There's a few things to note about Fitzro Pool if you've got the time and you're not too busy scoping out a concrete perch which to bake and take in the scene, or maybe just plunging into the water to escape the summer heat. This is, as we noted when we visited at the end of last year, Helen Gardan country. It's indelibly seared on the national literary consciousness by her
classic Monkey group. The pool was nearly shut down in the nineties by a local government who deemed it economically unviable. There was this community campaign full of locals and musicians and artists and more than a few writers, who fought successfully to save it. The famous painted sign up one end of the words aqua profounder is slightly misspelt, a
bastardized blending of Latin and Otanian. Local law has it that it was painted in the nineteen fifties by this pool manager who'd grown tired of and I quote, hauling the kids of Italian migrants out of the deep end. It pops up again and again in our literature. Earlier this year, I was reading Jock Serong's Magical New Fantastical history Cherrywood and was delighted when the pool raided a mention.
One of my nephews was equally delighted to discover it was the inspiration for Courtney Barnett's song Aqua profounder.
Us and laying next to me you to freestyle than twist.
I could see.
Dark hair.
What a cultural impact this pool has had. So we are back again.
It's our final episode audit of what the people lining the pool are reading. There are lots of to be sure, and even more closed eyes and tired faces, just looking to forget the year that's been and soak up the sun instead of the literary greatness. But over there's a copy of Sally Rooney's Into Metso and a dog eared John Lecare lying battered in the sun. One handsome, middle aged bloke is so intently reading to Kill a Mockingbird that he hasn't looked up no matter how many times
we try to approach it. So that's it. Even though I'm loath to interrupt a content reader, I'm going to lean into my nosiest snoopiest self for the final read this of twenty twenty four. It's time to ask some of these people what they're reading now that summer is here. From Schwartz Media. I'm Michael Williams and this is Read This the show about the books we love and the long summer reading sessions ahead of us. This is Clart.
I'm Charlie's thing. Yeah, I mean I've only just picked it up. Really, I actually found it on the street. Someone just left a box of books and I thought, why not, I'll give it a go.
So, yeah, enjoy its fan fibrow reading though side.
Yeah, I'm not gonna lie. It's a warm day and I'm kind of struggling through, but it's still pretty interesting. I mean, yeah, it's so far, you know, talking about her life in Paris, and yeah, I mean I'm enjoying it because I've come to Australia, you know, I got here like a month ago, and so she's talking about her travels and I'm kind of enjoying it.
Really excellent.
Well, I hope next time you pick up a box of books it's slightly less worthy and a little more conducive to like summertime. Ready.
Yeah, I think maybe I'll just give myself a really easy read after this and see what I can find. O.
Well, Best of Black thanks for chatting to thank you, thank you say much. Do you mind if we haressled you while you're sitting in the pool. I'm going to sit down properly because I've discovered that my crouching has a shorter shelf life than I realized.
If you could each say your names before your chat.
I'm Milli Ruby, I'm Phoebe.
Really, I understand you're reading the Slab at the moment. How are you going with it?
I am loving the Slab. I've been meaning to read it for years, and a few friends are reading it recently and it's so fun Bingji Summer read Melbourne Cultural Commentary.
Loving it as one that you've heard talked about for years. How does it measure up with the expectation, Like is it more or less what you thought it was from the conversation around it? Or is it a different beast?
I think you know, my parents read it and they were really obsessed with it, and I always saw it on the bookshelf and kind of hawd it as like my parents' generation kind of story. But now maybe that I'm a bit older, like resonates a bit more and it's funny to imagine kind of off friendship group having having children and navigating these questions about private public school, you know, cultural clashes in Sabavan, Melbourne, so loving which.
Of your friend's kids you would most like to hit?
We were literally just talking about this. Who would it be?
Which friend would he think?
It's a good like talking point.
Yeah, did you bring something bad today?
I did?
I did.
I've got a couple of books with me.
Actually one of them is an advanced copy of Ritual by Chloe Elizabeth Wilson, which is coming out next year, which the whole stick is like, imagine if.
Your favorite cult beauty brand was actually a cult. So it's a lot of fun, it's very Melbourne.
I'm loving it.
And then I also brought a copy of The Shadow of the Wind by Color through Sapon, which I read many years ago but I'm now trying to read in Spanish.
You did a circus before to kind of work out who head box and I saw the zphon and then so was in the Spanish and I was like, that's impressive. Someone's really committed that trying.
There's a lot of Google Translate being picked up along the way.
But were you a fan of Shadow of the Wind when you first.
Read it, I adored it.
Yeah, and I never went back and read like the second or the third, so hoping to get there on this round. But yeah, it was a beautiful book, like so gothic and so fun to like imagine that barcel owner of the past.
And did you bring a book to that?
Yeah, I brought.
To I have.
I couldn't believe it by Shandelier and then unlicensed bootlegging as a creative practice.
Why did you pick those two? And why did you bring two? Is one of backup in case the book.
I just started Shawandelier's one, so I wasn't sure if I was gonna like it or not, but I think I will. And then the other ones more like theory are theory. You never know what mood you're going to be in.
No, I'm the same. I'm repeatedly mocked for having multiple books, but nothing worse than sitting down beside the pool and suddenly being like, oh no, why did I think I was a worthy person? I'm on trash or the opposite. Yeah, thank you all so much, And yeah it feels very intrusive at the pool, but it's really great. I'm thrilled that you're reading Jackie Collins by The booll tell Us about Deadly Embrace.
So I've actually only just started it. This is probably my thirtieth Jackie Collins. In the last few months, I'm writing a book on Jackie Collins with a colleague of mine, so this is technically work amazing, but I love her. I was quite late to the bonkbuster genre, you would say, So, I've read a lot of Jackie Collins quite quickly, and
she's amazing. So I haven't read this one. But it's just like the third in a series with Madison Castelli, who is this journalist woman and she's found out her dad possibly murdered her mother, and you know, they're all just full of characters like this, and she's you know, she's flying to LA to go have dinner with her friend who's a TV presenter, and someone's going to get kidnapped, someone will probably get murdered again.
It's yeah, is this your primary genre of reading or is this a kind of reading where you enjoy it but then you read other stuff for pleasure or other stuff differently.
I read quite widely, I think.
So.
I'm an academic. I work at university and I teach genre fiction. Romance is my specialty, so that's kind of where the Jackie Collins thing came from. But for pleasure, I read much more widely than that. I'm very, very fussy with romance reading this kind of reading, I think because it's my job a little bit. But I quite like crime fiction, love a bit of fantasy. I'm reading another book which is like a kind of retelling, Nettle
and Bone. It's like a fantasy, kind of fairy tale retailing, which is quite good.
And last question before I let you go, did you watch the adaptation of Rivals, the Jilly Cooper book and what did you think of it?
I loved it. I'm thrilled they're doing a second season. I think they've really lean into kind of the eighties nostalgia of it, actually adapting it also from modern twenty twenty four sensibilities. There's these books can be problematic and some of the lingering, especially the eighties ones, the racism. They're quite homophobic in some ways, so it's nice that they've managed to kind of make something that's palatable in
twenty twenty four on the TV show. And yeah, it just it looks like what these books may make me imagine.
That's the Paul saying that's enough. Jilly Cooper talk.
Perfectest, Thanks hates.
I dis finished of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel Garcia.
My Kids.
Yeah, I really, I really love my kids. And the only thing I haven't read by him is Love at the Time of Cholera, And then I found that in a book library the other day, So it looks like it's all meant to be.
What is it you like about his books?
He's so primal, He's so like it's so raw, like like visceral, you know, like the way he talks about emotions and people's relationships and things like that. But that's and I guess of see this saga, you know, it's like everything turns back into herself and stuff like. That's really nice. That's my take.
I love it. Are you guys big readers or is it something that you only get to give over to like summer sitting.
Around I read, he said.
He said.
He also three, I work at readings a conflict of interest, and we've got.
To journey over there, and we've got an editor over there, and yeah.
I think I yeah, I think I saw a mean about a long time ago about monkey Grip and the circular when you come to the pool, and therefore a part of the original that's on.
In the there is there is a circle happening. We're all kind of subject to the cliches of literature. That's fine, it's a healthy thing. I haven't seen a monkey grip today. I did see someone reading Ghana when I was here last week and I was like, all right, what do you want? Yeah, yeah, I loved it. Yeah this season.
Yeah.
My partner works for Anguin and she got it from three months time to pull some strings and arrived like forty five minutes before we went out for like my birthday.
Oh, that's pretty good.
It's pretty good.
And Helen, I'm floming and Helen lives nearby and so we see her around a bit.
Ah, that's pretty good. You guys, Thank you. You really delivered on the Melbourne vibe. Yeah, okay, I think I have pested enough people for the day.
Microphone away, Time for a dip when we come back.
Some of Australia's best writers share their recommendations for summer reading.
We'll be right back. This year, we hosted forty five writers.
On read This, each and every one of them an unmitigated delight. We couldn't be more grateful to them for their company, for their generosity and their wisdom. And you can catch up on the archive of those episodes anytime.
That can be your company on the long road trip ahead, or maybe when you're cleaning the house after you've gotten rid of the relatives and you're munching on leftovers, and not just hours of excellent listening to the Read This archive, but once you're done, you can go to the audio version of the books we discussed. You'll be spoiled for choice.
So if you need one more recommendation before the year is done, maybe there's a Christmas gift you've forgotten, maybe you're just thinking about your own book list for those days off. We've invited some of our supremely well read guests from this year to offer their advice for summer reading.
Hello, my name's Briany Doyle and it was wonderful to be a guest of Read This in twenty twenty four, the year of novels that are both thought provoking and titillating. So my recommendations for the summer are The Safe Keep by Yale Van der Wooden and All Fours by Miranda July. I say pick the first if you want racy historical content, and the second if you want to stay in the racy present. Both are queer, smart page turners with important social implications for a summer that will be hot yet
deeply engaged. I hope you enjoys.
Bruce Pasco and my favorite book for the year was Time's Monster by Priyasatia.
This is a work of genius. Hi, my name's Melanie Chang. And last Christmas, I was engrossed in Yumna Kasab's book The Lovers. I just adored it and I would love to be encountering it again for the first time this summer holiday. It is fable like magical, but it was also brimming with truth about love across the life cycle, good and bad. I just think Yumna is one of the smartest writers working in Australia today. I highly recommend it. You won't be disappointed.
I'm Robbie Natt and my summer reading recommendation is Deep Water by James Bradley. My Loyal Lila, my name, We Need Done. And I'm the author of Dirt Porn Islanders. My summer reading recommendation is The Tribe by Michael Muhammad Ahmad, who is my dear friend. The Tribe, in its anniversary edition, which was published this year, is about members of a small Muslim sect who fled to Australia just before the
Civil War in Lebanon. So it really is a book that speaks to our times, despite the fact it was published ten years ago. What I really love about The Tribe is that it focuses on three generations of an extended family, as seen through the eyes of one of its youngest offsprings, a child named Banni Adam. So The Tribe is short and sweet and perfect for summer reading of Fatu Hi.
I'm Claire right, and twenty twenty four has been a big year for me with the completion of my Democracy trilogy, which I've been working on for over two decades, with the publication of the final installment, Knuku dah Rook, and what I'm looking forward to diving into this summer is appropriately a trilogy, and that's Frank moore House's The Edith Trilogy. I can't quite believe that I've never managed to get
to these books. So many people would have expected that it would be right up my alley and that I would have taken to them like a duck to water. But instead of continuing to mix my metaphors, I'm just going to start reading them top to bottom, and I think it's going to be a very happy summer's worth of reading.
A happy summer to you.
Too, what a treat. A big thank you once again to all our guests from this year. One of the reasons this show is so much fun to make is that the best writers are always terrific readers themselves. It's the books we love, the stories behind them, the authors we love, and the stories they read themselves. So just to finish up for a different flavor of summer, there's a poem that I go back to this time of
year without fail. It's by the late glorious genius John Clark, who put together a collection called The Even More Complete Book of Australian Verse. The book took us its central conceit the idea that the world's great poets were all actually Australian and they're best understood through that lens. It's both an absolutely pitch perfect literary satire, but also they're gorgeous poems in their own right. The John Clark version
of Dylan Thomas. He calls Dylan Thompson and introduces him as a martyr to the terps, who often woke in unfamiliar circumstances and attempted to catch the speech rhythms of the sea. Here's John reading that poem. I think it's glorious.
A child's Christmas in Warnabull. One Christmas was so like another in those years around the seatown corner now that I can never remember whether it was one hundred and sixty degree in nineteen fifty three or whether it was one hundred and three degrees in nineteen fifty six. All the Christmases roll into one down the wave, roaring, salt,
squinting years of yester boy. My hand goes into the fridge of imperishable memory, and outcome salads and sunburned lotions, the brief, exuberant hiss of beer being opened, and the laugh of wet haired youths around a zephyr six, the smell of insect repellent and eucalyptus, and the distant, constant, slowly listless bang of the flywire door and resting on a fore micer altar waiting for ron. The biggest pav
in the world. A magic pav, A cut and come again pav for all the children in all the towns across the wide brown bee humming trout fit, sheep rich two horse country, and the ants always the ants in the kitchen on the black and white photographed beach of the park, playing out the rope to a shared childhood court in the undertow and drifting, and some numerous uncles wondering occasionally why they weren't each other, coming around the letterbox to an attacking field in the test match and
being driven handsomely by some middle order nephew, skipping down the vowel flattening pitch and putting the ball into the tent flaps on the first bounce of puberty.
That's it for another year of read this.
Thank you so much for your support and enthusiasm for the show in twenty twenty four. It's been an utter delight to bring you conversations with our favorite writers from all around the world. A special thank you to our sponsor, the AAR Group. They came on board midyear and with their support the show remains possible. And thank you also to everyone here at Schwartz Media from Murray schwartzdown the
whole time. Couldn't be more supportive and more inclined to have a chat about what they're reading in the kitchen. Thank you all the read This team is small, but indefatigable and utterly tireless. Clara Ames makes the show what it is. Anything you like about the show that's Clara's work. Anything you don't like is because I insisted in a meeting and we made the wrong choice. The wonderful Travis Evans does the mixing and Zalton Fetcho provides the original compositions.
Head of audio Sarah mcviee was the brains behind the show in the first place and continues to be an amazing support.
Finally, don't forget.
To subscribe, rate review on all your podcast apps. Share those episodes Willy nearly turn it into the cultural juggnal that it deserves to be. For now, though, we're gonna have a little lay down, probably with a good book. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next year.