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David Sornig is the author of Spiel (UWAP) a novel that traverses an apocalyptically charged journey through Melbourne and Berlin. He is writing a follow-up about a family at the coalface of climate change.

Originally from Melbourne, where he taught creative writing and literature at Deakin and Victoria Universities, he now lectures at Flinders University in Adelaide.

Who taught you to read?

My older brother, three years ahead of me at school, who led me on adventures with Dick and Dora, or John and Betty. I forget which. Is this where I get to brag that my mum reckons I was reading when I was two? I expect it’s not quite true though. Mums. Bless.

Which books did you love as a child?

Wilhelm Busch’s 19th century proto-comic strip Max und Moritz. It’s about two kids who pull cruel pranks on the animals and people around them. Their anarchy is reined in when they fall into a mill and are ground into grain and eaten by ducks. It was a book full of mean-hearted cruelty that scared and fascinated me. That reminds me to read it to my kids. Perfect for today’s cottonwool generation.

The monster at the end of this book written by Jon Stone and illustrated by Michael Smollin and published as a Little Golden Book in 1971. Here Sesame Street’s Grover begs the reader not to turn the pages because it will bring him closer to the monster at book’s end; all the more reason of course to keep going. Grover tries to prevent the reader’s advance with ropes, wood and bricks. Hilarity ensues when the reader turns out to be stronger than Grover ever expects. Of course Grover’s bête noir turns out to be himself. A great first metafiction reissued by LGB a few years back, just for my kids apparently.

I also treasured — and still do — my personally signed copy of Yertle the Turtle by Dr Seuss about a pond of turtles whose megalomanic king is dethroned in a proletariat uprising led by a turtle named Mack. Books for their times.

Which five authors (living or dead) would you like to have dinner with
— you can say why if you like.

My dinner party would have to have a dual theme that reflects my writing interests, so it’s literature and climate change.

James Lovelock. A wise and very-nearly ancient scientist who is still ruffling feathers. He was the one who delivered to me my climate change ‘oh shit ’ moment in The Revenge of Gaia.

Jared Diamond. Collapse was my other ‘oh shit’ book. Here’s a guy who can draw together knowledge across disciplines and from that show us where civilisations might be headed.

Ian McEwan. A great contemporary storyteller who is actually trying to speak to the real world. I’m really looking forward to reading his ‘climate change’ novel Solar but am insanely jealous that he got there first.

James Joyce. I expect he’d do much of the talking on the literary side of things.

Jorge Luis Borges. Erudite, bookish type. He and Joyce would probably find a corner of the table somewhere to disappear into. They’d intimidate me.

Name the last two books you have read and rate them out of 5 (5 is the
highest rating) You can add a few sentences to say why you liked or didn’t like them if you wish.

Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming. 5/5 The standout anticipation-of-apocalypse novel of the year. Where Cormac McCarthy gives us the road at the centre of the apocalypse, this shows us the way there. I seriously worry that we’re going to get too much of this kind of thing.

Giles Foden’s Turbulence — Detecting a (weather) pattern here? This is a novel about weather. Specifically, it’s about the way politics needs to listen to science. More specifically, it’s about the way politics did listen to science during the D-Day landing. A lesson here. Some plot being forced into the weather sock stretches its credibility sometimes. 4/5

Where is your favourite place to read?

In bed, propped up with many pillows, or lying on my right shoulder, never the left which is weirdly uncomfortable. This nicely balances my eternal struggle between reading and sleep.

You are being sent to a remote island for who knows how long – which
three books are you going to take with you?

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary Volume 1, The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary Volume 2, Shakespeare’s collected works. (Do I get to bring paper and pen?)

What do you prefer: e-book or print?

I’ve never even held an e-book device in my hand. The moment I actually do will, I suspect, become the global tipping point everyone has been waiting for. I’m not an early adopter.

What are you reading now?

Kim Cheng Boey’s Between Stations.

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