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 “For service to the community through fostering an awareness of Australian literature as a bookseller, literary critic, and promoter and supporter of Australian writers.”
Reviews
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…
Defectors by Joseph Kanon
Simon Weeks and his older brother Frank had promising careers in the United States intelligence services. Members of a respected Boston family, their careers and life trajectories were mapped out for…
A Writing Life by Bernadette Brennan
I have to admit that I loved this book; I’m an unabashed fan of Helen Garner’s work and have been ever since the publication of her first book, Monkey Grip. As a young Carlton bookseller in 1977, the…
Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman
Most of the highly paid jobs in our new economy are bullsh*t jobs. The best and the brightest are paid huge amounts of money, yet they don’t create anything of value. Rutger Bregman is a young Dutch …
Last Words by Barry Dickins
It is 50 years since Ronald Ryan became the last person to be hanged in Victoria. Ryan was serving an 8-year sentence for breaking and entering and together with another inmate broke out of Coburg’s …
Press Escape by Shaun Carney
Shaun Carney started his career in journalism as a 20-year-old cadet at Melbourne’s Herald and moved a few years later to the Age. After a 26-year career there, holding many influential positions, Sh…
The Boy Behind the Curtain by Tim Winton
Helen Garner’s Everywhere I Look, a collection of personal essays and diary notes, delighted readers and it went on to become one of our bestsellers. I’ve got a feeling that Tim Winton’s collection, …
We Are Not Such Things by Justine Van der Leun
In the final days of apartheid a young American student, Amy Biehl, was murdered by a black mob in one of Cape Town’s townships. Three young men were convicted of her murder but the case was a strang…
The Hate Race by Maxine Beneba Clarke
Maxine Beneba Clarke’s father was the first in his family to go university. They were working class, from Tottenham, a suburb of London. He’d shown a talent for mathematics and became an academic; he…
A Long Time Coming by Melanie Joosten
My father’s former partner died a few years ago at the aged care home her 90-year-old cousin, Eric, and I had been forced to place her in. Whenever we’d visit her, Eric would invariably shudder and s…
Everywhere I Look by Helen Garner
We know Helen Garner best for her novels and her harrowing dissections of human dramas. She has a way of describing the world with such wisdom and candour and, sometimes, delight, that it takes one’s…
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
This is a short but profoundly moving and powerful book. Kalanithi, a young and brilliant neurosurgeon, is confronted by what proves to be his own terminal cancer. In his undergraduate days he had co…
Second Half First by Drusilla Modjeska
Most of us, I imagine, reflect only fleetingly on our lives, and few of us, thank god, do it in print, but when a writer of Drusilla Modjeska’s skill does it is something very special. Second Half Fi…
Island Home by Tim Winton
This book reveals two Tim Wintons. There is the wordsmith we feel we already know well through his renowned and evocative fiction, but this book also reveals a person who thinks very deeply about his…
Under Cover: Adventures in the Art of Editing by Craig Munro
University of Queensland Press (UQP) is a fine independent publisher but from the early 70s to the late 90s in particular it really punched above its weight. At one time or another, its stable of aut…
Sweet Caress by William Boyd
There’s a small group of us at Readings who are great fans of William Boyd, with one of my colleagues claiming his Any Human Heart as one of her favourite books. Boyd is a master storyteller who weav…
A Guide to Berlin by Gail Jones
I’ve always felt that Gail Jones is yet to receive the recognition she deserves. This is her sixth novel and it is, I believe, a masterpiece. It is a beautifully constructed novel that builds slowly …
The Mothers by Rod Jones
I vividly remember Rod Jones’ 1986 novel Julia Paradise, the story of a Scottish psychoanalyst and his eponymous patient set in pre-war China. It quite justifiably caused a sensation with its explora…
Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris
Last night I went to I Gradi for pizza with my son. It was an easy decision for Joe and me to make and we enjoyed the pizzas very much. You, possibly, think I should have written ‘Joe and I’. Well, t…
The Life of Houses by Lisa Gorton
The Sydney Morning Herald once described Lisa Gorton as ‘one of the most sensuous and cerebral of Australian poets’, praise that could equally apply to her first novel, The Life of Houses. Gorton is …
One of Us by Asne Seierstad
This is an horrific and tragic book; it is an account of one the most devastating mass shootings in recent history. In July, 2011, Anders Breivik detonated a home made bomb in front of the Norwegian …
A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler
Anne Tyler writes about families; usually they are quite ordinary, middle-class families. They might have a few quirks but mostly they, like the rest of us, are trying to navigate their lives as best…
Charlie’s Country
Charlie (David Gulpilil) lives in a small community in Arnhem Land. A sequence of events, funny yet sadly moving, drive him to eschew the community and go bush. But even he can’t survive in the bush …
Amnesia by Peter Carey
Despite its more serious subtext, Amnesia is a very funny book and is Peter Carey at the height of his powers. I read it a second time because I wanted to savour it again for its structure and its wr…
Warning: The Story of Cyclone Tracy by Sophie Cunningham
It’s almost 40 years since Cyclone Tracy destroyed the northern city of Darwin on the night of 24 December, 1974. Australia had not known a natural disaster like it since European colonisation. Seven…
Lygon Street - Si Parla Italiano
Surely everyone loves Italy and the Italians; the country has given us pasta, pizza, coffee, and, of course, Lygon Street in Melbourne. Lygon Street – Si Parla Italiano is a delightful homage to the …
The Tainted Trial of Farah Jama by Julie Szego
In 2008, a young Somali man was convicted of the rape of a 48-year-old woman at a Doncaster nightclub. The woman had been found unconscious in a locked toilet cubicle with her pants down: she had no …
A Mad And Wonderful Thing by Mark Mulholland
It’s a strange irony that Bernard McGinn died of natural causes just a few months or so back; Mcginn was part of an IRA group of snipers based in South Armagh, Northern Ireland, on the Irish border. …
My Promised Land by Ari Shavit
My Promised Land is a profoundly inspiring and challenging book. It is an intensely personal impression of a country, for which the writer has intense admiration and affection but also grave misgivin…
Coal Creek by Alex Miller
Alex Miller migrated to Australia when he was only 16 and his first job was as a ringer in outback Queensland. That early experience in the Australian outback informs a number of his works, including…
News
Mark’s Say, July 2017
The world moves in mysterious ways sometimes. Some time ago, we received a complaint from the Anti Defamation Commission (ADC) about some wrapping paper on sale in our St Kilda shop. Produced and designed in the UK, the paper featured a series of ‘quaint’ illustrations of characters from history and contemporary popular culture. At a glance, it seemed just the ticket to wrap a gift in. But if you…
Mark’s Say, June 2017
A year ago I joined the board of the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. In May, I went with the Foundation on a field trip to Melville Island, the largest of the Tiwi Islands. Melville has two primary schools and a secondary boarding school, Tiwi College, on the island. The main purpose of the trip was to run programs for both primary schools and the College. We were accompanied by singer and ILF am…
Mark’s Say, May, 2017
Like Australian publishing generally, university publishing in Australia has gone through its ups and downs. Melbourne University Publishing has dominated the sector for the last 30 years or so, but like many Australian publishers, it’s had to adjust to a changing landscape. University of Queensland Press established itself as a literary publisher in the 70s and 80s, publishing Peter Carey, Kate …
Mark’s Say, April 2017
Last month I went to the opening of a rather marvellous and moving exhibition at Melbourne’s Immigration Museum. The exhibition, They Cannot Take the Sky is based on the book of the same name (edited by Michael Green, Angelica Neville, André Dao, Dana Affleck and Sienna Merope). Like the book, it’s been put together by a group of people with a lived experience of immigration detention. Twenty-fou…
Mark’s Say, March 2017
The first Taipei International Book Fair (TIBE) was held in 1987 which made this year’s fair the 25th. Spread over six days, it is one of the largest trade book fairs in the world with over 621 exhibitors from 59 countries. For many years, Australia has enjoyed a reasonably strong presence at TIBE but after recent cuts to Australia Council and Austrade funding, this year’s stand was only the size…
Mark’s Say, February 2017
The book industry is mourning the end of Barack Obama’s presidency. Obama was a powerful advocate for the importance of books and regularly released lists of books that had influenced him and that he was reading. Often they went on to become bestsellers because of his endorsements. He and his family made regular and public visits to independent bookstores in the Washington area, although a 2013 v…
