It feels good to read books set in or originating from the places you visit – the added depth creates something like immersion; an extra layer of understanding. This works in both directions – your understanding of the book is tied up forever with your experience of the city. In London, I read A Room of One’s Own. In it, Virginia Woolf describes London as being ‘like a machine. We were all being shot backwards and forwards on this plain foundation to make some pattern.’ Running the foot race that is the first week of a holiday, with its equal… [Read more]

I’m reading tweets from space. More specifically, the twitter feed of @VanguardAdrift, part of an interactive art experience I read about in an article titled ‘Tweet me, I’m About to Die in Space’ (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2120497-tweet-me-im-about-to-die-in-space/). Artists Cath Le Couteur and Nick Ryan’s Project Adrift incorporates a combination of film, soundscape, and twitter feeds to explore the ‘lives’ of space junk, of which there are now more than 170 million pieces in orbit around the Earth. The oldest surviving man-made space object still in orbit, Vanguard 1, tweets updates about its journey around Earth at 21,630km/h. As I’m writing this, it tweets… [Read more]

My office is a lead-lined bunker, impervious to signals from without; the danger, therefore, dwells within. All I keep on my desk are two dictionaries and a thesaurus, but even a dictionary, I’ve found, can devour an hour or two. Words beginning with F or N in particular are spell-binding when there’s a deadline approaching. Lately, I made the mistake of allowing a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (188X) to infiltrate the bunker. It’s an old small-format hardback with a maroon leatherette cover, perfect for the pocket when walking. I was reading it… [Read more]

I’m on sabbatical at present, and my reading is skewed towards my research on lost plays from Shakespeare’s England. The overwhelming majority of plays written and performed during Shakespeare’s lifetime have not survived. We know of at least 744 by name but estimate that a further 1700 or more must have been written in order for the commercial playing companies in London to have enough titles in their repertories to remain competitive in the marketplace. Against these staggering figures for the lost plays, we know of only a paltry 543 plays that have actually survived (Shakespeare being responsible for about… [Read more]

While at times my reading style is a little meandering, moving between two or three novels, maybe a memoir or an essay, a range of things that are almost but not quite capturing me, other books take me by the throat and do not let me go. Two brilliant debut novels, Idaho by Emily Ruskovich and History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund, grabbed me in this compulsive violent way, and indeed forms of violence are at the core of both novels, though to reduce their scope to this alone does not do justice to either. Idaho explores an unspeakable act… [Read more]

Like a lot of people I know, I expect to die under my pile of my ‘to read’ books. Deciding what to read next is arduous. You don’t want to start and not finish. But, at the same time, you don’t want to start one that kind of sucks and find yourself forcing your way through it or tricking yourself into thinking you know how to speed read. I also don’t like to rely solely on the books I own but haven’t read. I like to buy new ones, keep my collection fresh. Buying new books ensures that I continue… [Read more]

Having failed in yet another attempt to attract Australia Council funding (this makes three rejections in six months: a pattern?), we here at Meanjin took a moment or two to consider our finances. We’ve been lucky to receive a recent boost in our support from the University of Melbourne, and will continue to make applications for other funding as best we can. Meantime, we thought it timely to have a look at the amount we charge for subscriptions and retail purchase of Meanjin. So we thought, and we thought, and we decided to leave things as they are for our… [Read more]

It was Paul Kelly who led me to read Raymond Carver. It was the early 90s, and my head had been stuck in a magic realist place for a while. I’d read loads of Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the 80s and wanted to be him, right up until I read Jorge Luis Borges. And wanted to be him. I chased after them with less chance of catching them than a three-legged dog on a freeway going after cars. For me, the 80s was mostly a view of their taillights fading into the distance. And, okay, also Kafka’s. Then I read… [Read more]