The students who took this class last year worked up some questions for Adrian Hyland and he kindly answered them by e-mail. I though you might find this interview interesting. (I reposted it to my personal blog ’cause I wanted a more permanent spot for it.) One thing I found interesting was that, while urban Aboriginal people appreciate the way he depicted their culture, not many people living in the outback – people like the Moonlight mob – have read it. He says “the written word plays a miniscule part in their lives at best. Few of the older people are literate, and even the young ones have more affinity with music, art and film.” Kind of sad to think that he’s writing about a way of life that doesn’t include reading books that depict it.

Thought I’d also link to a review by an Australian woman whose reviews I read regularly. I found this an interesting observation:

I’m not convinced this is crime fiction, at least not in its purest sense. There is a crime, and an investigation of sorts, but, for me anyway, that element of the plot wasn’t particularly important, although in the end it had its share of suspense. At the risk of making this sound like some kind of schmalzy personal-journey tale (schmaltzy this definitely isn’t) solving the mystery played second fiddle to the book’s other themes. Half-Aboriginal, half-white Emily Tempest’s search for somewhere to belong and someone to belong to is engrossing because it isn’t schmaltzy. Indeed all the characters’ search for ‘home’ and ‘family’ ,whatever those terms might mean to them, makes compelling reading. And the exploration of outback Australia after land rights claims started being awarded to Aboriginal groups feels very realistic. I used to be an archivist for a state government here and I did a swag of research for claimant groups and members of the stolen generations so have some small sense of those issues and Hyland’s portrayal of them felt very realistic to me.

To me, the best part of this book is the setting and the way it immerses you in a very different culture, largely through the character (and the very Australian language) of Emily Tempest who straddles the border between white and Aboriginal communities.

Here are the locations of the mysteries you all read as your “personal choice” book. If you click on the image, it will take you to a map that lists the authors and titles of the books – in case you heard about one you’d really like to read in your spare time. (Hahahahahaha!)

Today in an earlier class we were discussing a group of people named the shamans and their shamanistic beliefs and customs. As we read this article we were all shocked at the things they would do and to us it seemed unthinkable. I thought back and I had been in a similar situation back in my 8th grade geography class. My teacher had given us a very similar article and the same types of reactions were shared between all of us. Im pretty sure most of you probably have heard about this article before. It is about a group of people called the Nacirema’s, it explains there everyday life. I found this article and posted it in the link below. It is actually quiet interesting and I think everyone would enjoy it. Plus there’s a twist

Nacirema

So I think you might have figured this out already but Nacirema is American backwards. What I think the purpose of this article is, is to show people that we all have customs and such that can look and seem silly to others, even our own. I think this article really makes you think, I think that it shows how much we judge others when in reality we all have our own traditions that can truly look insane when looking at them from the outside looking in.

We also kind of talked about this after watching the “In My language” video in class. The person talks about how they feel like when others look at them on the street, they would become suspicious, they would think that something was off or wrong. But this is how the person with autism feels about the so called “normal” way people act, the way one is supposed to act in public to be accepted by others. I think this article, and the video can kind of go hand in hand. Its hard for me to explain but it think that many people with autism may feel similar to this. They may feel like people are looking at what is just their normal life, their “language” if you will and are judging them and their lives and making it seem unacceptable.

Im not sure if I really expressed this the way I was trying to, I hope I got my point across, but anyway I just think it is something we all can think about.

Today I want to define some terms in class and was thinking about all the different subgenres that exist in crime fiction. “Crime Fiction” is a catch-all phrase used more commonly in Britain than in the US and it includes mysteries, thrillers, and other books that focus on a crime, induce some kind of suspense in the reader, and are generally more focused on entertaining the reader than on literary quality and high originality (though for crime fiction to provide a good reading experience it has to be well written  and original).

Anyway, I did a little “mind map” as a way to think about it. This is not by any means an exhaustive list of kinds of crime fiction, but might illustrate that there are many sub-genres for which readers have different expectations.