We chatted to Alison Huber, our new head book buyer, about books, reading, and the strangest thing to ever happen to her in a bookshop.

Describe your taste in books.

Taste: such a loaded term! So personal, yet ultimately made real by the judgment of others. Consequently, describing my own taste makes me feel rather exposed. And like everyone’s, my tastes change, go through phases, and sometimes, become unrecognisable to my older self.

Reflecting on how I might answer this question, I started to write out a list of authors and books that I really like or have liked, but then I thought it better to find the themes that draw them together. It seems that my favourite books are the kind that put you through the wringer … Big stories, big themes, by writers who are not afraid to ‘go there’, even to the darkest of places.

Tell us about an Australian book that made a significant impact on you.

I remember reading Christos Tsiolkas’s Loaded for an undergrad subject at uni circa 1997, which was not long after it came out, and having my mind blown. In fact, I gave an impassioned tute presentation and wrote my major essay on it. I got 95% – where is that essay now…? Tsiolkas’s writing was (and still is) raw, confident, muscular and unapologetic. His portrayal of inner-city Melbourne in Loaded, and of the youthful excesses explored and tested in a search for identity felt very much like a generational moment. I admire his writing so much.

What’s the strangest thing to ever happen to you in a bookshop?

After almost twenty years of working in bookshops of one kind and another, I have a lot of stories from the frontline, some of which involve inappropriate behaviours, bodily functions, out-of-body celebrity interactions, hilarious misheard and misremembered book titles, a wedding proposal, and more. In light of this, it’s hard to pinpoint what the strangest single thing might be.

One of the most uncanny, though, happens with regularity and involves the mundane act of tidying the shelves …

You find a book on the shelf you’ve never seen before and take it in hand. You observe the cover, read the blurb and think it’s interesting before checking the sales history. It has been on the shelf for months and months. You look at it lovingly and wonder why; it sounds like something you would want to read. You put it back on the shelf where it belongs. Then, a couple of hours later, after you’ve all but forgotten about the book, someone brings it to the counter to buy it.

For me, this particular moment almost feels like book divining, or like I’ve reactivated a dormant book, and this is the kind of human-object interaction that has kept me working in the shop all these years. It’s also an example of a bookseller’s intervention that cannot be replicated by a computer algorithm.

Do you ever read books more than once?

Generally, no. I had the obvious, but nevertheless distressing, realisation recently that there are just so many amazing and worthy books in the world that I am just not going to get the time to read. Even if I am lucky enough to live as long as my 97-year-old grandma (whose reading appetite is yet to be sated), it’s just not possible to make anything but a minor dent on the literatures of the world, so in light of this sad fact, it seems more sensible to plough ahead and keep reading unread things.

However, there are a couple of notable exceptions to this drive to read new words. Here are four books I have read more than once (and am likely to read again).

Jane Eyre: no explanation necessary here, surely? I also used to reread childhood favourite Hating Alison Ashley by Robin Klein about once a year – which reminds me I haven’t read it for a while so it might be time. Erica Yurken is one of the best heroines in literature. Had she ever met Adrian Mole, the world might have imploded. Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole Diaries are also books I dip into from time to time and my enjoyment is never diminished. It feels like Adrian and I grew up together. I also periodically re-read Jane Gardam’s wonderful (but now out of print) Bilgewater.

What all these books have in common is that they are coming-of-age tales. I guess when one feels that life is all a bit hard, it’s a comfort to read these stories of becoming to remind oneself that things always change.

What are you reading right now?

I’m a big fan of Jonathan Franzen (which apparently makes me a ‘Fanzen’ as a colleague recently quipped) – so much so that when he came into the shop a few years ago to sign copies of his book, Freedom, I suffered a major episode of over-excitement that led to an inconvenient level of embarrassment. I took myself off down the back of the shop to re-alphabetise the dictionaries and recover from my freak-out, and in the end he didn’t even sign my book.

But, I have an early copy of his forthcoming book, Purity, and am well stuck into it now. This book is set to be one of important international releases of the year, and you can expect to hear a lot of opinions about it. I’ll be offering mine when I’ve made it to the end.

Alison Huber