I know this because my Reading List is getting unfeasibly long, which means I haven’t had ‘spare’ time to read.

If you’re a web designer or developer and you’re up for some self-directed professional development reading, the following list should prove fruitful.

Title: HTML5 & CSS3 for the Real World
Author: Alexis Goldstein, Louis Lazaris & Estelle Weyl
Publisher: SitePoint
Publication date: May 2011
Link: http://www.sitepoint.com/books/htmlcss1/

Title: Adaptive Web Design
Author: Aaron Gustafson
Publisher: Easy Readers
Publication date: May 2011
Link: http://easy-readers.net/

Title: The Elements of Content Strategy
Author: Erin Kissane
Publisher: A Book Apart
Publication date: March 2011
Link: http://www.abookapart.com/products/the-elements-of-content-strategy

Title: The Smashing Book #2
Author: Various, via Smashing Magazine
Publisher: Smashing Media
Publication date: February 2011
Link: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/02/01/smashing-book-2/

Title: 24 Ways Annual 2010
Author: Edited by Drew McLennan & Brian Suda
Publisher: 5 Simple Steps
Publication date: January 2011
Link: http://www.fivesimplesteps.com/books/the-24-ways-2010-annual/

Title: Hardboiled Web Design
Author: Andy Clarke
Publisher: 5 Simple Steps
Publication date: October 2010
Link: http://hardboiledwebdesign.com

Title: A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web
Author: Mark Boulton
Publisher: 5 Simple Steps
Publication date: February 2009
Link: http://www.fivesimplesteps.com/books/practical-guide-designing-for-the-web

Title: Weaving the Web
Author: Tim Berners-Lee
Publisher: Orion Business
Publication date: November 1999
Link: http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/Overview.html

Elisabeth is an essayist and reviewer who has just published her first novel, Those Who Come After.

The book is based on and extrapolated from Elisabeth’s own experiences, which she previously covered in an essay that won the inaugural Calibre Prize in 2007.

It might sound like overkill – writing a novel based on your own essay about your own upbringing – but Elisabeth’s is quite a story.

The following extract is from another essay of hers, Missing from my own life, published in 2008.

My full name is Elisabeth Miriam Esther de Rijke-Nassau. I am a medieval dinosaur. When I die, a DNA coiling back to Charlemagne will be declared extinct. In 2010 others who claim a more indirect descent from Charlemagne will gather in a place called Vianden, in Luxemburg, to celebrate one thousand years of identity as the Nassaus. Vianden, a castle in the air, was abandoned in the seventeenth century but reconstructed in the 1960s. It is where my ancestors first established their identities as warlords, dukes and princes. Now it is a tourist site.

The Nassaus led the revolt of the Low Countries against the Spanish in a war that lasted the worst part of eighty years, ending in 1588. A century later, another Nassau, William of Oranje-Nassau, became king of England. At the Battle of the Boyne he defeated his father-in-law, James II, the last Catholic king of the English. Among William’s legacies was a divided Ireland and the wearing of the Orange in support of the Protestant cause.

I was born on a freezing day in January 1947 in a place called Middelburg, on the island of Walcheren, the most south-western province of the Netherlands. Middelburg, or Middelbroch as it was known in the Middle Ages, was founded in the twelfth century by Elisabeth Kunigunda, daughter of the king of Thuringia and wife of Wolfert of Nassau. My grandfather, who had many titles but preferred to be known as ‘The Lord of the Islands’, registered my birth the same day. As if he knew I would be the dynasty’s full stop, he added to my birth certificate the title ‘The Lady of the Islands’. The matter of titles is a minefield of arcane conundrums. Only someone born into the family can be known as the Lord of the Islands. As I come from an unbroken male line, there had never been a ‘Lady’ before.

A few days after my birth, I was decked out in eighteenth century lace in preparation for my baptism. The tradition of the Calvinist sect I was born into dictates that one of the godparents should carry the child to church. My godfather, Prince Bernhard, the German-born son-in-law of Queen Wilhelmina – a war hero like my father, who was his close friend – emerged from my grandparents’ house, took one look at the snow and ice in the street and removed his army greatcoat. I was carried to my baptism wrapped in the same coat that Prince Bernhard had worn when he accepted the German surrender at Wageningen.

This should tell you two things: Elisabeth has quite a story to tell, and the telling of it plays a large part in her life.

I suppose this is all the more pertinent for me, because I’m Dutch-born myself. It certainly never occurred to me that when I sang the words of the Dutch national anthem as a child that I would later build a website for a descendant of the king mentioned in the song’s opening lyric.

As an immigrant, there is a further level of interest for me in Elisabeth’s story, in that it is very different to my own. My working class parents emigrated to Australia with the specific aim of providing greater educational, social and career opportunities than might have been available in The Netherlands. The Holdsworth family had very different reasons for emigrating and lived in very different circumstances.

The website itself is not a complex one, but that didn’t make it any easier to create. I think quite a few designers are like me and find sites with lots of content rather easier to build than those that only have a few pages. On a small site, every page seems to carry greater value.

In this case, I have probably ended up placing more emphasis on style, look and feel than I might normally. And there is also a kind of freedom in that.

By the way, the castle in the background of each page is the one Elisabeth refers to in the excerpt above. The presence of this edifice is intended to serve as a visual metaphor for the looming sense of historical imperative that pervades Elisabeth’s writing.

That it is classified as both Reference and Humour gives you some idea of its approach. It is always interesting, often surprising and sometimes very funny.

It does carry, however, a very considerable oversight.

The author, Simon Garfield, is a British journalist and the author of 11 other books, including a Somerset Maugham Award-winning study of Aids in Britain called The End of Innocence.

He writes for The Observer and makes various articles available at his website. He also provides extracts from his books but, somewhat surprisingly, doesn’t tell you much about himself at all, although you can download a photo of him.

Anyway, there is a great deal to like about Just My Type. From Gutenberg (the inventor of movable type printing) to Luc(as) de Groot (the designer of Calibri, Microsoft’s default font of choice), Garfield profiles the people behind the fonts we have come to use in print and on the web. He describes the ways in which some of the most famous – and obscure – fonts came into being, and he astutely examines the circumstances which made some successful and others less so: technological advances, social mores, language developments and the roles of politics, religion, advertising and art.

This is complex territory, but Garfield maintains a light touch and an open mind: rather necessary when you look at the lives of some of the people involved.

I have no hesitation in recommending this as an entertaining, diverting and highly informative read.

So, what is the oversight to which I referred earlier?

Well, despite being very clear about how fonts have become vitally important to the web and acknowledging the role that the web now plays in generating new fonts and reviving old ones, and despite showing great awareness of the sometimes difficult circumstances in which font designers ply their trade, Garfield makes no mention of the single most frustrating aspect of font selection and management for web designers, which is the limited control they have over which fonts can actually be displayed on web sites.

As they cannot be sure which fonts a site visitor might have installed on their computer, designers have had to implement a font-stack (at least until the recent advent of hosted fonts and the like). This meant we had to include a line of code in our style sheets that asked a browser to display, for example, Verdana or if the user didn’t have Verdana then Arial or, if the user didn’t have Arial then Helvetica, or at last resort any sans serif font that might be installed.

Herein lies a prime example of the difference between designing for the web and designing for print. Those pixel-perfect type models go out the window in a world defined and limited by browser defaults and user selections.

That such a detailed history of fonts as Just My Type does not even refer to this development, which fundamentally changes the role of the font designer and takes control away from them, seems to me entirely inexplicable.

However, even with that caveat, I still recommend the book: it is guaranteed to make you look twice at the fonts around you in your day to day life.

Like Paul Kelly’s How to Make Gravy, this is part memoir and part autobiography and there is a considerable overlap in the chronology between the two works. Both authors are counted among Australia’s greatest songwriters, they have places and experiences in common and one or two supporting characters crop up in both books, yet the end results are very different creatures.

Walker’s book is a series of mood-filled vignettes, pictures in prose that describe feelings as much as events and people. Reading this, you won’t find out exactly when and where he went to school, how he came to first write a song or even just who was in his unnamed and eventually successful band, but you will gain an impression of the poetry in him that led to some truly great song lyrics.

What Walker does do extremely well is convey a sense of what it was like growing up in a NSW regional town, watching country life disintegrate, wrestling with the demons of academic potential, becoming absorbed in music, exploring various intoxicants, waking up in strange places, forming bonds with fellow travellers and ultimately coming to no great conclusions about who he is or where he’s going.

You know how I said Kelly’s book was really about me? Well, Walker’s book features the me that perhaps I’d just as soon not remember. I certainly recognise myself in the Sydney sections: taking way too many unsafe substances; hanging out at places like French’s, the Kardomah and the Manzil Room; subsisting on little money and even less good food; forming some pretty unhealthy relationships.

Shots has an undercurrent that isn’t quite bitterness, but it’s not very pleasant either. There’s a sense of relief at having survived at all, rather than pride or even pleasure at having achieved any kind of success.

There are certainly passages where Walker’s lyricism allows him to paint some exquisite pictures of life in Australia in the 60s and 70s, but there’s not a great deal of affection and not a lot of hope. There’s some devastatingly casual cruelty, some figures who fall by the wayside uncared for and a frequent sense of disaster narrowly averted.

I’d tentatively suggest that there’s also a bit of room for tighter editing. No-one wants to mess with a major songwriter’s impressionistic manipulation of English to achieve a desired literary effect but there are some word manglings in here that are either unintentional or misguided.

Nevertheless, I found Shots very hard to put down. Especially reading it late at night with a glass of whiskey nearby.

Shots should probably be required reading for teenagers craving life in a rock and roll band, more so than Paul Kelly’s book.

I should also mention that there is an almost unbearable poignancy in my having read this book in the week that Walker’s bandmate Steve Prestwich died. Cold Chisel’s album East stands tall for me as one the best records ever produced in Australia, and Flame Trees – words by Steve Prestwich, music by Don Walker – is one of my all time favourite songs by anyone, ever.

Where’s that whiskey?

It was as challenging, engaging and inspired a piece of theatre as I have seen in many a day. To my mind, it is ideal festival fare, stretching the boundaries of how theatre and music interact, demanding much of the audience and rewarding those who get into it.

What has surprised me is the negativity of many of the reviews and online comments about it.

The Giacomo Variations is best described as a chamber opera, meaning it is performed with an orchestra of less than 50 who are not only visible to the audience (rather than hidden in a pit) but to some extent interact with the action on stage, and as a play in which four actors act out scenes adapted from the 1790 memoir of Giacomo Casanova, Histoire de ma vie.

The theatrical scenes are interspersed and underscored by selected musical passages from the operas Don Giovanni, Cosi fan tutte and Le nozze di Figaro, as well as a couple of other excerpts from the music of Mozart.

The two male actors play the older memoir-writing Casanova and his younger self, often on stage at the same time – which mimics the style of the book (or at least the copy I have – there have been several versions), in which Casanova narrates incidents in his life and muses on various – very various – topics.

The two female actors play the Countess Isabella in earlier and later life, she who was the sister of the Austrian princeling who gave Casanova a home for the last 12 years of his life, during which he wrote the memoirs that keep him famous today.

All performers but the actor playing the older Casanova also play various other characters who come up in the stories, and the older male steps into alternate roles – characters from the operas whose roles he claims to have inspired or written himself.

The overall effect is to intertwine Casanova’s claimed autobiographical notes with lyrics sung by characters from the Mozart operas. Could these operatic characters have been based on Casanova? Could he have had a hand in writing them? Could he have done all the things he said he did?

That this could be more than grandiose fiction is borne out by Casanova’s known friendship with Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, and his acquaintance with key figures from the 18th century, including Madame de Pompadour, George III, Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great, Benjamin Franklin, Rousseau and Voltaire. He met the Pope, escaped from the prison in the Doge’s palace and, most notoriously, enjoyed a string of liaisons across Europe that eventually made his name a byword for a champion of sexual conquests.

Significantly, not all of this is imparted to the audience of The Giacomo Variations. If all one knows of Casanova is his reputation as a womaniser – and none of his life as a law graduate at 17, an amateur physician, a failed priest, an occultist, a gambler, a Freemason, a Rosicrucian, an alchemist, a courtier and a spy – then much of this production will be a mystery.

That does not mean it is a failure, any more than an ignorance of the work of Mozart would. Only some of the sublime music was vaguely familiar to me.

While I greatly enjoyed the structure of the piece, its interweaving of theatre and music, of fact and fiction, of themes particular to that 18th century which saw the ineluctable shift from divine monarchy to revolutionary parliamentarianism, the absolute masterstroke of the production lies in the casting.

I can hardly imagine a living actor who could be capable of convincingly conveying the truth of such a man as Casanova, so seductive and so repellant, so witty and so cruel, so articulate and so emotionally stunted, as John Malkovich. I think he was superb, in total control and fully in touch with a person whose inability to love frightened himself.

I have seen Malkovich on stage before, in the 1990 West End production of Lanford Wilson’s Burn This, for which he was rightly lauded – which is only to say that I’m not starstruck about the actor, I just think he gave a superb performance.

I also think the rest of the cast was terrific. Ingeborga Dapkünaité was wonderful as the older Isabella, particularly at the beginning of the second act as she fruitlessly tried to get the old lothario to open his heart, only to be kept at a deliberate emotional distance. I don’t have much experience with opera, but if the singing is like that of soprano Martene Grimson and baritone Andrei Bondarenko I will gladly change that.

And the 41-piece version of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra sounded extraordinary to me, under the baton of Martin Haselböck. I think letting the players be visible (sometimes with full house lights up) and having some of them turn to occasionally watch the action on stage was a very clever and engaging tactic.

There is an obvious risk in a piece like The Giacomo Variations that allows theatre lovers to decry the musical interruptions and opera fanatics to abhor the talkie bits, but really, I would have thought a Sydney Festival audience could rise above that. The criticisms I’ve read seem to be emabarrassingly parochial, small-town and small-minded in nature.

Full credit to director Michael Sturminger for coming up with the concept and executing it in a way that amply rewards those who get it. I feel I did.

But it’s not really. This is a book about Australia: the Australia I grew up in, and now live in. Really, this is a book about me.

If you don’t like reading about grown men getting emotional, then don’t read any further. But then you probably won’t like Kelly’s book either. Or his songs.

First, some background about the book. In 2004, Kelly had been invited to play some shows in Melbourne in the Spiegeltent, a construction of wood, canvas and mirrors that holds about 300 people.

He came up with the idea of singing 100 of his songs over four nights, in alphabetical order, 25 songs each night. He searched his catalogue of 300+ songs and chose the ones that he thought would sustain both his own and the audience’s interest the best.

He added some storytelling about and around the songs, invited guests to join him on stage and the shows were a great success. He went on to perform them in different cities and countries, performances were recorded to form a CD collection and he thought about a book to go with them. This is the result.

It’s a marvellous device that sets Kelly off on seemingly unconnected anecdotes about his life and work. The end result is surprisingly cohesive and comprehensive, in just the way many of his best songs are.

Paul Kelly was born in Adelaide in 1955 (four years before me) and gave his first public performance in 1974 at a folk club in Salamanca Place, Hobart. I grew up in Hobart and gave my first public performances busking at Salamanca Place, four years after Kelly was there. I went on to play folk at the same St Ives pub where it turns out Kelly had been listening to jazz a few years before. The importance of this for me is not that I did what Kelly did – without knowing until now that he had done that – but that we both lived and started performing at a time and place where that was not only feasible, but a natural thing to do.

If you could play a guitar and hold a tune, well of course you’d get up and perform. Of course you’d write your own songs, and naturally you’d play them in public.

Throughout How to Make Gravy, Kelly emphasises that his career has never been based on a master plan. He doesn’t even call what he does a craft, because that term implies you know what you’re doing, and he’s never approached songwriting that way. His songs are not built as careful structures, they’re stories based on scraps of overheard conversations, dim memories and made-up characters that he can’t shake until he gets them into a song.

This is very familiar territory for me. That he’s a writer of fiction set to music has sometimes led to misunderstandings, something with which I can also identify.

In fact, I think a significant number of people our age who now lead steady, settled lives making a decent living and raising families around Australia came through a period where they followed paths they could never have guessed would appear. The ’60s and ’70s were times you could chance your arm without a safety net and see what happened. Not everyone came through unscathed, and some not at all, but as I sit here in my nice house south of Sydney and read of Kelly’s experiences that ended up providing him with various wives, children, addictions, awards, collaborators, friends and the inspiration for a catalogue of sometimes astonishingly beautiful songs, it puts into context for me how lucky I have been and am now.

One thing that How to Make Gravy makes clear is that Kelly is no dunce, that’s for sure. Plenty of people start reading Whitman, Sartre and Nietzsche to gain some understanding of the world, but not many move on to working with people like Archie Roach and Mandawuy Yunupingu, or visit asylum seekers locked up in detention camps  to gain some understanding of the country.  Lots of people listen to the Beatles, the Beach Boys and Frank Sinatra but not many come away with a deep understanding of lyrical structure, melodic variation and performance skills the way Kelly has.

And, of course, he can write. Not just songs, but prose: dialogue, description, mood are particular strengths. I had to read some sections out loud to my wife because they were so funny, or so sad, or so wise and each time I realised how well written this book is. I reckon I could read the whole thing out loud and hold an audience (why yes, Mr Kelly, I am available). I also found myself choking up when I read some of it out loud. And sometimes when I just read to myself.

A highlight for me is the role of Dan Kelly in this book. Dan is his nephew and an established singer, songwriter and guitarist in his own right. He’s also a key member of Paul’s band, support network and family. There’s no sense of “wacky families” in this, nor of “I made him what he is”. Having seen Dan perform with Paul’s band a few years ago, and then more recently solo at a Wollongong wine bar, it’s obvious that he is a precocious talent in his own right. Paul is clearly glad that Dan is an equal, a colleague and good friend. You can see how they work together on this clip of the song “How to Make Gravy“.

Maybe all of this just comes down to, I get Paul Kelly, and he gets me. He is of my time, of my place, of my generation. And his book is great.

For a while there, my reading seemed to be restricted to the online variety – which is fine – but having reacquainted myself with the tactile and visual pleasures of print on paper and being presented with a range of works that have proved impossible to resist, I’ve found myself devouring books in the last couple of months at something approaching my old voracious rate.

The one that kicked it off for me was an expanded and revised paperback version of Scott Berkun’s The Myths of Innovation. I was privileged to see Berkun deliver his conference presentation of the same name at Web Directions South 2007, and I mentioned it as one of the WDS highlights that year.

Berkun is a terrific speaker: engaging, informed and very connected to his audience. Good speakers aren’t always good writers, but Berkun combines his thought-provoking and lateral views on how ideas are generated and turned into innovative products and practices – or not – with a genuine facility for written expression, to turn out a book I simply couldn’t put down. Creative writing and creative thinking is a very winning combination.

Just as I finished that book, the second edition of 8 Faces appeared in my mailbox.

This is a relatively recent venture by Elliot Jay Stocks, a UK designer I admire even more after having participated in his WDS 2009 workshop From Photoshop to the browser.

I was very fortunate to score one of the limited run of the first issue of 8 Faces, which Stocks set up as a high quality paperback magazine profiling the work and ideas of eight influential web typographers and font designers in each issue.

I wrote about the first issue back in August and I am delighted to say that the second edition is, if anything, even stronger. Selecting the professionals for inclusion is only part of the story, of course – they have to have interesting things to say. Suffice to say, this was the second book in a row I read cover to cover.

I find something very affirming about the magazine’s positioning on the nexus between web and print – it’s about the presentation of words of as a craft, a science and an art to bring visula delight and enhanced meaning.

This was followed by another second-in-series, this time CSS3 for Web Designers by Dan Cederholm, the second volume in a series of “brief books for people who make websites”, published by the people behind A List Apart under their A Book Apart imprint. That those people include Jeffrey Zeldman and Jason Santamaria gives you some idea of what to expect.

I wrote about the first volume back in July, and I’m pleased (and completely unsurprised) to advise that Cederholm maintains the high standard set by Jeremy Keith‘s HTML5 for Web Designers.

Like Keith, Cederholm has the knack of communicating often complex concepts in clear language oriented toward practical implementation. Like HTML5, CSS3 will continue to evolve but there is little in this book that is likely to be superseded. If you are into using CSS3 to create cutting edge web design, this book will prove invaluable.

Shortly after I finished that book, my world was rocked by the death of one of my all-time favourite authors, Ruth Park. In my recent post about about Park’s importance to me, and her legacy to Australian literature, I mentioned her marriage to, and partnership with, D’Arcy Niland who died in 1967.

Niland is probably best known for The Shiralee (published in 1955 and never out of print since), the first of his six novels, and his deep affinity with Les Darcy, the Australian boxer who died in the US in 1917, the year Niland was born.

On Park’s death last month, I realised that I had never actually read the novel he wrote about Sydney called The Big Smoke despite having had it on my bookshelves for years. That this book was published in 1959 – the year of my birth – and that he dedicated it “For Ruth” was enough to make me pick it up. Once again, I couldn’t put it down. A fantastic panoply of characters whose lives intertwine to embody life in Sydney in the first half of the last century, it is unashamedly emotional and parochial and made me feel as Australian as it gets.

I read that novel in Newcastle, where my family enjoyed a few days as a pre-Christmas gathering with Hazel’s sister and mother. My mother-in-law gave me a copy of The King’s Speech, the book version of the story filmed with Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush, currently screening to great acclaim.

The book, and the movie, came to be as the result of the discovery of some previously missing diaries of Lionel Logue, the speech therapist who helped King George VI of England overcome a stutter that may otherwise have seriously impeded his rule.

I haven’t seen the movie (yet), but I can thoroughly recommend the book, on several fronts. First, I have seen indications that movie is, perhaps understandably, not able to cover as much chronological detail as the book, which will fill some important gaps for admirers of the film. Second, as The Big Smoke masterfully evoked Sydney between the wars, so did this book paint a new picture for me of England over the same period. The detailed word-pictures of life inside the Royal Family, as well as on the streets and in the drawing rooms of  London, are an eye-opener, to say the least. It also paints a bigger picture of a society dealing with the changing role of the monarchy in the 20th century.

I suspect there is something in the combination of a film-maker, Lionel’s grandson Mark Logue,  and a Sunday Times journalist, Peter Conradi, bringing the lost diaries to life that accounts for the success of this book. Unlike some other book-film insatnces in my experience, I found no impediment in reading this with the images of the lead actors imprinted on my mind. It probably helps that I hold both actors in equal parts of esteem and affection (I’ve even forgiven Rush for not giving me a job when I auditioned for him at Magpie Theatre back in the early ’80s).

That’s the summer reading so far. I’ve since embarked on How to Make Gravy by Paul Kelly and have Don Walker‘s Shots and Hardboiled Web Design by Andy Clarke waiting in the wings. It could be the best summer of reading I’ve ever had.

Park’s story is one of lyrical romance and harsh reality, both in her books and her life. She famously won a 1946 newspaper prize for The Harp in the South, a highly affecting depiction of life in the slums of Surry Hills between the wars, and continued the story of the Darcy family in Poor Man’s Orange.

Park captured both the brutality of day-to-day life and the emotional bonds of family in works that drew plenty of fire, some claiming that they painted an unrealistic and cruel portrait. In fact, Park wrote about what she had observed herself when living in the area with her husband D’Arcy Niland, another chronicler of Australian life with a sharp tongue and a sharper wit.

At the time, there were plenty of people who simply did not believe Sydney had slums at all. One of the aspects of Park’s life that has always affected me greatly is that she experienced both the greatest validation and the greatest fear that a writer can feel. It is clear that publication of The Harp in the South led directly to the razing of the slum cottages bounded by Devonshire St, Belvoir St, Crown St and Elizabeth St, an undeniable good. Park herself was invited to open the public housing estate that replaced it.

As it turned out, the high-rise, high-density Northcott Place was no solution. By the ’80s it had become known as Suicide Towers. Mental health patients, recently arrived non-English speaking migrants, abused families, drug addicts and ‘repatriated’ criminals were jammed together without adequate support in a social experiment gone horribly wrong.

I have always held that this illustrates the power of literature: a work of fiction can change events in real life, not always for the better. No blame can be attached to Park for how things turned out, and the charm and emotional power of her books remains untouched. Her portrayal of the different ethnic, social and family groups that inhabited Surry Hills is filled with fun and wit, the power of love shining through the poverty and hardship.

I lived in the area for several years in the early 1980s, in shared households in Nickson St and High Holborn St. Park disguised the street names but for someone who lived there it wasn’t hard to identify the real streets and houses. Between the clear geography of the books and a couple of side trips to the Mitchell Library, I was able to mentally overlay a map of the real environment on the events of the books.

Park’s other works have also touched me at different times and in different ways. Along with Blinky Bill (Dorothy Wall), Snugglepot and Cuddlepie (May Gibbs) and The Magic Pudding (Norman Lindsay), Park’s The Muddleheaded Wombat was a local touchstone for an immigrant child puzzled by Australia’s fixation with English literature for children. No offence to Enid Blyton, but I’ll take Mouse, Tabby Cat and their unwittingly naughty mate any day: “treely ruly”.

Then there’s Playing Beatie Bow, Park’s multiple award-winning story of a teenager who steps back into 19th century Sydney, in an area called The Rocks that is still the historical heart of the city. Unafraid to portray family difficulties in the present and the past, and the search for love that shifts from parental to romantic, Park captured perfectly the tension between past and present, rich and poor, rulers and ruled that has coloured Sydney so richly in its short history. The magic of the events portrayed is closely balanced by the meticulous depiction of the physical environment. The international awards for this book were richly deserved.

Swords and Crowns and Rings won Park the Miles Franklin Prize in 1977, still the most significant prize for fiction in Australia. It’s a marvellously affecting story of life in Australia before and during the Great Depression, as seen through the lives of the dwarf Jackie Hanna and his childhood sweetheart Cushie Moy. It is essentially a large scale romance designed to tug on the heart-strings, but Ruth Park can’t write about people without writing about their social context. If you want to know where some of Australians’ more distinctive world views come from, this book will go a long way to educating you.

One of Park’s lesser known books is also a personal treasure for me. In 1973, Park published The Companion Guide to Sydney, republished in 2003 as Ruth Park’s Sydney. I came across this book in the 1990s when I was researching my (still uncompleted) Sydney Literary Pub Crawl, a perambulatory and lubricated association between noted writers of (and about) Sydney and pubs in The Rocks (totally inspired by the excellent Dublin Literary Pub Crawl). Park’s book was clearly way ahead of me, a more sedate stroll through modern Sydney pointing out historical associations that might otherwise never be noticed. It is a beautifully compact and practical guide, unique as far as I’m aware. If I do ever complete the Sydney Crawl, I think I might dedicate it to Park.

Among her many other works, the standouts for me are Park’s autobiographies A Fence Around the Cuckoo and Fishing in the Styx. Her voice in these works is strong and determined, a woman carving out a role for herself as a professional writer at a time when not many dared. The books are filled with humour, sadness and passion as well as unflinching portraits of life in New Zealand and Australia in the first half of the 20th century.

Ruth Park has been a beacon of Australian literature for so long in my life, I’m not sure I can properly process the fact that she is gone. And, of course, in a very real sense, she is as much with me right now as she has ever been. Along with Kylie Tennant, Christina Stead and Eleanor Dark, I believe Ruth Park remains completely underestimated as a serious writer. Each of them captured aspects of Australian life in books that brought together an understanding of love, family, faith and politics informed by their own experiences and reaching out to readers of all types. They certainly reach out to me. They are writers whose sheer craft most people can only ever aspire to emulate.

Hazel once wrote to Jessica Mitford explaining why she liked Mitford’s work so much, and received a handwritten reply in which her idol thanked her for her correspondence saying it was “exactly the kind of thing that makes the arduous task of writing worthwhile”.

I wish I’d done that for Ruth Park.

Vale.

The web industry, in turn, is fortunate to have people like Andy Clarke, Mark Boulton and Elliot Jay Stocks to inspire us to seek and achieve beauty in our designs.

All three are highly creative visual designers as well as engaging and articulate conference speakers and workshop leaders. They are also the authors of books that highlight not just their own work and philosophies but those of their peers.

I was quick to pre-order a copy of 8 faces, a new magazine project of Elliot’s, and it was just as well I did, as it soon sold out.

No wonder, with people like Jason Santamaria, Jos Buivenga and Erik Spiekermann on board in the first issue to talk about typography: fonts, lettering, type, foundries, faces, treatments, rendering … everything to do with the presentation of words on the web.

Elliot’s idea was to plumb the thoughts of eight key people who work with type on the web, along the way asking each to list the typefaces they would use if they could have only eight.

If you are at all interested in how text is, and can be, presented on web pages and rendered by various browsers on a range of screens – and if you’re a web designer, you should be – this is fascinating and inspiring stuff.

One of the things I like about what Elliot describes as a “niche subject”, is that people who are into typography on the web see themselves as part of a historical chain, the latest practitioners of a craft that goes back beyond books and magazines in print all the way to cuneiform and hieroglyphics, as well as sideways into posters, tickets, timetables and advertising hoardings, and now onward into the digital age.

From choosing and implementing fonts for style and purpose, understanding how different fonts work together, creating illustrative lettering and designing new typefaces, right through to exploring business models for making a living out of all this, 8 Faces is both a wonderful showcase and an instructional guide.

It’s an ambitious project. $22.50 (which is what £8 worked out to) is not cheap for a magazine, but this is not your supermarket checkout kind of magazine. Producing a 210mm square 76pp paperback spinebound magazine in full cover on quality paper stock will set you back a few quid.

It must indeed have been tempting to extend the initial print run of 1,000 when it became clear the demand was there, but Elliot has said that he will keep his word to print no more, although pdf versions are available. And he’ll make sure to print more for #2, before Christmas.

I’m looking forward to it.

It’s quite a different kettle of code to Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 for Web Designers. That book explained how I could confidently starting using HTML5 with my existing and planned web projects.

This book, Introducing HTML5 by Bruce Lawson and Remy Sharp, goes into much greater detail about how much more I can do with HTML5.

Bruce Lawson is a UK web developer who works for Opera, with an impressive understanding of, and commitment to, the open web, standards and accessibility. Bruce is coming to Australia in November to hold a series of workshops on ARIA-HTML5 for WIPA, of which I am the newly elected President (did someone say ‘Steven Bradbury’?).

Remy Sharp is also a UK web developer with similar passions plus a particular facility with jQuery and JavaScript.

I haven’t even finished this book, but already I find myself extending my expectations of what I can do now and in the future with markup on a web page. That’s pretty exciting.

Significantly, Lawson & Sharp do not believe HTML5 is perfect. They simply focus on what HTML5 can do while noting its limitations, inconsistencies and logical discrepancies.

The examples they provide are clear, useful and relevant, and their language is positive. They inject enough humour and self-awareness to lighten the learning load.

I’m no dab hand with JavaScript but they make me feel I can handle this.

The book isn’t meant to be comprehensive, either in saying what HTML5 is and isn’t, or in defining what can be done with it. But the authors do walk through some of the more interesting APIs that become available.  OK, in the case of ‘canvas’ it’s more like ‘wade through’, but still.

I think what I like most about HTML5, at least as I’ve come to understand it so far via Keith, Lawson, Sharp and others, is that – particularly when used with CSS3 – it seems to greatly empower people like me who genuinely see themselves as designer, developer, information architect and all round web creator.

If there is a future edition of Introducing HTML5, I expect that some sections will be extended as the use of  HTML5 is refined.

In the meantime, this book will do nicely as a guide to practical application of the new markup.