The time for best book lists is here.
Here are just a few:
Publishers’ Weekly (US) includes Patti Smith (which I still can’t find anywhere) and [sigh] Freedom. This is the test for each list – does it include Freedom?

Anis Shivani at the Huffington Post calls it one of the year’s several notably “ponderous, bloated, eminently editable books”. He prefers Orhan Pamuk.

Closer to home, the Fairfax papers asked a whole lot of clever people what they liked. Christos has discovered Margaret Yourcenar. Colm Toibin loved David Malouf’s Ransom. And Geraldine Brooks adored- surprise, surprise – Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.

The Guardian did the same thing, with rather more mixed results: Philip Hensher loved Freedom. Can  that be right?

Finally, The Daily Beast added up the votes and came up with a list of lists – with Room at the very top, which is splendid. This list saves you having to read all the others. Nice.

Mine?
Wolf Hall. No contest.

Fiction is democratic, it reasserts the authority of the single mind to make and remake the world.

~ E L Doctorow

Reading

• Swordspoint and The Privilege of the Sword, by Ellen Kushner. Mannerpunk novels with lots of swordfights. Swordspoint, in particular, is delicious. And I get to claim I’m reading them for research, too.
• Opera, or The Undoing of Women, by Catherine Clément – gorgeous critical writing.
• The Slap. Finally. And I don’t know why it’s so compelling either, but it just is.
• Occasional Writings, by Margaret Atwood. I meant to save it for my holiday but couldn’t.

So instead I’m taking to the beach:

• Timepieces – Drusilla Modjeska on writing
• The Lacuna – Barbara Kingsolver, about which I’ve heard mixed reports, but I know it isn’t The Poisonwood Bible, so I’m prepared for anything
• The Red Shoe – Ursula Dubosarsky
• Notes from the Teenage Underground – Simmone Howell 
• And Bleak House. Just because.

Watching

• Teddy Tahu Rhodes in The Marriage of Figaro
• Firefly on DVD
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part 1) about which I feel better as the distance between us grows. 

The sixth HP film was always going to be slightly problematic, since it is largely about the trio and their quest/conflicts, without the usual ensemble, and all the big battles will be in the final instalment. But it really does work, not least because the three main actors are now so much better than they were when they were younger.
I’ve heard numerous stories of small children sobbing in the cinema. It’s not a little kids’ film by any stretch of the imagination – please, if your kid is not old enough to read the book without help, don’t take them to the movie.

Writing
Of course I’m writing my PhD novel. But also making scribbles for a sort of fantasy something.
And doing last minute proofing things to Act of Faith, which is now coming out in July.

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honour, duty, mercy, hope.

~ Winston Churchill

I try to leave out the parts that people skip.  

~Elmore Leonard

History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities, surface towards us then sink away. Some we hook out, others we ignore, and as the pattern changes, so does the meaning. We cannot rely on the facts. Time which returns everything, changes everything.
~ Jeanette Winterson

I write novels, short fiction and poems for adults, young adults and young readers.

My new book is Act of Faith and it’s in the shops now.

Here you can read about my books, including sneak previews of some works in progress.

I’m also a journalist and editor who has worked on newspapers, magazine and websites, and my poetry has appeared in leading literary journals. You can read some of my travel writing, feature articles and poems.

Or you can read my blogs:

• Ocean Without End (on writing and reading)
• Bush Backyard (on gardening)

Nice essay by Geraldine Brooks on writing about the world beyond Australia, but with Australian eyes.

“The bookshelves of my Australian childhood were garrisoned by foreign troops, filled with stories by faraway English people who wrote of things I couldn’t see or touch or know: A.A. Milne, Enid Blyton, C.S. Lewis; The Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden, The Snow Goose. These were good books, but they came between me and my country. Australia had been an independent nation since 1901, but in the 1960s, my imagination was still a British colony.

The characters in my childhood books built their tree houses in reddening rowan trees; they did not scramble up scribbly gums…

One day, I hope to write an Australian novel. But I now know I will have to work for it.”

Clive James has written about this beautifully, too, in Unreliable Memoirs and now, as ever, Geraldine Brooks best describes the feeling: The Writing Life.

People always ask me why I write novels about European history. I’ve never cried more over a book than The Snow Goose; never been more desperate to get my hands on a book than Saturday afternoons at Nunawading Library, browsing the shelf that held both Geoffrey Trease and Rosemary Sutcliffe.

That’s why. That, and the fact that it is, objectively, fascinating.

I have written one very Australian book: the picture book, Billabong Bill’s Bushfire Christmas. But that, too, was set in the past, in that late 50s/early 60s world that does genuinely feel now like a different country.