Readings And Writings: Forty Years In Books
Editors: Jason Cotter and Michael Williams
Published by: Readings Books Music and Film

Mark Rubbo is Lygon Street gentry. His dad taught at Melbourne University; his sister did the pen drawing of a coffee grinder at Grinders Coffee. Rubbo himself ran Professor Longhair’s Music Shop on Lygon Street, Carlton, but in 1976 he returned to his real love – books – when he and his business partners Greg Young and Steve Smith took over a bookshop down the road, which had been founded in 1969 by Ross and Dot Reading.

Yep, that’s right. It’s called Readings because that was the owner’s name. Didn’t I feel like a chump when I worked that out – fortunately, before I read this anthology, which the independent store (now a Melbourne-wide chain that also sells CDs and DVDs) has produced to mark its 40th year in business.

It’s a handsome volume, with wonderful cover and interior illustrations by James Gulliver Hancock. It’s an anthology of stories contributed by both prominent and emerging authors, some of whom are Readings staff members. Editor Jason Cotter is himself a writer moonlighting in book retailing. Co-editor Michael Williams is a book maven – a freelance editor, reviewer, head of programming at Melbourne’s new Centre For Books, Writing And Ideas, and dead ringer for News Limited sports writer Finn Bradshaw, for whom I continually mistake him at events.

It begins in a very Melburnian fashion that might not resonate with readers from elsewhere. Rubbo has a potted history of his business, then Shane Maloney effortlessly takes the piss out of the ‘historical reminiscence’ writing mode with a foreword that reads like Homer Simpson’s photographic memory of Marge’s attitude to gambling: “The proprietor, a ruffian named Rubbo, stood behind a book-laden counter … Immensely tall and dressed in his customary buttercup-yellow jodhpurs and tasselled fez, he appeared very much as he does today.”

However, the rest of the anthology is wonderfully wide in scope – city stories, country stories; stories set in Melbourne and as far as Rome or Tokyo. As a collection, it’s also impressively balanced between fresh and established voices, literary and genre writers, light and dark subjects.

Many stories operate in the realist mode and hinge on pregnant moments of revelation, or catch characters on the thresholds of new lives. There was a lot of sharply observed characterisation and dialogue here, but it’s easy to read this kind of story and think, “That was nicely written, but so what?” Some stories here did, I’m afraid, provoke that reaction in me.

Others were more intriguing. With its musings on the nature of home, Alex Miller’s ‘The End’ is a subtle sketch of people giving up on finding shared ground; Paddy O’Reilly’s ‘After The Goths’ brings new meaning to the phrase “I kid ’cause I love”, while Tony Birch’s affecting ‘The Loneliness Of The Dead Runner’ speaks hopefully of redemption.

Readings And Writings also contains playful and allegorical works. Leanne Hall’s mysterious ‘Flight’ is perhaps a companion piece for Miles Allinson’s ‘A Very Small Story From The End Of The World’. Chris Grierson tells an odd fable in ‘Most People Around Here’, Steven Amsterdam finds magic realism in grief in ‘Right About Now’, and David Cohen’s marketing satire ‘Woodcutter’ is just great fun.

So many stories stuck in my mind; I’d think about them later while doing something altogether different. However, it was the desperate and morally ambiguous characters who really stayed with me: the old lady in Chris Womersley’s chilling ‘The Age Of Terror’, the woman of the cloth in Peter Goldsworthy’s ‘The Nun’s Story’, the malignant narrator in Amy Tsilemanis’s ‘A Little Piece Of Their Life’, the “terrible lost thing” of a father in Kate Holden’s ‘The Sightseers’, and the cynical wife in Catherine Harris’s ‘A Grand Leap Of Stupid Faith’.

All up, an impressive celebration of literary culture from one of its strongest defenders in Melbourne.