The Present At the Byron Writers festival in August I was on author panels with Trent Dalton (Boy Swallows Universe), Jarrah Dundler (Hey Brother) and Elise Valmorbida (The Madonna Of The Mountains). I read their books for professional reasons, figuring that if I were going to be on a panel where the discussion would centre on their books then it was only fair that I read them. I enjoyed all three books very much, but had a particular soft spot for Elise’s book which is set in northern Italy through the Fascist period and the war. It’s a part of […]

Dead Girls by Alice Bolin Is it okay to hate a book, if only because you didn’t write it first? Alice Bolin’s Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession slaps with the brand of critical analysis and self-deprecating memoir I’ve been writing and not writing for the past year. That’s not to say that humanity only has room for one book about pop culture’s penchant for commodifying women’s bodies, hot and cold. It’s just that Bolin’s collection is so sorely true, so sharp and current, why shouldn’t I just give up? In the book’s opening quartet of essays, the […]

Each year, I record the books I read in the back of my diary. When a friend asks for reading recommendations for, say, a kayaking holiday in Vancouver, I just photograph the page and offer the numbers specific to that person’s taste and to a kayaking holiday in Vancouver: 2, 4, 17, 26 etc. No other words needed. This year I’ve recommended West by Carys Davies a lot. Also Robbie Arnott’s Flames, Jane Rawson’s From the Wreck, and Madame Zero by Sarah Hall. I get heaps of book recommendations from people on Twitter. A person I’ve never met says: ‘You […]

Each time I meet my supervisors to discuss my thesis, they tell me to take more out. You can’t write about that, they say. You don’t have room for that other thing. Narrow down, simplify. Obedient, or perhaps just worn down by the whole PhD process, I do. But from time to time they also tell me: stop reading. Go deep, not broad. You’ve read enough. That, I cannot obey. Because it’s in the nature of reading for one thing to lead to another; to start at A and end up at goldfish or the history of cricket. Because, for […]

The Hebrew, a play by George Soane George Soane (1790-1860) was more than unhappy his father wanted him to lead a single life, rather than the double life that he, George, had mapped out for himself. ‘Mercurial’ wouldn’t cover the younger man’s elemental tempers. Maybe ‘potassic’, with the world as his water. George was, or acted endlessly surprised to be, (or to have been) caught out in his parallel ways of being, and was, to understate it, disappointed and regretful that Sir John seemed not to feel the affection for him that a loving father ought to feel for an […]

As an academic who studies literary cultures, I am at least as interested in the question of how I am reading, as I am in what I am reading. Last year, I finished a monograph, Satirizing Modernism, about several long and ‘difficult’ modernist novels, such as Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God (1930) and William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955). Just around the time I sent the manuscript off, I began to find it increasingly difficult to concentrate on books. Perhaps a decade of teaching and academic study had finally undermined my passion for the written word? Maybe the constant interruption […]

My love of literature has always sustained me; more than alcohol, drugs, psychiatry and medication ever have or will. The fleeting hope and peace I have found can always be traced back to the books I have read, and the landscapes and images I have been given by human beings I have often never met, and never will. It is a truly indescribable phenomenon, this marriage of an escape from, and confrontation with, the world. Poetry has been the constant reason for everything I do and am. Kafka said ‘a book must be the axe for the frozen sea with […]

In my grandmother’s day, parents in Hong Kong waited a month before celebrating the birth of their baby. Infant mortality rates were high and families didn’t want to introduce their child to the world until they were certain of his or her survival. My grandma was not unusual in burying two of her eight children—one immediately after birth, and the other, aged two, from meningitis. Nowadays, thankfully, the death of a child is a relatively rare occurrence. But that doesn’t stop us from worrying about it. We put gates on stairs and cameras on cars and fences on pools in […]

The patella is pearlescent, our instructor muses. Bone, fat, fascia—all shades of white—but the knee bone of this rat shines like a perfect, tiny pearl. The taxidermist stretches the skin back over the leg before cutting the joint with a pair of wire cutters. The image is doubled, I watch her ungloved hands metres away, performing delicate work a millisecond ahead of the streaming screen above. So little holds the skin to the creature, she claims, and it is the same with us. It seems I am a writer obsessed with dead things. That’s how I introduce myself to other […]

All the imaginings…   I want to read all the stories ever written. I want to know all the imaginings. But much of what I read is that which makes up our day to day. Emails and letters and headlines and newsfeeds. I hurry, but I can’t get through them all. I don’t hurry the imaginings. I try to read one short story every day or so, although sometimes I binge, and I often have a few books on the go at once. There is a bookstack beside the bed, another two in the lounge, and a few in the […]

It is, in a way, an act of withdrawal, and I worry about it sometimes. I am spending more and more time reading and alone. How healthy can that be? But let us be honest: for a natural hermit, it is very healthy, especially when I am fortunate to have a room dedicated to books—a private library. Eight years ago, partly due to good luck and partly due to a desire to put literature at the centre of my being, I left Canberra for a town an hour away, in regional New South Wales. Although I would need to continue […]

Not only can I tell you what I’m reading, but I can tell you every book I’ve read in the last three years—plus the date I finished reading it. I have a spreadsheet, you see. When I was twelve I read a novel about three sisters, and I remember exactly two details from it. That one of the sisters lost a finger in a cave but managed to get it re-attached, and that the youngest sister kept a diary. Instead of recounting what happened during the day, however, she simply listed the meals she ate. From there, memories of everything […]