Readings.com.au: VCE English 2009

Birds And Other Plays: Knights Peace Birds Assembly Women

Oh wings are splendid things, make no mistake:
they really help you rise in the world.'

These plays, written over forty years, contain Aristophanes' trademark bawdy comedy and dazzling verbal agility. In The Birds, two frustrated Athenians join with the birds to build the utopian city of 'Much Cuckoo in the Clouds'. The Knights is a venomous satire on Cleon, the prominent Athenian demagogue, while The Assembly women considers the war of the sexes, as the women of Athens infiltrate the all-male Assembly in disguise. The lengthy conflict with Sparta is the subject of Peace, inspired by the hope of a settlement in 421 BC, and Wealth reflects the economic catastrophe that hit Athens after the war, as the god of riches is depicted as a ragged, blind old man.

The lively translations by David Barrett and Alan H. Sommerstein capture the full humour of the plays. The introduction examines Aristophanes life and times, and the comedy and poetry of his works. This volume also includes an introductory note for each play.

Home

A story of homecoming, this absorbing novel opens with city bred young lawyer Candice as she sets out on her first visit to her ancestral homeland. She arrives at "the place where the rivers meet", the long abandoned camp of the Eualeyai where in 1919 her great grandmother Garibooli was abducted. The twentieth century falls away and Garibooli, renamed Elizabeth by the authorities, takes up the story of Candice's Aboriginal family. In her short lifetime as a teenaged servant then as wife and mother, Garibooli never finds her way back "to the place where the rivers meet". Her children follow with their stories, each revealing the impact of an orphanage home on broken families and the consequences of having dark skin in 1950s Australia. It is in connecting the histories of her scattered ancestors that Candice will find her way home.

Man for All Seasons

A Man for All Seasons dramatises the conflict between King Henry VIII and Sir Thomas More. It depicts the confrontation between church and state, theology and politics, absolute power and individual freedom. Throughout the play Sir Thomas More's eloquence and endurance, his purity, saintliness and tenacity in the face of ever-growing threats to his beliefs and family, earn him status as one of modern drama's greatest tragic heroes.The play was first staged in 1960 at the Globe Theatre in London and was voted New York's Best Foreign Play in 1962. In 1966 it was made into an Academy Award-winning film by Fred Zinneman starring Paul Scofield.

Caucasian Chalk Circle

The play is a parable inspired by the Chinese play Chalk Circle. Written at the close of World War II, the story is set in the Caucasus mountains of Georgia, and retells the tale of King Solomon and a child claimed by two mothers. A chalk circle is metaphorically drawn around a society misdirected in its priorities. Brecht's statements about class are cloaked in the innocence of a fable that whispers insistently to the audience.

Sometimes Gladness

The sixth edition of Sometimes Gladness includes twenty-five new poems written between 1997 and 2005. Bruce Dawe is one of Australia’s most acclaimed poets and the recipient of numerous awards.

Hard Times

Coketown is dominated by the figure of Mr Thomas Gradgrind, school headmaster and model of Utilitarian success. Feeding both his pupils and his family with facts, he bans fancy and wonder from young adult minds. As a consequence his obedient daughter Louisa marries the loveless businessman and 'bully of humanity' Mr Bounderby, and his son Tom rebels to become embroiled in gambling and robbery. And, as their fortunes cross with those of free-spirited circus girl Sissy Jupe and victimised weaver Stephen Blackpool, Gradgrind is eventually forced to recognise the value of the human heart in an age of materialism and machinery.

This edition of Hard Times is based of the text of the first volume publication of 1854. Kate Flint's introduction sheds light on the frequently overlooked character interplay in Dickens's great critique of Victorian industrial society.

Shark Net

Aged six, Robert Drewe moved with his family from Melbourne to Perth, the world's most isolated city – and proud of it. This sun-baked coast was innocently proud, too, of its tranquillity and friendliness.

Then a man he knew murdered a boy he also knew. The murderer randomly killed eight strangers – variously shooting, strangling, stabbing, bludgeoning and hacking his victims and running them down with cars – an innocent Perth was changed forever.

In the middle-class suburbs which were the killer's main stalking grounds, the mysterious murders created widespread anxiety and instant local myth. 'The murders and their aftermath have both intrigued me and weighed heavily on me for three decades. To try to make sense of this time and place, and of my own childhood and adolescence, I had, finally, to write about it.'

The result is The Shark Net, a vibrant and haunting memoir that reaches beyond the dark recesses of murder and chaos to encompass their ordinary suburban backdrop.

Beverley Farmer Collected Stories

Beverley Farmer's reputation as a deeply sensitive and lyrical writer was established with her short stories.

Her two collections *Milk* and *Home Time* are included here with five uncollected stories and others which were part of A Body of Water. The stories in this richly rewarding collection unfold in the order in which they were written.

Line: A Story of the Burma Railway

This is a story on two levels; it is a father's account through four distinct pieces of writing to explain his experience on the Burma railway; at another level it is the story a son's attempt to understand what that story means to his father and through that to himself.

The Poetry of Robert Frost

This comprehensive and authoritative edition of Robert Frost's poetry brings together the full contents of all eleven of Frost's books of verse - from A Boy's Will to In the Clearing. This handsome volume, comprising more than 350 poems, was prepared under the editorship of Edward Connery Lathem, a Frost scholar and a friend of the poet. In his notes, Mr Lathem records extensive bibliographical information about the publication of Robert Frost's poetry during nearly three-quarters of a century - from 1894, when his first poem appeared in a national publication, to the final volume Frost worked on just before his death in 1963. The editor also carefully traces textual changes that have occurred in the poetry over the years. Robert Frost was not merely one of America's greatest poets; his voice speaks to all men.

Romulus. My Father

Romulus Gaita fled his home in his native Yugoslavia at the age of thirteen, and came to Australia with his young wife Christine and their four-year-old son soon after the end of World War II. Tragic events were to overtake them. Raimond Gaita has an extraordinary story to tell about growing up with his father amid the stony paddocks and flowing grasses of country Australia. Written simply and movingly, Romulus, My Father is about how a compassionate and honest man taught his son the meaning of living a decent life. It is about passion, betrayal and madness, about friendship and the joy and dignity of work, about character and fate, affliction and spirituality. No one will read this wonderful book without an enhanced sense of the possibilities of being alive.
'Consistently astounding... one of the most remarkable works of autobiography I have read for years, a memoir of absolutely compelling tragi-comic quality.'
Peter Craven, Australian

Maestro

Against the backdrop of Darwin, that small, tropical hothouse of a port, half–outback, half–oriental, lying at the tip of northern Australia, a young and newly arrived southerner encounters the 'maestro', a Viennese refugee with a shadowed past. The occasion is a piano lesson, the first of many...

Generals Die In Bed

Drawing on his experiences in the First World War, Charles Yale Harrison tells a stark and poignant story of a young man sent to fight on the Western Front. It is an unimaginably harrowing journey, especially for one not yet old enough to vote.

In sparse but gripping prose, Harrison conveys a sense of the horrors of life in the trenches. Here is where soldiers fight and die, entombed in mud, surrounded by rats and lice, forced to survive on insufficient rations.

Generals die in bed brings to life a period of history through the eyes of a twenty-year-old narrator, who reminds us that there is neither glamour nor glory in war.

The Kite Runner

Twelve-year-old Amir is desperate to win the approval of his father and resolves to win the local kite-fighting tournament, to prove that he has the makings of a man. His loyal friend Hassan promises to help him; for he always helps Amir; but this is 1970s Afghanistan and Hassan is merely a low-caste servant who is jeered at in the street, although Amir still feels jealous of his natural courage and the place he holds in his father's heart. But neither of the boys could foresee what would happen to Hassan on the afternoon of the tournament, which was to shatter their lives. After the Russians invade and the family is forced to flee to America, Amir realises that one day he must return, to find the one thing that his new world cannot grant him: redemption.

Don't Start Me Talking: Lyrics 1984 to 2004

There is something unique and powerful about the way Kelly mixes up everyday detail with the big issues of life, death, love and struggle-not a trace of pretence or fakery in there.' - Neil Finn
'At its best, Paul Kelly's art is a meeting of opposites, a gift for melody and a gritty sense of reality. It is like seeing ribbons on a barbed wire fence.' - Martin Flanagan
Don't Start Me Talking comprises some of the finest poetry written in Australia. Paul Kelly s lyrics illuminate the way we live, sometimes with a haunting and savage intensity, sometimes with humour, always with a lightness and simplicity that belies the complexity of the world he is singing and writing into being.
In addition to his lyrics, Kelly has written songs with and for many other artists, include Renee Geyer, Kate Ceberano, Vika and Linda Bull, Nick Cave, Kasey Chambers, Yothu Yindi, Archie Roach and Troy Cassar-Daley. The lyrics encompass his writing over two decades, from 1984 to 2004, and are grouped by album in chronological order: Post, Gossip, Under The Sun, So Much Water So Close To Home, Comedy, Funerals And Circuses, Wanted Man, Deeper Water, Words And Music, Professor Ratbaggy, Smoke, One Night The Moon, Nothing But A Dream and Ways and Means. Also included are lyrics that have not been previously published.

Into Thin Air

This is the true story of a 24-hour period on Everest, when members of three separate expeditions were caught in a storm and faced a battle against hurricane-force winds, exposure, and the effects of altitude, which ended the worst single-season death toll in the peak's history.

Enduring Love

This story begins on a windy spring day in the Chilterns when the calm, organized life of Joe Rose is shattered by a ballooning accident. The afternoon, Rose reflects, could have ended in tragedy, but for his brief meeting with Jed Parry. Unknown to Rose, something passes between them - something that gives birth in Parry to an obsession so powerful that it will test to the limits Rose's beloved scientific rationalism, threaten the love of his wife Clarissa and drive him to take desperate measures merely to stay alive.

Totally compelling, utterly and terrifyingly convincing, *Enduring Love* is the story of how an ordinary man can be driven to the brink of murder and madness by another's delusions. It is the finest novel Ian McEwan has written in his remarkable career.

Island

Alistair MacLeod has been writing stories set mainly in his native land of Cape Breton, Novia Scotia, since the seventies. Both then, and again in the eighties, he published collections, but it wasn't until his novel No Great Mischief became a bestseller in recent years, that MacLeod has received the critical acclaim he so highly deserves. These stories, which go back to 1968, have a refreshing old-fashioned quality. His is a masculine world primarily, a world of miners and fishermen, loggers and lighthouse keepers, who live in a harsh but beautiful landscape hostile to much of human endeavour. In this sense, MacLeod could be seen as a male Alice Munro - the collection could as easily be titled 'lives of boys and men'. Which is not to say that anyone who loves beautifully crafted stories won't enjoy these.

Fly Away Peter

For three very different people brought together by their love for birds, life on the Queensland coast in 1914 is the timeless and idyllic world of sandpipers, ibises and kingfishers. In another hemisphere civilization rushes headlong into a brutal conflict. Life there is lived from moment to moment. Inevitably, the two young men -sanctuary owner and employee - are drawn to the war, and into the mud and horror of the trenches of Armentieres. Alone on the beach, their friend Imogen, the middle-aged wildlife photographer, must acknowledge for all three of them that the past cannot be held.

The Crucible

Arthur Miller's classic parable of mass hysteria draws a chilling parallel between the Salem witch-hunt of 1692 – 'one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history' – and the McCarthyism which gripped America in the 1950s. The story of how the small community of Salem is stirred into madness by superstition, paranoia and malice, culminating in a violent climax, is a savage attack on the evils of mindless persecution and the terrifying power of false accusations.
'One of a handful of great plays that will both survive the twentieth century and bear witness to it.'
John Peter, Sunday Times

Bombshells

Six monologues made famous by the diva Caroline O'Connor, exposing six women balancing their inner and outer lives with humour and often desperate cunning. They range in age from a feisty teenager to a 64-year-old widow yearning for the unexpected.

In the Lake of the Woods

This remarkable new novel from the National Book Award-winning author of Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried combines the power of the finest Vietnam fiction with the tension of a many-layered mystery. It begins in a remote lakeside cabin deep in the Minnesota forests, where Kathy Wade is comforting her husband John, an ambitious politician, after a devastating electoral defeat. Then one night she vanishes, and gradually the search for Kathy becomes a voyage into the darkest corners of John Wade's life, a life of deception and deceit the life of a man able to escape everything but the chains of his darkest secret.

Nineteen Eighty Four

Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute obedience and controls him through the all-seeing telescreens and the watchful eye of Big Brother, symbolic head of the Party. In his longing for truth and liberty, Smith begins a secret love affair with a fellow-worker Julia, but soon discovers the true price of freedom is betrayal.

Great Short Works

The classic poems and spinetingling stories of a Gothic American master collected in one volume. Of all the American masters Edgar Allan Poe staked out perhaps the most unique and vivid reputation as a master of the macabre. Even today in the age of horror movies and hightech haunted houses Poe is the first choice of entertainment for many who want a spinechilling thrill. Born in Boston in 1809 and dead at the age of 40 Poe wrote across several fields during his life noted for his poetry and short stories as well as his criticism. The best of each of these is collected here including the classic poem The Raven and timeless stories like The TellTale Heart.

Inheritance

The Myrtle twins, Dibs Hamilton and Girlie Delaney, are turning 80. As the family gathers to celebrate, speculation grows as to who will be the one to inherit the family property, Allandale, when the ageing Farley Hamilton is gone. From award-winning playwright Hannie Rayson, comes a powerful new family drama, where duty contends with freedom, and the differences of race, gender and generation must be reconciled before the claims on Allandale, and its families, may be settled.

The Catcher in the Rye

The Catcher in the Rye is the ultimate novel for disaffected youth, but it's relevant to all ages. The story is told by Holden Caulfield, a seventeen- year-old dropout who has just been kicked out of his fourth school. Throughout, Holden dissects the 'phony' aspects of society, and the 'phonies' themselves: the headmaster whose affability depends on the wealth of the parents, his roommate who scores with girls using sickly-sweet affection.

Lazy in style, full of slang and swear words, it's a novel whose interest and appeal comes from its observations rather than its plot intrigues (in conventional terms, there is hardly any plot at all). Salinger's style creates an effect of conversation, it is as though Holden is speaking to you personally, as though you too have seen through the pretences of the American Dream and are growing up unable to see the point of living in, or contributing to, the society around you.

Richard III

The bitter, deformed brother of the King is secretly plotting to seize the throne of England. Charming and duplicitous, powerfully eloquent and viciously cruel, he is prepared to go to any lengths to achieve his goal and, in his skilful manipulation of events and people, Richard is a chilling incarnation of the lure of evil and the temptation of power.

Selected Poems

One of Australia’s finest poets, Kenneth Slessor would be outstanding in any company. His brilliance of technique gives an impression of unconscious mastery in poems that are always arresting in conception and illuminating in image.

Slessor was born in 1901 in Orange, New South Wales. He was educated in Sydney and became a journalist in his late teens. Most of his life was spent in Sydney, which he grew to love, and the city’s harbour, streets and people appear in a number of his poems. He died in 1971.

Sky Burial

Xinran's extraordinary second book takes the reader right to the hidden heart of one of the world's most mysterious and inaccessible countries. In March 1958, a Chinese woman learns that her husband, an idealistic army doctor, has died whilst serving in Tibet. Determined to know what has happened to him, she sets off courageously to join his regiment. To her horror, instead of finding a Tibetan people welcoming their Chinese 'liberators', she walks into a bloody conflict, with the Chinese subject to terrifying attacks from Tibetan guerrillas. Before she can know her husband's fate, she is taken hostage and embarks on a life-changing journey through the Tibetan countryside - a journey that will last twenty years and lead her to a deep appreciation of Tibetan culture in all its beauty and brutality. She meets travellers who tell stories of a stranger given a Tibetan sky burial (his corpse left in the open where sacred eagles come down to take pieces up to paradise). Tragically, when she finally discovers that her husband sacrificed himself to create peace between two fatally different societies, she must carry her knowledge back to a China that, in her absence, has experienced the Cultural Revolution and changed beyond recognition.

Citizen Kane

In May of 1941, RKO Radio Pictures released a controversial film by a 25-year-old, first-time director. That premiere of Orson Welles Citizen Kane was to have a profound and lasting effect on the art of motion pictures. Through its unique jigsaw-puzzle storyline, inventive cinematography, brilliant ensemble acting and direction by Welles, the story of Charles Foster Kane is a fascinating portrait of Americas love of power and materialism and the corruption it sometimes fosters. Like all great films, Citizen Kane is a memorable fusion of cinematic art and marvellous entertainment. Discover the meaning of Rosebud... in a hugely influential movie that regularly tops the list of the greatest films ever made.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Rating:M15+

From acclaimed writer Charlie Kaufman and visionary director Michel Gondry comes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. An all-star ensemble cast shines in this comical and poignant look at breakups, breakdowns and breakthroughs. Joel (Jim Carey) is stunned to discover his girlfriend, Clementine (Kate Winslet), has had their tumultuous relationship erased from her mind. Out of desperation, he contacts the inventor of the process, Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), to get the same treatment. But as his memories of Clementine begin to fade, Joel suddenly realises how much he still loves her. Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffolo and Elijah Wood co-star in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – a memorable film that The Wall Street journal calls “a romantic comedy unlike any other!”

Jindabyne

Stewart Kane, an Irishman living in the Australian town of Jindabyne, is on a fishing trip in isolated hill country with three other men when they discover the body of a murdered girl in the river. Rather than return to the town immediately, they continue fishing and report their gruesome find days later. Stewart’s wife Claire is the last to find out. Deeply disturbed by her husband’s actions, her faith in her relationship with Stewart is shaken to the core. Stewart is not convinced that he has done anything wrong. Claire wants to understand and tries to make things right. In her determination to help the victim’s family she sets herself not only against her own family and friends but also those of the dead girl. Her marriage is taken to the brink and her peaceful life with Stewart and their young son hangs in the balance.

Look Both Ways

Meryl imagines disaster coming from every direction?train crashes, man-eating sharks, baby-eating killer whales...and then there's Nick. An innovative mix of animation and live action, set over a scorchingly hot weekend, when people dealing with unexpected events find their lives intersecting. Nick (William McInnes) visits a doctor for a routine medical and is given a devastating diagnosis but has to wait until Monday for specialist advice. Meryl (Justine Clarke), returning from a funeral, has until Monday to finish her project or lose her job. Andy (Anthony Hayes) is thrown by his girlfriend's ultimatum and has to consider the news of her unplanned pregnancy. The convergence of their paths creates an intriguing picture, intimate, universal and uplifting.

Omagh

Peter Travis’s vibrant and emotionally rich drama examines the tragic events and appalling aftermath caused by the bomb that devastated the Northern Ireland town of Omagh in August of 1998. Suspenseful, moving and immediately relevant to current affairs, Omagh tells Northern Ireland’s bloody history from the point of view of its true victims – ordinary people caught between the militants. It shows people who refuse to be beaten, and stands as a monument to those who died.