There’s a stack of recent-reads on the bookshelf in my bedroom. It’s tall and unsteady and I have to be careful not to knock it over when on summer nights I open the window. Over the next couple of weeks, these books will be distributed to other shelves in other rooms or to friends with an urgent nod—you must read this. My small suburban home has bookshelves in every room, this is my childhood dream come true: a house full of books. My parents were Sicilian migrants, they worked long hours in factories to pay the mortgage and put food on the table. The only book they owned was a small prayer book Nonna gave my mother on the wharf in Messina the day she left for Australia.  My parents were not readers but for me, reading is as essential as breathing.

Essential and political. The first time I was conscious of reading as a political act it was the late 1970s, and I was an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne.  Frustrated with the domination of works by white male writers (the only women novelists we studied were Austen and Eliot), I dropped English Literature at the end of second year, opting instead for majors in Politics and Geography. For the next few years, I devoured books by women writers … Morrison, Angelou, Atwood, de Beauvoir, Woolf, Lessing, Garner… strong literary and feminist novels that challenged my thinking; they were my companions as I struggled through my turbulent twenties. These writers taught me how to write when finally, twenty years later, I became brave enough to begin telling my own stories.  Reading, like writing, is a political act; we make a decision each time we pick up a book about which stories and which voices are worth our time and attention. When we listen to a diversity of stories, we expand our sense of who we are as a community and a people.