The June Readings Monthly is here and this month we're celebrating all things Australian fiction! Below is our head book buyer Alison Huber's column discussing the inaugural Readings Australian Fiction Month and why Australian fiction matters.
You can read the June Readings Monthly online now, or pick up a copy in our shops. Keep an eye on our blog for more updates and recommended new releases throughout the month!
Do you ever look around and wonder, ‘What are we doing here?’. I mean that question in every which way you might imagine, from home to work to the world to the moon to the outer reaches of space. Whatever your inclination, we can probably all agree that it’s incredible that we’re all here sharing time on Earth together right now, and that it’s a privilege to be doing what we are able to do, at this time and in this place. It’s pretty wild.
When I ask that question, ‘What are we doing here?, in relation to what we are doing at Readings (something I do regularly, to keep the feet on the ground), this comes closest to answering this question: we are supporting, championing, and selling the work of Australian writers in a globalised publishing industry.
Indeed, everything we do coalesces around this idea, an intent that has grown to be part of the long history of Readings: we’ve taken the lead of our chairman, Mr Mark Rubbo OAM, on this point, and Mark speaks to some of the background that has framed this approach, which has its roots in the changing cultural and publishing landscape of the 1970s and ’80s, in his column. It’s not that we don’t read and love and recommend books from all over the world (of course we do!), but our routine practice of giving a lot of love and energy to highlighting the work of our local authors and their unique output in the market where it matters most is ideological. It guides everything we do.
The reason why this matters was again clear to me upon the publication of a list, of ‘the 100 best novels of all time’ kind, this time published by The Guardian in the UK. I love lists. They make me think about how and what we remember of culture, and what it takes for a cultural thing to stand the test of ‘the test of time’, and be retained for use in the future. In the literary world, lists are one of the many mechanisms that contribute to the formation of a canon, the concept of ‘backlist’, and publisher decisions about what is kept in print. They are also a call to action for a book buyer. The list says, ‘Here, this is what you must have, and must have read’. Whatever the parameters and criteria are that shape these lists (which are themselves ripe for close analysis), when Australian books don’t feature on lists like this or only feature in a really marginal way (in this one, only Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus features at number 53), Australian publishing and Australian writers are made to seem like an exception to the global literary sphere rather than part of it. And this leads me back to the question, ‘What are we doing here?’.
So this month, we’re naming our enterprise, and focusing our attention even further than we usually do, and I’m excited to announce the launch of our inaugural Australian Fiction Month at Readings. We invite you to join our mission by buying Australian fiction in June. It’s political, it’s cultural, and it’s more than just a supportive sentiment, it’s a tangible contribution to the work of national storytelling and sustains those who write!
For anyone who needs some inspiration or (re)entry point, we have a fantastic 20% off promotion in both the Adult and Kids departments. You might wonder how we assembled the offering for this promotion, and I will admit to you that it’s a daunting thing to put together a representative list, until one realises that in fact it could never be that. Whatever happens, we will omit many of our darlings and the number left out will be unbearable to contemplate, but – pull yourself together, Alison! – one does have to put some sort of frame around this collection for practicality, so: for the Adult promotion I’ve mined some lists of my own, collecting together all the available fiction that covers winners of the Miles Franklin since 2000, the Stella Prize, the books that our community voted as the ‘Best Australian Books of the 21st Century’ (a list assembled in 2024 following that other infamous New York Times list that outrageously featured no Australian writers), plus of course the winners of The Readings Prize, and a chunk of staff suggestions (avoiding the new releases of the last twelve or so months for reasons of scale). But this is just the beginning, dear Reader, the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Come in to one of our shops and ask our brilliant and passionate staff to recommend an Australian novel to you. It’s what we love to do.
