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.

Aurelia Orr is reading Animal by Lisa Taddeo

A reader will come across many books in their life, but it is rare to read a book that is as impactful and powerful as Lisa Taddeo’s Animal. The novel brilliantly delves into the perspective of the mistress, revealing the protagonist Joan to be a woman full of complexity, vulnerable and deprived and always yearning for something more than just lust. A woman who was introduced to a world of violent, salacious men too young, and has grown up believing sex is the answer to everything: from the human need for attention and affection to the base resort for survival against danger. Joan’s is a story of extremes but within it we see the shades of many women’s experiences.

Taddeo’s unflinching prose reveals the quotidian of ‘little rapes’ women experience throughout their lives: the lingering ogles they ignore yet feel accountable for, the unsolicited touches, and most importantly, the burden of shame that tells them that these actions are nothing but the consequences of being a woman. These ‘little rapes’, as Taddeo points out, are the ultimate killers, and her novel confronts this misogyny women are forced to ingest.

Like its setting in the California desert, this book is suffocating and sticks to your skin, creeping and resting inside you no matter what reprieve you try to find. Typically when I finish a book, I’ll move straight onto the next one. But when I finished this book, I was frozen, stuck processing everything that had happened. The reader’s experience is raw, unforgiving and brutal, and yet by the end you realise that Joan is not the stereotypical ‘other woman’, but a mosaic of pain and heartbreak, each piece of her story a memory or experience of trauma every woman can identify with.

Animal left me haunted and hollow, tormented by the fact that the next book I read simply cannot be as good.

This book contains content that may be distressing to some readers, including explicit depictions of sexual assault, domestic violence, and suicide.

Chris Gordon is reading with seasonal and festive food in mind!

Picture this. Long luxurious days are ahead of me and to celebrate I am surrounding myself with cook books. I am plotting meals that spread from a beachside picnic for me and my bloke all the way to an elaborate dinner party where everyone receives a home cooked gift to take home. I’m planning on making food to feed family and friends, and meals suitable for eating while curled up on the couch watching the despicable characters in Succession. For that particular experience I’m going to need to something very spicy and so will dip into Christine Mansfield’s Indian Cooking Class. 

For beachside picnics and evenings bathed in fairy lights I’m very taken with Miguel Maestre’s Feast cookbook. Delightfully simple recipes that scream with fresh flavours and brilliant colours. Paul West’s  Homegrown will also inspire me with his no nonsense and no fuss approach to making the most of being outside. Time to create a worm farm? Why, yes it is. 

But for my most ambitious holiday plan, the one where I even wear shoes, I’m planning menus with the assistance of  Home Made: Cooking at home with Melbourne’s best chefs, cooks and restaurants. Described as a love letter to Melbourne, it contains everything that is completely and utterly brilliant about Melbourne’s tenacity. On the days I’m not cooking, I’m planning on venturing to one of the brilliant restaurants that contributed.

Clare Millar is reading Vanishing Fleece by Clara Parkes

It’s not often I actually spy something in the shop that I don’t know, but thanks to whoever set up the arts/crafts table display, I discovered Vanishing Fleece by Clara Parkes.

This is the story of how Clara spends a year transforming a 676-pound bale of wool into actual yarn, travelling all over the US to oversee each little step of the process in a dying and unsupported industry. I don’t care that much for wool, really, and I’m a terrible knitter (as my fellow booksellers Tristen and Eleanor could attest to…), but this is really compelling story. Parkes has knack not just for explaining the process but also for capturing the quirks of all the people she meets along the way. I felt like I was travelling along with her.

I picked this up primarily because it’s the closest book I’ve ever found to what I’m writing about glassblowing, so it has been an inspiring process to see both the journey unfold before my eyes, and to search for structure for my own writing process. Vanishing Fleece to me is an overlooked and understated work of narrative nonfiction - a bookseller’s dream, honestly!