If you’ve ever read this blog before you know how much I love reading. In fact, if you read this blog I’m guessing you love reading too. I am incredibly lucky: I was born in a home where books where everywhere and reading was valued. My parents read to me and encouraged me to read […]

Books are consumer goods, just like dresses or DVD box sets or surround sound systems or these things. Making them consumes non-renewable resources, no one ever bothers asking what conditions are like in the places where they’re made, and masses of fossil fuels are used to ship them around the world. And like fashion, books can be […]

Last year I signed up to do #TBR20, a challenge where you agree to read 20 books you already own before borrowing or buying anything new. I’ve been awful at it, just awful – once I finish my pile of 20 I’ll let you in on all the other books I’ve read since I started […]

This week I asked my boss if I could start working four days instead of five, to give me a day for writing, and he very kindly said yes. It seemed a sensible thing to do: I like writing, after all, and consider myself a writer. That’s worth taking a 20% cut to the family […]

Writer-wise, I am a speculative fiction dilettante. I do not have any deep understanding of the form, I have read only around the fringes (Mieville but not Asimov; Mitchell but not Le Guin), I don’t know enough about the tropes and styles to properly respect them. My own writing might be glorified by calling it […]

I’ve been meaning to stop reviewing on Goodreads and start reviewing over here instead (if you can call it reviewing: I never write more than a few paragraphs), so here’s my first attempt. N by John A Scott is an Australian novel, released last year and since shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award (announced […]

A little while ago I signed up for #TBR20, vowing to read 20 books I already owned before buying or reading more. I’ve already failed: I accidentally got Harry Sadler to send me a copy of his novel Small moments, and I can just tell I’m going to buy The Fox Woman by Kij Johnson […]

Right, let’s assume I’m not going to finish any more books between now and the end of the year. What a ridiculous assumption. Anyway, here’s my 2014-in-reading wrap-up (which won’t cover the books I read between now and the end of the year. I promise to update you if any of them are earth-shattering). This […]

This was the first year I did the Australian Women Writers challenge. I set out to achieve ‘Franklin’ level – 10 books read and six of them reviewed. I ended up reading 39 books and reviewing 30 of them (though most of my reviews are only a paragraph or two: I’m no reviewer). I had no […]

Sometimes I feel utterly overwhelmed by reading. I remember a time (OK, maybe I imagine it) when I used to run out of books to read, or when friends would lend me a book and I just started reading it right away, not worried about the other important books I was meant to be reading. […]

Thanks very much to Helen Merrick for interviewing me for this year’s round-up of Australian speculative fiction. It felt a little presumptuous to be saying so much when I know so little, but it was a really fun process. The interview is here, and there are links to all the other bloggers doing interviews at […]

Thanks to everyone who participated in my ‘what do you read on the toilet?’ survey. I’ve written up the results and revealed all about my own revolting habits in this post for Writers Bloc: The book that…I read on the toilet.

In January, I signed up for the Australian Women Writers reading challenge. I figured I might as well go for gold, and selected ‘Miles Franklin’ level: I pledged to read 10 books by Australian women – any genre, published at any time – during 2014. I figured it would take me nine months or so […]

My last Aurealis Awards review is of this ripping time-travel tale. More conventionally science-fiction than the other finalists, and the only one with no Australian references. I have no idea who is going to win this thing…

My third read of writers shortlisted for the Aurealis Awards, Nike Sulway’s Rupetta is a formidable novel, a thorough creation of a world and a philosophy. I was pretty impressed, as you can see from this review.

This is surely the favourite for the SF section of the Aurealis Awards. Lexicon made Time magazine’s list of the best ten books of 2013, NPR’s list of the same and the New York Times’ best summer reads. More than 3000 people have reviewed it on Goodreads. And it is an undeniably ripping read. My […]

Fear is defeated by understanding, right? Right. So I’m reading the books of everyone else who was shortlisted in the science fiction category of the Aurealis Awards. So far it’s not making me any less scared. Review number one is of Andrew MacRae’s ‘Trucksong’: read it here.

So this year I thought I’d take part in the Australian Women Writers challenge which is, thankfully, a reading rather than a writing challenge. I realised that last year I read 13 Australian women writers without even trying, so thought I’d promise to read 10 this year. It’s not even February and i’m through five […]

I like to keep track of what I’ve read each year on Goodreads, because otherwise I tend to forget and accidentally read the same things twice. This year I read 62 books (and started another two that I didn’t finish). I think that’s probably too much reading, and I should consider doing a few other […]