I was really sick for the first half of 2010.  My tonsils were angry pustular sores, my liver shut down and my brain crashed and re-started more often than my 2005 MacBook Pro. On the bright side, I got a lot of reading done. I usually stick closely to non-fiction hard copy books, but my extended convalescence broadened my reading horizons.

I read my first zine in April (Gutterslug, as mentioned below). It blew my mind, put it back together again and opened it to the wonderful world of D.I.Y. publishing.  Since then, I’ve put together three zines of my own and participated in at least three other collaborative zines. I’ve also met a lot of cool people in the process – there are fewer dickheads in D.I.Y. publishing than there are in D.I.Y. music.

I also stopped resisting the idea of e-books when I ran out of hard-copy books during a hospital stay in June. The convenience of reading books on my phone is fantastic, especially during boring bits at music festivals when usually I’d have to deer with jeering bogans for pulling out a book.

SO: Here are the things I’ve read during the 2010 calendar year that have enlightened, entertained, changed and stuck with me. I hope you enjoy the list.

Joshua Dysart – ‘The Unknown Soldier’ Vol 1 & 2

I love The Phantom, and grew up reading and collecting kilos worth of Frew’s Phantom comics. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve really resented how the current writers and publishers of Phantom comics have kept him camp and separated from the modern world and then problems within it.

Vertigo’s new graphic novels of the Unknown Soldier could be a worthy stand-in for the Phantom, fighting the real problems plaguing Africa at the moment, with his injured face swathed in bandages. Here’s the official summary:

Welcome to Northern Uganda. In 2002, it’s a place where tourists are hacked to death with machetes, 12-year-olds with AK-47s wage war, and celebrities futilely try to get people to care. Moses Lwanga is a pacifist doctor caught at the center of this. But when his life is threatened, Moses suddenly realizes he knows how to kill all too well. What is this voice telling him the only way to fix what’s wrong with the country is by slaughtering those responsible? And what is Moses’ connection to past bandage-wrapped warrior?

The series has been cancelled due to lack of readership (BOOOOO!), with the last trade paperback collection due out mid-2011.

Check it out here.

Bizarrism

I picked up the latest issue of Bizarrism while raiding the  Smells Like Zines distro library and have been hunting for all the other issues since (I’m only missing issues 1 – 4 now). Bizarrism is the brainchild of Sydneysider Chris Mikul, and each issue is chock full of stories about freaks, weirdos, evil, cults, dictators and anything else odd and interesting.

Check it out here.

Gutterslug Issue 1 & 2

I purchased Issue 1 of this zine from Rockinghorse Records whilst on a Friday night drunken shopping spree.  I read it while waiting for my train home and was utterly gripped by author Emily’s stories of living on the street,  in homeless shelters and tonnes of other unsavory adventures. It’s a harrowing and compelling read told in an honest and good-humoured way,  and Issue Two is equally as good.
Buy it now.

Cory Doctorow – ‘A Place So Foreign and eight more’

I was stuck in hospital with nothing to read. Browsing the web on my ancient Nokia N95, I searched for stuff to read that my phone could handle, and the free Creative Commons  e-book version (containing 6 of the 9 stories in the hard copy version) of  “A Place So Foreign…” came up.
I’m hesitant to classify the short stories in this book as sci-fi, mainly because Doctorow focuses more on the characters than the settings. ‘A Place So Foreign…’ has stories about aliens that hoard junk and Superman as a nice Jewish Canadian boy.

You can download the same version of the book that I did here.

Rosie Boycott – ‘Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes’

Rosie Boycott’s book about her misspent youth (A Nice Girl Like Me) is one of my all-time favourite books, and I’ve been slowly tracking down her other work.

‘Spotted Pigs…’ begins as a story about Boycott and her husband Charlie starting up a hobby farm in rural England, and ends as a polemic on the impact gigantic chain stores and supermarkets are having on rural communities and farmers themselves.

I felt like I was learning about these issues with Boycott, not being dictated to by an all-knowing being. The chapter where she takes pigs that she has hand-raised since they were piglets to be slaughtered is a highlight of the book and an excellent example of description.

Pick it up here.

Andrew Mueller – ‘Rock and Hard Places’

Aussie-born journalist Andrew Mueller couldn’t decide whether he wanted to be a rock journalist or a foreign correspondent, so he freelanced doing both. From hanging out with Radiohead in America to covering the aftermath of war in Sarajevo, he writes with insight and a great sense of humour.
This book is a collection of his work over the past couple of decades, and I especially enjoyed the forewords at the beginning of each article. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

See more here.

Anna Krien – ‘Into The Woods: The Battle for Tasmania’s Forests’

Compelled to investigate after seeing this footage, Anna Krien spent well over a year talking to loggers, protestors, locals, premiers and other major stakeholders in the Tasmanian forestry industry  in an attempt to figure out what hell was actually going on in an industry sacrificing old-growth forests in the name of profit and convenience.

She hiked, camped, was followed by dodgy people, slept in her car and contracted food poisoning and ended up producing one of the best journalistic works of my generation.

Pick it up here.

Rosamond Siemon – ‘The Mayne Inheritance‘

I love it when local history is told in an interesting way. Rosamond Siemon’s book  about one of the most important families in Brisbane’s history is fascinating, quick paced and a must-read for anyone interested in how Brisbane got to be where it is today. Here’s the official blurb:

The Mayne Inheritance tells the story of Patrick Mayne, a young man who migrated to Australia from his impoverished background in County Tyrone, Ireland in 1841. He soon moved to the infant town of Brisbane where he found work as a slaughterman in an abattoir. In 1848 a sawyer, Robert Cox, was savagely murdered at Kangaroo Point and a considerable amount of money was presumed to be stolen.

The next year, Patrick Mayne married and, despite being a poorly-paid labourer, bought his own butcher’s shop in what is now Brisbane’s central business district. He then expanded his business empire through investing cleverly and soon became one of Brisbane’s richest men. Patrick became one of the aldermen on the first Brisbane Municipal Council in 1859.

He died in 1865 from an unspecified illness, and during his dying days confessed to the murder of Robert Cox. He left behind a widow and five children who had to survive in a hostile colonial environment which ostracised them for being the son of a confessed murderer. The second half of the book deals mainly with the lives of these children, none of whom married, and in particular James O’Neil Mayne who used the wealth inherited from his father to become a philanthropist. His most notable deed was funding the purchase of 270 acres (1.1 km²) of land at St Lucia for the University of Queensland. This spacious riverside site is still the main campus of the University.

Pick it up here.