Andrew Leigh (Fenner, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury) Share this | Hansard source

In the words of Groucho Marx: 'Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.' In the past five days, Canberrans have been enjoying the Canberra Writers Festival. The biggest program yet featured the likes of Andy Griffiths, Elizabeth Finkel, Trent Dalton, Virginia Haussegger, Jack Heath and Chris Hammer. My congratulations to festival Chair Jane O'Dwyer and the volunteers for their hard work in pulling the event together.

Many people work to fuel an active book scene in the bush capital. Colin Steele's Meet the Author series, run in collaboration with the Canberra Times and the Australian National University, is perhaps the best-attended book-launch series anywhere in Australia. The Indigenous Reading Project, founded by Daniel Billing, is a non-profit company that works to improve the reading ability of First Nations children. At Cafe Stepping Stone Strathnairn, founded by Australian local heroes Vanessa Brettell and Hannah Costello, a monthly silent reading group invites people to come along and read quietly with fellow book lovers.

Canberra hosts a bevy of book clubs, from the Tough Guy Book Club to Mamma Mingle. The Canberra Fantasy Book Club has you set for dragons. The National Film and Sound Archive book club does movie combos. The Gals Evolving Book Club focuses on feminism. And Book Cow's book clubs include queer, translations and OzLit clubs. Libraries ACT makes it easy, lending out book-club sets of up to a dozen copies of a single title.

Canberra has many independent bookstores, including Book Face in Gungahlin; Pulp Book Cafe in Nicholls; Book Passion in Belconnen; Book Lore in Lyneham; Harry Hartog at Woden and ANU—shout out to Katarina Pearson; Peter Arnaudo's Book Cow in Kingston; and Tayanah O'Donnell's Paperchain in Manuka.

For my own part, I do most of my reading through audiobooks and try to dive into the soul-nurturing breadth of fiction as much as possible. This year, I've been devouring Liane Moriarty's wonderfully Australian thrillers, especially Here One Moment, and sharing the canine joys of Markus Zusak's Three Wild Dogs. I've also enjoyed some near-future novels, including Bruce Holsinger's Culpability, Ted Chiang's Exhalation, Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time, Laila Lalami's The Dream Hotel and Eleanor Catton's Birnam Wood. Outside of fiction, I've loved Astrid Jorgensen's memoir, Average at Best; Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance; Bent Flyvbjerg's How Big Things Get Done; John McWhorter's Pronoun Trouble; and Suzanne O'Sullivan's The Age of Diagnosis.

Thanks to the writers who inspire us, the readers who sustain us, the booksellers who keep our shelves stocked and the volunteers who make it all possible. In a city built on ideas, our bookshops, festivals and reading groups remind us that the best conversations don't stop when the final page turns.

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