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.

Ryan O'Neill's Favourite Australian Short Story Collections

In the last few years I’ve been trying to read as many Australian short stories as I can. Below, in no particular order, are some of the best collections I’ve come across so far.

1. Ride a Cock Horse by Gillian Mears (1988) Mears is an exceptionally talented short story writer. This collection leaps about in time to follow the boyhood, young adulthood and old age of Albert, sometimes as the main character, and sometimes as a peripheral one. Towards the end of the book we learn, almost in passing, that Albert has died, and this obliqueness gives added poignancy to his death. Mears is a brilliant practitioner of the ‘linked collection’ or ‘novel in stories,’ a form that continues to be explored in this country through writers such as Patrick Cullen and Gretchen Schirm.