The city is shrinking now. Gaining some fiction of cohesion as it recedes into contours and right-angles, pastel-washed slopes, a matrix of shipyards. The brutalist clock tower on the port strikes the hour with an unexpected ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ jingle. I am leaving Piraeus harbour on a ferry at sunset, staking out a seat by the window, attempting to wedge my overstuffed cabin-sized suitcase somewhere out of the path of the (apparently all) more compact and more composed passengers onboard. This is typically how I travel—outsized and overburdened, with books and clothes and vitamins, whatever the mode of transport. […]

Two things have happened to me in the last six months that have affected my reading: I finished a novel that was acquired by a publisher, and my mother died. I am now working on edits of the novel and so, at the moment, ‘what I’m reading’ seems even more pointedly about my own work than usual. At the same time, and while I come to terms with doing everything for the first time in a world that no longer contains my mother, ‘what I’m reading’ feels even more pointedly about her too. The first people to read my manuscript […]

Like many, most, who contribute to this blog, I read professionally, which is to say, I read a lot of emails. Things I’m not reading: political coverage (just for a bit longer, please, a bit longer). Twitter, when I can possibly avoid it (I could certainly avoid it more). Traffic signs (I cross where I please). My open tabs (to be closed en masse, unread, in a cleansing end-of-year ritual). Downloaded early-childhood-development PDFs (kids grow quick; who can keep up?). Not as many books as you might think. More, things on the way to being books: manuscripts, proposals, inchoate musings. […]

One of my greatest joys whenever I finish writing a book is re-entering the zone of whimsical, spontaneous reading. While I am at work on a long manuscript, I am always careful about what I read, particularly during the first draft. I think of this as going on a reading diet—mainly to prevent harm coming my way, to protect my budding voice. For instance, although I love Jonathan Franzen’s fiction, reading his novels when I write is dangerous for me, because they are thick on dialogue and thin on mood, whereas my ratio is the reverse. Franzen’s powerful voice can […]

There’s a moment in Patrick White’s Voss when Tom Radclyffe remarks that he would be ‘curious to read little Laura’s thoughts’. Little Laura responds, mischievously, if not maliciously, that she has been thinking ‘of nothing in particular. Which is another way of saying: almost everything.’ This is almost certainly the recognisable condition of those currently in possession of an internet password and the hardware to put it to work. We are mushroom people now, our mycelium constantly interacting with countless threads that have been sent out by others to find, lose, or avoid us. We are novelists now, too, digging […]

I guess since I heard Sheila Heti ask, How Should a Person Be? in 2012, the question has been on my mind. I read it when I was depressed and living through a Canadian winter a long way from home. I was 20. The book changed the nature of my self-awareness. The ache inside myself was no longer an immovable weight but was something to be interrogated. How did I want to be? How did I want to function in the world? What did I need to do? I’ve looked at my time since then as a project of efficiency. […]

It is mid-morning on a blue-bird day and I am coughing my way up the side of a mountain, suffering from what I will later decide must be bronchitis—constant coughing, weariness, shortness of breath. I’m on the west coast of Tasmania for a writing job, and there’s just enough time to hit the hills on the way home. I don’t have proper boots or gaiters here, so my feet are covered in mud; after pushing through the early patches of overhanging bush, the pad opens up and I scoot up the track as quickly as I can. I feel pretty […]

There are no good novels about the internet because the internet itself is too powerful a text, it’s rife with ambiguities and inconsistencies and bracing shocks, hidden meanings, fathomless mystery. It’s not the role of the novel to dilute anything, and I doubt you can write the internet without diluting it in some way. You can watch teens eat Tide Pods on it, you can watch people die on it, you can sign a petition to change the ending of a videogame on it. On Amazon, you can buy print-on-demand books beloved by white power terror groups (but why would […]

When I was about 36 weeks pregnant, my workmates threw me a little goodbye party on the last Friday afternoon before I began maternity leave. There was cheesecake and Twisties and everyone else downed brimming glasses of sparkling wine. I remember being so relieved that I’d made it through eight months of pregnancy while working. The vomiting, the constant need to wee, the pain of being regularly kicked in the ribs and bladder from the inside. And I was proud, because even though any little error I made was instantly attributed to baby brain by my colleagues, I didn’t think […]

i. The most I’ve ever dreamt is seven dreams in one night, back to back. I remember the first three dreams. I bothered to get up and write them down. It happened after I read Natsume Soseki’s Ten Nights Dreaming, a book of ten short stories based on ten dreams set in different time periods. Four of the ten stories begin with ‘This is what I saw in my dream.’ This is what I saw in one of my seven dreams, scribbled down half-awake/asleep: ‘Cars slowed to a crawl. Hazard lights on. Lights that do nothing. Penetrate nothing. A dust […]

I’m 11, 16, 21, sprawled across Nanna’s dusty rose velvet couch with my head resting on her lap watching Midsummer Murders or A Touch of Frost. Hetty Wainthrop Investigates. Inspector Rex. Her lap is the easiest place to relax, my safe space since I was a kid. I learned about fairytales rocking on her knees. I learned obsession from her, the art of getting lost, and the art of reading. Crime stories—better if it’s a series, better still if it’s British or Scandinavian (although recent Australian contributions by Emma Viskic and Jane Harper have similarly hit the spot)—have always been […]

What it’s like to read something you’re not engaged with if you have ADHD? Read one line. Don’t absorb it. Read again. Skip down to where a word you like jumps out at you. The word is dancing, skittering on the page. Read me, it says. You like me. NO! EYES UP! Go back up to the first line and read it again. It sinks in. Read the next line, and the next. Finally, you’re paying attention! You can do this. Now you’ve reached the word you like. Read it over and over. Think about how it doesn’t seem like […]