20 Glittery Books for your Holiday Reading

Let me help you narrow down your reading this festive season while exposing you to some dazzling works of literature that will keep your mind sharp and your heart pounding. No Colleen Hoover, btw.

And that’s right – no mention of Colleen Hoover – why, you ask? Because there is so much more great writing out there than one TikTok sensation, and it’s my job to show you the surprising literary gems you may have missed. The first ten choices are the whimsical party mix. The final ten books, released tomorrow, will keep your thinking cap pulled tight over your expanded mind. Enjoy.

Part One: Cocktails on the Beach Edit

1. Sex & Rage by Eve Babitz

Not the most perfect prose I’ve ever read, but what this book has going for it is its unapologetic, crass honesty about life in 1970s Los Angeles. Fun, dreamy and intoxicating, Babitz’s Sex & Rage is a love letter to youth and reinvention. Jacaranda, child of sun and surf, moves to LA and finds herself somehow wedged within the celebrity in crowd. A shocking story rife with men, distractions and narcotics, Babitz blends languid West Coast vibes with the sharp intensity of New York. While I felt the book needed much more refining, its rawness is also its charm – and the novel cements Babitz’s name as a sharp chronicler of 70s culture. You might be surprised to discover she was a rival-slash-friend of Joan Didion, but she’s not the same writer at all. Babitz might not be as prosaic and perfect as Didion, but she’s definitely more entertaining. You can read more about their uneasy friendship, and the resulting biography of the two writers, here.

2. Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

How can you not love anything penned by Murakami? I picked up a dog-eared copy of Norwegian Wood in a secondhand bookshop while travelling, and I’ve never forgotten the impact it made on me from the first page. Easy to read yet deep and layered, this is a melody of memory, grief, and the tender ache of first love. Plot summary: When Toru Watanabe hears a Beatles' song, he’s thrust back into his youth – a time of uneasy friendships, fractured hearts, and the magnetic pull of two women: fragile Naoko and fiery Midori. Through Tokyo’s misty streets and dorm rooms, Toru navigates passion and loss, reflecting on love’s impermanence. With Murakami’s hallmark dreamlike prose, this novel evokes the bittersweet beauty of growing up – and the haunting echoes of what could have been. I left my finished copy behind in India as the ultimate pass-it-forward for the next lucky person.

3. Song of the Crocodile by Nardi Simpson

A favourite of the year for me, Song of the Crocodile is a poetic symphony of land, language, and legacy, set in the fictional town of Darnmoor – a place of beauty and deep scars. As the town grapples with rapid social and environmental upheaval, buried secrets resurface, resulting in a violent act that shatters decades of silence. Simpson masterfully weaves Yuwaalaraay language and music into a story that mourns the intergenerational wounds of colonisation and racism while celebrating First Nations resilience. With exquisite descriptions of the plains – above, on, and below – this eco-fiction novel is a lament and a call to listen to the land that sustains us all.

And just for your information, eco-fiction, also known as climate fiction or cli-fi, is a genre that tackles the many environmental challenges we are now facing by blending imagination with pressing real-world issues, raising awareness while inspiring us to strive for a greener tomorrow.

4. A Language of Limbs by Dylin Hardcastle

Hardcastle’s A Language of Limbs is a lyrical, aching celebration of queer love and identity. Set against the backdrop of 1970s Australia through the AIDS crisis, it chronicles two women – one openly queer, the other closeted – whose lives nearly collide over decades. I can’t quite explain how powerful and beautiful this novel is. Hardcastle’s sentences ripple with playful elegance, blending prose and poetry while evoking longing and loss in equal measure. With its sliding-doors narrative and richly imagined characters, this is both a tribute to queer history and a testament to the transformative power of love and authenticity. Unforgettable.

‘I remember how I felt the first time I sat with her by the still water of the creek, how everything became rippled and saline. How she had laughed at my nervousness. How I’d laughed at hers. How we witnessed each other. Suddenly, the kookaburra begins to laugh. The sound, fresh feathered and glistening, reverberates out through the park, into this new day. It feels cruel and absurd and beautiful.’

5. Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors

OK, full disclosure: I just wasn’t that into Coco Mellors’ second novel, Blue Sisters, which received so much glory and buzz this year. I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I didn’t hate it as such, it’s just that it lacked the raw charisma and energy of her debut novel, Cleopatra and Frankenstein, which is the winner for me: a shimmering and shocking exploration of love’s messy, electrifying edges, with a style and drive that had me gasping for breath. Yes, there are some painful cliches along the ride, but Cleopatra and Frankenstein redeems itself with a glittery backdrop of New York’s intoxicating chaos, while examining the impulsive decisions that can ruin lives. Mellors’ characters are deeply flawed yet achingly real, navigating addiction, infidelity, and the search for identity. A great ‘lose yourself on the beach’ read.

6. Joan Didion: The Essential Trio

Joan Didion’s works are a masterclass in precise, powerful writing. If you’re not reading Joan Didion yet, get on it and discover what you can learn from her. The following three books I consider to be Joan Didion’s quintessential texts, listed in the order I would read them in if I had my time over again (even though I actually read them in the reverse order!)

1) Play It As It Lays – a novella

2) Slouching Towards Bethlehem – collection of essays

3) The Year of Magical Thinking – the memoir

Definitely begin with Play It as It Lays. Somewhere out of Hollywood, Maria Wyeth drifts along the freeway in perpetual motion, anaesthetised to pain and pleasure. Maria Wyeth’s meanderings mirror an existential drift in a barren Los Angeles on the cusp of the 70s: a time and a place where too much freedom made a lot of people ill.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a collection of essays chronicling the counterculture of 1960s San Francisco with sharp wit and a journalist’s eye. She slips herself into the Summer of Love and the heart of the revolution, only to slip out again with this masterpiece. My favourite work of hers to date.

Finally, The Year of Magical Thinking is a searing memoir of loss, marriage, and memory, as Didion grapples with her own grief. This is the book that put Didion on the map (and the curriculum of all creative non-fiction classes) due to her mind-boggling tale of profound misfortune and loss in just one year. Everyone starts Didion with this one, but trust me – read the others first and you’ll have a better understanding of where this memoir fits in her life.

7. Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton

For anyone who needs a hilarious beach read, Dolly Alderton’s most-loved book to date – her ‘love’ memoir – sparkles with wit and raw honesty, recounting the highs and lows of coming of age. From disastrous house parties to heartbreaks, bad dates to enduring friendships, Alderton captures the chaos of early adulthood in all its messy glory. Through her sharp observations and humour, she paints a portrait of love in its many forms – romantic, platonic, and self-acceptance. Hilarious and deeply relatable, Everything I Know About Love is both a nostalgic ode to reckless youth and a warm reminder that through every misstep, our friends are there to carry us home.

8. The Season by Helen Garner

Helen Garner simply can do no wrong when it comes to words. In her most recent book, The Season, Helen Garner trades literary gravitas for the warmth of a grandmother on the sidelines of her grandson’s under-16s football games. This tender chronicle of Melbourne’s footy season is a celebration of team spirit, masculinity’s fragility, and the bittersweet beauty of fleeting moments. Garner’s sharp eye and humour elevate these ordinary afternoons into reflections on family and connection. Shivering under the dusky sky, she captures the delicate dance between boyhood and manhood, weaving a tale as graceful and gritty as the game itself.

‘All my life I’ve fought men, lived under their regimes, been limited and frustrated by their power; but in the first decade of the century I became a grandmother to a girl and two boys, a hands-on nanna who by some unimaginable miracle was invited to buy the house next door, knock down the fence, and become part of family life… I now began to learn about boys and men from a fresh angle, to see their delicacy, their fragility, what they’re obliged to do to themselves in order to live in this world, the codes of behaviour they’ve had to develop in order to discipline and sublimate their drive to violence.’

9. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

Penned by a 16-year-old girl in the 60s, this story never gets old – and to this day I still get random messages from my former students who long to share memories of this book and their deep connection to the protagonist, Ponyboy. In truth, I taught this book to Year 9 classes for over ten years, so that’s a lot of students who unanimously loved this beat tale. Who doesn’t love an east-side vs west-side story? Tinged with young love and a few gnarly fights, the core messages of friendship, family, acceptance, love and hope remain the same no matter how much time passes.

S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders remains a timeless anthem of youth and rebellion. Set in the gritty streets of Tulsa, it follows Ponyboy Curtis and the Greasers as they navigate love, loyalty, and class conflict. With unforgettable characters, from sensitive Ponyboy to fierce Dallas, it’s a poignant exploration of belonging and identity. Fifty years on, this tale of friendship, tragedy, and resilience still speaks to the dreamers, the fighters, and anyone who’s ever felt on the outside looking in.

10. Two Australian Short Story Anthologies:

1. New Australian Fiction 2024, A collection by Kill Your Darlings Magazine

2. Anthologia! A collection by The Kind Press

OK, OK. A little self-gratuitous as I am published in one of these anthologies. However, each story printed in these annual literary collections showcases a fresh voice pushing literary boundaries. With each story, a new layer of Australia emerges – its humour, heartbreak, and beauty refracted through inventive forms, styles and perspectives. These writers are not only supremely gifted with the written word, but they provide inspirational reads for anyone wondering what they could achieve out of the HeartWriting course, and a testament to the power of the short story to capture people, worlds and ideas just as powerfully as the novel.

‘B’s best scar was the white line across the width of her abdomen. The caesarean. Puckered pink edges. She wouldn’t touch it. So I kissed it, put my lips on it. She sighed loudly when I did that.’ – Lucy Nelson, ‘You Think I Can’t Do Hard Things’

What a list!

Hopefully you now have some fantastic ideas for the festive season. If you’re keen to go deeper into the creative act of reading and writing, join my signature writing course which acts as a bit of a bookclub – while teaching you everything you need to know about writing your very own masterpieces! Check out the signature HeartWriting course here.

Coming Up In Next Post: Part Two The Intellectual Edit