Jo Case
Jo Case works as a bookseller at Readings Doncaster.
Reviews
Girls at the Piano by Virginia Lloyd
Entering the world of some memoirs feels like an intimate conversation with a stranger who will, over the course of your time together, become your new best friend. Reading Virginia Lloyd’s exquisite…
Skin in the Game by Sonya Voumard
Sonya Voumard’s father was a ‘member of Melbourne journalism’s gregarious tribe’. At ten years old, when she was fascinated and spooked by stories of child abductions, her father laid out three newsp…
Feel Free by Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith’s new collection brings together eight years of eclectic cultural essays written ‘during the eight years of the Obama presidency’.
In her foreword, she is specific about this period, and…
The Woman Who Fooled the World by Beau Donelly & Nick Toscano
You don’t need to have heard about Belle Gibson, the Instafamous ‘wellness warrior’ who made a fortune and built an empire on her claim to have treated her brain cancer (which she didn’t have) with d…
Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich
Following Trump’s election, classic dystopias like 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale have resurfaced on bestseller lists. In our mid-climate-change, post-truth, resource-depleted, racist-and-sexist-backla…
Heather, The Totality by Matthew Weiner
I was excited to read the first novel from Matthew Mad Men Weiner – not just because he’s the meticulous craftsman at the helm of one of my favourite screen stories, but because he’s often cited 1950…
Stories and True Stories by Helen Garner
I know I’m not the only Melbourne writer whose motto, at my laptop, is WWHGD (what would Helen Garner do?). From Monkey Grip – Readings’ first Australian bestseller – to last year’s collected non-fic…
Mayhem by Sigrid Rausing
Sigrid Rausing is the editor (and owner) of Granta. Her grandfather built the Tetrapak global packaging empire. An heir to the resulting fortune, Rausing’s first memory is the smell and alienation of…
Evening Primrose by Kopano Matlwa
Masechaba, a medical intern in a South African hospital, is a teenager suffering excruciating periods when she’s inspired to become a doctor. Her secret plan is to one day convince a colleague to giv…
Watching Out by Julian Burnside
Julian Burnside, intellectual hero of the left and early advocate for the rights of asylum seekers, voted Liberal in every election from 1972 to 1996. And while he infamously defended the MUA in the …
Thirty Days by Mark Raphael Baker
Older readers (like me) might remember Mark Raphael Baker’s critically acclaimed, deeply moving family memoir, The Fiftieth Gate, about the experiences of his Holocaust survivor parents. His second b…
Big Little Lies
Fantasy dreamscape flashes to nightmare, and back again, in the HBO limited series Big Little Lies, based on Liane Moriarty’s bestselling novel and masterfully directed by Jean-Marc Valee (Wild). Eve…
Do Not Become Alarmed by Maile Meloy
Maile Meloy is one of my favourite writers. Her short stories are regularly published in The New Yorker (and were recently adapted for the film Certain Women, with Laura Dern, Michelle Williams and K…
The Mighty Franks by Michael Frank
I gobbled up this deliciously dark, profoundly poignant memoir in two half-days. The Mighty Franks is Hollywood gothic, complete with distorted families, claustrophobic passions, silver-screen glamou…
Depends What You Mean by Extremist by John Safran
Self-described ‘television prankster’ John Safran confirms that he’s a major writing talent with his second book. Here, he embeds himself with Australian political extremists and attempts to tease ou…
For a Girl by Mary-Rose MacColl
For a Girl is the story Mary-Rose MacColl has been writing around all her life. Its themes – of sexual misconduct and secrets – have driven her critically acclaimed novels, Falling in Snow and Swimmi…
Lion
Lion opens in remote rural India, where tiny Saroo, having promised to wait for his brother on a train platform, curls up in a stationary train carriage, and wakes up with the empty train moving at s…
The Family by Chris Johnston and Rosie Jones
Books about cults were big last year: Emma Cline’s The Girls, about the Manson family, was the talk of 2016. Locally, Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s The Love of a Bad Man included stories about the Manso…
Blood by Tony Birch
Tony Birch’s debut novel, Blood, will surely attract a lot of interest from the many fans of his accomplished short stories. He has published two acclaimed collections, Shadowboxing (2006) and Father…
Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey
Craig Silvey’s much-awaited second novel is very different from the elegiac Rhubarb – but it’s every bit as good, if not better. And, like Rhubarb’s play on the Beatles song Eleanor Rigby, with its b…
Butterfly by Sonya Hartnett
Sonya Hartnett’s latest novel will appeal to readers well beyond the age of its nearly 14-year-old protagonist.
Plum Coyle exists in a semi-permanent state of agony. Her body is awkward, stuck betwe…
News
Gifts to cement your status as the cool aunt/uncle
Last week, a Gen-X friend of mine asked me for advice on books to gift his voraciously well-read, book-loving niece for her fourteenth birthday. She’d given him an impressively eclectic list of authors she liked, ranging from Jennifer Niven to Christopher Pike; Georgia Blain to David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas!). This was one seriously adventurous reader.
So, I advised my friend (who is the kind of p…
The best DVDs of 2017
Cross The Stepford Wives with Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and the comedic brain of Key & Peele, and you …
A reading list for fans of Mindhunter
Usually, it’s the books I read that lead me to other books. I finish one and follow the references and ideas to the next. But while I was watching David Fincher’s new Netflix series, Mindhunter, about the birth of criminal profiling in the FBI, I found myself mentally referencing books I’ve read, and making notes to read others.
On Halloween eve, here are nine chilling – and excellent – books th…
Exciting new releases in August
I first discovered Jock Serong last year, when Readings’ Stella Charls, Alice Pung and I were reading through an enormous book pile, judging the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction. None of us expected to be utterly seduced by a crime novel titled The Rules of Backyard Cricket (spoiler: none of us are sporty). But we were all intrigued by its gritty, elegant exploration of Australian m…
My five favourite books about writers
It’s no coincidence that my name is Jo. Okay, I’m not named after her, but I’ve always identified with Little Women’s tomboyish writer Jo March. The second-oldest of four sisters during the American Civil War, Jo is the driving force of the quartet: she writes plays for them all to act in; she invites the lonely boy in the mansion across the road, Laurie, to be their best friend; a…
Exciting new releases in May
There’s something both delicious and dangerous about working in a bookshop. Every other day, I discover a new – or old – book that I suddenly can’t live without. It’s tempting enough working on the shop floor at Readings Doncaster (Mondays), but now that I’m editing Readings Monthly too, my bedside book mountain is rising to ridiculous levels.
I don’t know if it was a desire to scale the mountai…