'A long and intimate relationship with reading has taught acclaimed writer Tegan Bennett Daylight that - in life as in books - the delight is in the details.
'Tegan Bennett Daylight has led a life in books – as a writer, a teacher and a critic, but first and foremost as a reader. Reading has been her inspiration and solace, her recreation and profession, her poison and her medicine.
'In this deeply intimate and insightful work, Daylight describes how her rich storehouse of reading has nourished her life, and how her life informs her reading. In both, she shows us that it’s the small points of connection – the details - that really matter: what we see when someone close to us dies, when we give birth, when we fall in love, when we make friends. The details are what we can share and compare and carry with us.
'Daylight writes with invigorating candour and compassion about her mother’s last days; her own experiences of childbearing and its aftermath (in her celebrated essay ‘Vagina’); her long admiration of Helen Garner and George Saunders; and her great loves and friendships. Each chapter is a revelation, and a celebration of how books offer not an escape from ‘real life’ but a richer engagement with the business of living.
'The result is a work that will truly deepen your relationship with books, and with other readers. The delight is in the details.'
Source: publisher's blurb
Live Recording : Tegan Bennett Daylight on Reading
Alice Robinson
(interviewer),
2020
23473430
2020
single work
podcast
interview
'Tegan Bennett Daylight chats with fellow author Alice Robinson about her new book, The Details: On Love, Death and Reading. This is a live recording of an online event hosted via Zoom during the Covid-19 crisis.' (Production summary)
'When William Blake wrote of seeing ‘a World in a Grain of Sand’, he meant the details: their ability to evoke entire universes. So did Aldous Huxley when, experimenting with mescaline, he discovered ‘the miracle … of naked existence’ in a vase of flowers. More recently, Jenny Odell’s bestseller How To Do Nothing: Resisting the attention economy (2019) made a case for rejecting productivity in favour of active attention to the world around us.' (Introduction)
'Novelist and short-story writer Tegan Bennett Daylight’s first nonfiction collection, The Details, is a book about paying attention: to words in books; to life’s patterns and paradoxes. The author credits her mother, a voracious reader, with teaching her to notice details: “When I read, I am still in conversation with her.” This reading lineage is passed down from Daylight to her own children.' (Introduction)
'Novelist and short-story writer Tegan Bennett Daylight’s first nonfiction collection, The Details, is a book about paying attention: to words in books; to life’s patterns and paradoxes. The author credits her mother, a voracious reader, with teaching her to notice details: “When I read, I am still in conversation with her.” This reading lineage is passed down from Daylight to her own children.' (Introduction)
'When William Blake wrote of seeing ‘a World in a Grain of Sand’, he meant the details: their ability to evoke entire universes. So did Aldous Huxley when, experimenting with mescaline, he discovered ‘the miracle … of naked existence’ in a vase of flowers. More recently, Jenny Odell’s bestseller How To Do Nothing: Resisting the attention economy (2019) made a case for rejecting productivity in favour of active attention to the world around us.' (Introduction)
Live Recording : Tegan Bennett Daylight on Reading
Alice Robinson
(interviewer),
2020
23473430
2020
single work
podcast
interview
'Tegan Bennett Daylight chats with fellow author Alice Robinson about her new book, The Details: On Love, Death and Reading. This is a live recording of an online event hosted via Zoom during the Covid-19 crisis.' (Production summary)
