By Ian Warden
Horror! My smug assumption that I must be Barnaby Joyce's intellectual superior (for I am so scholarly and metropolitan while he seems such a bush yokel) has been challenged by the deputy PM's released list of his holiday reading.
He says that he is going to read Albert Camus' The Fall. But I must confess, blushing, to never having read a word by the Algerian-French genius, 1957 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The notion of holiday-reading suggests a chance at last to do some reading that is mind-broadening and even ennobling.Credit: iStock
And in another dimension of this horror Joyce's announced list reveals that both of us are reading some Hemingway over the holidays. An intellectual snob, I have wanted to be as little like Joyce as possible but now find we have Hemingway in common.
But to digress, perhaps it is naïve of us to believe that pollies really are going to do the holiday reading they proclaim. We never expect them to be truthful about anything else. Do they, with these lists, seek to deceive to impress? What if they in fact spend the holidays looking at comics?
Malcolm Turnbull's announced holiday reading looks suspiciousy vast and various. His list may be intended to suggest a voracious and towering intellect. He nominated a heap of big books about government, history, society and Life.
Bill Shorten announced that his impressive-looking holiday reading will include, ominously, (for Shorten already seems Napoleonic enough without studying the man even further), a new biography of Napoleon. Then, perhaps so as to seem appropriately common and working-class, Shorten was also committed to reading these holidays a book about the Collingwood Football Club.
The notion of holiday-reading suggests a chance at last to do some reading that is mind-broadening and even ennobling. This is why we do take an interest in news stories about what our leaders are going to read. We fancy that to know what a leader is reading is to have him or her somehow revealed to us.
So for example when he comes back from the holidays we will expect Joyce to be a softer, gentler, more philosophical man for having read The Fall. It is said to "explore themes of innocence, non-existence, and truth". It is character-building to worry that perhaps one may not exist, a notion that till now may not have crossed Joyce's simple country mind.
Barnaby Joyce is probably still reading old-fashioned books made of paper (his lips moving as he reads, his brow furrowing as he comes across longish words). Meanwhile, more metropolitan than him, I am doing some of my holiday reading on the swish little Kobo e-reader Santa brought me at Christmas.
But after 65 years of book reading I find it a struggle to abandon paper books and my new puppy (thank you the RSPCA!) has got me thinking about this.
For there I was on the sofa re-reading my 1964 edition (Penguin Modern Classics, five shillings and sixpence) of Ernest Hemingway's The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber when suddenly my puppy flung himself into my lap.
Then, with his silky-plump body pressed engagingly against me, he began to gnaw at the edges of the book's cover and pages. He gnawed gently, philosophically, like an old gentleman on a rural Texas porch chewing tobacco and leisurely wondering whether or not to vote for Donald Trump.
This man-and-his-book-and-his-dog camaraderie is rather lovely but the gnawing is a little distracting. I found myself having to re-read some sentences again and again to make sense of them. This in spite of Hemingway's sentences being legendarily stunted. They go like this: "She [Macomber's wife] had a very perfect oval face, so perfect that you expected her to be stupid."
But my point is that my puppy's attentions, leaving the book's edges lightly mangled and prettily perforated, have given the book some added character and sentimental value. I could never have let him munch on my expensive Kobo. Now, though, in this decoratively chewed artefact I have a dear memento of an idyllic Summer afternoon of long ago.
Talking of people with perfectly oval faces (leading you to expect that they will be stupid) I see that Barnaby Joyce's other readings over the holidays will include his re-reading of Orwell's Animal Farm.
Here again we find Joyce doing a surprisingly smart thing, for a hobbledehoy. All of us should be re-reading. "If reading is one of the pleasures, and necessities, of youth, re-reading is one of the pleasures, and necessities, of age", Julian Barnes, 65, has just mused for The Guardian.
"You know more, you understand both life and literature better, and you have the additional interest of checking your younger self against your older self."
Yes, this columnist has just re-read, this time with the puppy's page-perforating help, Patrick White's Voss, finding it a very different novel from the one I first read when I was a boyish, flaxen-haired undergraduate.
How I hated the book then! Now, mature at last, I can see it is a marvel. I gave many a "Gosh!" of awe at White's finesse. Each "Gosh!" waking the sweet ugly mongrel ("He's going to lower the tone of the neighbourhood!" my pure-bred wife enthuses, looking forward to it) snoozing in my lap