How often does it happen that we’re talking to someone – at a dinner party, over drinks at a bar, on a moor – and that book comes up? Or we wake in the middle of the night to the ship-like groaning of that listing pile by the bed? How many times do we say to ourselves, ‘I simply must get to reading that book, that author’?
Agonise no more, dear friends. Help is at hand. All the great names are here; those we’ve heard of but never quite got round to exploring, those we’ve been too scared to broach, those who, for no real reason, have simply evaded us at every turn.
Classics by the likes of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Baudelaire and Dostoyevsky; 20th century wonders including Italo Calvino, Virginia Woolf, Clarise Lispector and Jose Saramago; and contemporary award winners by Han Kang, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Michael Ondaatje and Jeanette Winterson. Books it seems that everyone has read except us. Well no longer!
Join us each month as we delve into the books we both know but don’t know, take hold of our sketchy literary past, and shore up that rickety tsundoku (aka life-threatening book stack).
Guiding us through these foggy straits is novelist and bookseller Adam Ouston. Adam has been a member of the Fullers family since 2007, has run many a book discussion group, teaches at the university, and his debut novel, Waypoints, was on many of last year’s Best Books lists as well as being listed for this year’s Miles Franklin, ALS Gold Medal and the Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Award.
The Books We’ve Always Meant to Read in 2024:
• February: Flights by Olga Tokarczuk
• March: The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg
• April: The Castle by Franz Kafka
• May: The Monk by Matthew Lewis
• June: At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien
• July: The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
• August: Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
• September: Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris by A.J. Liebling
• October: Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima
• November: The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
The Books We’ve Always Meant to Read group will be held on the first and second Wednesdays of the month at 6.00pm.
For more information, or to register your interest, contact Adam.