Has Melbourne ever seen fangirling of the kind we saw last month when Taylor Swift visited Australia for her record-breaking concerts? At each performance, more than 90,000 people swooned with admiration … and a degree of obsession. While I love the overt displays of joy at these concerts, it is a quieter but no less adoring fangirl that attends a book festival, snatches up the latest copy of a beloved writer’s book or awaits the airing of an adaptation of their favourite novel. However, I can’t help but see the similarities between the fanbases of Tay Tay and the bookish community. I was rece ..read more

Ever since they started reading Spot and Grug, I’ve loved helping my kids choose their next read. As the kids have reached their tween years, we have continued to share book talk and I still love recommending new books, or ones that I loved at their age. However, as my eldest turns 13 years old, I’m having a bit of trouble determining which books are suitable for his age group, whether at the library or bookshop or on the kindle. While children’s books are obvious with their big, bright colours, and size, there is little guidance on the age at which the book is aimed once they move on from pic ..read more

Audiobooks I’ve listened to audiobooks while walking, vacuuming and cooking this year and they’ve improved each of these activities immensely. They make waiting in the car for the school pickup enjoyable, and help me get through the commute to work. I’m so reliant on audiobooks now that I can barely hang up the washing or visit the supermarket without an audiobook on the go. My kids aren’t as happy when I drown out their questions or arguments with a Vera Stanhope novel … Ann Cleeves A perfect segue to my favourite books when listening – somehow Vera Stanhope, Inspector Ramsay and DI Matthew V ..read more

It has been quite a while since I posted, but during that time I have been busy travelling, then getting my life back in order after extended time away. But I haven’t forgotten to write about how I went with all of the books I planned to read while I was away. I really love how books that you read on holiday retain a link to that place in your mind. I remember reading Sorrow and Bliss while walking along Four Mile Beach in Far North Queensland, and tramping through the bush near Robinvale on the Murray River listening to The Redhead by the Roadside. Now, I will associate Daisy Jones and the Si ..read more

I’m about to leave on an international holiday with my family and I’ve been doing some careful planning about what books and audiobooks to load onto my Kindle and phone. It has made me realise that planning holiday reading is quite different to regular home-reading. As this holiday is a long one – 10 weeks! – I tried not to fall back entirely on ‘beach reads’, but neither did I want any books that would make me work too hard. Perhaps there should be a service offering holiday-makers advice on how to choose the perfect holiday read, depending on their destination and duration … Here are the boo ..read more

I have a love/hate relationship with politics. I love that we have a stable form of politics in Australia, even though sometimes it can get a little heated and it certainly isn’t without its problems. But I hate that it has taken over writers festivals to the degree that it is hard to find a session that isn’t overtly political. These festivals have moved from being celebrations of books to become fixated on politics and ideology. At risk of sounding like that uniquely Australian politician, Pauline Hanson, I just don’t like it. I’m not saying that literature doesn’t play an important role in ..read more

I never would have imagined how much I would come to love audiobooks. In the past I considered myself a purist – books had a feel and a smell that couldn’t be replaced; no ereader for me, and listening to an audiobook was not reading. Now, I have a list of audiobooks saved on my phone so that I can read anywhere, anytime. And I’ll never travel without my beloved kindle. Over the years since my misguided stand on what is and isn’t a ‘real’ book, I have embraced audiobooks and now I couldn’t walk, vacuum, mow without one. And I have to admit they have a very real advantage that traditional books ..read more

A shared love of a book is a beautiful thing. But a mutual dislike for a highly-regarded one is even better. That is what I’ve found recently reading the comments that my post about Sarah Winman’s bestselling and much-loved Still Life has attracted. If you have read the review, you will see that I wasn’t the book’s greatest fan. I didn’t like the one-dimensional and too-good-to-be-true characters (although I have to admit that I find it hard to resist a book that shamelessly indulges in its love for Italy). However, my criticisms were nothing compared with that of the readers of this blog. The ..read more

Reaching the end of 2022, I’ve been thinking of how I would describe my year of reading. There have been some definite highlights (I’m looking at you, A Little Life, Sorrow and Bliss, The Mirror and the Light, and The Arsonist), but there have also been a lot of ho hum reads. I feel like it has been a year of reading without structure, and I have flopped between different genres, from trying science fiction with Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed to following the crowd to Sally Rooney’s latest, and re-reading Harry Potter with my youngest. I tried to find the enchantment that I felt on first ..read more

Does the reader have a responsibility to read a book ‘well’? And what does that even mean? In the past, I might have argued that there was no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way of reading a book, but having just read a past favourite, I believe it might be true that a book can be read badly. I picked up Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude with excitement. I hadn’t read the classic novel for 20 years after having adored the novel when I read it as a uni student. Two decades ago, I remember being swept away by this strange and wonderful world and I was looking forward to reliving the expe ..read more