Steph Harmon
It might seem over the top to knock out two memoirs before you’re 30 but Rosie Waterland has already survived so much more than anyone should – and writes about it with so much more humour, warmth and honesty than most people can – that I’ll read anything she ever writes, which is why Every Lie I’ve Ever Told
is top of my reading list this summer.
I’ve been wanting to read Sarah Krasnostein’s The Trauma Cleaner since we published Lou Heinrich’s fascinating interview with the author in September. Krasnostein spent four years following Sandra Pankhurst, another remarkable woman who survived an awful childhood but who now spends her life in white sneakers and a hazmat suit, cleaning through the pain of others.
Then I’ll wade grimly into Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace: like every other woman in my life, 2017 has brought with it a burning fury about the lot of women that I’m strangely eager to stoke. To further fuel the rage, I’ll delve into Ta-Nehisi Coates’s collection of essays on racism, white supremacy and the Obama years that led to Trump.
I’ll want a novel next and, after recommendations from my colleague Stephanie Convery, I can’t go past Sarah Schmidt’s reimagining of the infamous 1892 Lizzie Borden case, See What I Have Done. And, for a bit of balance, some poetry from author, hip-hop artist and beat poet Omar Musa, who seems to be on the right side of everything.
Through it all, I’ll be dipping in and out of Helen Garner’s two gorgeous collections of fiction (Stories) and non-fiction (True Stories): a pair of hardcovers so handsome and essential that I also bought them for my mum and best friend.
• Steph Harmon is the culture editor of Guardian Australia
Stephanie Convery
I feel like I’ve retained that sense of endless summer from my childhood when the reality these days is that, between work, preparing for Christmas and recovering from new year revelries, a number of these books will likely sit half-read on my bedside table for some months to come.
Still, I am nothing if not ambitious and this summer I’m keen to check out Miles Franklin award-winner Kim Scott’s most recent novel, Taboo, particularly after reading Melissa Lucashenko’s stunning review. I bought Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff when it was the talking point of every book club a couple of years ago and, now that the hype has died down, I feel like I can read it without that clouding my judgment. I’m looking forward to some escapism in Philip Pullman’s first instalment of The Book of Dust and plan to make good on my promise to myself to one day read China Miéville’s highly acclaimed steampunk-style fantasy novel Perdido Street Station.
I loved Ali Smith’s How To Be Both and I have high hopes for her quartet of seasonal novellas, beginning with Autumn. For my dose of non-fiction, I’ve already devoured quite a lot of Masha Gessen’s fascinating account of contemporary and Soviet Russia, as told through the stories of people born on the brink of supposed democracy, The Future is History. No reading list is complete without a classic and the inroads I’ve made into My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin suggest much enjoyment to come.
• Stephanie Convery is the deputy culture editor of Guardian Australia
Jenny Valentish
Being British, bath time is reading time – but I’ve managed to gather some books that haven’t yet slipped to the murky depths.
Since it’s my favourite topic as a journalist, I’ve been doing some background reading about substance use – this time, focused on my home country. Peter Morgan is a Manchester-based youth worker who, in Spice Boys, fictionalises the problems he sees with the synthetic hybrid that has blighted homeless communities and prison populations. Lisa McKenzie’s Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain examines stigma and social structures by a researcher who herself spent 20 years on the much-maligned St Ann’s estate in Nottingham. Also on topic, from the US, is Memoirs Aren’t Fairytales – actually a novel from Marni Mann, about heroin use.
I’m finishing off The New Girl (great title) – an inspiring read from former club kid and drag queen Rhyannon Styles, who has transitioned and even landed a column in the UK edition of Elle. Then I’ll peruse Sticky Fingers, Joe Hagan’s bio of Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner, so I can figure out where I went wrong in my career. While on the topic of self-improvement, Waking Up, by neuroscientist-author Sam Harris, promises to explore spirituality without religion. He does a great podcast, too. On the novel front I’ve got The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker, a boozy tale of two creative female friends; and also The Tattooist of Auschwitz, the fictionalised story of a real Jewish prisoner by Australian author Heather Morris.
Finally, now that I’ve read the source material, I can get stuck into Erik Jensen and Alice Pung’s takes on Kate Jennings and John Marsden – I’m really looking forward to that since I went to see Erik and Alice talk on the subject.
• Jenny Valentish is a freelance journalist
Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore
This festive season, I’m dividing my time between a Christmas at home in the English countryside – think roasted chestnuts over a roaring fire – and, when I return to Australia, turning pages under the hot summer sun. To get through all those long wintery nights, little seems more perfect than Richard Flanagan’s First Person, the story of a ghostwriter, in the words of Penguin, “haunted by his demonic subject”. In between, I’ll be dipping into The Descent of Man by Grayson Perry. Perry, who I interviewed in 2015, is not only great company but razor sharp, an artist and commentator who has made his craft from burrowing down into the recesses of society, in this case the toxic expectations of rigid masculinity.
For languishing, long days on the beach, I want to revisit Tim Winton’s brilliant novel Eyrie, set in a suffocating Perth highrise. Then there’s the trans writer Jan Morris’s travel book on Sydney. Morris, who is Welsh, and now in her 90s, always drives into the very heart of what makes a culture tick, delivering it to her readers with lyricism and biting wit. As a fan of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs, now showing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, I’m reading Just Kids by Patti Smith, her account of the pair’s lifelong affair, as lovers, then friends, and always, above all, artists striving for something bigger and more beautiful than themselves. Finally, I’ve picked out a pocket-sized book of Leonard Cohen’s lyrics. He was, in my mind, the greatest poet of our time, sorely missed. If ever life feels uneven, if I ever want to find solace in imperfection, I look to his words: “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.”
• Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore is a freelance writer
Alexandra Spring
Each summer, I too am wildly ambitious about the books that I intend to read and invariably I get through one – if I’m lucky. Still, it’s good to have goals and this is my summer reading list. Possibly also my autumn and winter reading list.
Helen Garner is the writer so many of us aspire to emulate and A Writing Life by Bernadette Brennan maps Garner’s literary life through her books, letters and diaries, some previously unpublished. Rebecca Huntley is one of those women who juggles 17 things at the same time, without breaking a sweat. Among the social researcher’s many 2017 accomplishments, she published Still Lucky, a look at where Australia is right now. So far, the answers are optimistic – and we could do with more optimism.
Growing up in South Africa in the 80s, I had a complicated relationship with Winnie Mandela, a woman portrayed as public enemy No 1. But earlier this year I saw the compelling documentary Winnie at the Sydney film festival and found myself admiring her fearlessness as a woman surviving in a world dominated by racist white men. I’m looking forward to finding out more in Winnie Mandela, A Life by Anne Marie du Preez Bezdan.
His TV work (Mad Men, The Sopranos) was sophisticated commentary on the great American dream, so Matthew Weiner’s debut novel, Heather the Totality, is well-timed in the age of Trump. There are shocking holes in my reading history and George Eliot’s Middlemarch is one. Still, when Anna Russell described it in the New Yorker as “miss-your-stop-on-the-train and sneak-a-read-at-work good”, I realised it was time to find out what the fuss is all about. Finally, I do love a wartime spy thriller, ideally populated by well-dressed Russians and Englishmen in trench coats and fedoras. OK, I was sold on the noir-esque cover of the reissue of this classic but William Boyd’s Restless sounds like an ideal summer read too.
• Alexandra Spring is the editorial partnerships editor at Guardian Australia
Veronica Sullivan
For me, the summer break is a time to indulge in some fun reading but also to dig into books I haven’t had the brain space to engage with during a hectic year. I’ll be
heading out of the city and spending plenty of time on a verandah in the country with a supply of great books and cold beers.
Briohny Doyle’s Adult Fantasy is part-memoir, part-generational stocktake. It’s the perfect thing to read as I leap into a new year and the impending end of my 20s. The Woman Who Fooled the World by Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano is the book everyone seems to be talking about this summer and I’m keen to find out why Belle Gibson claimed she had cured cancer with healthy eating.
I loved Sofie Laguna’s last novel, The Eye of the Sheep, which deservingly won the Miles Franklin literary award, and I’ve been looking forward to her latest, The Choke. Laguna has a masterful ability to inhabit a child’s perspective, exploring the failings and damage wrought by adults through their eyes. Ceridwen Dovey is another brilliant local fiction writer. Her last book, Only the Animals, was a collection of linked short stories told from the perspectives of different animals at key points in human history. By contrast, her new novel, In the Garden of the Fugitives, is all about humanity – our obsessions, desires, repression and guilt. It’s out in March 2018. And I’m looking forward to jumping into two genre reads: Alison Evans’ speculative YA novel, Ida, and Mel Campbell and Anthony Morris’s rom-com The Hot Guy, which comes endorsed by a real-life Hemsworth brother.
• Veronica Sullivan is the incoming program manager at the Wheeler Centre
Lou Heinrich
Snow fell from the sky a couple of weeks ago. It was my first time (surprise: it crunches beneath your gumboots). In Ireland to research women and religion, I’ve discovered there’s nothing like howling winds and dark skies to usher one inside to read, so I’ll be starting with Hannah Kent’s The Good People, a wonderful dramatisation of the conflict between traditional folklore and the rule of the church. Nance is a traditional healer who arrives at Nóra Leahy’s house in 1820s rural Ireland to help cure Nóra’s grandson, with grim results.
Not pictured is my e-book of Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell by Louise Milligan, particularly pertinent to read following Australia’s child sexual abuse royal commission report, and also in Ireland, where the church continues to hold power despite even more horrific revelations. As well as first-person narrative nonfiction books Stasiland by Anna Funder and To the River by Olivia Laing (To the River was recently reissued in Australia, following the success of Laing’s third book, The Lonely City), I’ll be tucking in to Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing. This novel, set in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is said to be full of haunted, lyrical beauty as it follows 13-year-old Jojo’s road trip with his drug-addicted mother, and broods on race and poverty in America. Not an easy read but one full of tenderness and poetry.
• Lou Heinrich is a writer and critic
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