What Have You Been Reading?

There's always a question that gets asked around our lunch room table and that's 'what have you been reading?' Being the book nerds that we are, we've always got something new on the bedside table and our diverse reading tastes always ensure that the answer to that question is varied. Of course, there are always our own excellent Black Inc. titles which get enjoyed too: from The Best 100 Poems of Les Murray to Catherine Deveny's fantastic debut novel The Happiness Show.

But, in answer to the question 'what have you been reading' - here's what some Black Inc. staffers have been dipping into over the Summer:

CHRISTINA, OFFICE ADMINISTRATOR

I’ve been making my way through the series A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin since joining the Black Inc. team in September. Over Summer, I began the fourth book in the series A Feast for Crows but felt that it was probably healthy to have a break from its ‘adult themes’. So, I signed up for an online lit course on fantasy fiction and SF, and began Grimm’s Household Stories. I also read the first chapter of 1835 by James Boyce and found it fascinating.

Some little-known gems about Australia’s Prime Ministers

To kick off the start of the election year we have an updated edition of Mungo MacCallum’s The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely: Australia’s Prime Ministers.
 
Here are some things you might not have known about our esteemed leaders.

Malcolm Fraser appeared in 1986 in the foyer of a somewhat sleazy Memphis hotel in search of his trousers, which stripped away much of his former gravitas.

Alfred Deakin was a passionate spiritualist, publishing The New Pilgrim’s Progress in 1877, which he said had been dictated to him by the spirit of John Bunyan himself. As a politician, he claimed to be receiving instruction from the ghosts of Sophocles, John Knox, Lord Macaulay, Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill and (rather out of place in such exalted company) a former Victorian chief secretary named Richard Heales.