{"id":112498,"date":"2019-11-08T10:26:08","date_gmt":"2019-11-07T23:26:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/?p=112498"},"modified":"2019-11-11T11:25:24","modified_gmt":"2019-11-11T00:25:24","slug":"garry-disher-author-of-peace-on-the-trouble-with-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/2019\/11\/08\/garry-disher-author-of-peace-on-the-trouble-with-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Garry Disher, author of Peace, on the trouble with books"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Peace<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Garry Disher has published over 50 highly praised and widely translated books in a range of genres: crime thrillers, literary\/general novels, short-story collections, YA\/children\u2019s novels, and writers\u2019 handbooks. His latest book is <\/em>Peace<\/a><\/strong>, the follow-up to the highly regarded and prize-winning crime novel <\/em>Bitter Wash Road<\/a><\/strong>, and we have limited signed copies of it!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, Garry’s on the blog to talk about his love of books. Read on!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Books keep me grounded, at peace. I feel twitchy if I don\u2019t have one to hand. I know that a waiting-room magazine will keep me up to date on Hollywood baby bumps or reveal how for an exquisite $50,000 I can makeover my kitchen (who does my dentist think his patients are?), but I always take a book with me. Dentist; chiropractor; doctor. Train, bus and plane trips. Waiting for visitors to arrive. And purely for relaxation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Books have also brought me pain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was too young to read my grandfather\u2019s collected volumes of C.E.W. Bean\u2019s history of Australia\u2019s involvement in the war of 1914\u201318, but not to illustrate them with coloured pencils: bayonets going in, flames erupting from gun barrels and other mayhem inspired by the photographs. I remember my patrician grandfather towering above me, gravely shocked and disappointed. He got his revenge: whenever he drove \u2018out east\u2019 to check on his sheep (the landscape you\u2019ll find in my novels Bitter Wash Road<\/em> and Peace<\/em>), I was invited along to open and shut the gates\u2014dozens of them. And Bean\u2019s war history? My grandfather left it to me in his will.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later, when I could read, I chose reading ahead of doing my chores during the long summers of the wheat and wool country. Hiding in the tree house or the hayshed with a book while my poor mother searched high and low, needing me to bucket bore water to her struggling roses. I\u2019d feel guilty, but not guilty enough. Hooked; drugged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pain? Pocket money docked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the age of twelve I was reading my parents\u2019 adult titles, for young adult literature didn\u2019t exist back then. Hornblower<\/em>. The Cruel Sea<\/em>. The Ship that Died of Shame<\/em>. Alistair MacLean. Room at the Top<\/em>. Lady Chatterley\u2019s Lover<\/em>. Mostly I didn\u2019t know what was going on. Then I discovered the James Bond novels. One Glenelg holiday, while police cadets waded through the drained boat basin searching for the bodies of the missing Beaumont children, my father found me reading From Russia With Love<\/em>. “You do know life\u2019s not like that, son?” he said worriedly. It was never my desire to disappoint or betray him, but I had to keep reading those novels\u2014with the stealth of a secret agent after that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Peace<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I spent 1987 in the hills outside Florence, writing The Stencil Man<\/em>, visiting galleries, hearing William Trevor read at the British Institute, and haunting an English-language second-hand bookshop. I\u2019d buy an Ed McBain, an Alice Munro or a Naipaul, read them and trade them in for something else. One time I\u2019d withdrawn cash in 500-lire notes from the ATM before taking the train in, and used one as an absent-minded bookmark while finishing Sophie\u2019s Choice<\/em> \u2026 I hope it was someone like me, a young, penniless sojourner, who next bought that book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back in Australia, writing history textbooks to supplement my fiction writing income, I formed attachments with other young historians. Lunch, informal study sessions, books borrowed and swapped. Attachments. My first true love still has my first edition of Morris and Macartney\u2019s Australian Literature<\/em>. She\u2019s never returned it. I\u2019ve never asked for it. Books (and CDs) can sit uneasily on the fault lines of a relationship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Books matter. To give a book, receive a book, is significant. I\u2019m always giving away copies of my novels, often to people who don\u2019t read but who\u2019ve done me a favour above and beyond the call of duty. Generally they\u2019re bemused\u2014like the mechanic to whom I gave a Wyatt novel for getting my wreck of a car going again. But he read it, and it resonated with him: by chance I\u2019d used his wife\u2019s (unusual) surname for one of the characters.
Other recipients have been downright suspicious. A few years ago I toured US bookshops with an American author. She did most of the driving, and as a thank you I presented her with a copy of the US edition of Chain of Evidence<\/em> after our first gig in a San Francisco bookshop. \u2018Did you just steal that?\u2019 she demanded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And sometimes a book will sneak up and bite you on the bum. An email from a concerned reader, saying, “On page 144 of Under the Cold Bright Lights<\/em> it should be Pia wearing the backpack, not Neve.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I swear I read the proofs three times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Signed copies of Peace<\/em> are available while stocks last – get yours here<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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