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.

Amy is reading Conversations With Creative Women: Volume Two by Tess McCabe

I’m reading my way through Conversations With Creative Women: Volume Two, a gorgeous and inspiring locally published book that’s just come into Readings this week. Compiled and edited by Tess McCabe of the Creative Women’s Circle, the book contains…

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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…

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Over the next few weeks we’re participating in a work experience program with students from high schools across Melbourne. Here, 15-year-old work experience student Anna Louey tells us about her favourite books.

How would you describe your taste in books?

As a bibliophile, I enjoy reading books from all different genres as I believe they all hold individual value. However, I particularly enjoy contemporary coming of age novels as I find their simplicity powerful. Such novels do not need made-up…

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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…

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Here we share some of the fantastic entries to our Why I Love To Read competition. Thank you to everyone who sent one in!

Congratulations to our winner!

I love to read and draw more than anything else in the whole world. Sometimes I do both of them at the same time! I love to read stories about Japan, where I was born. I like to learn about Manga and how to draw Manga. And I love Alice Miranda…

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If you’re a mother in a children’s book it likely means one or both of the following: (a.) you’re horribly dysfunctional, or (b.) you’re dead. So with Mother’s Day approaching (on Sunday 11 May), here are some mothers who not only made it out of the book alive, but with more than a shred of dignity.

1. Mrs Josephine Rabbit in The Tale of Peter Rabbit

What I love about Mrs Rabbit is her consistency. She warns Peter about the…

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While there are many fine books published, and it feels a great privilege to sell and promote them, it’s not so often that I come across a book I know holds the potential to have a profound effect on its reader, and the world around them. One such book, from last year, was Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree, which tells wide-ranging stories of parental love. Here are two recent books that struck me in the same way, though…

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Michael Pryor on the thinking behind his techno-thriller,

Humanity has been fascinated by mechanical people ever since the whole idea of machines came about. You can call them robots or automatons or androids or cyborgs, all with their own variations and differences, but what they really are is a reflection of us. Robots are us but with something extra – strength, or endurance, or some other sense. We comfort ourselves, though, by insisting that robots are lacking some of the…

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Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard reminds us, in the style of Proust, that the only subject needed for a life’s work is a life itself. Though so far just half of his six-volume My Struggle cycle has appeared in English (Knausgaard’s translator, Don Bartlett, can’t work fast enough for most of his Anglophone readers), the stretch and the intensity of his project is already clear; reading volumes one and two feels a bit like standing on the cliff’s edge and…

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The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka by Clare Wright

Bonkers: My Life in Laughs by Jennifer Saunders

The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair by Joel Dicker

Australian Notebooks by Betty Churcher

Foreign Soil by Maxine Beneba Clarke

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty

Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi & Sami Tamimi

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent

Diary of a Foreign Minister by Bob Carr

Only The Animals by Ceridwen Dovey

Last week, after being named winner of the 2014…

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