Welcome to the Weekend Coffee Share, a blog hop by the lovely Diana over at Part Time Monster. Every weekend we get together for virtual coffees and a little casual chat.

If we were having coffee today, we’d sit outside in the sunshine to enjoy our drinks and we’d talk about all things books-related.

If we were having coffee today, I’d tell you that the first few books for my M.A. thesis arrived. I’ll be writing about cultural concepts in Australian Literature and because I study Cross-Cultural Communication by distance learning I do not have access to a university library. I need a total of 12~14 novels to look at, three to four each for aboriginal authors, settlers/convicts, visiting authors and “born Australians” for lack of a better term at the moment.

For indigenous authors, I’ll be looking at Mullumbimby by Melissa Lucashenko, My Place by Sally Morgan, Carpentaria by Alexis Wright and Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington.  For literature by and about early settlers and convicts, I’ve got For the term of his natural life by Marcus Clarke, Letters from an Exile at Botany Bay by Thomas Watling, While the Billy boils by Henry Lawson and the poem A Convict’s Tour to Hell by Francis McNamara. As for visiting authors, I’ll be looking at Down Under / In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson, The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin and Kangaroo by D.H. Lawrence.

Just contemporary authors are hard to narrow down. I have not decided yet, as all of these sound good and should give me a good variety of stories that deal with how characters and authors view and use the land. So if you know any of these books and could recommend it, I’d love to hear it! Eucalyptus by Murray Bail, That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott, True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey, The Tree of Man by Patrick White, Voss by Patrick White, We of the Never Never by Mrs. Aeneas Gunn, Happy Valley by Patrick White, Gould’s Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan, Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, Journey to the Stone Country by Alex Miller, It’s Raining in Mango by Thea Astley, The Shiralee by D’Arcy Niland, Capricornia by Xavier Herbert, The Lucky Country by Donald Horne, The Sundowners by Jon Cleary, and  So Far From Skye by Judith O’Neill.

I get the funny feeling I should at least have Patrick White in there, as he is a Nobel Prize for Literature winner and the only author on the list I have read before. What do you think?

But I also got quite a few text books as well. Some I ordered second hand from Amazon, some I found as eBooks and in online libraries as downloads. But there were some I just could not find, or when I did they cost €80 used and I don’t have that money lying around. My sister is a student too (on an actual, local campus), and from a list of 13 books she’s been able to get me 7 from her library! Result! So now I’m going through them and start to write my bibliography, so that I’ve got all the details and later just need to sort out the books I didn’t end up using.

If we were having coffee today, we’d talk about the A to Z Challenge. Unfortunately, some personal issues and overtime at work have reduced my writing time this week. I am, however, still participating and trying to catch up.

That’s pretty much it from me for this week. Check out the other Weekend Coffee Sharers as well! Thank you for having coffee with me! Same time, next week?