Kate Evans

I think it's, you know, it could be an American tradition in a way because he's not someone that I've read, but, you know, like Thomas Pynchon and these sort of writers often have, I think, silly names.

They ring alarm bells in my head when I'm reading them because I can't take the book as seriously.

But these names in this book, and because Strout does it so well,

That didn't bother me.

And I found these names exotic and good, very American, but they didn't tip into silliness.

And so I found all of that fine.

The Boundless Deep by Richard Holmes, which is a biography of Alfred Tennyson, the 19th century English poet.

He's looking at the early career of Tennyson up to about 1850 when Tennyson's 40, almost 50.

You know, Tennyson is a poet whose, probably his reputation has gone down quite a lot over the last 50 years.

50, 60 years, but he sort of resurrects the early Tennyson, not the poet laureate of empire that he becomes in the latter half of the 19th century, but it's the young man at Cambridge writing his early poetry who's a far more radical person than what he turns in to be.

So it's concentrating on early Tennyson as a poet, and at the same time, and this is something that Holmes has done a lot over the last 20 years, is wind in scientifically

discovery through botany astronomy the invention of the telescope the invention of the microscope and how this brought into this crisis of god and man in the early part of the 19th century and how it affected the poets he's a really good writer he's he's light he doesn't get bogged down and he's really good on literary criticism and looking into he knows the poets really well

Well, I recommend David Maloof's Jono.

It has a special resonance with me because he was a Brisbane author.

I was born and raised here.

So was Maloof.

And I read Jono when I was in school in the mid-70s, early 70s, because the book was set in Brisbane.

And the books, I wasn't from a family of readers, but, you know, I'd encountered literature the first time in secondary school.

And so, you know, like we'd read Dickens, we'd read

Salinger, we'd read The Great Gatsby, and suddenly to have the next book that came in the English course around the age of 15 or 16 that I was, for it to be a Brisbane novel, so beautifully written, with great sensitivity, but also covered a time of