Books We've Loved
10 booksellers share their personal favourite reads of 2022
Below 10 booksellers share which books stand out as exceptional amongst everything they’ve read this year.
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, Trespasses by Louise Kennedy, and The Colony by Audrey magee
My favourite reading experiences this year have all come courtesy of Irish women – Trespasses by Louise Kennedy, The Colony by Audrey Magee, and Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. Each of these novels engages with Ireland’s complicated political past with intelligence, insight, subtlety, and compassion…
Our favourite reads of 2021 so far
We asked staff to let us know which book stands out as exceptional amongst everything they’ve read so far this year. Below are the books they’ve loved the most and you can browse our more extensive collection of favourites here.
Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder
I haven’t yet stopped thinking about Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder. Its dry humour and refreshing weirdness was just what I needed.
— Alison Huber, head book buyer
Wild Abandon by Emily Bitto
Happily for me…
What we're reading: Barker, Brokken & Ginzburg
Each week we bring you a sample of the books we’re reading, the films we’re watching, the television shows we’re hooked on, or the music we’re loving.
Teen Advisory Board Member Aurelia Orr is reading Waking Romeo by Kathryn Barker
I finished Waking Romeo by Kathryn Barker last night and it was SO GOOD. I loved every minute of it and devoured it in two days (stayed up to 3am first night, 1.30am the next). Easily a 5 star read…
What I loved: The Mouse and his Child by Russell Hoban
The Mouse and his Child is a perfect book for the word-dreaming child. The tale of two tin wind-up mice in search of their own territory sings with incident, humour and emotion. At its heart is a story of family bonds that cannot be broken. And in Manny Rat the novel also has one of the most villainous figures in children’s fiction.
The Mouse and his Child is undergoing a revival – the Royal Shakespeare Company (who also created the…
What I Loved: Monkey Grip by Helen Garner
I read Monkey Grip when I was first trying to learn to be a writer, and looking around to see if there was anything Australian that could help me. There must be tens of thousands of Australians who have gone through this: you’re young, you read Crime and Punishment and Madame Bovary, or other books as strong, and you think: alright, that’s very, very strong. But who’s strong, who can help me, here? And the book I found…
What I Loved: Lean on Pete by Willy Vlautin
One of the highlights of my reading year so far has been Willy Vlautin’s novel The Free. The book draws together the stories of three characters – an Iraq War veteran who attempts to take his own life; a nurse at the hospital where he is treated; and the night caretaker at the group home where he has been living – with quiet attention and compassion, but never with sentimentality or pity. It’s excellent. It was not by chance…
Retro Reads: Daddy Long-Legs by Jean Webster
In our new Retro Reads series, we remember books from our past. Here, Bronte Coates talks about Jean Webster’s
I was a vicious reader as a child, an obsessively competitive MS-Readathon participant with a penchant for developing intense literary crushes (please see here). I consumed nearly everything I found on my family bookshelves and it was thanks to my grandmother (by path of my mother and older sister) that I first came across ‘College Girl’ stories – novels that…
What I Loved: The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
At certain times a book is able to take hold of you in such a way as to direct the angle of your life for a while. W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn did this for me when I first discovered it a few years ago. I still think it’s the best work of fiction I’ve ever read.
Nominally the account of a long walk, which the narrator once took along the coast of East Anglia, The Rings of Saturn…
What I Loved: Girl meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis by Ali Smith
As I was texting my sister, asking her to lend me her copy of Girl Meets Boy so I could write this column, she was, in that moment, handing it to a friend to read. I lost my copy a while ago to the same practice. She retrieved it for me, and I sat down to re-read a story I have read and loved on several occasions and yet can never entirely recall. The details might be hazy as I…
What I Loved: Americana by Don DeLillo
Here is how I ended up with a copy of Americana: I was 17 and it was lent to me by a neighbour, a professor at the university my father had worked at, who told me it was good but not Don DeLillo’s best. At the time I was like a lot of 17-year-olds who studied creative writing; likely too arrogant and too annoying to be around.
I’d borrowed the book with the idea that I wanted to read…
What I Loved: Jesus' Son
A few years ago I was listening my way through the New Yorker fiction podcasts – a new discovery to me at the time – when I came across Denis Johnson’s short story, ‘Emergency’, read by Tobias Wolff (if this recommendation doesn’t spur you on to buy the book, at least go online and listen to Wolff’s wonderful reading of an American classic). I listened to the story twice. A couple of weeks later I bought Johnson’s Jesus’ Son…
What I loved: Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
My favourite books hook me with their first lines: Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, for example, or Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, or Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The best deliver an uninterrupted flow of intriguing sentences, beginning to end. Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star does this in a brutal, disconcerting way, while conveying its story through a scrim of self-consciousness. It is bizarre and unsettling, but full of gems; it is bleak but funny…
What I loved: How The Light Gets In by M.J. Hyland
In 1996 I began the RMIT Professional Writing and Editing course, and while I didn’t share any classes with M.J. Hyland, I soon began to hear a lot about her from classmates. Not only was she an amazing writer, I heard, but a talented editor as well. Since our student days she has published three books, one of which (This Is How, 2007) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. However it’s her first novel, How the Light Gets…
What I Loved: Because a White Man'll Never Do it by Kevin Gilbert
Sometimes publishers make bold choices. The recent re-publication of Kevin Gilbert’s polemic from the 1970s, Because a White Man’ll Never Do It, is such a choice. Gilbert, a co-founder of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra, wrote the book to spark debate and encourage political organisation in Aboriginal communities. That the work still stands as relevant today, and even as absolutely urgent, says a lot about what has and hasn’t happened since its original publication.
A quick glance through…
What I Loved: The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville
My reading of Kate Grenville’s 1999 novel, the one she says brought a little-known Australian author international recognition (it won Britain’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, previously the Orange Prize), was a signifier of several new beginnings for me. It was a gift from a close friend as I was emigrating from London to live in Melbourne. This friend and I had shared a crush on Australia since we were at university together and, as we said goodbye, her simple act…
What I Loved: The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
It’s the early 1960s and life is aglow on the American east coast. Amateur musicians are composing Beatles-inspired pop music, local shrinks are starting to prescribe medicinal LSD, and words like ‘feminism’ are sprouting in the minds of the young. Somewhere in this budding psychedelic mix is Oedipa Maas, a 28-year-old homemaker who has just been informed that her millionaire ex-lover is dead and that she has been named executrix over his will and assets.
Such an appointment is a…
What I Loved: What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt
What I Loved is Siri Hustvedt’s third novel, published a decade ago now, and set in New York, opening in 1975. It follows Leo Hertzberg, an art historian teaching at Columbia, who forms a life-long friendship with artist Bill Wechsler, after purchasing a piece of his work long before he was established. The book follows both men as well as their wives, Erica and Violet, who are both academics, and their sons, Mark and Matthew, who were born at around…
What I Loved: The Complete Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz
There’s this story about Charles M. Schulz, the creator of Peanuts, that I really love. After drawing and writing strips for close to 50 years, uninterrupted except for a five-week break in late 1997 to celebrate his 75th birthday, he was diagnosed with cancer. The illness soon began to affect his ability to see clearly and, as a result, he announced his retirement. Later, in an interview on The Today Show in 1999, Schulz said that some time after…
What I loved: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
One day my younger brother came home to find me sobbing at the kitchen table. I told him not to worry, that I was just reading a book and he said, why would you read something that makes you cry?
I’m still not sure how to answer that question but, thinking back on the books and films I’ve loved the most, there’s a definite trend in this direction. In a strange, masochistic way, the ability to make me tear up…
What I loved: Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
by A.S. PatricRevolutionary Road was an immediate critical success in 1961, and its author, Richard Yates, was set to become one of the great names in literature. Yet the novel failed to find an audience, and by the time of his death Yates was penniless and practically unknown. All of his nine books had fallen out of print. Then something extraordinary happened. An article was published in a small journal in 1999. The Boston Review piece was a spark that rapidly caught…
What I loved: It’s Raining in Mango by Thea Astley
As 2013 will see the introduction of the inaugural Stella Prize, the first literary prize for Australian women writers, I feel compelled to revisit one of my favourite Australian authors.
Despite winning four Miles Franklin Awards – as many as Tim Winton and more than any other writer, male or female – Thea Astley’s novels have never reached an audience as widespread as the likes of Winton or Peter Carey, who won the award three times. (Incidentally, Astley shared…
What I Loved: A Death In The Family by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Depending on the continent on which you purchase your reading material, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s most recently published work will either be available as a novel entitled A Death in the Family (Australia and UK) or a biography entitled My Struggle: Volume 1 (US). This, I think, is unusual.
Granted, very often, for marketing purposes, books are assigned different titles in different countries on the basis of commercial viability. (In this instance, I can appreciate that Knausgaard’s British publishers elected not…
What I loved: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Jason Austin shares with us a book he loved for our new ‘What I Loved’ series.
About ten years ago I was stuck for something to read. You might think it strange that a bookseller was bereft of reading material, but, like most, we too have those moments where nothing piques our interest.
It was at the back of one of my bookshelves that I found a bruised copy of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. I’d picked it up…
What I loved: To Siberia by Per Petterson
Readings Monthly
It is possible to think about reading as a series of turning points. Every now and then, a book comes along like a shock – making and breaking, staying with you. It’s an ‘ah’ moment of recognition, when you finally realise that writing can be done like that, often leading to a whole new plane of discovery. Thus far, I can count my history of such books on the one hand: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Joan…
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