Will Dean

Oh, I want to get back to the likeability or unlikeability of characters in a moment.

And also, I love that idea of a book giving license for the imagination, because ideally, I think that's what reading should do.

But Belinda, we need to hear about what book you chose to look at and why.

it's interesting isn't it when you revisit a text and try to make sense of the impact it had on you and given that all three of you are doing this both as writers trying to make sense of why a book has had an impact on you but you also all

teach, does it undo fiction too much for you?

I mean, does it ever take away from the pleasure of it using this sort of analytic way of reading?

And I guess that's a question for any of you.

And one of the things I like about having such an engaged set of essays about particular books and about the nature of both reading and writing is that it sort of helps me grapple with something that on this program, The Bookshelf, I often have to think about, which is what reading does or what it's for.

whether reading has to be comforting or solace or escape, not that there's anything wrong with that, but the importance of a reading also being discomforting or alarming or uncomfortable.

Where does that notion of what reading does, where does that sit for you guys in your analysis as a writer?

Where then, Deborah, where then does that question of likeability or relatability or what it is that we look for when we read, where does that then sit in your understanding of what reading is?

Nicholas, can I ask you a question that's sort of a slightly sideways one to this?

It's about not just what reading can do, but what the novel can do.

Because in your essay in this collection, you seem to be talking about both the sort of definitions of the limits or the lack of limits for what we think a novel is.

Now, I'm not at all surprised that writers want to talk about other writers and books that they admire.

And I have to say that this collection, Reading Like an Australian Writer, has just given me a huge list of other books that I want to read, partly because of the enthusiasm of the analysis.

So this is a pretty generous collection, isn't it, Belinda?

Belinda Castle, Deborah Adelaide, Nicholas Jost, thank you so much for speaking to us today on the bookshelf.

And the edited collection, Reading Like an Australian Writer, is published by New South.

And that's it for this week's edition of The Bookshelf.