As much as I love reading fiction, sometimes you crave something that gives your brain more to chew on. Here are three non-fiction books I enjoyed during 2024.
Wifedom by Anna Funder, Penguin, 2023
Anna Funder has the gift of transforming highly detailed research into a readable whole. Her thesis in this work is that the writer George Orwell and his biographers have largely overlooked or discounted the important contribution of his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy.
As a well-educated women Eileen worked in a variety of jobs during their marriage while at the same time working on Orwell’s drafts, typing and retyping, proofreading, and providing feedback. In particular, Funder argues that one of Eileen’s poem (‘End of the Century, 1984’) written in 1934 dealt with a similar futuristic vision as Orwell’s novel ‘1984’, and that the writing style of his novel ‘Animal Farm’ can be seen as reflecting Eileen’s own wit and humour.
There are of course contrary opinions to that of Funder and, while it’s hard by the end of the book to have much sympathy for Orwell as a man, I think his quality as a writer is undiminished. For me the most compelling parts of the book were the descriptions of Eileen’s courage during their time in Spain during the civil war, and her physical labours and deprivations during their time living in the cold countryside. For a clever and skilled woman who could have taken other life paths, it was hard to understand how she could throw herself on the pyre of his success. He was indeed very fortunate to have her.
Into the rip by Damien Cave (‘How the Australian way of risk made my family stronger, happier … and less American’), Scribner Australia, 2021
I ran across this book through a short YouTube clip from an interview with the author.
The book is part memoir, part commentary on the author’s experience on moving to Australia from America with a young family. Since the family lived near the beach, they were intrigued by the Nippers program run by Surf Lifesaving Australia. Risk, particularly with regard to their children, was something to avoid in their previous life. In Australia, risk was the very thing that their children were being introduced to. The book is a quick and easy read, and offers a fascinating glimpse into ways our distinctive Australian way of viewing the world.
The only plane in the sky: The oral history of 9/11 by Garrett M. Graff (full cast recording (15 hrs), Octopus Publishing Group, 2019
Every September since the events of 9/11 we are provided with documentaries and memorials. Each year I swear I’m sick of it, but I find myself drawn to it. I think many of us remember where we were when it happened. Watching the events unfold on live television broadcasts seared these distant events into our consciousnesses.
‘The Only Plane in the Sky’ (2019) is an audiobook collection of 500 oral accounts collected in interviews by author, journalists, and researchers on a two year project. The interviews were condensed and edited for clarity, but remain uninterpreted: pure oral history. For the audiobook, in order to achieve the highest audio quality production, the accounts are narrated by actors selected for similarity with the original speaker.
The collection is large and too much to absorb in a continuous way. I still haven’t listened to them all, but the chapter segmentation is easy to follow and I found I could dip in and out to follow where my interest lies. This collection isn’t for everyone, but it is a fascinating resource.
