Well, actually, I finished it a while ago because I am well beyond the twenty I nominated. Anyway, here are the books alphabetically by surname that I read for the challenge this year:
Michelle Arrow The Seventies: the personal, the political and the making of modern Australia
Maggie Black Up Came a Squatter: Niel Black of Glemorniston
Geraldine Brooks People of the Book
Sue Course Lost Letters from Vienna
Sophie Cunningham City of Trees : Essays on Life, Death and the Need for a Forest
Amanda Curtin Kathleen O’Connor of Paris
Kate Forsyth and Belinda Murrell Searching for Charlotte
Vicki Hastrich Night Fishing
Kerry Highley Dancing in my Dreams: Confronting the Spectre of Polio
Jess Hill See What You Made Me Do: Power Control and Domestic Violence
Chloe Hooper Arsonist: A Mind on Fire
Jacqueline Kent Vida: A Woman for Our Time
Judith Lucy Drink, Smoke, Pass Out
Julie Marcus The Indomitable Miss Pink
Catherine McKinnon Storyland
Katherine Murphy The End of Certainty: Scott Morrison and Pandemic Politics (Quarterly Essay #79)
Brenda Niall Friends and Rivals: Four Great Australian Writers
Favel Parrett There was Still Love
Cassandra Pybus Truganini
Margaret Simons Cry Me a River: The Tragedy of the Murray-Darling Basin (Quarterly Essay #77)
Leigh Straw After the War: Returned Soldiers and the Mental and Physical Scars of WWI
Laura Tingle The High Road: What Australia can learn from New Zealand (Quarterly Essay #80)
Helen Trinca Madeleine: A Life of Madeleine St John
Clare Wright Beyond the Ladies Lounge: Australian Women Publicans
Only three fiction out of 24. The dominance of non-fiction is probably because I’m conscious of keeping the ‘history’ numbers up in the AWW History, Memoir and Biography Round-Ups that I compile.
Other stats? I read 24 Australian women writers compared with 9 Australian male writers. I read more Australian literature (33 books) compared to international fiction (28 books). Of those 28 international reads, 18 were written by women and 11 written by men.
Overall, I didn’t read as much this year as I thought that I would have given that I had 112 day lockdown. I just didn’t seem to be able to settle, and much of the year just slid away from me.
But I’m up for joining the Australian Women Writers Challenge for 2021, and perhaps this time I’ll aim for a little more fiction in my life.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 