Veggie Mama Book Club #8: 100 Years of Dirt, by Rick Morton

I’m really excited about this one – I’m super keen to read Rick’s account of growing up in the outback, bits and pieces of which I’ve come across in the almost decade I’ve known him and chatted with him online. He’s a brilliant writer, funny and insightful, and I’ve no doubt this memoir will be a cracking read.

I sure hope he talks about his non-diced tomato phobia.

About 100 Years of Dirt

Social mobility is not a train you get to board after you’ve scraped together enough for the ticket. You have to build the whole bloody engine, with nothing but a spoon and hand-me-down psychological distress.

Violence, treachery and cruelty run through the generational veins of Rick Morton’s family. A horrific accident thrusts his mother and siblings into a world impossible for them to navigate, a life of poverty and drug addiction

One Hundred Years of Dirt is an unflinching memoir in which the mother is a hero who is never rewarded. It is a meditation on the anger, fear of others and an obsession with real and imagined borders. Yet it is also a testimony to the strength of familial love and endurance.

Where to Find 100 Years of Dirt

There are copies at Melbourne University Press, on Amazon, (including Kindle), Check your local library, the website of your State Library, and ebook borrowing sites online. Hard copies are out of stock but on order at Booktopia, Angus and Robertson, and Dymocks online. For in-store in Melbs, I love Brunswick Bound and Readings, but it should be available in your local, or they can get it in.

About the Veggie Mama Book Club

This is super-chill, read what you want, as much or as little as you want, participate-however-you-want-kind of book club. Maybe challenge yourself a little because that is a good thing, but let this not be a burden.

We’ll pick a book per month and discuss it both on the blog and in the Facebook group (and for locals, in real life, over a beverage and platter of some type).

You can share at any time anywhere with the hashtag #vmbookclub and you can tag me @veggie_mama. I am also open to suggestions at any time, and I look forward to us maybe getting out of our literary comfort zones and always learning something when we do, even if we don’t like the book itself. Or the author. Or Tuesdays. Or broccoli.

Find previous picks here:

• February: M Train, Patti Smith / discussion
• March: Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh / discussion
• April: Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf / discussion
• May: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy / discussion
• June: Lost for Words, by Edward St Aubyn / discussion
• July: A Cook’s Tour, by Anthony Bourdain / discussion