In the middle of the Serengeti the scrubby land is flat, stretching into the unbroken distance on all sides. We set up camp—a motley group of Americans, Germans, Brits and Aussies—and begin preparing the evening meal. The area is seemingly uninhabited, but suddenly children are emerging from everywhere. We peel vegetables, cut off the unwanted sections, and remove the fat from a pile of chicken. Discard the bits we don’t want. The children can’t believe how wasteful we are, are wide-eyed over it. We bag up our ‘rubbish’—feeling a mix of emotions, the most prominent being multilayered guilt—and hand it… [Read more]

After more than a year of wanting to read David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, a friend gave it to me, so I finally have—at the same time that everybody else has moved on to reading his latest work on democracy. Bloomberg Businessweek called Debt, ‘a sprawling, erudite, provocative work’. For me, anthropologist and anarchist Graeber asks the great and central questions about debt. I was ultimately unconvinced by his central thesis that the swings between coinage money and credit money have been a decisive factor in human history. But it is a book that tackles head-on one of… [Read more]

Have you ever seen someone drink a can of beer in one hit and then crush the can? That would be an apt metaphor for the way I consumed Jami Attenberg’s The Middlesteins, a wry and perceptive drama about a dysfunctional family which I couldn’t get enough of. I also tore through Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, although I felt increasingly alienated by the narrative voice and ultimately a little soiled by the reading experience. Almost a decade ago my husband bought me a gift subscription to The Paris Review which he has faithfully renewed… [Read more]

I’ve had the good fortune of spending most of my life working with books in one way or another—as an editor, as a writer, occasionally as a teacher. There are books all over the house, and their grasp on domestic geography reaches beyond the back door and into the garden to my studio, which was once the storeroom for a shop. Nine bookcases, one coffee table, a sofa, four desks, two filing cabinets, sundry benchtops—books in, or on, them all. (None, I should add, on the bedside table; I hate reading in bed.) There’s a ‘sort of’ logic to all… [Read more]

I don’t have a bedside table. Actually, I do have a bedside table, but I’m not sure exactly where it is. My partner and I recently moved house—from a tiny East Brunswick unit into a place two or three times bigger, down in Portarlington. (Where? Exactly.) We’ve been too busy to unpack properly, and the spare room is a trash-heap of oversized stripy plastic bags and obscurely labelled boxes and hopefully my bedside table. I have no idea where my socks are, or my undies, but meanwhile our precious books have all been taken out of their boxes and filed,… [Read more]

A few months ago I moved out to the Dandenongs, which meant I started driving more, which meant I started listening to audiobooks more, which meant I became obsessed with Audible.com, more. I’ve listened to more books in the past six months than I would have ever had time to read. For my monthly $14 Audible subscription I get one audiobook ‘credit’ a month, and I always spend it on a book that has a celebrity narrator. Because with celebrity narrators I feel like I am getting incredible value. Not only am I purchasing a brilliant masterpiece of literature, but… [Read more]

Who has time to read? I’m in output mode, as my character Don Tillman would say. That’s a simplification of the reason that I have not read much fiction lately. But I find that reading others’ work while I’m creating my own has a negative effect on both activities. I’m writing a novel in first person, and wary of anything that may disturb my narrator’s voice. And reading good prose is still intimidating for me: if I want to be inspired to greater heights, I’m better seeing a play or a concert. The estrangement from reading dates from sixteen months… [Read more]

Beside the bed in Melbourne: Three kindles. All loaded full of books. All broken. We know any given e-reader will eventually become obsolete. Mine are early. — On the train to Castlemaine: George Saunders, Tenth of December. I had a major argument with a close friend last week. As a make up present he left this book at my house. I took it to read on the train. I’d never heard of George Saunders. But from the first story, I had a sense of ‘where have you been all my life’? He’s vastly funny, and has one of the most… [Read more]

Every week when I visit my GPO box it’s filled with new books from publishing houses, wrapped in cardboard packages like I’m living some sort of year-long, literary Christmas. Along with the classics I wish to get to, novels I purchase, and research tomes as neglected as my thesis, there is the steady stream of latest releases for various freelancing deadlines that tumbles out of box 4094—making me feel as though I’m always reading both too much and too little, my life a blur of reading and rereading and not reading. But I find myself wanting to write here about… [Read more]

My friend Lorelei and I set aside a day each week for creative activities. One of our projects was to write a screenplay for a throm-com (thriller-romantic-comedy—yes, we coined the term). We soon realised we were doing much more time-wasting than planned. For example, Lorelei might ask: ‘What would a dreadlocked counsellor working in a nursing home be called?’ A solid hour of listing names would follow, before we’d settle on ‘Eric’. So for practical reasons, we decided to retire our pens and find a novel to adapt into a blockbuster instead. So I launched into a reading list with… [Read more]