Books like The Plains — picked by fans

This is a book that I never hesitate to go back to because it sums up perfectly a society that wants to find you guilty because of who you are.

As the protagonist searches for the rationale behind his arrest, it is a never-ending spider’s web designed to obscure the answers. The point is that at any moment, your personality, your character, your heartfelt beliefs can be the thing that you are guilty of, even if you have done nothing wrong.

The Trial is the abstraction of totalitarian systems. Freedoms that we think we have can be taken away at a moment’s notice, with no rhyme or reason.

Of all the elements of this story, I feel the love triangle between Eustacia, Wildeve, and Clym is of secondary interest to the environment in which it takes place, which is the weird and lugubrious heathlands.

Perhaps I am unfamiliar with heaths; as far as I know, we don’t have any in the U.S. Hardy describes the British heathlands like the landscape of another planet. Largely flat with shallow hills and vales, it sometimes bursts with floral color, and depending on the weather, it can be beset with raking orange sunlight or gloomy palls of mist.

The locals are fond of lighting evening bonfires, and Hardy’s descriptions of the firelight dancing on their faces are mesmerizing and compellingly suggests an unbroken cultural link with Britain’s pagan past.    

I grew up in a time (1950’s) and place (rural northern Wisconsin) when there was only one television channel—available only in good weather—no internet, and a library not much bigger than an Amtrak roomette.

It was a childhood full of wonder, but with very short horizons. I can’t say I actually read every book in our town’s library, but I came close. Books were my magic carpet to times and places and, more importantly, frames of reference well outside the box I lived in.

How was it that among its several hundred volumes was The Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramahansa Yogananda? I did not discover Bruno Schulz, a Polish author murdered by the Nazis in 1943, until many years later. But having traveled far and experienced much, I was just as shocked when I walked through the door into Schulz’s world in a small Polish town, as though I… show more.

In the forests of France near the Belgian border during World War II, a French soldier is stationed in a bunker with his squad members.

They are ordered not to leave their posts and to be on the lookout for German tanks. Nothing happens for months except a long, snowy winter. The protagonist experiences a sense of liberation in this rural isolation that he relishes. His environment appears timeless, forever suspended in a gray, benevolent limbo filled with snow, mist, and conifers. He wishes his post would never end.

I love this book because it describes an introvert’s ideal environment: ensconcement, privacy, silence, freedom from larger society, and nature. It contains some of the most unique descriptions of splendid aloneness in the woods I have ever read.

This is a cornucopia of the weird and wonderful in Australia: the origins of ‘mateship’, rural remedies, measuring the weather by the behaviour of birds, how ‘Waltzing Matilda’ had its origins in a shearers’ strike, and the bizarre life of the itinerant swagman, including hints on how to make a ‘swag’ and carry it according to the legendary writer Henry Lawson. There are wonderful tales of Australian ‘taciturnity’ and folks living so remotely they still thought Queen Victoria was on the throne in the mid-1900s. It may be light-hearted in tone but this book somehow gets to the heart of what makes Australians unlike anyone else in the world.  

The premise of this short novel sucked me in right away. Missy Wright is shy, unhappy, poor, and a spinster. She is stifled and demeaned by her overbearing sisters and the local small-town gossips where she lives. Despite the fact that Ms. McCullough paints the portrait of a fairly unsavory heroine in the form of Missy, I still found myself rooting for her, wishing with all my might that she would (under the most improbable circumstances) find love. When I write about a heroine in my own novels, I want my readers to see past appearances and the superficial trappings of our society’s ideals. That is what this novel does—it draws you in and makes you believe the impossible is possible if only we can see beyond what is right in front of our faces—that dreams really can come true, for all shapes, sizes, styles, and substance.

This is the diary Australian writer Helen Garner kept during a difficult period of her life: the period when she was married to (and eventually separated from) her third husband.

The writing is exquisite, which is why I love this book. Garner records the intricacies and intimacies of the marriage in such exacting terms. Her observations about marriage and the world leave me breathless. 

The Mammals of Australia is one of the go-to books on my bookshelf. It covers all the mammals in Australia with great pictures, maps, simple summaries, and readable and interesting facts. When it was published, it summarized all the latest information in one place and has been an invaluable reference ever since. Every time I pick it up I find myself reading about some other fascinating species as well as the one I was looking up.

It covers everything from koalas and quolls to dugongs and dingoes, to monotremes and marsupial moles. It covers bats and seals and introduced mammals (although not whales). I wish I had a book like this for every major taxonomic group. 

Remarkable accounts from nineteenth-century newspapers, letters, and diaries reveal that most Australian colonists realized that their invasion of the vast continent whose fringes they inhabited was not unfolding peacefully. Warfare broke out between the white invaders and Aboriginal peoples as the frontier shifted further from the coastline, and it was not until 1870 that the last of the British soldiers left the Australian colonies. Shockingly, over time many descendants of the British chose to forget about Australia’s frontier wars and even denied that frontier conflict had ever taken place. John Connor’s book provides significant insights into the militarized Australian frontier from the time of first settlement in the late eighteenth century through until the late 1830s. It’s an important reminder about the struggles that took place as First Nations people contested the incursion of the British into what became Australia. Connor writes back clearly and concisely against notions of the… show more.

Even before Archibald Edmund Filby embarked on his famous African expeditions, he took advantage of a government-sponsored scheme to migrate to Australia. It was 1921 and his daredevil nature soon had him performing reckless feats as a buckjumper in a popular circus rodeo. Whilst trekking through this vast continent, he embraced the opportunity to become a jockey, photographer, actor, pilot, car salesman, and pearl diver.

Not only was A E Filby a famous British explorer, but he was also my Uncle Archie. What a shame he never saw his memoirs published before his death in 1942.