What I’m Reading

This is one of those columns that I read semi-regularly especially when friends and colleagues are giving their response, but it’s not one I ever thought I’d be asked to do. It’s uncool to admit you’re excited to be asked, ...

I find it hard to concentrate. I repeat myself more often than I’d like. It’s the internet; it’s the pandemic; it’s the doom clouds above in another Victorian winter. I wonder how scatterbrained we would seem to my grandparents, their ...

When Covid-19 emerged, my reading choices veered sharply to factual. I trained as an epidemiologist. Now, here was the disaster I’d been taught was inevitable. I pored over scientific papers about the new virus, trying to understand what was happening, ...

It might sound morbid, but I’ve been reading a lot of epitaphs lately. It’s because I’ve been spending a lot of time in a cemetery. Melbourne General Cemetery, to be precise. I go there most days, via the Macpherson Street ...

I’m always a little hesitant to speak about the books I’ve read. And that’s because there are so many books I haven’t read. Compared to a lot of authors I know, I get through an embarrassingly small number of books ...

Last month, for the first time in more than a year, I slept in a bed that was not my own. At the foot of a ravine, on the bend of a river, I fed logs into flames and drank ...

I am drinking tea, made in a blue enamel teapot. It is lukewarm. I need to either finish or reheat it. I live on Wurundjeri country. Today, this week, I am on Darug and Gundungurra country. I am mindful of ...

Arab-Australian Literature is having a moment. A few months ago, the poet Omar Sakr walked away with a Prime Minister’s Literary Award for his stunning collection, The Lost Arabs (UQP, $24.95), and Randa Abdel-Fattah launched her Coming of Age in ...

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You can’t read Hamlet. Try taking it out of your bag in a doctor’s waiting room or sitting on a train. There is no edition out there that can ambiguate that heavy-weight six-letter title or ameliorate the feeling you are ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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: ...

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 ...