Geordie Williamson

Discover more great ABC podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.

This is an ABC podcast.

Yeah, we managed to get two kids, two cats, a dog and our worldly goods across a continent in the middle of a plague, just in time for the build-up.

All the locals think we're quite insane, but we're loving it so far.

I think that it is the thing, the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle that sets something in motion.

I must say that I adore the details.

That collection of essays by Teagan is just the work of a glorious and proper reader.

And it was a book that recalled me to this really crucial notion, which I first encountered in the work of Nabokov.

who talked about a crow sitting on a fence.

But then when you had the crow extend its feathers and fan them out, it was that detail of noticing the fanned feather that quickened what could just be a few words on a page into something that lived and breathed.

So really, it's all in the details.

Conan Doyle is built on that kind of, that reef of noticing the little details.

But for me, it's Georges Simenon, the Belgian-French crime writer.

He's so good on the sensory details, particularly the smell.

And all you have to do with his novels is open it up, one of his maigres, and you're in Paris, and it's so redolent.

So for me, yes, it's not about the plots, which are all uniformly, you know, kind of tidy and cleaned up by the end of, you know, 120 pages.

But the sensory kind of universe remains.

It's really hard to think back because, you know, for all of us who read for a living, what I'm reading at the moment is Hermione Lee's

long-awaited biography of Tom Stoppard.

And I think for me, in much the same way that for Tegan, it's been a restful read, her choice.