War on Waste

Very productive reading day.

In between the Irish financial crisis and Judith Butler at college, and some stupid event for shmoozers at work, I got through the whole of The Waste Land, and Tomorrow When The War Began, by John Marsden.

The Waste Land I shall skip. I will not pretend to even have the faintest idea what’s going on in it, and I’ve read it about ten times. But then my lecturer hasn’t a cue either, so I’m okay with that.

Obviously I missed something fairly major as far as TWTWB is concerned, because until I watched the film with my little brothers I’d never heard of it. Apparently though, according to Google, this book is a very big deal. It’s a recommended secondary school text in countries the world over and in Sweden it was doled out to every schoolchild of appropriate age in an attempt to promote literacy.

God, in my school they just gave us fifty pence book vouchers.

Anyway, in its’ native Australia this book is like, I don’t know, Goodnight Mister Tom, or Under the Hawthorn Tree if you went to school in Ireland. It’s a rite of passage type of affair.

And deservedly so I reckon. The book is pacy, believable and boasts a likeable narrator in Ellie, our eye on the world.  The plot concerns a group of Aussie teens who head into the bush for an end-of-summer camp out (which is soooo what I did with my mates at school) only for the country to be invaded by unnamed forces while they’re off cosseted in the wilderness. The novel then becomes an account of the friends’ attempt to win back the freedom of their homeland, as well as their fight to stay alive.

The book is the first in a series of seven, the second of which is due to be reprinted in January-the books first appeared in the nineties and are widely out of print in the UK and Ireland now, which is a pity; I’m actually quite excited to read part two. The film adaption is also quite good if you’re not feeling up to a whole novel this late in the week.

In other news, I'm waiting to get my paws on Susan Hills' The Betrayal of Trust, which is out this week. I'm really looking forward to this, so stay tuned for a review early next week.