Nicholas Jost

It sort of ups the stakes.

And, I mean, one of the things about this particular, this collection is that these are contemporary writers writing about books that, you know, have been written mostly by living authors or recent authors.

So there's a very strong sense to me of a kind of community thing

undertaking here that underlies this question of reading like an Australian writer.

Oh, I was going to chime in and say, I think there's something inexhaustible about a novel that you really like.

And so it doesn't matter how many times you go back to it, you are finding new things.

And so the analysis never has an end point

And I suppose that's part of the mystery.

But by actually doing it, by rereading and finding those things, you're always going deeper.

Yeah, well, I think a novel can really be anything and in some ways it's up to the reader to work out what new ways a particular novel is doing things in.

So novels are always sort of reinventing themselves, and the reader is part of that.

I mean, I think what I want to say in this discussion is that reading is not a passive thing.

You know, there's that image of the person who just sits in a chair staring at a book, very passive, but that is absolutely not what it is.

I think reading is really an active thing and an interactive thing, and fiction is the thing that opens up spaces to readers to read.

imagine and to push back and to create spaces so how that happens it starts you know with the with the first page of the voice of the book or the setting so that's where i'm not saying you know anything can be a novel

But I am saying a novel can be anything and it might look like something else when you kind of start to read it and then you see the way it's playing with you and you play back.

And, I mean, the novel I wrote about Elizabeth Costello at the beginning is an absolute classic example of that.

Because it just says, we've got to get from here to there.

We've got to get to the far shore.

And he gets to the far shore by the end of the sort of first page.