The Melbourne Review

Summer Reading

December 2012

From classic Australian fiction to sharp political essays, the fine thinking and writing doesn’t stop coming.

The proliferating need for knowledge of the present; the constant re-interpretation of the past; the light thrown into even the most obscure corners of personal and national histories; the continued cultivation of the imagination; the boundaries of popular science and the interface between new technologies and the human soul; and the shifting prospect of the future – the reader is faced with the contemporary curse of too much choice and too little time.

Here at The Melbourne Review we asked a selection of friends to guide us through 2012’s vast array of books with an eye to the summer months ahead. We hope these lists will be useful as a guide – it’s always a good thing to give a book for Christmas, or indeed at any time.

ROBERT MURRAY
Director of Marketing & Customer Relations Melbourne Recital Centre
 
Best of 2012
1. Camille Paglia, Glittering Images (Pantheon)
2. Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations (Knopf)
3. Julian Green, Paris (Penguin)
 
Summer Reading
• Paul Elie, Reinventing Bach (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet (Granta Books)
• Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah (Penguin)

RAMONA KOVAL
Writer, editor and broadcaster
 
Best of 2012
1. Elizabeth Harrower, The Long Prospect (Text Classics)
2. Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower (Text Classics)
3. Colm Toibin, The Testament of Mary (Penguin)
 
Summer Reading
• Sonya Hartnett (ed.), Best Australian Short Stories 2012 (Black Inc.)
• Elizabeth Finkel, The Genome Generation (Melbourne University Publishing)
• Hermann Langbein, People in Auschwitz (University of North Carolina Press)

NICHOLAS GRUEN
CEO, Lateral Economics, Chairman Australian Centre for Social Innovation

Best of 2012
1. Graham Freudenberg, Churchill and Australia (McMillan)
2. David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity (Viking)
3. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind (Pantheon)

Summer Reading
• William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life (Oxford UP)
• William H. Chafe, Bill and Hillary: The Politics of the Personal (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Molly Ringwald, When It Happens to You (It Books)

MAXINE McKEW
Author, Tales from the Political Trenches
 
Best of 2012
1. Drew Weston, The Political Brain (Perseus Books)
2. Arthur Herman, The Scottish Enlightenment (Harper Perennial)
3. James Button, Speechless – A Year in My Father’s Business (Melbourne University Press)
 
Summer Reading
• Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies (Fourth Estate)
• Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety (Modern Library)
• Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behaviour (Faber and Faber)

CHRIS FEIK
Editor, Quarterly Essay; Publisher, Black Inc.

Best of 2012
1. Tony Judt/Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century (Heinemann)
2. Tim Soutphommasane, Don’t Go Back To Where You Came From (New South)
3. Albert O. Hirschman, Shifting Involvements (Princeton UP)
 
Summer Reading
• Chloe Hooper, The Engagement (Penguin)
• Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle (Princeton UP)
• Leszek Kolakowski, Is God Happy? (Penguin UK)

SUZANNE DAVIES
Director and Chief Curator, RMIT Gallery
 
Best of 2012
1. Anna Funder, All That I Am (Hamish Hamilton)
2. Kiran Nagarkar, God’s Little Soldier (Harper Collins)
3. Mark Rowlands, The Philosopher and the Wolf (Granta)
 
Summer Reading
• Kiran Nagarkar, Cuckold (Harper Collins)
• Nile Green, Sufism (Wiley-Blackwell)
• PJ Keating, Last Words (Allen & Unwin)

TONI JORDAN
Writer
 
Best of 2012
1. Michelle de Kretser, Questions of Travel (Allen & Unwin)
2. Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate)
3. Carrie Tiffany, Mateship with Birds (Picador)
 
Summer Reading
• Zane Lovitt, The Midnight Promise (Text)
• Anne Enright, The Forgotten Waltz (Jonathon Cape)
• Cate Kennedy, Like a House on Fire (Scribe)

EMILY HARMS
Marketing Manager, Readings Bookshops
 
Best of 2012
1. A.M Homes, May we be Forgiven (Granta)
2. James Meek, The Heart Broke In (Canongate)
3. Cate Kennedy, Like a House on Fire (Scribe)

Summer Reading
• Benjamin Law, Gaysia (Black Inc.)
• Neil Young, Waging Heavy Peace (Viking)
• Alice Munro, Dear Life (Chatto & Windus)

BRETT SHEEHY AO
Artistic Director, Melbourne Theatre Company
 
Best of 2012
1. The Presidential Recordings: Lyndon Johnson (W.W. Norton)
2. Christopher Hitchens, Mortality (Allen & Unwin)
3. Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Diaries 1963-1981 (Hamish Hamilton)
 
Summer Reading
• Dan Wakefield (ed.) Kurt Vonnegut: Letters (Delacorte Press)
• David Hare, Obedience, Struggle and Revolt (Faber & Faber)
David Byrne, How Music Works (Canongate)

MAREE COOTE
Melbourne Style

Best of 2012
1. John Lahr, Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilization (Farrar Straus Giroux)
2. Matthew Benns, Fixed (Ebury Australia)
3. Russell Hoban, Ridley Walker (Bloomsbury)

Summer Reading
• John Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (Random House USA)
• Hanna Rosin, The End of Men and the Rise of Women (Penguin Viking)
• Neil McGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects (Allen Lane)

CLIVE SCOTT
General Manager, Sofitel Melbourne On Collins
 
Best of 2012
1. Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (Orbit Books)
2. Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life (Virgin Books)
3. Mark Lawrence, Prince of Thorns (Harper Voyager)
 
Summer Reading
• Lily Chan, Toyo: A Memoir (Black Inc.)
• Isobelle Carmody, Green Monkey Dreams (Allen & Unwin)
• Austin Ratner, The Jump Artist (Penguin Viking)

ALICE PUNG
Author, Her Father’s Daughter and Unpolished Gem
 
Best of 2012
1. Susan Cain, Quiet (Penguin Viking)
2. Curtis Sittenfeld, American Wife
(Random House)
3. Marieke Hardy, You’ll Be Sorry When I’m Dead (Allen & Unwin)
 
Summer Reading
• Tom Wolfe, Back to Blood (Jonathan Cape)
• Chester Eagle, The Pilgrims (Trojan Press)
• Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project (Harper Perennial)

ANGELIQUE DINGLE
Communications Manager, Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre

Best of 2012
1. Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence (Faber & Faber)
2. Anna Funder, All That I Am (Hamish Hamilton)
3. Mario Calabresi, Pushing Past the Night (Other Press)

Summer Reading
• Michelle de Kretser, Questions of Travel (Allen & Unwin)
• Joachim Fest, Not Me (Atlantic Books)
• Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate)

Other Articles You May Like

The Best Australian Essays 2012

Ramona Koval (ed.) / Black Inc.

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