Each week we bring you a sample of the books we’re reading, the films and TV shows we’re watching, and the music we’re listening to.

Paul Goodman is reading Inadvertent by Karl Ove Knausgaard (translated by Ingvild Burkey)

I took another break from the new Murakami to read Karl Ove Knausgaard’s contribution to the Windham-Campbell Why I Write series, Inadvertent. With characteristic suspicion and microscopic analysis he addresses his ‘reasons’ for writing one by one, asking how legitimate it is to sum up anyone’s desire to create in a single line. Contrasting Kundera with Hamsun and evaluating Munch in a similar way he would himself, Knausgaard toys with the overt, those events that shaped his life, and then the subtle, the accidents and ‘inadvertent’ wells of inspiration that take him when his guard is down. Knausgaard manages to write with stupefying clarity on the nature of writing, why he writes and whether answering the question at all reveals anything that the finished product, the artist’s work, can reveal independent of him. I loved it.

Lian Hingee is reading You Think It, I’ll Say It by Curtis Sittenfeld

2018 seems to have been a really stand-out year for short story collections, and the most recent one to grace my bedside table is Curtis Sittenfeld’s You Think It, I’ll Say It. I’ve a relative newbie to Sittenfeld (despite the near evangelical love my co-workers have for her) and the only book of hers that I’ve read previously is Eligible, a contemporary retelling of Pride and Prejudice.

Her latest book deals with topics as diverse as competitive parenting, emotional infidelity, institutionalised sexism, grief, love, sex and friendship, but at the heart of each one Sittenfeld invites the reader to think about what it means to be a woman in the modern world. Whether told in the voice of a bored upper-middle class SAHM, a naive college freshman, or an unnamed presidential candidate (it’s Hillary, it’s obviously Hillary), the stories in You Think It, I’ll Say It are brittle, bright, witty, acerbically funny, heartfelt, and never anything but absolutely authentic.

Bronte Coates is reading Coyote Doggirl by Lisa Hanawalt

Coyote Doggirl is the first full-length graphic novel from Lisa Hanawalt, and it’s entirely terrific. At turns funny and melancholy, subversive and nostalgic, whimsical and cut-throat, playful and heartfelt, this is the comic artist’s refreshing take on the Western adventure tale, soaked in her trademark vibrant technicolour. When the independent and fierce Coyote is tragically separated from her trusty steed Red, she’s left on the brink of death, missing her best friend and determined to have her revenge on those who have wronged her. This is a stand-out graphic novel of 2018.