In June of this year I moved back, temporarily, to Sydney. I say moved ‘back’ because I lived in Sydney as a teenager and in my early twenties: 12 of my 38 years, with the remainder spent in regional Victoria and Melbourne. But Sydney marked me formatively. It’s brutal and beautiful. I feel nostalgic for it but I also remember how it felt to struggle here. I remember why I left. I haven’t moved back to the Sydney I remember. In some ways that would be impossible; more than 15 years have passed and cities, particularly ones you have nostalgia […]

Anne Enright hides her books in the basement. ‘Books are like knives,’ Enright says as she sits on her couch in County Wicklow, swatting away questions about her reading habits. ‘I don’t like people picking up my books and saying “what’s this like?” … People do nothing but boast about their books, nonstop … But I can’t. They are too personal. They are too much part of my machine.’ It is the only time in the interview that she turns away from the camera, her profile firm and still. The image of books stowed below ground loops in my mind. […]

This is one of those columns that I read semi-regularly especially when friends and colleagues are giving their response, but it’s not one I ever thought I’d be asked to do. It’s uncool to admit you’re excited to be asked, isn’t it? I’ve never been cool: am absolutely thrilled! Truthfully, since developing chronic c-PTSD symptoms in 2019, my reading isn’t as voracious as it used to be: do people with PTSD in disciplines where they are expected to consume a lot of information in various media talk about the brain fog? I’ve cut down from reading maybe 1.5 books a […]

I find it hard to concentrate. I repeat myself more often than I’d like. It’s the internet; it’s the pandemic; it’s the doom clouds above in another Victorian winter. I wonder how scatterbrained we would seem to my grandparents, their parents. In another decade I read Don Quixote in Berlin. I was by myself and staying in a quiet hostel that had once been a hotel. It was far too nice for a hostel and it was empty and I didn’t know why. Suspicious elderly East Germans glared at me and my long grey hair when I walked past. I […]

When Covid-19 emerged, my reading choices veered sharply to factual. I trained as an epidemiologist. Now, here was the disaster I’d been taught was inevitable. I pored over scientific papers about the new virus, trying to understand what was happening, as did my friend Peter whom I met at graduate school in Seattle, 30-something years ago. We began emailing each other critiques of public health responses to the pandemic, Peter from California where he’d retired, me from the Central Victorian bush. Peter approached the task with rigour, reviewing the modelling and preparing a summary ‘memo’ for me and his many […]

It might sound morbid, but I’ve been reading a lot of epitaphs lately. It’s because I’ve been spending a lot of time in a cemetery. Melbourne General Cemetery, to be precise. I go there most days, via the Macpherson Street gates. On entering, the road is flanked with contemporary graves. Many of these are Italian. Their epitaphs are mostly brief, though flush with sentiment. Beyond that stretch, the road diverts. I head right and curve toward the Princes Park side to one of many Roman Catholic sections. On the way, by the road, an especially eye-catching memorial. A bronze head […]

I’m always a little hesitant to speak about the books I’ve read. And that’s because there are so many books I haven’t read. Compared to a lot of authors I know, I get through an embarrassingly small number of books. The reason is that I read painfully slowly. Sentence by sentence, word by word. And I go back and re-read sentences just to make sure I’ve really understood and appreciated them. When I’m sure there’s no one listening, I like to read out loud, rolling each word around my mouth. And when I can’t read out loud, I read just […]

Last month, for the first time in more than a year, I slept in a bed that was not my own. At the foot of a ravine, on the bend of a river, I fed logs into flames and drank red wine. I poked coals and consumed Sarah Sentilles’ Draw Your Weapons until the evening turned charcoal. Then I settled under the star-shot sky to think about the connections she had drawn between art and philosophy, trauma and morality. Later I lay in bed and, through the bleed of rain down the wall-length window, read the constellations. To the sound of […]

I am drinking tea, made in a blue enamel teapot. It is lukewarm. I need to either finish or reheat it. I live on Wurundjeri country. Today, this week, I am on Darug and Gundungurra country. I am mindful of having a safe place to read and write while devastation racks India, and Palestine. Because I’m doing a PhD, I am reading a lot of different things all at once, greedy for the thoughts of others. I was drawn to study because I’d entered a cycle of disaffection with my writing that felt untenable. I needed a breath. I wondered […]

Arab-Australian Literature is having a moment. A few months ago, the poet Omar Sakr walked away with a Prime Minister’s Literary Award for his stunning collection, The Lost Arabs (UQP, $24.95), and Randa Abdel-Fattah launched her Coming of Age in The War On Terror (New South Books, $34.95). A few weeks ago, writer and activist Sara Saleh won the prestigious Peter Porter poetry prize for her poem A Poetics of Fo(u)rgetting. A few days ago, I launched Sara Haghdoosti’s debut novel, Sunburnt Veils (Wakefield Press, $24.95) at an in-conversation event at Readings. In a few months’ time, I will be […]

You can’t read Hamlet. Try taking it out of your bag in a doctor’s waiting room or sitting on a train. There is no edition out there that can ambiguate that heavy-weight six-letter title or ameliorate the feeling you are somehow being silly and somehow up to something, the ultimate milquetoast pretending to read. I don’t think you could even take it out near the office of your favourite English professor without sensing you’ve committed a grave social error. Hamlet is the kind of thing only Hamlet would read (surely someone has said this before). Perhaps Hamlet would read Hamlet […]

I’ve been reading too much; I haven’t been reading enough. We’ve been in a pandemic for a year now and I have whiplash from having to pivot so hard so often. At first it feels like all I read is the news and policy directives. My attention span is gone too, reading is harder than it was. When I cast my mind back to write this, all sense of chronology is gone—time is a circle, and the circle is a zero. First, I read Chernobyl Prayer by Svetlana Alexievich, and wonder if there is any hope for us at all. […]