Thanks for travelling through the highways and byways of this Reading Trails series. Here’s hoping it’s opened many doors to Meanjin’s archive – introducing you to new writing friends and reading companions along the way, as well as re-uniting you with old favourites.
For this final week, head into Meanjin’s 2024 round-up of books released that year by Ned Hirst, Claire Cao, Clare Millar and Sonia Nair which scoops in authors including Michelle de Kretser, Siang Lu, Dylin Hardcastle, Yumna Kassab, Melanie Cheng and Inga Simpson – among many more.
Weave your way out from these recommendations through Melanie Cheng herself on Australian author Enza Gandolfo and Yumna Kassab’s “Guernica” from April 2024, and on to a stunning meditation on the attentions and inattentions of reading as Jarrod Hedel reads Luke Carman reading Gerald Murnane.
“There are many accounts of writing in our culture,” Hedel notes, “how to do it, why to do it, what is happening when you’re doing it, who is doing it, who isn’t doing it, who should and shouldn’t be doing it, who is and isn’t winning the prizes, and so on, as if this is a culture of writing. But rarely are there strong accounts of the reading experience.” His essay, on Carman’s own reading-based essay, steps beautifully into this space.
Which leads back to Gerald Murnane himself, his short story “Stone Quarry” from Meanjin Autumn 1986, and his essay “Why I Write What I Write” from summer that year.
Voting in this year’s ABC-RN Top 100 Australian Books poll closes at 7pm, 1 October, 2026.
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Best of Australian Reading in 2024 – Ned Hirst, Claire Cao, Clare Millar and Sonia Nair
What I’m Reading – Melanie Cheng
Guernica – Yumna Kassab
The Inattentions of Reading – Jarrod Hedel
Stone Quarry – Gerald Murnane
Why I Write What I Write – Gerald Murnane