Ken Gelder

Well, I've been reading some crime fiction.

I guess I've been trying to read crime fiction that isn't anglophone.

So I've been going out to read more Japanese crime fiction and more Italian crime fiction.

And the most recent novel that I read is an old novel, really, by a Spanish-Mexican writer called Paco...

Ignacio Tebo II, sometimes known as Pitt.

He's quite a prolific novelist.

He's the founder of the neo-political genre of the novel in Latin America.

He's very political.

And the novel that I read most recently called The Shadow of the Shadow, very typically for him set back in the 1920s in a

A revolutionary or post-revolutionary Mexico City that is massively criminal and massively corrupt.

It's really good.

No, in translation.

Oh, you can track reading quite well through...

Library resources and academics and other folk are putting together a whole load of material that really tracks what libraries used to lend in the 19th century, so we can see what kinds of books people are borrowing.

And we also know a lot about what kinds of books were being shipped out to Australia, what kinds of books and journals as well, and magazines.

And you can also tell a lot about what people are reading or were reading in the 19th century

through the Australian journals, because the Australian journals published a lot of Australian material, but they also serialized an awful lot of mostly British, but also European literature at the time, either legally or illegally.

I mean, they often pirated this material.

But it can also be really, really good.

And you can be surprised at how interesting colonial popular fiction was.