What I’m Reading

I am a ravenous beast when it comes to reading. I’ll read anything and everything, it’s as if I fear that in one second every book in the world will disappear and only memory will keep them alive. There weren’t ...

Reading the Instructions I find myself a first-time author at the age of fifty-one. I’m not from a writing background; my day job is medical (previously a GP, now a surgical assistant). I have no formal qualifications in writing, no ...

 degraded echo (de Chirico?) a white sun, nudging a post heavy sun: velleities hairy sun: shaking itself dry barely an impingement, a diluted sun, a dilated sun, egg broken into a large bowl of soup sun   hot sea, in ...

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I’m not a very focused reader. Even with the writers closest to my heart, I’ve usually only read a few of their books. I figure I’ll get to the rest gradually, one each year or so, and spread them out ...

Glassblowing is magic. Anyone who has seen a demonstration—even on Netflix—will know this to be true. It has become almost all I can think about: the grumble of the furnace and reheating chamber;  the smell of runny beeswax used to ...

This time last year, in lockdown, my partner and I decided to work our way through the novels long-listed for the Booker prize. Surprisingly, we both agreed before the announcement of the winner that Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart was ...

‘I’ll be watching, because history is going to be made,’ President Trump told his supporters on January 6 as they started their march to Washington’s Capitol Building. History was made that day, and no amount of airbrushing by US conservatives ...

I am reading books about how to murder my family. I blame Australian author SL Lim. They started it. About two, maybe three weeks ago, I was idly Googling books about murdering close family relations, when I came across Revenge: ...

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Reading Like a Mother Recently, I gave birth. To be more specific: recently, I almost gave birth in a carpark, because when I telephoned the midwives at the hospital to let them know I needed to come in, they didn’t ...

Reading Literary Blockbusters on Ngannawal Country On Ngunnawal country, the Canberra bubble continues to expand, with its brutalist architecture, national institutions, consulates, and blue-tinged gums from which the Telstra Tower on Black Mountain (aka the Syringe aka the Spaceship Docking ...

Just before restrictions came into effect in late June, I converted my dining room into a new art studio, pushing the table into one corner and setting up my writing space in the other. ‘We’ll just eat at the coffee ...

My eyes are painfully sore from lying in bed till 3am while holding a phone above my face and tapping it with my finger—I mean, scrolling. Oh yes, the phone was displaying environmentally unfriendly content best described as a spectacular ...

Writers are often asked what they’re reading: a question that always makes me squirm. After all, reading is personal and intimate, and literary folk can be so judgey. Do I really need to show you mine, even though you haven’t ...

In June of this year I moved back, temporarily, to Sydney. I say moved ‘back’ because I lived in Sydney as a teenager and in my early twenties: 12 of my 38 years, with the remainder spent in regional Victoria ...

Anne Enright hides her books in the basement. ‘Books are like knives,’ Enright says as she sits on her couch in County Wicklow, swatting away questions about her reading habits. ‘I don’t like people picking up my books and saying ...