Shelfies #63: Kathleen Jennings

What are these shelves? Their topic is less obvious than elsewhere (poetry, Georgette Heyer, art reference, fairy-tale reference, the Big Series shelves…). I suppose they are some sort of anchor or triangulation — loose reminders of types of creative lives that can be lived, and the loose intersection of history and folklore and the Gothic. As a result, I have Things To Say about nearly every book on these shelves. But here are my five:

Live Alone and Like It by Marjorie Hillis. For some reason, not unrelated to Helene Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road, I have multiples of this. It’s allegedly a guide for the budget-conscious “extra woman” in New York in the 1930s, and it’s funny and judgy and charming (“Mrs de W is having an elegant time”) and occasionally startlingly indefensible. But it’s also one of the best books I’ve read on living the life you want as a freelance creator. The chaotic Cook Until Done (Bradshaw), a little further down the shelf, manages to do the same with food.

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens. My favourite Dickens and one of my favourite novels — and a fairy-tale novel, too, with its through-threaded images of Little Red Riding Hood, and explicit references to and quotations from other stories. Its once-upon a time beginning (“In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise…”) its bold brave heroines (“rowing down the stream as never other woman rowed on English water”), its wolfish dilettantes (‘You may come in, if you’re good.’ ‘I am not good,’ said Eugene, ‘but I’ll come in.’). But also moments of society and technology shifting (papers “caught flying by the electric wires”). It’s the Princess Bride of Dickens novels. It’s also enormous and I usually forget it’s Dickens by the 75% mark, and then am very surprised when all the plots start being woven together. ALSO I recommend the BBC miniseries as an entry point — it’s only 4 episodes long, somehow, and delightful, and once you’ve read the book it’s very difficult to come back to that compressed a version, and it would be a shame to miss it (Paul McGann plays Eugene).

Cameos of Crime by M O’Sullivan. I picked this up in a second-hand bookstore at Coolangatta. It’s the memoir of a man who, in his youth in the late 1800s, was encouraged to make an expedited departure from Ireland, and by the 1930s ended up becoming the head of the police force in Queensland. It captures a lot of history of life and law (and how much some of it hasn’t changed) in the state, and also links to lots of other bits of local lore — bushrangers and cattle empires and assassination attempts on Princes of Wales. It forms part of a little collection of non-fiction books with recurring characters, about half of which are early aviation memoirs and therefore on another shelf. It’s also been a very useful book to have read, especially for navigating publishing parties to which reluctant political representatives have been invited. But many obscure, out-of-date, non-fiction books are very useful for such conversations.

Time Without Clocks by Joan Lindsay. Of course I love Picnic at Hanging Rock (also represented). But this memoir of creative life in and outside Melbourne between the wars is brief and namedroppy and enchanting. It captures a transition between eras, a whirlwind of bohemian existence, privileged and impoverished, and its cast includes representatives of many Australian and international creative dynasties. Russian ballet stars express opinions on horseback riding, artists write the time they think it should be on a broken clock, and young couples drape tiger skin rugs over hedges and frighten the school children on the other side. I love My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell (related era) and Time Was by W Grahame Robertson (Edwardian) for similar reasons — lives lived in flamboyant margins, touching wonderful writers, focussed to the exclusion of economics or realism on pursuits of beautiful experiences. Idiosyncratic and unwise and giddily human.

The Letters of Private Wheeler. Letters home by a soldier in Wellington’s army. Awful and funny and interesting, full of death and hijinks and soldiers getting welded to the deck of ships in the night when the fresh tar melts to their uniforms. He eventually became a regimental schoolmaster in the Mediterranean and describes seeing the ship bearing Byron’s body back to England. It’s the complement to Harriette Wilson’s scandalous (affectionate) memoirs of Regency England.

Trucker Ghost Stories, edited by Annie Wilder. I gleefully appropriated this on a visit to the Tor offices, and read it in a New York apartment where plastic sheeting covering a renovation drifted out into the corridor and the elevator rumbled unpredictably, and I rapidly discovered that perhaps I should read it during the day. It also introduced me to my favourite category of helpful highway hauntings, which I like to call “mechanics without borders”.

Kathleen Jennings is a World Fantasy Award-winning illustrator and British Fantasy Award-winning writer based in Brisbane, Australia. 

Her most recent novel is Honeyeater, a subtropical suburban Gothic tale. She has also written Flyaway, Travelogues: Vignettes from Trains in Motion, and Kindling: Stories.

She has an MPhil and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Queensland, and is much too online, mostly as @tanaudel.

Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin.
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