[[bob:wide]]Bob Carr is best known as a former Premier of NSW – but it’s also well known that he’s an avid reader and a bit of a history buff. In his new book, My Reading Life, he takes us on an idiosyncratic, hugely enjoyable tour of his favourite books. Jo Case spoke to him for Readings.

What was the first book you really loved?

A small novelised treatment of Peter Pan, a present when I was five or six. I loved the monochrome art nouveau illustrations— Wendy and Peter above the chimney tops, Captain Hook and the crocodile. Around the same age I received a child’s history of Australia, The Australia Book, by Eve Pownall, published by the House of Sands. It was the size of a broadsheet newspaper with beguiling illustrations by Margaret Senior. Australian history as a pageant. I remember the opening words: “The first Australians had been in the land so long that no man, not even the oldest, could say how they first came here.” At least I think that’s right.

How did you select which books to include? Did you have a set of criteria for inclusion or was it more about your personal affinity to the books?

Personal affinity. For example I nominate Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man because, to me, it is the purest of all the books in the literature of testimony, that is, the books testifying to the genocides and other cruelties of our last 100 years. I think the book is very special. It’s personal affinity that made me nominate Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Gore Vidal’s Lincoln and spend a lot of space analysing them for people who have never tackled them. Of course, the mere fact of nominating a book and advising readers how to approach it has driven me deeper into the essence of the writer. I found this happening with Dostoyevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov which I return to in three of my chapters… and which I look forward to re-reading myself. It has worked itself into my imagination.

You write about meeting some of the literary icons you admire, even ‘hero worship’, like Patrick White and Norman Mailer. Who are the writers you would most like to meet now, and why?

I’m looking forward to interviewing Simon Sebag Montefiore on May 22 at Sydney Writers’ Festival. He’s the author of two volumes on Stalin and of a study of Catherine the Great’s Prince Potemkin. You admire a writer’s scholarship and style and you want to meet him or her. I like polymaths, like Mailer and Vidal who I have been privileged to meet. I would have loved dinners with Anthony Burgess. The ultimate time travel experience … knowing James Joyce. Shakespeare, another fantasy.

You like historical fiction because ‘these novels are about big events and famous names, the world of power’. That seems to be a common thread running throughout your selection, from Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer to Colleen McCullough. What is it that you get from historical fiction that you don’t get from reading history?

Historical fiction enables a writer to fill in the gaps. With Colleen McCullough, to imagine what Caesar, Pompey and Crassus said when they sat down in an inn on the Campus Martius outside the Servian Walls to plan the First Triumvirate. Or what a nerve-wracked Lincoln said in the bedroom of the White House to his wife Mary after another fearful battlefield catastrophe.

You write that no novel is capable of capturing ‘the scale, sprawl and drama of the [American] story, perhaps the most important in human history’. This book includes many American books, especially in the genres of history and politics. Do you think your affinity for America was born partly from your extensive reading about that American story?

I loved America – note the past tense – because of its history. I hope I capture this in two chapters – one devoted to American fiction and one to American history. Here I try to recommend the unusual books – the quirkiest, the funniest, the most insightful. The American novels I recommend are those that are anchored in its history: the trauma of race relations and of the Civil War, the migrant experience, the United States of the Cold War. In this last category I strongly commend Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost (1991) in which the author describes the CIA as ‘the mind of America’ as he delineates a young careerist’s rise in the Agency’s ranks.

It took you a while to embrace Shakespeare – and it certainly didn’t happen at school! Now, you rate him among ‘the things that make life worthwhile’. What do you think the ideal introduction to Shakespeare is, and is there any way that can happen at school?

It’s easier to teach Shakespeare at school now than it was when I was at school because of performances on DVD that enable students to see Shakespeare acted and enable them to compare different performances. This is incalculably richer. I would ban amateur productions of Shakespeare. Should have made them an offence under the Crimes Act when I was Premier.

Is there a book (or books) that really changed your way of thinking about a political issue or matter of public policy? If so, what were they?

The literature of environmentalism—to which I devote a chapter— especially Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb (1968) and Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature (1990), one of the first books to describe global warming. I hope also that My Reading Life revives respect for the literature of anti-totalitarianism. I analyse Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror (1968) which laid bare the scale of Stalin’s mass murder. I also provide a practical guide for readers who want to venture inside the three volumes of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, which appeared in English in 1973. These books refined in me a fierce hatred for totalitarianism. At the very start of this genre—which as been over the decades a fundamental shaping force in my thinking—lies George Orwell, the foremost political thinker (and literary critic) of our time. I took pleasure in including a guide to Orwell’s works.

You recommend that we challenge ourselves in our reading, tackle ‘great’ books like Proust and Joyce. ‘You may even be persuaded that you are a different person because you have read so-and-so.’ Are there any books that have made you a different person?

I think a single chapter of Tolstoy’s War and Peace outweighs all the bestsellers in the front window of any bookshop today. If you know Flaubert and Joyce and Homer deeply and affectionately you are different from someone who lives in celebrity culture, current affairs and the sporting pages. Susan Sontag said she was a different person because she had read Dostoyevsky. Of course different does not mean better. We know from Montefiore that Stalin was astonishingly well read. Work that one out. We live in a world of contradictions. I found plenty in writing My Reading Life.