William Safire told me something that really helped: “Never feel guilty about reading. That’s what you do.”

The seventeenth-century Haiku master said: If you want to know about a tree, go to the tree. This is what I take from that: if you want to write well, read well. I’ve been thinking about this in the lead-up to Christmas and the summer holidays, a time traditionally given over by busy people to reading, and by newspapers to lists of recommended reading, best-of lists, and predictions of big books for the new year. As a nation we might be avid consumers of newspapers and magazines from February to November, but in December and January we pick up all the books we meant to read in the other months and fell asleep over, the Booker or Pulitzer or Miles Franklin winner or short-lists, or our favourite from Australia’s burgeoning number of fabulous crime writers. Ask any bookseller about the briskness of pre-Christmas trade and they’ll look at you through exhausted eyes and say, fabulous.

But for writers of any genre, every season is a reading season. We all go to the great books to learn our trade, and to recent books, books by our friends – even by our enemies – to see how it’s done. I realised long ago that I could not read a book the way many of my friends did. They read purely for joy and entertainment, for escape perhaps. I could do that only rarely. I spent most of my reading time scrutinising paragraphs, reading sentences aloud, going back over chapters, trying to find out how it was done.

Books are tools for writers, as well as the source of tremendous pleasure. They are the source, the oracle, the instruction manual. We go to them for what they can teach us about plotting and character, about rhythm and pace, about humour and dialogue and imagery and endings. And of course, like everyone else, we go to them for new ways of seeing the world, for solace, for company, because we feel our blood will stop beating in our veins if we don’t.

Now, with the prospect of a few weeks off, I’m walking around dreamily thinking about the books I will read on holiday. Of course, the list is endless: even the priorities would number in the dozens. For months I’ve been eyeing my copies of W.G. Sebald’s books (especially The Rings of Saturn); Independent People by the Icelander Haldor Laxness; the novels of New Zealander Elizabeth Knox and of Doris Lessing, who won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature; the short stories of Alice Munro. I want to re-read Drusilla Modjeska’s groundbreaking Poppy and Wayne Johnson’s Baltimore’s Mansion; anything by Milan Kundera.

But amid the clamour a couple of books are beginning to push their way into my backpack. Travels with Herodotus, by the Polish journalistRichard Kapacynski, has already claimed its place. This extraordinary writer reported for magazines like The New Yorker from all over the world, carrying a copy of the works of his ancient mentor with him. Then there’s Carpentaria by Alexis Wright, which has won several major Australian literary prizes this year, and The Trout Opera, by Matt Condon, a former colleague and wonderful writer of fiction and non-fiction. Elizabeth Knox is also vying for space, along with her compatriot, Lloyd Jones: when I’m travelling I always read the locals and I’ll be walking in New Zealand. And then there’s the poetry…

My favourites for the year:

Per Pettersen, Out Stealing Horses – Beautiful, lyrical, full of Scandinavian images dear to my heart.
Anne Enright, The Gathering – Booker Prize winner this year. A haunting, very dark take on Irish family life
David Malouf, Every Move You Make – The Australian master at his best.
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust – If you are a walker (Carmel Bird reckons walking and writing go together, and I agree) you’ll love this history of walking, from Rousseau to Wordsworth and modern walking artists.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera – rewards every re-read, every time.
Fabulous magazines: Monthly, Griffith Review, just about anything from McSweeney’s, plus the ALR, every first Wednesday of the month in The Australian.

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issue 08:09 | archive by category | archive by author