Australians Germaine Greer, Nam Le and Kate Veitch have made it into the influential Best Books 2008 list recently issued by the Library Journal of America. This achievement is quite extraordinary given the very select company these writers are keeping – the relatively short list (no “top 100″ here) includes both fiction and nonfiction, and features names such as Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and Philip Roth (when will he finally be awarded the Nobel Prize?).

Of Greer’s biography of Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s Wife, the Journal editors say that “Greer ‘corrects’ an image of Hathaway based on bias and rewrites history”. Nam’s collection of stories, The Boat, is justly praised for the author’s ability to give voice to characters as diverse as a teenage assassin and an old painter. And about Kate’s novel Without a Backward Glance (which I, as a proud personal friend, highly recommended in this post when the book was first published in Australia in 2006 under the title Listen), the editors write: “This heartfelt and beautifully written novel will resonate with many readers.” What an amazing result.

An extract from my The Young Widow’s Book of Home Improvement appears in the January 2009 issue of Psychologies, a monthly magazine published in the UK. I might be biased, but since learning about this magazine I have been amazed at how much content there is in it that I actually want to read. My usual experience of the articles in “women’s magazines” is that they tend towards the generic – making me think, “Didn’t I just read this article somewhere else?” – or they assume a set of values that I don’t share (for example it’s either “Yes, of course I’ll pay $1500 for a dress” or “Yes, I’ll devote my Saturday afternoon to recycling all my plastic bags into a new doormat”). Happily Psychologies has intelligent and valuable content that both informs and entertains without leaving me feeling at the end of the issue that I’m not “too” anything (fat, poor, dumb etc) – just myself, a work in progress like everyone else.

Ouch. That’s the verdict, one week after the multiple extraction of all my wisdom teeth in one literal sitting, in the chair in the Park Street rooms of my dental surgeon and his anaesthetist, who drops by on Tuesdays. “Tuesdays are extractions,” the dentist’s assistant explained cheerfully when it had become evident I would have to have the teeth out, and needed to schedule the next available appointment. Looking at the crowded waiting room today, as I returned for my one-week checkup, I was pierced by that fine but powerful current, thankfully rare, which makes me a little rueful that I wasn’t more interested in things scientific, biological, physiological, chemical and so on in my formative years. Perhaps it was because I was not surrounded by scientists in my family. Perhaps it was a personality-driven preference for things cultural and bookish. At the moment I’m writing up a story for a women’s magazine about intelligent women, grappling among other things with stereotypes that surround them and the changing nature of debates over women’s intelligence over the decades/centuries, in which women’s relative lack of professional interest in the sciences has remained fairly consistent. While no one seems to have found an empirically defensible reason for this disparity between the sexes, it nevertheless exists and my own lack of interest was quite stunning today as I waited for over an hour for my three-minute consultation.