MY READING LIFE

Bob Carr - Viking - A$35 - NZ $40

It is not often that the Bookman would get excited about the idea of reading a book by an Australian politician but here is an exception.

Longtime former Premier of the state of New South Wales, Bob Car, has written about his lifetime passion for books and reading.

To be released here in NZ next week (I can't wait) this is what Penguin's website has to say about the book.

Welcome to my library. Dog-eared paperbacks falling to pieces. Second-hand books from the stores and barrows of four continents. Modern first editions, some inscribed ...

In My Reading Life, a personal investigation into the nature of democracy, dictatorship, decency and the hardwired human condition, Bob Carr shares his profound love of books and reading - books you've never heard of, books you've always wanted to read, books you will rediscover afresh.

Here are the essential clues to devouring Tolstoy, Proust, Flaubert, Solzhenitsyn and the Epic of Gilgamesh.From the social comedies of Anthony Powell and Patrick White and the tragedies of Sophocles and Shakespeare, to the twentieth century's darkest moment - Auschwitz - powerfully recounted by Primo Levi in If This Is a Man, Carr invites us to discover the most important testaments to the highs and lows of human nature.

He discovers, through his great love of the written word, that decency can survive the greatest tests, giving us all cause for hope.

Bring it on !!

And this from The Australian last weekend:

BOB CARR'S READING LIST
Best writer on 20th-century politics: George Orwell
Most important book of the 20th century: Primo Levi's If This is a Man
Only crime novelist worth reading: James Ellroy
World's best living female novelist: Colleen McCullough
The great novelists: Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Anthony Burgess, Honore de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Favourite historian: Thomas Babington Macaulay, author of The History of England
Favourite historical novelists: Gore Vidal, Colleen McCullough