Rod Jones, who lives on Victoria's Great Ocean Road, is the award-winning author of six novels. His new novel, The Mothers (Text Publishing), is the semi-autobiographical story of several generations of single mothers in Melbourne, and an angry young man who meets his birth mother.
The Golden Treasury
Selected by Francis Turner Palgrave
In my childhood home there was an old edition of Palgrave's Golden Treasury, my father's textbook at Collingwood Tech in 1930, second-hand even then. This anthology gave me my teen taste for the Romantic poets. I even had a German shepherd named Keats. Palgrave's Golden Treasury keeps reappearing in my novels, like a ghost.
A Moveable Feast
Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway's unreliable memoir impressed on me at an early age the need for discipline and perseverance in the life of a writer. I also loved F. Scott Fitzgerald. Hunter S. Thompson used to type out The Great Gatsby as a way of tuning his ear to cadence in prose. Good writing connects with us through our senses, just as music does. Madame Bovary and The Letters of Gustave Flaubert taught me that style has to be an obsession, or it is nothing.
The Alexandria Quartet
Lawrence Durrell
Durrell's quartet of novels and John Fowles' The Magus enticed me to go and live in Greece at the end of the 1970s, an experience which led to my enduring interest in Mediterranean cultures.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Marquez taught me that fiction is the domain of magic: the novelist creates a new world by declaring that something happened. I could write my first novel, once I had learned that. The Lover by Marguerite Duras dazzled me with its ruthless vivisection of self. I keep returning to Proust, though. He is the great psychologist. As Virginia Woolf said, "Well – what remains to be written after that?"
