WHAT I€™M READING
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday December 18, 2009
Sophie Cunningham, author and editorSophie Cunningham says there are some hazards to reading when literature is your work, passion and pastime. "Often I read Australian fiction because we might be thinking of running an article on it, we might be about to launch the book or I'm judging it, so the critical part of my brain is on. I sometimes find it hard to relax and enjoy it, which is why I've always got something a bit lighter on the go as well," she says.Her definition of "light" covers Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, in which each instalment is more than 600 pages of organised crime, political intrigue, murder, rape, incest and torture."It is nice to read something that's a page-turning thriller but has great gender politics, contemporary characters you can relate to. It's a very political drama." She describes the character Lisbeth Salander as "the best female heroine of a thriller that I've ever come across".Despite receiving more than 100 submissions a week for the literary journal Meanjin, Cunningham is still impressed by the quality and range of Australian writing."What I've been struck by in the Australian fiction I've really enjoyed has been that it hasn't been conventional forms." Among those has been Steven Amsterdam's Things We Didn't See Coming, "which is kind of discontinuous narrative. You could either see it as short stories or a novel." Also, Nam Le's The Boat and Tom Cho's Look Who's Morphing. "Cho's very playful at the same time as making some really interesting comments about culture," she says."The other one that fits into this slightly unusual form isJ.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year, which has three different panels on each page; it's like there are three different stories going on at once. I think some people found it a bit much but I actually really enjoyed it."Anne FullertonThe summer issue of Meanjin Quarterly is out this month.
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