Today Aussies of all ages are encouraged to set aside 60 minutes for a date with a book.
The Australian Reading Hour initiative aims to help people discover or rekindle a love of reading, reduce stress (by 68 per cent, to be exact) and improve literacy skills.
Any material will do, but if you’re keen to read something cover-to-cover or add another classic to your reading resumé, here are a selection of books, old and new, that you can knock over in an hour.
My Purple Scented Novel by Ian McEwan
Originally run in The New Yorker as a longform short story, Ian McEwan’s My Purple Scented Novel has been released as a 34-page book to celebrate the author’s 70th birthday. The story follows two friends who, for their entire lives, have jostled for literary success in increasingly unhealthy competition. This slim book is lighter than some of McEwan’s full-length works, like The Children Act and Nutshell, and according to gr’s Emma Harvey it ‘still bears his careful characterisation and restrained yet lively prose’.
The Fish Girl by Mirandi Riwoe
This novella by Mirandi Riwoe (who also writes novels under the name M J Tjia) won Seizure’s Viva la Novella prize last year. It’s about an Indonesian girl in a fishing village whose life is transformed when she goes to work in the household of a Dutch merchant. Described as a kind of fairy-story set in the tropics, The Fish Girl is packed with evocative descriptions of Indonesia and tells a haunting story that is short, yet powerful.
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
This seminal work of early feminist literature follows a woman’s descent into madness, but also scrutinises 19th-century attitudes towards the mental health and the propensity to diagnose a woman with ‘hysteria’ should she be anything but obedient and demure. Written in first person as diary entries from a woman cooped up in a colonial mansion as she undergoes the ‘rest cure’, this is a strange, powerful, daring short novel.
Gotham by Nick Earls
The short novel is the perfect vehicle for the fast, funny, crisp prose of Brisbane author Nick Earls. Gotham follows an Australian journalist in New York as he profiles an up-and-coming rapper called Na$ty Boi. It’s quirky and unexpectedly moving; the journalist needs to publish the article in order to help pay for the treatment for his severely ill young daughter. And if you fall in love with Earls’s writing in the hour it takes to read Gotham, there are another four loosely-linked novellas in the ‘Wisdom Tree’ series that follow.
Storm Boy by Colin Thiele
With another film adaption in the works that’s slated for release early next year, now’s the perfect time to read or revisit Colin Thiele’s classic Aussie children’s novel, Storm Boy. The story of a boy’s friendship with Mr Percival the pelican and an Indigenous man named Fingerbone has touched hearts since its publication in 1964. For best results, recruit a Reading Hour companion, settle in beside a window, and share this beloved story aloud.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (and other classics!)
If Mary Shelley can invent science fiction over a weekend, you can read this book in an hour (or at least make a healthy dent). Other classics you’d come close to completing in 60 mins include The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson at 64 pages, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F Scott Fitzgerald, also at 64 pages, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis at 55 pages, and George Orwell’s Animal Farm at 112 pages.
