I build reading lists the way I pack a small bag for a trip: with attention to mood, a hunger for surprise and a soft refusal to overplan. Rainy weekends and quiet afternoons call for lists that feel like companions—books that suit the rhythm of drizzle against the window, the slow stretch of...
Read more...
Reading Guides
When I think about building a reading guide, I usually start with a single...
Interviews
When I sit down to interview a writer, I’m not only listening for a soundbite...
Deep Reads
When I first started rooting through the secondhand shelves of a tiny bookshop...
Deep Reads
There are books that show you a historical date, a set of facts and figures....
I like reading routes—small, deliberate itineraries you can follow that bring you to unexpected places. A month-long reading route through postcolonial short fiction is one of my favourite ways to travel without leaving home: it’s compact,...
When I first returned to Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children after years away from it, I expected the bruising domestic drama I remembered. What surprised me was how the book's power sits not in plot alone but in the porous, restless...
There is a special kind of pleasure in getting inside a dense modernist novel: the sensation of being tested, of having to slow down and think differently. But that pleasure is fragile. Read too quickly or with the wrong expectations, and you may...
I still remember the first time I held a book from a press I’d never heard of before. It wasn’t a polished hardback with a glossy jacket and celebrity blurbs — it was a slim paperback from Galvanised Books, the kind of title that looks like it...
I’ve sat across from authors in bookshop backrooms, over coffee, on panels and through pixelated video calls. Across formats and temperaments one thing becomes quickly clear: the questions we ask shape what we get. Ask for a sales pitch and...
I have a soft spot for charity shops and secondhand stalls—their mismatched shelves and cardboard boxes feel like invitations. Over the years I’ve learned to read those murmured voices of books: the cracked spines that have been loved, the...
When I think about the twentieth-century novels that have stayed with me longest, they’re almost always the ones that arrived quietly into my life—pulled from a mis-shelved pile in a charity shop, recommended by a bookseller who could not be...