- The Guardian
- Issue #2139
We asked the Guardian Collective what they’re reading right now. This is what they told us.
Spix’s Macaw: The Race to Save the World’s Rarest Bird by Tony Juniper
By 2000 the world’s rarest bird was extinct, killed off by collectors who sold them to private collections for huge sums of money. The challenge then was to restock the Brazilian Caatinga region by breeding from the Macaws held in private collections held around the world. A fascinating but sad story of what greed is doing to rare but beautiful birds around the world.
GH
Revolutionary Suicide by Huey P Newton
His autobiography and a brilliant insight into the Black Panthers
CB
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
Famous for a series of stories about impossible things. A man who can’t forget anything hides in a cupboard to avoid the torment of learning anything new, a Mayan priest is tortured and locked up with a jaguar, Averroës, the Islamic translator, who’s never seen a play can’t translate an Aristotle book about plays, the Minotaur tries to understand what’s going on. The stories are mind-bending, but they have interesting traces of Borges’ upbringing in a Latin America colonised by feudal Spain, and freshly colonised by the imperialist USA.
Dracula by Bram Stoker
One of those classics that no one actually reads, even though they should. Dracula is a pretty unique book. It’s the bridge between Victorian and modern horror. This means it’s usually a love or hate book for most modern readers. Like most horror stories of its time (including Frankenstein) it’s a slow burn, written as if pieced together from different journal entries and letters. That’s a style I was familiar with beforehand from reading some of HP Lovecraft’s works. What makes Dracula special, at least for me, is the opportunity to notice all the bits and pieces that would go on to be genre-defining tropes to this day. Gothic literature’s blending of themes like the dark, tragic, and supernatural (lifted from Shakespeare and Milton) with the sublime (which carried over from the Romantic writers) is also really interesting in general.
It’s also just a good horror story. The arrival of the ship Demeter is a particularly iconic scene.
As a side note, my liking of Dracula should have been a sign that I would go on to enjoy goth music so much. I’m a big fan of The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Sisters of Mercy, and other classic goth bands. Goth is one of the big three genres that I listen to (the others being George Harrison/Fleetwood Mac/Paul Kelly folk/folk-rock and really old jazz).
CB
Eureka and Beyond: Monty Miller, his own story by Monty Miller, edited by Vic Williams
One of those people whose place in time meant that his life spanned incidents we usually think of as impossibly distant, Monty Miller lived in Victoria through the gold rush, was at the Eureka Stockade, and then lived long enough to be involved in anti-conscription campaigns during the First World War. It’s a Party original too – the book was edited by poet and long-time Communist Party of Australia member Vic Williams, and published by the Socialist Party of Australia in 1988. Miller’s writing is old-fashioned but readable, and the book is a very direct account of what it was like to live in Australia then.
FK
Available from the cpa.org.au shop
