Happy Book Lovers’ Day! 📚 A day celebrating reading, libraries and independent bookstores.
I’m enjoying a slow Sunday morning read in the company of my spaniel Alfie.
We are currently reading Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say, a wonderful story about how life looks compared with how it feels. Mature adult relationships, grown kids and long-held, unknown secrets.
It feels to me a bit like Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day — but set in Massachusetts Bay in 2024.
For a long time, I somehow thought I had to read non-fiction to be a serious human. Books about leadership, psychology, wellbeing, work, people…
Then, back in 2023, I joined the wonderful Birds of a Feather online book club, run by Rebecca Sparrow & Jane Sullivan, and they reignited my long-time love of fiction.
Fiction makes my life so much richer. Great novels let us into other people’s inner worlds. They remind us that how someone’s life looks from the outside can be very different from how it feels to live it. That people and relationships are wonderfully complicated. And that there is rarely only one version of a story.
Given I spend much of my time in Canberra these days, a Book Lovers’ Day shout-out to Canberra-based (but globally famed!) author Emma Grey, whose books I love. Her latest, Start at the End, is wonderful, but my very favourite is The Last Love Note. She writes warm, poignant, funny, heartfelt rom-coms set in parts of Australia that don’t always get to be the backdrop for these kinds of stories.
And finally, some love for two wonderful independent bookstores: Book Passion in Belconnen, Canberra, my local these days, and Avenue Bookstore in Albert Park, my favourite in Melbourne.
Happy reading, friends. 