Mark Rubbo
Twitter: @markrubbo
Mark Rubbo is managing director of Readings. He is a past president of the Australian Booksellers Association and was founding chair of the Melbourne Writers Festival. In 2006 he was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia.
Reviews
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan
Families are funny things; they can be the source of great strength, but also great cruelties, humiliations, and sadness. In a soulless Hobart hospital, Francie’s three adult children gather round he…
The Tolstoy Estate by Steven Conte
It’s 1941, in the depths of the Russian winter, and the beginning of the end of the German advance on Russia. A German medical unit stumbles through the gates of Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s country es…
A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville
Kate Grenville returns with a much-anticipated fourth novel considering Australia’s colonial past, and interactions between Australia’s First Nations peoples and colonists. Purporting to be the lost …
Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler
Micah Mortimer ‘… lives alone; he keeps to himself; his routine is etched in stone.’ Micah’s an ordinary man. He dropped out of college to found a start-up with a friend; that failed and since then h…
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara
Have you ever been through periods when most books you pick up fail to ignite that magical spark? I’ve just emerged from one and Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line has been my saviour. Set in an imagina…
Apeirogon by Colum McCann
This is quite a surprising novel in its structure made up of a series of numbered passages. Every passage is connected in some way and at times not in ways that are immediately obvious. It is based o…
Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume I, 1978–1987 by Helen Garner
When Helen Garner’s debut novel Monkey Grip was published in 1977, a couple of larrikins made some beer money by publishing a pamphlet, ‘Who’s Who in Monkey Grip’ and there might be a temptation for …
Finding the Heart of the Nation by Thomas Mayor
In 2017, over two hundred and fifty Indigenous representatives from around the country gathered at Uluru and unanimously adopted the Uluru Statement from the Heart. The last paragraph reads, ‘In 1967…
Other People’s Houses by Hilary McPhee
At one time, Hilary McPhee’s life was in upheaval and she was struggling with the illness and death of her parents, a bout of cancer and the end of a long marriage. It was a period of deep desolation…
Maybe the Horse Will Talk by Elliot Perlman
It’s a long time since Elliot Perlman’s last novel The Street Sweeper and it’s so good to see him back. Perlman’s work looks at social issues through the prism of a mighty fine story. He’s looked at …
Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe
Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe’s examination of the Troubles in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, won the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Writing. Keefe, a…
Harry Seidler’s Umbrella by Joe Rollo
The first thing that strikes you about this book is its sheer beauty. Joe Rollo got his friend and graphic designer Garry Emery to design the book and together they agonised over it. It’s a lovely ob…
Travellers by Helon Habila
A unnamed narrator accompanies his artist wife who’s been awarded a fellowship in Berlin. She is American, he is Nigerian. After a miscarriage they both feel unmoored; they both react differently: hi…
Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan
In Machines Like Me, Ian McEwan imagines a world in the past that is also the future. Britain has lost the Falklands War and driverless cars are the norm. Alan Turing, the great scientist, is also st…
Invented Lives by Andrea Goldsmith
I read an early draft of Invented Lives a year or so ago; it was almost wonderful then but now it really is wonderful. What I like most about Andrea Goldsmith’s work is that it manages to combine a d…
The Rip by Mark Brandi
If The Rip has any antecedents it’s probably novels like Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip and the late Andrew McGahan’s Praise; its gritty look at the underbelly of our society is raw and unflinching and a…
Love is Blind by William Boyd
I have to confess that William Boyd is one of my favourite authors; his Any Human Heart is probably his best but Love is Blind comes close. It’s an exotic and sad love story that kept me wanting more…
21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari
In the beginning of the twenty-first century all we can seem to see is a world of rapid change and turmoil, with the rise of a destructive right-wing nationalism, and technology outpacing our ability…
Prize Fighter by Future D. Fidel
Future D. Fidel is a refugee from the Congo. Prize Fighter is based on the acclaimed stage play written by Fidel and it too follows the life of Isa Alaki from the war-torn Congo to life in Australia.…
Origin Story by David Christian
David Christian coined the phrase ‘Big History’ in reference to a project that aims to tell the story of everything that’s happened from the beginning of the universe until now. It’s an idea that cau…
Reading the Landscape: A Celebration of Australian Writing
The University of Queensland Press was established in 1948 (coincidentally, the year I was born). In the mid-sixties, under the stewardship of American expat Frank Thompson, it started to publish Aus…
The Madonna of the Mountains by Elise Valmorbida
Set in the Veneto region of northern Italy, this novel about life in rural Italy between the 1920s and 50s is compulsively beautiful. It opens with a young woman, Maria, waiting for her father to bri…
Marcia Langton: Welcome to Country by Marcia Langton
I sense a growing desire for non-Indigenous Australians to know about our Indigenous culture. The recent successes of Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia (one of our bestsellers last month) and Alexis…
The Death of Noah Glass by Gail Jones
Mattanza is a Sicilian word to describe a seasonal ritual of hunting and killing tuna in the waters around Sicily; it also the term used to describe periodic mafia killings. Noah Glass, an art histor…
The Shepherd’s Hut by Tim Winton
Jaxie’s dad ‘wasn’t always a c#%t. Like he was probably decent once and you were happy and so was your mum.’ But he is now, or was; he’s dead now and Jaxie Clackton, 16 and desperate, is on the run –…
On Borrowed Time by Robert Manne
The publisher describes this book as a ‘stunning new collection of essays’ and the hyperbole is certainly justified. The essays range over a number of topics that matter to Robert Manne and, on readi…
Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker
In 1784, philosopher Immanuel Kant asked, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ It was, he argued, humankind’s emergence from its submission to the ‘dogmas and formulas’ of religious or political authority. The E…
A Long Way from Home by Peter Carey
One of my favourite books is Peter Carey’s Illywhacker, with its outrageous narrator Herbert Badgery and the sprawling basalt plains of Bacchus Marsh. It was a riot of fun that hid a message about th…
First Person by Richard Flanagan
Probably Australia’s largest fraud case involved John Friedrich, executive director of the National Safety Council of Australia. Friedrich embezzled almost $300 million from a number of banks through…
On the Java Ridge by Jock Serong
Jock Serong’s books don’t shy away from tackling topics that affect contemporary society and in On the Java Ridge, although this doesn’t dominate the narrative, they are there. In Quota, it was the e…
News
Mark’s Say, October 2020
You might be surprised to know that year-to-date books sales in Australia are up 7.7% on last year, despite Victorian bookshops being pretty much closed for the last two and a half months. It’s good news for the Australian book industry, and heartening to see books being embraced as a means of inspiration and escape in the Netflix age. At Readings, our shop sales are down around 80%, but it’s not…
Mark’s Say, August 2020
If you’ve been a customer at Readings you’ve come across Alison Huber, either directly or indirectly. She’s been with us since 2003. For many of those years, she moonlighted from her day job as an academic at the University of Melbourne. Prior to that, she worked at the Melbourne University Book Room and the Dymocks at Melbourne Central (now gone). Bookselling just didn’t seem to let her go. In 2…
Mark’s Say, July 2020
You might recall that in my last column I contemplated what the impact of the escalating COVID-19 crisis might be and grappled with how we would cope. As we went into lockdown, I was going to read Middlemarch and hoped that some of you might go on a similar journey. Our shops might have been closed but, wonderfully, many of you shifted to buying from us online. It was so heartening, but the numbe…
Mark’s Coronavirus Diary, Thursday 27 March 2020
I email our accountant asking how long can we trade without any income? What are our liabilities? What can we do for our staff? We have a number of casuals with no leave provisions, how can we help? Who needs help? What about our publishers and authors? How will we sell their books? How will we let you know about them? How can we get them to you?
My dear son Joe says these times will test our re…
An important message to all Readings customers
Dear Friends of Readings,
In 51 years of business Readings has really only closed its doors on Christmas day (apart from the time when Carlton’s sewer burst – that was unpleasant). We pride ourselves on supplying books, music and film to the public of Melbourne and Australia.
We have remained open during the current crisis, partly because our job is selling books, but also because we know that …
Mark’s Say, March 2020
One of the booksellers at Readings Kids suggested in early January that we do something to support the bushfire victims. We decided to put the money we raised from gift wrapping in January towards bushfire relief. We also decided that Readings would match the amount collected. In a normal January we collect about $1000. We were thrilled that in response to our call the amount raised this January wa…
