I'm Ruby Jones and you're listening to seven Am. Marie Carty is a writer, broadcaster, and former panelist on the ABC's First Tuesday Book Club. I've spent years listening to her and reading her work. Mariek's passion and enthusiasm for the books she loves is contagious. But she's also direct and unapologetic when a book isn't for her, so you always know that when she recommends something, it's going to
be worth your time. I couldn't be more thrilled to be bringing you her favorite books of the year, a ready made list of what to read this summer. Her list starts with a sprawling novel about friendship and love and winds its way through so many other huge themes grief, violence, war, and how the Internet has ruined us. Today, Marie Carty with her five favorite books of twenty twenty five. It's Tuesday, December twenty three. MARIEK.
Welcome to the show.
It's great to have you here, and I am very excited to talk about books with you.
I'm so excited to chat books with you.
Okay, so tell me about the first one that you want to talk about.
Where do I want to start. I think I might start with Eric Pukner's Dream State. It's a big novel. It is fantastic. It's a novel about love. It's a novel set over decades, which is one of my kind of favorite ways to tell a narrative fiction. But it's one of those ones that I went, Oh, my god, has anyone heard of this fabulous? Because no one I know is talking about it, And as a film and television writer, I went, oh, I wonder if someone's got
the rights, I'll google it. And he's been featured on Oprah's Book Club, the rights have been picked up by Apple, it's been I don't know, directed by Emerald Fanel or something. It's one of those it's not a secret. It's not a secret. I think it made a bigger mark in the States than it did here because it doesn't seem to be a novel that amongst my big reader friends they have picked up. But it is so fabulous and
everyone who's picked it up since adores it. It begins on the precipice of a young couple about to get married, Cec and Charlie. It's a book set in Montana, mostly at Charlie's family holiday house. Charlie's best friend Garrett picks cec up from the airport for the wedding, and thus begins a journey between these three characters that spans decades and love and loss and grief and children, and showing us that who you are as a young person is
not set in stone. It shows change through characters, but it's one of those books that shows change through climate and environments so beautifully and subtly. I think often cli fi can really beat us over the head, particularly people who are interested in the degradation of climate. This is handled so beautifully and subtly. You watch the environment kind of fall apart as these lives fall apart. It's just the most beautiful epic novel.
I also love an epic novel, something that really gives you the chance to follow people cross generations and across lifetimes. One of my recent favorites was The Beasting by Paul Murray Ah from a couple of years ago. But tell me a bit more about the ambition of this novel, because it begins, I think with a kind of sort of classic set up. There's a wedding being planned, there's hints of a love triangle, but it moves far beyond.
That it does. And I mean just I adored the Beasting as well, and I do think there is a Venn diagram here that does cross over the corrections and all of those books that are about big family dynamics, and this, I suppose is about a love triangle, as you said, and really unfolding these characters over time and the way their lives overlap, the way their loves overlap.
I guess I love watching characters grow because it shows us as we're growing and all that what we always feel, we're fixed in a moment wherever we are right now is who we are, is what we feel, is what our love life will always be like, what our marriage will always be like. And I think Eric so grandly sweeps through that in a way that gets you into the minute shave of these characters' minds and the absolute stumbles they make, the missteps, the way they hurt each other.
But you know, we're all growing old together. What a gift it is to grow old together and to know people over the course of time and all your misspent youth and the bad decisions you made and the chaos of your youth. I think he does it so deftly and beautifully and in such a way that holds up a mirror. I just thought it was such a wonderful book.
Tell me about your second pick, Well, I.
Think I want to talk about Shealdine Brooks Memorial Days, which is a nonfiction of Geraldine Brooks. Oh one of my favorite wonderful and it's a book about grief, which can be a very private thing and mostly is a very internal thing. And I always appreciate writers that we admire turning themselves inside out and putting that grief on the page. Shelaldine Brooks husband Tony Howitz, who was a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. They'd been married for thirty five
years American. He died very, very suddenly in DC on Memorial Day. That's the title, and it's a real interrogation of the nonlinear aspect of grief. It really does show the kind of really overworked medical system and how the humanity sometimes gets lost in those calls, and how she receives that information, how she needs to access her husband's body. But you see her in that fog of grief and just going into organization mode, which is what a lot
of people do in those circumstances. Tony was a public figure. She has to arrange all the public memorials as well as the funeral and the casket and all those things. But she also looks at other cultures and how they grieve, the rituals of grieving, which I think she doesn't feel
like she properly went through a ritual of grief. So three years after Tony's death, she goes to Flinda's Island, which is a place they've visited together off the coast of Tasmania, and she looks at the history of Flinda's Island and the Aboriginal history, the first nations, massacres that have happened, and she really elegantly uses those kind of practices to understand her own grief. They don't feel tacked on,
they don't feel like platitudes. It feels like she is trying to understand grief and love and loss through opening herself up to the world and opening herself up to a sense of place and purpose. Grief is chaotic and clumsy and frantic and feverish, and she feels all those things she's lost in a fog. But ultimately she tries to educate herself as much as one can to understand this unimaginable thing that's happened.
Coming up, an old friend sends Marique the book he's just written. What could possibly go wrong?
Okay? Number three, Well, I think I want to talk about VJ. Karana's debut novel, The Passenger Seat. I've done VJ for years. We were both at Triple J at the same time a million years ago. He's a brilliant human being, a kind interesting man. This is his first novel, and he emailed me he said, can I send it to you? And I went, okay. You know, I always quite nervous when a friend says they're going to send you their book. It is unbelievable. It is such a
stunning novel. It's about two young men, Teddy and Adam, who they've disaffected. They go on a road trip together. Look, I know it sounds kind of trying to go it's about toxic masculinity, because isn't everything these days, But it is a really subtle interrogation of all the forks in the road that young men can go down, all the decisions that they might have made at different points in their life, how they end up in this quite claustrophobic van together and what that trip looks like. I think
I've read it in three days. I couldn't put it down. I kept gasping. It's very shocking, it's very sobering. But VJ makes some incredible choices narratively, including a final chapter which was the most stunning creative to see I think editorial decision on his part to do so. Yeah, I'm still awed by it.
And Kanana has said that this novel is based on a real event, which I speak about without I suppose getting into too much detail, but a real violent event from twenty nineteen and when that happened.
There are a lot of questions about why, about the motive that the people involved could have possibly had for what unfolded. So to what extent does this book, I suppose, try to answer that question of why violence happens, and does it provide any answers.
I think it's really deeply insightful. I mean, obviously I often access my social education through fiction. I mean obviously I read a lot of nonfiction and political news and all that kind of stuff, But sometimes those dance think pieces about toxic masculinity and why young men do the things that they do, and you know, I fade out a bit, whereas this is the most incisive view. These
two young men come from different family homes. There's a great line from the book saying approaching the wrong person with open hands can be fatal, and that speaks to a lot of different characters in the book. But I think it really searingly hones in on what it is for someone who is a little lost, who is looking for answers, who is standing there with open hands, and
they unfortunately take a step in the wrong direction. So it's interesting that you say, I mean, it is the kernel of it a real life event, but there's quite a few real life events that we're not going to mention in here that I'm remember saying of VJ, or is this based on? And so I think he's pulled together a lot of pieces of a lot of familiar tragedies that have young men at the heart of them and just kind of woven them into a really compelling story.
And would you call it an Australian book because VJ, I mean, what's more Australian than working at Triple J. But he he's spent much of his career overseas, obviously in the UK in Europe. So is there anything about this that feels unique to Australia or is it more of a universal experience.
It's so interesting because it's a road trip and he writes about landscape really beautifully, and I guess, growing up in Australia, my head immediately places in an Australian landscape. But it's set really in America. The boys call their mother's mom and they're heading on a road trip with the intent to end up in Alaska. But you don't
feel completely melded in America. I think there is unfortunately a universality to these two young men and the decisions that they make, and I think the landscape becomes a part of that. So really great book for anyone wanting, as you said, to understand why some young men make the decisions they do. I think this is more interesting to me than listening to, say Joe Rogan's podcast. I'm sure that's true again number four, So number four, I've
gone nonfit. I've gone Peter Beinart's Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, which is a book that was recommended to me. He toured Australia this year. I think he did quite a few events, did a few in conversations. This book is really interesting. It's obviously from a progressive Jewish perspective that really speaks to Jewish history, Jewish identity, how a lot of Jewish people wrestle with a war
that is being waged ostensibly in their name. I found it really interesting because it begins with a note to my former friend and Peter speaking about some a friend that he's lost over this issue, which as we know, is hugely emotional for people, and people get very distressed about it. I've lost some friends over this. I was looking to educate myself. I was looking to understand different voices. Obviously, there's some great new books by Palestinian writers this year.
Sarah m Salle and Randa abdel Fatar have both got books out. I found this one, Peter's book to be incredibly informative, incredibly compassionate. He has said, there's a great quote what he said, by reading these words, you have agreed to walk with me. And I think that is such an invitational way to begin this book. You sit down a new walk with him and you listen. I gave it to my father, who had some quite different views than me on what was happening in Gaza, and
he found it very moving as well. And I think I would encourage anybody who is looking to have more gentle conversations or ways to access this information to pick it up.
Coming up a book so violently disgusting, you may want to hose down afterwards. Okay, an incredible mix here so far, do you have a fifth pick?
So the reason I'm interested in this book is my friend Tase said, you have to read this book. I found it so violently disgusting. I wanted to be hosed down after reading it. And I'm like, I'm listening and so like a moth to a flame, of course, I went to this book and it's Tony Tulla Timody's Rejection. It's a series of short fictional essays from really gross, unlikable characters. I saw a great comment on it saying it's like being inside the Internet, and I think that's
exactly what it's like. It covers in cells. It's really violent characters. I mean, it's cringe culture. It speaks to how isolated and how set in our worldview we get when we sit alone with a device. I found near the end of the book, he started to doubt himself. There's two pieces at the end of the book where I thought, you're second guessing yourself now, and you're trying to out clever yourself and get in front of the
criticism that you're going to get for this book. And I thought that diminished it quite a lot for me. I thought he showed the puppet master's strings, and he showed his self consciousness about all the bold work he was trying to do, and I thought it really took away from the abject disgusting power that he'd put in the previous essays.
Well, I haven't decided yet whether or not I'm going to read that one, but the other four on your list sound like excellent choices for the summer. Marie, thank you so much for your time. Thank you.
Ruby a big fan