Reading matters

File this blog posting under 'shameless self-promotion' if you like, but I'm featured in another blog this week, at the literary magazine, 'Meanjin'.

Here's the link to my little piece on "What I'm reading".

How all this came about is that one of the people at Meanjin, Australia's second-oldest literary magazine (established 1940) contacted me recently saying that "we have not published any pieces with a specific interest in gardening and Australian horticultural literature" and so my little contribution would help to redress that omission.

I remember Meanjin as a child, when it was called Meanjin Papers, and Dad always had copies of it in his reading pile (he must have been a subscriber). So I was just a little bit thrilled to be asked to contribute something to Dad's old literary magazine.

It's simply 600 words on the topic of what I'm reading now, and of the three authors I mention only one is a gardening writer, Tommy Garnett, the former gardening writer for The Age newspaper. The other two are crime fiction's Raymond Chandler and Ryszard Kapuscinski, a Polish journalist and foreign correspondent. All three have something in common, in my mind, and you'll have to read the piece to find out what that is. How's that for suspense!

So, when you have the time, check out not just my own little contribution, but please bookmark the Meanjin website and explore it further. There's a lot of good reading (and good writing) there on a very wide array of topics, and if you revisit the blog over the coming months you'll probably find other garden bloggers showing up, reading list in hand.