Summer’s almost over but there’s still time to catch up on your reading before heading back to classes. Whether you’re interested in the classics, genre fiction or graphic novels, you’ll find everything you need in UWA’s libraries. Karlee Calderwood – client support officer from Barry J Marshall Library – has put together a list of possibilities to keep you turning pages well into autumn.
Here for a good time and a long time
The long vacation is a good opportunity to try a long read. Or perhaps a long, long, long read…If you’ve ever been tempted to tackle the notoriously epic novel War and Peace, there are multiple copies available at the Library! Clocking in at almost 600,000 words (that’s an average reading time of about 39 hours), Tolstoy's masterpiece will really give you something to sink your teeth into.
It’s the end of the world as we know it
The 2020 Tokyo Olympics, a global catastrophe that has changed the world, and children fighting the system for a better tomorrow…No, it’s not the evening news, it’s the plot of the classic 1982 manga series AKIRA. Katsuhiro Otomo's seminal graphic novels have had a massive influence on sci-fi and post-apocalyptic stories in the last four decades – you can grab all six volumes of this cultural milestone at UWA Library.
It’s a kind of magic
Love all the powerful women from Game of Thrones, but prefer the more fantastical and less brutal world of Harry Potter? Then it's time to try some Tamora Pierce. Kicking off with Alanna: The First Adventure, Pierce’s Song of the Lioness series has been entertaining young adults since the 80s. The story of a girl who disguises herself as a boy and uses sheer grit, will and a gift for magic in order to become a knight is a classic of the genre.
Real-life drama
If you liked The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak, you'll love I Am Sasha by Anita Selzer. The incredible true story of Selzer’s father, it’s based on her grandmother's memoirs of German-occupied Poland in 1942. With Nazi soldiers taking young Jewish boys away to camps or just shooting them in the street, a desperate mother comes up with an ingenious, impossibly risky plan to keep her son safe. Sasha is no more; in his place, a young girl…
The hand-picked tales
The TV adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale has given novelist Margaret Atwood’s work a whole new audience. If you’re curious to try another story by one of the most renowned, respected and truly relevant authors of our time, we’d recommend The Blind Assassin, Alias Grace, or The Penelopiad.
Noongar novelist
Enjoyed Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe? Interested in some local Indigenous fiction? Multi-award-winning Fremantle author Kim Scott is of Noongar heritage and UWA Library carries a number of novels, picture books and academic texts he has written or contributed to. Perhaps try Benang, Taboo, or Kayang and Me.
You don’t have to limit your reading to just the summer holidays…dive into writing of all kinds, from classic literature to modern TV drama, by majoring in English and Literary Studies at UWA.
