer Byrne

The first publication from FIRST TUESDAY BOOK CLUB, this book is a collection of specially commissioned writing from selected guests on a book they have loved and treasured.
first tuesday book club has been blessed with entertaining, inspiring and provocative guests. Now, a selection of wonderful authors and booklovers featured on the show comes together to reveal the books closest to their hearts. Some love classics-Jane Eyre anyone? A Moveable Feast? Anna Karenina? Some champion neglected gems: Ask the Dust, New Grub Street and Excellent Women may soon top your must-read-next list. And some make choices that will surprise you-which author's books are beloved by both Augusten Burroughs and Christos tsiolkas? Who adores the cultish whimsy of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast ? Who puts up their hand for the Hobbit?One thing remains common to all the contributors: a deep and genuine love of books and reading. that's what first tuesday book club is all about. So find yourself a comfortable spot, tune out your daily distractions, and enjoy!

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Jan 17, 2011
• ISBN: 9780730494546

Jennifer Byrne

Jennifer Byrne writes humorous essays, satire, and journalism. She is the author of Fake It, The Intrepid Parent's Field Guide to the Baby Kingdom, and The Lazy Girl’s Guide to Life. Her writing has been published in The New Yorker, the Huffington Post, The Rumpus, The Hairpin, The Second City Network, National Lampoon and more. She lives in New Jersey.

Book preview

Jennifer Byrne

JENNIFER BYRNE began her career as a journalist as a cadet with The Age. After working in the United States and Britain, Jennifer moved to television as a reporter with Channel Nine’s Sunday program, and later with 60 Minutes. In 1993, she became the morning presenter on ABC Radio’s 2BL, and in 1995 was appointed publishing director of Reed Books. In 1999, Jennifer took up the anchor’s job at Foreign Correspondent, and for five years worked both as host and reporter for the program. She continued to write features and book reviews and regularly hosted Radio National’s breakfast program. In 2003 she joined The Bulletin magazine as a senior writer, winning national awards for columnist of the year and story of the year. While continuing to write, she hosted the ABC’s My Favourite Book program, and now enjoys her dream job as host of the first tuesday book club.

Introduction

I was sleep-walking round the supermarket the other day when a man brandishing a packet of rolls wrapped in cellophane – those putty-white ones reminiscent of giant witchetty grubs – caught my attention in the bread aisle. I’d guess he was in his late sixties, with a ruddy, battered face. ‘So what do you do with these things?’ he yelled to the aisle at large. ‘Do I need an oven or what?’ These were questions within my slender competence so I backed up and was explaining that yes they did require heating, and not in a microwave because that would make them soggy, when his eyes suddenly sharpened focus.

‘You’re that books lady from the telly, aren’t you? Well, have I got a book for you!’ He named Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh. Absolutely his favourite book, he said, and for a good five minutes beneath the blinding fluoros he explained a bit about the plot (young man grows up in religious Victorian household) and a lot about why it meant so much to him (‘I’ve never trusted the Church and he just skewers it, the bloody hypocrisy of it all’). After re-stating the title, then getting me to repeat it, then writing it down anyway, he and his rolls sauntered off across the road and disappeared into the TAB.

And this for me is the single best thing about our first tuesday book club, which we launched in mid-2006 with the high hope that Australians – such big buyers of books – wanted a show about reading. Not writing, not authors, but the thing we all share: a passion for reading, and for books to help fire that love. As host, there’s no end to the pleasures of my job. Getting the latest releases from publishers is pretty good. Being able to lie on my special reading sofa all afternoon and call it work is also excellent. Arguing with my regular sparring partner on the panel, that minx Marieke Hardy, remains a constant joy, even into our fifth year. But the most rewarding thing, the always surprising and delightful thing, is that being ‘that books lady’ puts me at the receiving end of the enthusiasm of strangers.

This is not at all what I was used to. For many years – okay then, decades – I worked as a current affairs journalist. Remarks from strangers in public generally ranged from tart to scornful. I’d go out in a good mood on a sunny afternoon and come back feeling grumpy. I didn’t think much about it until we started the club and everything changed.

People started bowling up to me to talk about the books they loved, that made them happy. Books that marked milestones. Books that had lit up their childhoods, changed their lives, that they’d never forgotten and wanted to share. And, of course, there being as many books as lives, the range and variety of recommendations were – are – endless. My diary is full of suggestions scrawled at the coffee shop, or while filling the car, or at the weekend soccer game – and I ask you, as a reader yourself, can you think of anything better? It’s like being constantly showered with presents.

I’m hoping that this book will make you feel the same way. That you are receiving gifts. They come from some of our favourite book-clubbers over the years, who mostly acknowledge the difficulty of lifting one child above the ever-shifting brood of the beloved. But they have done it for our sakes. Bless them. Their reasons are sometimes literary but always personal, which is the only way to choose a favourite book.

Rightly or wrongly, I always feel I know someone better when they tell me their favourite book. When Malcolm Fraser, for instance, a prime minister who seemed so contradictory – crashing through on the Whitlam dismissal but cautious on reform, an economic conservative though progressive on matters of race and refugees – revealed his favourite book, things fell into place. It was Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s powerful ode to individual achievement which presents capitalism as a philosophical rather than political force. Love it or loathe it, its message – that it’s better to rebel against an encroaching government than have it crush your spirit – helped explain some of the ambivalence.

You can’t read a life in a choice, but you can learn something about character, what presses the buttons. Honesty is imperative in nominating a favourite book; the temptation to grandstand is always there, which is why I’m sometimes a wee bit suspicious when someone names Crime and Punishment or Nabokov’s short stories or (the fashionable reader’s current pick) Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. It could be absolutely true; it would be madness to say that a canonical book can’t be a favourite. But being officially great isn’t enough; the book has to speak to the heart. And, as contributors to this book remind us, discovering a book to love has a lot to do with the time and circumstances in which it revealed itself. It is the book that electrified you, shifted the frame, inspired you to be a better writer or reader. It showed you what’s possible and left you a richer person.

Alternatively, it simply lured you out of your busy life and into a place of distraction and pleasure. That’s allowed too. Favourites are not taste tests and snobbery is the abiding enemy of reading. It’s one of the reasons I dislike the term ‘airport novel’ – it’s so dismissive, as if a reader has to ‘live up to’ a favourite book. No, they just have to love it – to feel its magic, as Augusten Burroughs puts it. One of my own favourites is Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar – an old chestnut of a book which, I’m the first to admit, lacks any conspicuous literary merit. It’s about a Jewish princess growing up in New York – no match with me yet – but what it went on to say about this girl who wanted the world but settled for the ordinary, about the

Reviews for A Book To Love

[jeniwren_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Enjoyable read that will be of interest to booklovers. Contributors include Ian Rankin, Christos Tsiolkas, Augusten Burroughs and regulars to the program Jason Steger and Marieke Hardy. All titles featured are classics and provide a good reading list with Carson McCullers a favourite featuring twice in the collection. I personally will be adding The Gormenghast Trilogy by Peake and Great Expectations to my wishlist . Beautifully presented and bound and one to keep on the shelf for aesthetic reasons.

[fliss88_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A good eclectic mix of authors talking about the books they hold dear to their hearts.