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.

Ellen Cregan is reading Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith

For the past few weeks I’ve been on a literary bent with my reading, which has been slightly mentally exhausting. For this reason, I picked up a copy of the third installment of the Cormoran Strike novels written by J.K. Rowling under the pen name of Robert Galbraith.

I haven’t read the first two novels in the series, but this hasn’t really mattered. Rowling has written the story in such a way that it can be enjoyed as a stand-alone adventure. This is a hefty book in terms of page numbers, and I am very much enjoying making my way through it. Protagonist Cormoran Strike is a London-based private eye who has lead a very colourful life as an army veteran and the son of a legendary band groupie. Like any good detective novel, these elements from Strike’s past are always lurking right around the corner as he tries to solve a rather grisly murder. Strike is a bit of a lovable brute, and definitely doesn’t feel as hard-boiled or clinical as some other P.I.-type characters in similar novels I’ve read.

This book will follow you everywhere you go – whenever I’ve had time to spare, even five minutes, I haven’t been able to resist reading a few pages (the chapters are generally short and sharp which makes this even easier to do).

Chris Gordon is reading Finding Fire by Lennox Hastie

I’ve been fortunate enough to get an early copy of this forthcoming cookbook from Lennox Hastie. Really, Finding Fire is more than simply a cookbook and rather, I’d consider it a history of how we cook and eat. This beautifully presented book includes some terrific recipes, but what sets it apart is its top-rate information about how to create a cooking fire in your own back yard, everything from what type of wood to use and how that assists the flavour of the food you are making.

This is a turn-back-the-clock cookbook with a ‘slow down please’ plea included – the sort that can fire up romantic notions of the great outdoors, of friends and family gathering, and of misty eyes gazing into embers. And as the balmy evenings kick off in Melbourne, I’m all in.

Jo Case is reading writing by people I know

This morning I realised that what I’ve been reading and loving the most recently is writing by people I know.

I’ve been reading the first chapter of the second book from my dear friend Rochelle Siemienowicz (whose memoir, Fallen, about the last days of her marriage, which she entered aged 20, was published two years ago). Her new book, a novel, is about three middle-aged people in an open relationship, but it’s also about love and desire and family and convention, and what happens when decide to you live outside convention, to shape the life you want rather than the one you think you should have – and how hard that can be. It’s honestly the book I most can’t wait to keep reading. You can get a sense of her material, and her beautiful writing, in this lovely memoir-essay on Bladerunner 2049 and relationships on-screen.

I’ve also been reading a new short story by Laura Elizabeth Woollett, whose debut short-story collection The Love of a Bad Man, based on real-life criminals and sociopaths and written from the perspective of their partners, was a favourite of mine last year. Woollett’s narrators have the dreamy-but-utterly-self-aware quality of Jeffrey Eugenides in The Virgin Suicides, as if recounting a particularly vivid dream or nightmare. And next year, her novel about Jonestown will be published and I cannot wait!

Finally, earlier this year I got talking to a creative writing lecturer I know, who told me that Joe Rubbo, the shop manager at Readings Doncaster, was a ‘gifted’ star student of hers. Joe had kept this side of himself very quiet, so naturally, I rushed to work and shared this news with all my colleagues. We searched out the anthology his short story is published in, Near and Far, and took turns reading it on our lunch breaks. The lecturer was right: Rubbo’s story, ‘The Trampoline’, is a crisp and poignant story about an absent father and yearning son. This year’s editor of the Best Australian Stories, Maxine Beneba Clarke, clearly agrees, because she’s selected it for this year’s anthology, out next month. I always look forward to Black Inc.’s annual Best anthologies… but this year, there’s an extra reason to.