When I look around my study I see all the books in my reading pile as well as all the titles I have stacked on shelves above my head: that’s when I realise I will never have enough time to read all the books I keep buying. I’m not sure whether collecting like I do is an affectation or a disease. All I know is I simply can’t walk into a bookshop and then leave it without buying at least something.
My obsessive love of books comes mainly from the influence of my late Aunt Blessing, a small thin, but very striking woman, who spent her working life in such professions as a travelling librarian, a newsagent, a proof-reader, and an educational book seller.
Bronia (Blessing) worked for Abbey’s in Sydney and Blackwood’s in London and was one of the very few people I have ever known who could say she had read every one of Patrick White’s novels. She also at one time sold cigarettes and newspapers from a kiosk on the London underground, and could also tell you who Ern Malley, Charmaine Clift and George Johnston were. What a star!
Her greatest fear in life? To find she had run out of rolling tobacco or something good to read. Yes, I can definitely relate to that …
| Mythos | Stephen Fry | Penguin / Michael Joseph | 2018 |
| Pili’s Wall | Philip Levine | Unicorn Press | |
| DMS for Dummies: a reference for the rest of us | Blair Rampling, David Delan | Wiley Publishing Inc | 2003 |
| Hold Your Own | Cate Tempest | Picador Poetry | |
| The Water Knife | Paolo Bacigalupi | Orbit | 2017 |
| Binti | Nnedi Okorafor | Tor Books | 2018 |
| Binti Home | Nnedi Okorafor | Tor Books | 2018 |
| The Cambridge Companion to Dante | Various | CUP | 2001 |
| The Portable Sixties Reader | Ann Charters | Penguin Classics | 2003 |
| The Portable Beat Reader | Ann Charters | Penguin Classics | 1992 |
| True Stories | Helen Garner | 2017 | |
| Sun Music and Selected Poems | Judith Beveridge | Giramondo | 2018 |
| Ghost Speaking | Peter Boyle | Vagabond Press | 2017 |
| Towns in the Great Desert | Peter Boyle | 2016 | |
| The Fall of America | Alan Ginsburg | ||
| The Short story and its Writer | Anne Charters | 2004 | |
| The Peloponnesian Wars | Thuycidides | Penguin Classics | 1954 |
| Metamorphoses | Ovid | Penguin Classics | 2004 |
| Guide to Greece 1: Central Greece | Pausanias | Penguin Classics | 1971 |
| The Histories | Herodotus | Penguin Classics | 1972 |
| The Iliad | Homer | ||
| the Odyssey | Homer | ||
| Words are my matter | Ursula LeQuin | ||
| The English Auden | W.H. Auden | ||
| Collected Poems | W. B. Yeats | ||
| Collected Poems | T. S. Eliot | ||
| Collected Poems | Alan Ginsburg | ||
| The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present | |||
| Greek Art | Richelieu | ||
| Bird Minds | Gisela Kaplan | Csiro Books |
