In anticipation of Mother’s Day this Sunday 11 May, our staff reflect on how their mothers have shaped their reading habits.

Belle Place:

I have few memories of my mum without a book in hand. She reads widely and very quickly – the type of reader who will bring a book to the breakfast table on holidays. Aside a recent upset over My Brilliant Friend, the first book in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan trilogy (I adored it, she loathed it, we had to stop speaking about it because I was so incredulous that she didn’t like it), and that she’s a voracious crime reader and I only sometimes dip into the genre, we often read and like the same books. She reminded me recently that two of her favourite books were recommends from me: Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.

In return, here are my mum’s thoughts on what I should be reading (and contrary to what she might say, I do sometimes do what she tells me):

‘I wish you would read, if you haven’t already, Master Georgie, Wuthering Heights, the complete works of Thomas Hardy and Arnold Bennett, Vernon God Little and any sort of crime fiction – you just have to try it. I think both Hardy and Bennett write unusually well about women (Tess is one of my favourite literary characters, as is Bennett’s Anna, and let’s not forget the wonderfully stupid Emma Bovary). You must also read Anthony Powell. You should read crime because it is so much fun! I am currently into Tana French – she does a very good Irish noir.’

Nina Kenwood:

My mother is a voracious reader, and so am I, but we don’t often read the same books. Mum loves crime. She’ll get through a couple of crime novels a week. But more than crime, she loves action. She enjoys a fast-paced novel, with twists and turns and a decent sprinkling of violence. Dean Koontz and Lee Child are two of her favourite authors. In contrast, I tend towards contemporary fiction about family and relationships (“too slow,” Mum will sigh).

I might be overstating our differences, since her last book recommendation to me was The Girl With a Clock for a Heart, which I plan to read. The stories we’ve bonded over most in recent years were the TV series The Walking Dead (we watched the first two seasons together one summer, staying up late and churning through 5 or 6 episodes a night, and now we have a phone-call debrief after every new episode) and The Hunger Games trilogy, which we both devoured in the space of a few days.

Reading is one of the defining pleasures of my life, and I owe that to Mum. She always had books in our house, and never censored my reading (my sister and I were allowed to read Babysitter’s Club and Sweet Valley High to our heart’s content). We were horse-crazy and Mum helped us find wonderful books like Black Beauty and The Silver Brumby series. She took me to the library every week when I was little. When as a teenager I insisted I had to attend the John Marsden writing camp, she drove me there and paid for it without question. Mum has been the perfect influence on my bookish life – providing me with never-ending encouragement to read more and read widely.

Bronte Coates:

As a rule, my mum and I have very different tastes, really only converging in ways too embarrassing to list here – suffice to say we’re entering Tom Cruise territory. So when I asked my mum to let me know the best and worst books I’d ever recommended her she wrote, “This is difficult… The best may be Silk by Alessandro Baricco as I kept that one! I can’t remember what the worst was called but it had some awful part of an animal dying and I hated it!!!! Ghastly… I’m sure you recall what it was!”

(I do. The book was Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found which I read while travelling and absolutely loved. When I’d passed on the book to her I’d forgotten about that scene she’s mentioned – which was astonishingly moving, I cried – or I never would’ve shared it. Mum can’t handle any kind of violence against animals.)

When we thought about books mum had recommended me, she remembered Jean M. Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear series, most of which I read in high school. At the time my oldest brother was also reading them and agreed, yes, they were good, but that I would have to skip all the sex stuff. My mother then berated him, saying I could read whatever I wanted – advice I’ve always followed. While it’s not a book, most recently we also both loved Sarah Polley’s documentary Stories We Tell which is an extraordinary tribute to the filmmaker’s own mother.

Fiona Hardy:

Despite having a dealer in the family, my parents love to go to libraries (how very dare they) and there’s always a book on Mum’s side table when I go to visit. While much like Dad, I almost exclusively read crime, I’ve often been fascinated by Mum’s favourite topics: biographies and Australian history. As a carer of children with severe disabilities, a volunteer position she’s been in for years, Mum has always been interested in people with the odds stacked against them, and as an English immigrant, she likes to find out about this great expanse of land we live on. Though we don’t always read the same books, I’m glad when we do. She doesn’t know it yet, but I’m going to pester her about reading Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree which I raved about last week (right here). Before that, I bullied her into reading Stephen Briggs hilarious biography, The Boy Who Could Tickle Clouds. She happily agreed with me that the book was a total riot and also, it was a good thing that me and my two sisters weren’t shipped off to boarding school, now an eternally terrifying prospect thanks to Stephen.

I recently grilled Mum on her thoughts about our reading relationship…

What was your favourite book to read to me or my sisters?One of the favourite books you girls had was Hansel and Gretel. It was read so many times that when it fell apart Dad took it to work and someone rebound it for him.

What was a book your mother shared with you?I can remember Mum reading Noddy to my brother Ian and I, and the Grimms’ Fairy Tales.

Do you trust my recommendations as your daughter?Yes I do trust your recommendations. (Ed. note: I didn’t pay her to say that, but she knows there would be no more tea next time she came over if she said otherwise.)

What is the best book that you’ve read lately? I really enjoyed Di Morrissey’s Tears of the Moon.

What is it about memoirs and historical fiction that you enjoy?As far as history books go, I think it’s interesting to have an insight into what the world was like for people way back when. I had an elderly lady – who had had a very difficult life during the war – say to me once: “If people don’t remember then they might never have existed.”