How often does it happen that we’re talking to someone – at a dinner party, over drinks at a bar, on a moor – and that book comes up? Or we wake in the middle of the night to the ship-like groaning of that listing pile by the bed? How many times do we say to ourselves, ‘I simply must get to reading that book, that author’?
Agonise no more, dear friends. Help is at hand. All the great names are here; those we’ve heard of but never quite got round to exploring, those we’ve been too scared to broach, those who, for no real reason, have simply evaded us at every turn.
Classics by the likes of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Baudelaire and Dostoyevsky; 20th century wonders including Italo Calvino, Virginia Woolf, Clarise Lispector and Jose Saramago; and contemporary award winners by Han Kang, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Michael Ondaatje and Jeanette Winterson. Books it seems that everyone has read except us. Well no longer!
Join us each month as we delve into the books we both know but don’t know, take hold of our sketchy literary past, and shore up that rickety tsundoku (aka life-threatening book stack).
Guiding us through these foggy straits is novelist and bookseller Adam Ouston. Adam has been a member of the Fullers family since 2007, has run many a book discussion group, teaches at the university, and his debut novel, Waypoints, was on many of 2022’s Best Books lists as well as being listed for the 2023 Miles Franklin, ALS Gold Medal and the Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Award.
The Books We’ve Always Meant to Read in 2025:
Roberto Bolano’s 2666 over several months (because it’s over 900 pages):
February: Parts 1, 2, and 3
March: Part 4
April: Part 5
May: The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
June: Nostalgia, Mircea Cartarescu
July: On the Calculation of Volume I, Solvej Balle
August: The Master and the Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
September: The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson
October: Nadja, Andre Breton
November: Michael Kohlhaas: Newly translated by Michael Hofmann, Heinrich Von Kleist
The Books We’ve Always Meant to Read group will be held on the first and second Wednesdays of the month at 6.00pm.
For more information, or to register your interest, contact Adam.