Emily Paull

Edited by Elizabeth Tan and Jon Gresham Published by Margaret River Press in collaboration with Ethos Books My copy courtesy of the publisher A short story anthology is a wonderful thing. Authors from different backgrounds with different interests come together to interpret a theme from as many angles as they can, providing the reader with a 360 degree portrait of a cultural moment. The collaboration between Ethos Books and Margaret River Press is just that-- a portrait of a cultural moment-- but its point of difference is the culture that it embeds itself in. In This Desert, There Were Seeds is a collection that celebrates the geographical closeness between Western Australia and Singapore, and a shared vision of our future as both countries face up to the realities of climate change, the shift in what 'community' has come to mean, and the new shape of our political, economic and social structures, as disheartening as these sometimes can be. The twenty stories collecte...

As a child, I used to look forward to trips to the library with Mum or Grandpa, or whichever adult happened to be taking me there at the time. I remember the feeling of browsing the books at the three different libraries I used as I grew up, and have particular memories of the audio tape display at one library, where the cassettes seemed to be suspended in columns from the ceiling. Photo by Pixabay courtesy of Canva I was a member of what some libraries refer to as The Lost Generation for a while-- people who stop using the public library in their late teens when their parents stop taking them and they no longer make the effort to go there on their own. Me, I stopped because I had access first of all to my school library, and then, to money of my own with which I started my rather large book collection. I went back to the library in my early twenties, when a friend of mine and I decided that we would read the entire Man Booker Prize Longlist. I did not want to own all of those bo...

Photo by Jonathan Borba (Canva) The difficulty with being a person who loves books is that you end up with a lot of them. As physical objects, they take up a lot of space. Sometimes, the unread ones stare at me, accusingly. They say things like 'Why haven't you read me yet?' and 'You're not really  as big a bookworm as you like to think you are-- you're just a person who likes the idea of owning a lot of books.' So for the second year in a row, I have committed to doing the Unread Shelf Challenge, an annual commitment to prioritising reading books I already own, and making space in both my apartment and my brain. The challenge is run by Whitney, a Kansas based booklover whom I first came across on the fabulous What Should I Read Next podcast. She provides you with regular emails cheering you on in your journey to get that Unread number down, as well as challenges such as instigating a 'No Buy, No Borrow' month in January-- which I almost ...