It’s the last day of the year. Reading has been an endlessly healing practice for me this year in the face of complicated and difficult family circumstances. Here are the books that I have read. This doesn’t include journals (thank you, especially to Cordite, Mascara, Island, Westerly, Meanjin, SWAMP, Meniscus, Plumwood Mountain) that I have read. Also, thanks to Erin Vincent for introducing me to The Offing, and for her extraordinary essay ‘Fourteen Ways of Looking’, one of the pinnacles of my reading year, truly, brava, Erin!) or essays online, nor the extensive chapters and articles for my PhD. I remain eternally grateful for the gift of what I read. And for my local bookshop, Ink, and local and university libraries. I am very privileged to be able to read what I want to and to be able to buy a lot of books and support writers.
In no particular order, highlights were The Colony, Hamnet, My Name is Lucy Barton, Fugitive, The Keepers, Olive Kitteridge (my thanks to Katelin Farnsworth for the gift of E Strout), Small things like these, Salt and Skin, Limberlost, The Diplomat, Signs and Wonders, Leaping into Waterfalls, The Department of Speculation, On Earth we are Briefly Gorgeous. The Trees was the most surprising,and original, and I liked the ways that Sarah Manguso utilised the process of association that she has previously used in her nonfiction books to construct her first novel in Very Cold People. I loved returning to Micheal Ondaatje after some years and falling into his lovely prose again in Warlight. I admired the sense of landscape and longing in My Heart is a little wild thing. Mourning Diary, A tomb for Anatole, Time, lived without its flow and Anne Carson’s If not, winter will all stay with me for many years to come and will inform my creative and critical writing. I can’t not mention Anne Carson’s essay ‘Stillness’, which I read in two airports late this year in a space of my own stillness. And Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan’s long conversations on grief, spirituality and creativity impact on me is marked by its many lines of pencilled underscores and notes, truly a gift in a year like this. Note, all of the poetry was amazing and life-affirming, I couldn’t live without poems.
Many thanks to those who have published my work this year, and for those who have read said work (these are all listed on my ‘writing’ page).
Fiction
Hamnet, Maggie O Farrell
The Marriage Portrait, Maggie O Farrell,
My name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout
Anything is Possible, Elizabeth Strout
Oh Willliam! Elizabeth Strout
Lucy by the sea, Elizabeth Strout
Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
The Burgess Boys, Elizabeth Strout
The Book of Goose, Yiyun Li
Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan
The Overstory, Richard Powers
Mayflies, Andrew O Hagan
Bewilderment, Richard Powers
More than I love my life, David Grossman
The Trees, Percival Everett
Very Cold People, Sarah Manguso
Stone Town, Margaret Hickey
Salt and Skin, Eliza Henry-Jones
The Colony, Audrey Magee
The Diplomat, Chris Womersley
My heart is a little wild thing, Nigel Featherstone
Cold enough for snow, Jessica Au
The Keepers, Al Campbell
The Fell, Sarah Moss
Cold Earth, Sarah Moss
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, Maggie O Farrell
On earth, We’re briefly gorgeous, Ocean Vuong
Devotion, Hannah Kent
Department of Speculation, Jenny Offill
The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson
Limberlost, Robbie Arnott
Warlight, Micheal Ondaatje
The Dutch House, Anne Patchett
Limberlost, Robbie Arnott
Warlight, Micheal Ondaatje
The Dutch House, Anne Patchett
All that’s left Unsaid, Tracey Lien
Pachinko, Min Jin Lee (in progress)
Nonfiction
An Inventory of Losses, Judith Schlansky
If Not Winter, Fragments of Sappho, Anne Carson
Aurelia, Aurélia, Kathryn Davis
Notes on Grief, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The red of my blood, a life and death story, Clover Stroud
Mourning Diary, Roland Barthes
A tomb for Anatole, Stephane Mallarmé
Fugitive, Simon Tesdeschi
I am, I am, I am, Seventeen Brushes with Death, Maggie O Farrell
And when did you last see your father, Blake Morrison
Leaping into Waterfalls, the enigmatic Gillian Mears, Bernadette Brennan
Tell me again, Amy Thunig
Grief Girl, Erin Vincent
Signs and Wonders, Delia Falconer
Faith, hope and Carnage, Nick Cave and Sean O Hagan
Found, Wanting, Natasha Sholl
Paris or die, Jayne Tuttle
Time lived without its flow, Denis Riley
Essays One, Lydia Davis
The writer laid bare, Lee Kofman
True North, Catherine Deveny
1913, Florian Illies (in progress)
Poetry
Resilience, Mascara/Ultimo Press Anthology
A kinder sea, Felicity Plunkett
Ephemeral waters, Kate Middleton
Drop Bear, Evelyn Araluen
Trigger Warning, Maria Takolander
The Singer and other poems, Kim Cheng Boey
Look! Alex Selenitsch
Wings, Catherine Vidler
The Open, Lucy Van
Song of less, Joan Fleming
Walk back over, Jeanine Leane
Slowlier, Ella O’ Keefe
Frank, sonnets, Dianne Suess
Time is a mother, Ocean Vuong
The Book of Falling, David McCooey (in progress)
What follows are the books I bought in 2023 but haven’t yet read, though they too will have their moment! I would love to promise not to buy any other books until I make progress on this extensive list, but I’m unlikely to stay true to such an assurance, it will be a mix of this list and the other new must-read right now books that present themselves. Like Paul Dalgarno’s upcoming book, A country of eternal light, and all of Robbie Arnott’s previous books, oh, and Willowman by Inga Simpson. Obviously, I’d better get cracking.
Abandon every hope, Hayley Singer
Like to the lark, Stuart Barnes
On Freedom, Four songs of care and constraint, Maggie Nelson,
Grimmish, Micheal Winkler
Words are eagles, Gregory Day
Half the perfect world, writers, dreamers and drifters on Hydra 1955-1964, Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell
Wildflowers, Peggy Frew
The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy
Daisy and Woolf, Michelle Cahill
In memory of memory, Maria Stepanova
The Blacksmith’s Daughter, Selim Ödogan
Open Secrets, Essays on the writing life Anthology by Sydney Review of Books
My 1980s and other essays, Wayne Kostembaum
When I sing, mountains dance, Irene Solà
Mermaid Singing / Peel me a lotus, Charmian Clift
1835, James Boyce
We come with this place, Debra Dank
City of Trees, Sophie Cunningham
Maps of our spectacular bodies, Maddie Mortimer
My Sweet Guillotine, Jayne Tuttle
Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver
The Furies, Mandy Beaumont
This devastating fever, Sophie Cunningham
A kind of magic, Anna Spargo-Ryan
Fishing for Lightning, Sarah Holland-Batt
Big beautiful female theory, Eloise Grills
Lincoln in the bardo, George Saunders
Wild Abandon, Emily Bitto
Our shadows, Gail Jones