Hear This 26th September 2025

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Episode Transcript

S1 (00:18):
Take a look. Take a look inside the book. Take
a look.

S2 (00:33):
Hello and welcome to hear this. I'm Frances Keeland, and
I'm bringing you the Vision Australia Library radio show, where
we talk about wonderful books in the Vision Australia collection.
There's such a variety. It grows phenomenally as well each month,
each year. Hundreds and hundreds of more books are put
into the collection, as well as magazines and newspapers. But

(00:53):
without further ado, I hope you enjoy listening to this
week's here this. Let's begin with the reading recommended. And
this is from Mark in Bronte. He recommended My Friends
by Frederick Backman and he says the novel is a
wonderful story about friendship. It is warm, sad and funny,

(01:16):
and the book is beautifully narrated. I have recommended this
book in our book club, so thank you. Another person
who gets a lot of enjoyment out of a book club,
giving us one of the reader recommended. And thank you
for listening to hear this, Mark. So in my friends
in the corner of one of the most famous paintings
in the world, three tiny figures sit at the end

(01:37):
of a pier. Most people don't even notice them. Most
people think it's just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa,
an aspiring artist herself, knows otherwise. 25 years earlier, in
a distant seaside town, a group of teenagers seek refuge
from their bruising home lives by spending long summer days together.
They tell jokes, they share secrets, and they commit small

(02:00):
acts of rebellion. These lost souls find in each other
a reason to get up each morning. A reason to dream,
a reason to love. Out of that summer emerges a
transcendent work of art, a painting that will unexpectedly be
placed into 18 year old Louisa's care. Determined to learn
how it came to be and to decide what to

(02:21):
do with it, Louisa embarks on a cross country journey.
But the closer she gets to the painting's birthplace, the
more nervous she becomes. Let's hear a sample of My
Friends by Fredrik Backman. It's narrated by Marin Ireland.

S3 (02:37):
Louisa is a teenager, the best kind of human. The
evidence for this is very simple. Little children think teenagers
are the best humans, and teenagers think teenagers are the
best humans. The only people who don't think that teenagers
are the best humans are adults, which is obviously because
adults are the worst kind of humans. It's one of

(03:01):
the last days before Easter. Very soon, Louisa is going
to be thrown out of an art auction for vandalizing
a valuable painting. Old ladies will shriek and the police
will come. And it really wasn't planned. Not to brag,
but Louisa did have a perfect plan. It wasn't the
plan's fault that she didn't stick to it. Because sometimes

(03:24):
Louisa is a genius. But sometimes she isn't a genius.
And the problem is that the genius and the non-genius
share a brain. But the plan. Perfect. The auction is
one where extremely rich people go to buy ridiculously expensive art.
So teenagers aren't welcome there. Especially not teenagers with backpacks

(03:45):
full of cans of spray paint. Rich adults have seen
far too much news about activists who break in and
vandalize famous paintings. So for that reason, the entrance is
protected by security guards weighing £300 with zero ounces of humor.
They're the sort of guards who have so much muscle
that they have muscles that don't even have Latin names,

(04:07):
because back when people spoke Latin, idiots as big as
this didn't even exist yet. But that shouldn't have been
a problem, because the plan was for Luisa to get
in without the guards even noticing she was there. The
only problem with the plan was that Luisa was the
person who was going to carry it out. But it
started well. It has to be said, because the building

(04:27):
where the auction is being held is an old church.
We know that because all the rich people at the
auction keep saying to each other, did you know this
is an old church? Because rich people love reminding each
other about how incredibly rich they are, so rich that
they can buy things from God.

S2 (04:46):
And that was a symbol of my friends by Fredrik Backman.
And Fredrik is f r e r I k f
e d r I k. Backman is b a c
k m a n b a c k m a n.
And that book goes for 13 hours. And Fredrik Backman

(05:07):
has been around for a while now, and I hadn't
realized it. But when I looked up his name, of course,
he wrote a man Called Ove, which was made into
a movie with Tom Hanks Americanized a little bit. A
man Called Ove. Ove is also available in Braille as
well as audio. Backman was born in Sweden, and My
Friends was published in Or. The English translation was published

(05:30):
in 2025. Oh, actually, the Swedish book was published in 2025.
Just scrolling through the reviews here and look, it gets
unanimously wonderful reviews. Tender, heartwarming, exploring the challenges and joys
of life itself, and talking about ways of loving and
trusting others of unexpected changes. In a review from Audible.com,

(05:54):
it does say that impure backman form the messy parts
of being human are front and center, simultaneously ugly and
beautiful and so true to life. He explores the meaning
of and impact of art, how it can connect us
as well as change us. And the review finishes with
as always, Backman has left me wrecked and rebuilt in

(06:15):
the course of one novel. And that's from an audible editor,
Tricia F. So thank you once again, Mark, for that recommendation.
I was listening to the radio, um, ABC Local Radio
recently and the morning host, RAF Epstein and somebody else, uh,
were recommending a book that they'd read years ago, and

(06:36):
they had both, um, mentioned this book and said, oh, yeah,
I read it ten years ago, and I absolutely loved it. Um,
it was a great book. So I thought I would
put it on today's show. And this book is non-fiction,
and it is Collapse How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive.
And it's by Jared Diamond from groundbreaking writer and thinker

(06:56):
Jared Diamond comes a visionary new book on the mysterious
collapse of past civilizations and what this means for our future.
Why do some societies flourish while others founder? What happened
to the people who made the forlorn, long abandoned statues
of Easter Island, or the architects of the crumbling Mayan pyramids?

(07:17):
Will we go the same way? Are skyscrapers one day
standing derelict and overgrown, like the temples at Angkor Wat?
Bringing together new evidence from a startling range of sources
and piecing together the myriad influences, from climate to culture,
that make societies self-destruct, collapse also shows how, unlike our ancestors,

(07:38):
we can benefit from our knowledge of the past and
learn to be survivors. Let's hear a sample of this sum.
It was added to the collection in 2006, so it's
not a new book. It is Collapse How Societies Choose
to Fail or Survive by Jared Diamond, and it's narrated
by James Wright.

S4 (07:56):
When I asked my friend Stan Falco, a 70 year
old professor of microbiology at Stanford University near San Francisco. Why?
He bought a second home in Montana's Bitterroot Valley. He
told me how it had fitted into the story of
his life. I was born in New York State and
then moved to Rhode Island. That meant that as a child,

(08:19):
I knew nothing about mountains. While I was in my
early 20s, just after graduating college, I took off a
couple of years from my education to work on the
night shift in a hospital autopsy room for a young
person like myself without previous experience of death. It was
very stressful. A friend who had just returned from the

(08:41):
Korean War and had seen a lot of stress there,
took one look at me and said, Stan, you look nervous.
You need to reduce your stress level. Try fly fishing.
So I started fly fishing to catch bass. I learned
how to tie my own flies. Really got into it
and went fishing every day after work. My friend was right.

(09:04):
It did reduce stress. But then I entered graduate school
in Rhode Island and got into another stressful work situation.
A fellow graduate student told me that bass weren't the
only fish that one could catch by fly fishing. I
could also fly fish for trout nearby in Massachusetts. So

(09:25):
I took up trout fishing. My thesis supervisor loved to
eat fish and he encouraged me to go fishing. Those
were the only occasions when he didn't frown at my
taking time off from work in the laboratory, around the
time that I turned 50. It was another stressful period
of my life because of a difficult divorce and other things.

(09:49):
By then I was taking off time to go fly
fishing only three times a year. 50th birthdays make many
of us reflect on what we want to do with
what's left of our lives. I reflected on my own
father's life and remembered that he died at age 58.
I realized with a jolt that if I were to

(10:10):
live only as long as he did, I could count
on only 24 more fly fishing trips before I died.

S2 (10:16):
And that was, um, collapse. How Societies Choose to Fail
or Survive by Jared Diamond Jared is j a r
j a r and diamond is d I a m
o n d I a m o n d. Also
in the library there is guns, germs, and steel. A

(10:38):
short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years. In
that book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental
factors shaped the modern world. Societies that have had a
head start in food production and advanced beyond the hunter
gatherer stage and then developed religion, as well as nasty
germs and potent weapons of war and invention and adventured

(11:01):
on land and sea to conquer and decimate Pre-literate cultures. Guns,
Germs and steel chronicles the way that the modern world
came to be and dismantles racially based theories of human history,
and that book won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
And I'm going to play another nonfiction book. This is
Balcony Over Jerusalem by Australian journalist John Lyons. The full

(11:25):
title is Balcony Over Jerusalem a middle East Memoir, and
it's written by John Lyons and his arm partner, Sylvie
Le Clézio. A gripping memoir of life in Jerusalem from
one of Australia's most experienced Middle East correspondents, leading Australian
journalist John Lyons will take readers on a fascinating personal
journey through the wonders and dangers of the Middle East,

(11:49):
from the sheer excitement of arriving in Jerusalem with his
wife and eight year old son to the fall of dictators,
and his gripping account of what it feels like to
be taken by Egyptian soldiers, blindfolded and then interrogated. This
is a memoir of the Middle East like no other.
Drawing on a 20 year interest in the Middle East,
Lyons has had extraordinary access. He's interviewed everybody from Israel's

(12:12):
prime ministers, Shimon Peres and Ehud Olmert to key figures
from Hezbollah and Hamas. He's witnessed the brutal Iranian Revolutionary
Guard up close, and was one of the last foreign
journalists in Iran during the violent crackdown against the Green Revolution.
He's confronted Hamas officials about why they fire rockets into

(12:32):
Israel and Israeli soldiers, about why they fired tear gas
at Palestinian schoolchildren. Lyons also looks at 50 years of
Israeli occupation of the West Bank. The mechanics of how
this works and the effect it now has on both
Israelis and Palestinians. Lyons explains the Middle East through everyday
life and experiences his son's school, his wife's friends, and

(12:55):
his own dealings with the range of people over six years.
Let's hear a sample of Balcony Over Jerusalem, a middle
East memoir by John Lyons and Sylvie Leclezio. It's narrated
by Daniel Wilks.

S5 (13:09):
We had the best balcony in Jerusalem. From it we
could see the best and the worst of this ancient city.
The extraordinary past and the beguiling present. The good and
the bad, the hope and the despair. And it was
from this balcony that I would go forth around the
Middle East, flying to wherever yet another dictator was slaughtering

(13:32):
his people. It was from this balcony that I would
travel to a meat refrigerator in Libya, where Colonel Gaddafi's
body had been taken. Muammar Gaddafi lived in obscene wealth.
Yet for all the family's trappings, his end was appalling.
It was from this balcony that I'd travelled to Egypt
to cover the fall of Hosni Mubarak, and his security

(13:55):
forces would blindfold me and tie my hands with electrical cord.
Soon after doing so, they used the butts of their
guns to bash the Egyptian man sitting in front of
me from this balcony I'd travelled to Iraq. We think
Islamic State might be close to taking Baghdad. One of
my editors said to me, can you get there as

(14:16):
soon as possible? That's the sort of phone call you
get in journalism. While everyone else is scrambling to get
out of a place you're trying to get in Islamic State,
the most savage terrorist group of our age was within
50km of Baghdad, and it was thought they might take
the capital. As the plane came in to land at

(14:37):
Baghdad International Airport, I wondered what I'd do if Islamic
State did make those last 50km. But I'd been in
journalism long enough to know that I could worry about
that later. And it was from this balcony that my
paper sent me to South Africa to cover the funeral
of Nelson Mandela, the man who slayed apartheid in Pretoria.

(14:59):
I joined the long queue and filed past his body.

S2 (15:03):
And that was the symbol of balcony over Jerusalem. A
middle East memoir are John Lines. John is j o
j o h Lyons is l y o n s
l y o n s. And his wife is Sylvie.
S y v I e s y l v I e.

(15:24):
And the surname is in two parts r or l
and then Clézio space, and then Clézio c l e
z I o Clézio. That book goes for 11.5 hours,
and John Lyons has been in the press a lot lately.
He had that fairly notorious Confrontational interview with Donald Trump recently,

(15:48):
but he does pop up as a leading expert on
the ABC about what's going on in the Middle East.
There's a really fascinating end chapter there where he talks
a lot about Benjamin Netanyahu, and that book was originally
published in 2017. Let's have a change of pace now
with some gritty, gritty crime thriller. It is called The

(16:09):
Whisper Man and it is by Alex North. After the
sudden death of his wife, Tom, Kennedy believes a fresh
start will help him and his young son Jake heal.
A new beginning, a new house, a new town for
the bank. But the town has a dark past. 20
years ago, a serial killer abducted and murdered five residents

(16:29):
until Frank Carter was finally caught. He was nicknamed the
Whisper Man, for he would lure his victims out by
whispering at their windows at night. Let's hear a sample
of this creepy thriller. The Whisper Man by Alex North.
It's narrated by Christopher Eccleston.

S6 (16:47):
There's so much I want to tell you, but we've
always found it hard to talk to each other, haven't we?
So I'll have to write to you instead. I remember
when Rebecca and I first brought you home from hospital.
It was dark and it was snowing. And I'd never
driven so carefully in my life. You were two days
old and strapped in a carrier in the back seat.
Rebecca dozing beside you. And every now and then I'd

(17:08):
look in the rear view mirror to check you were safe.
Because you know what? I was absolutely terrified. I grew
up as an only child, completely unused to babies. And
yet there I was, responsible for one on my own.
You were so impossibly small and vulnerable and me so
unprepared that it seemed ludicrous. They'd allow you out of

(17:29):
the hospital with me from the very beginning. We didn't fit.
Rebecca held you easily and naturally, as though she'd been
born to you rather than the other way around. Whereas
I always felt awkward, scared of this fragile weight in
my arms, unable to tell what you wanted when you cried.
I didn't understand you at all. That never changed when

(17:52):
you were a little older. Rebecca told me it was
because you and I were so alike. But I don't
know if that's true. I hope it isn't. I'd always
have wanted better for you than that. But regardless, we
can't talk to each other. Which means I'll have to
try and write all this down instead. The truth about
everything that happened in feather Bank. Mr. Knight, the boy

(18:15):
in the floor. The butterflies. The little girl with the
strange dress. And the whisper man. Of course it's not
going to be easy. And I need to start with
an apology. Over the years, I told you so many
times that there was no such thing as monsters. I'm
sorry that I lied.

S2 (18:32):
And that was a sample of the British crime thriller
The Whisper Man by Alex North. Alex is Alex. That's Alex.
North is n o r t h n o r
t h. And that book goes for 9.5 hours. And
the narrator, if you're a fan of, um, Christopher Eccleston,

(18:54):
you may have seen him in the reboot of the
Doctor Who series early in the 2000 or mid 2000. Um,
he's appeared in many, many British films and television series.
And that's the only book we have by Alex North
in the library, which is surprising because he has written
quite a few books and is an internationally best selling

(19:14):
author with really creepy titles like The Man Made of Smoke,
which was his latest, released in 2025. The shadows, The
Shadow Friend, the Angel Maker and Whisper Man was his
first novel, and it looks like the Whisper Man will
be made into a miniseries soon, with Robert De Niro
in it. Sounds like it's getting an American makeover as well.

(19:38):
But it's true British crime thriller gets Alex North and
the Whisper Man. Now to a very popular and very
cozy light murder mystery. And it is the Thursday Murder
Club by Richard Osman. Hugely popular and just. The movie
is now streaming with Helen Mirren. Who else? Just a

(20:00):
phenomenal set of actors. So in a peaceful retirement village,
four unlikely friends meet weekly in the Jigsaw Room to
discuss unsolved crimes. Together, they call themselves the Thursday Murder
Club when a local developer is found dead with a
mysterious photograph left next to the body, the Thursday Murder
Club suddenly find themselves in the middle of their first

(20:22):
live case as the bodies begin to pile up. Can
our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer before it's
too late? Let's hear a sample of the Thursday Murder
Club by Richard Osman. It's narrated by Lesley Manville.

S7 (20:37):
Killing someone is easy. Hiding the body. Now that's usually
the hard part. That's how you get caught. I was
lucky enough to stumble upon the right place, though. The
perfect place, really. I come back from time to time
just to make sure everything is still safe and sound.
It always is. And I suppose it always will be.

(20:59):
Sometimes I'll have a cigarette, which I know I shouldn't,
but it's my only vice. Part one. Meet new people
and try new things. Chapter one. Joyce. Well, let's start

(21:20):
with Elizabeth, shall we? And see where that gets us.
I knew who she was. Of course, everybody here knows Elizabeth.
She has one of the three bed flats in Larkin Court.
It's the one on the corner with the decking. Also,
I was once on a quiz team with Stephen, who
for a number of reasons is Elizabeth's third husband. I

(21:41):
was at lunch, this is 2 or 3 months ago,
and it must have been a Monday because it was
shepherd's pie, Elizabeth said. She could see that I was eating,
but wanted to ask me a question about knife wounds
if it wasn't inconvenient. I said, not at all, of course. Please.
Or words to that effect. I won't always remember everything exactly.
I might as well tell you that now. So she

(22:04):
opened a manila folder, and I saw some typed sheets
and the edges of what looked like old photographs. Then
she was straight into it. Elizabeth asked me to imagine
that a girl had been stabbed with a knife. I
asked what sort of knife she had been stabbed with,
and Elizabeth said, probably just a normal kitchen knife. John Lewis.

(22:28):
She didn't say that, but that was what I pictured.
Then she asked me to imagine this girl had been
stabbed 3 or 4 times just under the breastbone.

S2 (22:38):
And that was a sample of the Thursday Murder Club
by Richard Osman. Richard is rich. Osman is o m o.
And that book goes for 11 hours and 45 minutes.
And it's part one of the Thursday Murder Club books.

(23:00):
I think Richard Osman has just released another one. And
as yet, there are four in the library, four in
the series, in the library. And I tell you what,
if you ever wanted to retire anywhere, if you happen
to get a look at the retirement village in the
movie version of the Thursday Murder Club, it's perfect. The
rooms are huge, ornate, full of antiques. It doesn't look

(23:25):
like a retirement village at all. The grounds are spacious
and beautifully kept. So obviously you have to be very,
very wealthy to get into this particular retirement village, but
it's a lot of fun. Now to our last book today,
one that many people would have read, I think, over
the years. And maybe if you haven't, you might like
to listen to it. This is The Hobbit and it

(23:46):
is J.R.R. Tolkien. It was published in 1937 to wide
critical acclaim, being nominated for the Carnegie Medal and awarded
a prize from the New York Herald Tribune for best
juvenile fiction, and introduced us to the protagonist, a respectable, reserved,
and well-to-do hobbit, Bilbo Baggins. Let's hear a sample of
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. It's narrated by Gabriel Wolfe.

S8 (24:11):
In A hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.
Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole filled with the ends
of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry,
bare sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down
on or to eat. It was a hobbit hole. And

(24:31):
that means comfort. It had a perfectly round door, like
a porthole painted green with a shiny yellow brass knob
in the exact middle. The door opened onto a tube
shaped hall, like a tunnel. A very comfortable tunnel without smoke,
with paneled walls and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with

(24:53):
polished chairs and lots and lots of pegs for hats
and coats. The Hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel
wound on and on, going fairly, but not quite straight
into the side of the hill. The hill, as all
the people for many miles around called it, and many
little round doors opened out of it, first on one

(25:15):
side and then on another. No going upstairs for the Hobbit. Bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries.
Lots of these wardrobes. He had whole rooms devoted to
clothes kitchens, dining rooms. All were on the same floor
and indeed on the same passage. The best rooms were

(25:36):
all on the left hand side going in. For these
were the only ones to have windows. Deep set round windows.
Looking over his garden and meadows beyond. Sloping down to
the river. This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit and
his name was Baggins. The Baggins is had lived in

(25:59):
the neighborhood of the hill for time out of mind,
and people consider them very respectable, not only because most
of them were rich, but also because they never had
any adventures or did anything unexpected.

S2 (26:14):
And that was The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, with with
the author's name. So it's just simply the initials J,
and then R and then R and Tolkien is spelled
t o l k I e n t o l
k I n. And that book goes for nine hours
or nearly ten ten hours, actually. And there is just

(26:36):
so much information about him and of course, the complexity
of this novel, but also the follow on trilogy of
the Lord of the rings, much loved, much debated about
much researched and, uh, and Tolkien really left behind such
an amazingly influential piece of work. And for those who
are fans of, um, that kind of, uh, very gorgeous narration.

(27:00):
And as you read, if you do listen to the book,
you'll hear him doing the different characters. Gabriel Wolf is
a British film, radio and television actor. He was born
in 1932, so he's now 92 years old. He's also
the voice of the Beast in Doctor Who, and has
gathered a huge fandom from his work in those amazing
television series. Thank you for joining us on here this

(27:31):
today I'm Frances Keeland. Thank you to Mark for contributing
that wonderful suggestion for my friends by Fredrik Backman. If
you would like to recommend a book, please do. You're
always welcome to and you can call the library on 1300 654 656.
That's 1300 654 656. Or you can email library at that's library org.

(27:59):
And that's also the contact details. If for anybody who
would like to find out more about how to join
the library. Um, and how to start getting some of
the fabulous books that we have on the show. Have
a lovely week and we'll be back next week with
more here. This.