After a busy day outdoors yesterday, I thought I'd better sit it out today and stay close by the fireplace while Padma went into town for lunch with friends and some shopping. I was well into reading Salman Rushdie's memoirs when Padma's message came in: "I'm in Vinnies. Are you interested in any of these books?"
"The Hunter" was also made into a great movie with Sam Neil and is about a mercenary who's sent to the Tasmanian wilderness by a military biotech company to hunt down the last of the Tasmanian tigers in order to thwart competing organisations from getting their DNA. I'd just read something in the news about TIGRR Lab, a research centre focused on piecing together the DNA of the thylacine, and having neither seen the movie - I will now! - nor read the book - I will now! , it was a "yes".
"What You Can See From Here" is set in a small village in Germany in which whenever someone called Selma dreams of an okapi, someone is about to die. That would explain the picture of an okapi on the front cover but little else, so I was intrigued and gave it another "yes".
John McGahern is considered a master of the Irish tradition of the short story, of which several collections were published as well as "Love of the World", a collection of non-fiction essays, so that's "yes" again.
Peter Mews' second novel "Bright Planet" begins with the quest for the inland sea that the early Australians had an obsession with, and seems to have borrowed from Patrick White’s "Voss" which is based on a true story of Leichhardt’s explorations which had a similar imperative to find something in the middle of the continent. "Yes" again.
And while I was considering all this, and wondering how Padma had such a good idea of what books I'm interested in, a photo of John Banville's "The Sea" popped up on the Whatsapp screen: "What about this one?"
Another Irish writer, and it's not even St Patrick's Day! I'd seen the trailer of the movie they'd made from the book, and was sufficiently interested to send back a fifth "yes" which should just about cover all my reading needs for all of next week, and all for the princely sum of ten dollars.
