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 […]

There has never been a time in my life—not even when I was a homeless heroin addict dossing on a friend’s floor and sleeping all day only to rise and cross town to work on winter streets as a sex worker, no, not even then, because if I hadn’t had historical fiction and cyberpunk novels to get my head out of there, I wouldn’t have survived—when I haven’t had a few books beside my bed. But it is getting ridiculous now.   I have just gone and counted the pile on my bedside table. Fourteen books, all in the middle […]

The first movie I ever saw twice was Dirty Dancing. I was 15. My best friend and I sat at the back of the cinema and swooned at Patrick Swayze, wishing ourselves decades out of our own time and into an American summer camp full of Patrick Swayzes. The minute the movie finished we bought fresh tickets and walked straight into the next session of the movie. I tell this story because the decision to spend the little money I had on a self-indulgence as great and intangible as the FEELING I had in that theatre at 15 was one […]

It has been a good year for the obituarists among us. I suppose every year is, when you think about it, though it nevertheless seems that there have been more obituaries than usual lately, at least within my own particular spheres of interest. Death notices, appreciations, take-downs. (It’s always better to wait until someone is unable to respond before you put the boot in.) There was Wolfe, then Roth, then Bourdain, then Naipaul, with names new to me—Jonathan Gold’s, for example—thrown in for good measure along the way, added to the must-read list. Each death has brought with it a […]

I’m writing this as I read my own handwriting which says ‘Reading the same line over and over.’ Now I’m wondering about you (the reader) reading this while I write it. So, I’m writing an article about reading which will be largely concerned with the fact I no longer read the way I used to while pondering whether you’re really reading my writing or perhaps just skimming. Are my thoughts being thrown down a screen, or are your eyes vaulting the monitor like a lizard on lily pads as you dash with desire to waste as little possible time gleaning […]

In the second year of my Arts degree at the University of Queensland, I took a critical theory course from which I remember only two details (I did not do well). The first is the lecturer gesturing towards an image of a glaring, turtlenecked Foucault and describing the philosopher as being present ‘in all his sartorial glory’. The second is a piece of wisdom delivered by my tutor, a perpetually beleaguered wild-bearded PhD candidate who, at the time, seemed sagaciously ageless but, looking back, was probably 24. Responding to a student who had asked what he liked to read, the […]

When I was a child, I would read the comic strips in the paper as a daily ritual. The subtleties of Cathy, Hagar the Horrible and Wizard of Id were perhaps lost on my tiny self, but I was thrilled by the meticulous minutiae of these characters’ actions—three or four small squares telling a little story, a snippet of a life, their movements represented so precisely. I devoured Peanuts and Far Side books at my cousin’s house, but at some point I stopped reading comics. They were for kids or men or nerds who liked superheroes—they weren’t really for me. […]

I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction about smells. Or smell perception, to be exact. How people experience smells, through their bodies, socially or emotionally, is the focus of some fascinating nonfiction. Nonfiction offers a unique opportunity to tell vivid stories that weave together a scientific understanding of smells, scents, odours, fragrances and aromas with unexpected insights into everyday life. Stories about smells are not just scratch and sniff books—although these are not without their olfactory charm. Rather, nonfiction that explores the ephemeral and often powerful experiences of smell can help to re-imagine our relationship to the world, and each […]