Each week we bring you a sample of the books we’re reading, the films we’re watching, the television shows we’re hooked on, or the music we’re loving.

Chris Gordon is reading One Day I’ll Remember This: Diaries 1987-1995 by Helen Garner

Along with the entire population of Melbourne, I’ve been reading Helen Garner’s new volume of diaries: One Day I’ll Remember This. This volume begins in 1987 and finishes in 1995 with the publication of The First Stone.

These are the reasons that I love Garner’s writing. She does not flinch. She does not cower to other people’s opinions. She writes about her experiences of being a parent, a friend, a lover and a woman. She strives for honesty – the type of honesty that exposes her. Helen Garner is vulnerable, strong and astute. These diaries not only reveal her literary talent, but her musings also hold a mirror up to my own deepest, darkest, most trivial feelings. Surely this is the power of a very great writer: she exposes me too.

Kate McIntosh is reading Smart Ovens for Lonely People by Elizabeth Tan

This is my second reading of Elizabeth Tan’s Smart Ovens for Lonely People. For someone who works in a bookshop, is surrounded by books all day, is very well aware that each month hundreds of new books will be released, reading the same book twice is not something I do often, nor take lightly. Life is too short and as we all know there are simply too many books.

However… This year’s Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction winner is exceptional, and could be read repeatedly, with something new and different to be taken away from it every time.

There are 20 short stories to be devoured, each unique, intriguing and fabulous. On page one you will be lulled into reminiscing about hot childhood summers and your local playground, only to be jolted completely and utterly out of this reverie by page two. Follow this up with unicorns, mermaids, shopping centres, stationary and suicide, a smart oven that is SO much more useful than a smart phone, a child’s game that can somehow alter the very fabric of the universe, sexism, spies, grief, love and the end of the world, and what more could you possibly wish for in a book?

I am not normally a fan of short stories. They have previously left me wanting more, more background, more information, more pages. And yet, this collection has won me over.

Congratulations to our judges for choosing this gem, and unwittingly, for making me read it twice.

Bronte Coates is reading Only Happiness Here by Gabrielle Carey

I read Elizabeth Von Arnim’s 1922 novel, The Enchanted April, a few years ago on a friend’s recommendation and thoroughly enjoyed this witty, charming and joyful read in which four dissimilar women rent a small medieval castle in the Mediterranean. When I heard about Gabrielle Carey’s book about Von Arnim, I was immediately interested. Rather than a straightforward biography, Only Happiness Here is Carey’s investigation into the author’s relationship with happiness – how she wrote so well about it in her novels, and how she emphasised it in her own turbulent life. Von Arnim is an incredibly fascinating subject and the conclusions Carey draws about her personal philosophy of happiness feel timely to us all this year.