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. […]

Early this year, days after my dog died and before I became lit up with the pale-blue fire of a bout of mania, I became fascinated again with the work of Robert Lowell. As a young man, I had encountered the poet in the corners of a classroom I went spectacularly mad in, my nose always bleeding, and found him stodgy. He was another one of those fuckers who makes you work, I thought, and who unravels himself only when you begin applying the thumb-press of analysis. That wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted poetry that was rude; that made […]

For as long as I can remember, my reading material has formed a kind of orbit around me. Every time I read a new sentence, particularly when the book is good, and it’s good surprisingly often, it feels like a re-negotiation of the world. My reading matter tends to be multi-genred and multi-modal. I like to surround myself with different types of texts, so it would be normally an audiobook on the way to work, some poetry on the bedside table, and a novel or two by the sofa. I will immerse myself in both poetry and fiction most evenings […]

I didn’t move to Mexico to fall in love. It happened, as love does, unexpectedly. Prior to meeting my partner, I knew that I would have to pick up my long-lost Spanish where I had left it more than 15 years ago: on bits of scrap paper, my homework written hastily in between classes and hangovers while I was studying at the University of Sydney. Learning Spanish all those years ago was a lesson in what not to do, I mumbled to myself when I took the mandatory entry exam to restart my learning. If I was going to live […]

The future is now When my brother left home in the 90s for the blinking lights of the IT boom, he gifted me something. I’d grown up with his penchant for sci-fi and intense 70s prog, but this was new: a space man called David Bowie. Unlike Freddy Mercury, who I wanted to marry, I didn’t want to be with Bowie: I wanted to be Bowie. Or, no, it’s more psychological than that. Our dad had died just before I was born and my 12-year-old brain pretty much slotted Bowie in as a vague approximation. I had, after all, grown […]

Reading American Literature Readying myself for isolation during the Great Pandemic of 2020, I naturally went to my local bookstore to stockpile necessities, had a heavy discussion with one of the sellers about finally making time to reread old favourites. He named the Russians and I said Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, having secretly claimed African American literature a birthright since leaving my home in the United States twenty-one years ago, my skin white like spaces between the words that have consistently taught me right from wrong. I remember being twelve, newly bleeding. It’s near-to summer and the scent of magnolia […]

A Burns Philp general store was my childhood gateway to the world. My parents were based in Kavieng, the main town on the island of New Ireland in Papua New Guinea. The general store commandeered the main street, providing expatriates with some basic comforts from overseas. It was also the only place on the island that stocked books. Amongst the jumble of shelves displaying canned food, processed cheese and tins of powdered milk, was a solitary, somewhat lopsided, arrangement of idiosyncratic titles. Restocking of this shelf was haphazard. But whenever it was replenished, I pleaded with Mum to spend a […]

Archetypes: A Reading Guide Books are full of words that are ingested like medicine. Their benefits, largely intangible, linger long after the book is closed. Books are powerful with the capacity to change lives and alter how we relate to the world. As Mrs Constance Winterson liked to say, ‘The trouble with a book is that you never know what’s in them until it’s too late’. A book is a presence conjured by a being that speaks to us of other realms. The creator embodies an archetype to shape a work with a life of its own.   The Magician …works […]

Making sense of pain and chaos   My children were returned to me when schools closed last year. At five and seven, their lives had just been uprooted in the wake of family separation, shunting them from a big block in the country with a trampoline and a treehouse, to two tiny apartments in Melbourne’s inner north. It’s fair to say that things felt uncertain, precarious and hard. At that point, I read Deborah Levy’s memoir again. The Cost of Living reflects on remaking a life in the wake of divorce. ‘The writing you are reading now is made from […]

Lately, people in my life keep asking me: ‘Do you read fiction at all? Or do you just read memoir?’ The first time I’m asked the question, I smile. ‘Of course I read fiction,’ I reply. ‘Don’t you remember me posting Instagram stories about being obsessed with Laura McPhee-Browne’s Cherry Beach and Vivian Pham’s The Coconut Children during lockdown?’ When I am asked the question again by someone else, at a post-lockdown brunch, I give a vague response but am disquieted by it. Later, I check my book-tracking app. Sure enough, I haven’t been reading many novels. I add about […]

The last book launch I went to before the pandemic was for Ellena Savage’s excellent Blueberries. This is also the last book I can clearly remember reading. Earlier today, I opened the notebook where I recorded the titles I read in 2020. After Blueberries was Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy; Jenny Offill’s Weather; and Tara June Winch’s The Yield. After that, Svetlana Alexievich’s brilliant Voices from Chernobyl. Then nothing. I remember reading Voices from Chernobyl slowly. At the time, I thought it was because it was such a harrowing book that I was inadvertently pacing myself. Now I suspect that it […]

The New True Crime: a case for empathy over voyeurism   …the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world. – Edgar Allan Poe   I am swimming in a deep dark sea of terrible stories. I’ve been doing a deep dive into true crime and 2020 has found me buried in books, physical and virtual, plus essays, journalism and podcasts (so many podcasts). Bound up in brutality, violence and other people’s trauma, I’m beginning to wonder: what are the consequences of immersing in a genre obsessed with dead women and girls? \\ […]