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Good Reading Podcast

Good Reading Podcast

Good Reading Magazine

Book talk and author interviews aimed at helping you discover your next favourite read, presented by Good Reading Magazine.
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Top 10 Good Reading Podcast Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Good Reading Podcast episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Good Reading Podcast for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Good Reading Podcast episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

During the Second Sudanese Civil War, thousands of South Sudanese boys were displaced from their villages or orphaned in attacks from northern government troops. Many became refugees in Ethiopia. There, in 1989, teacher and community leader Mecak Ajang Alaak assumed care of the Lost Boys in a bid to protect them from becoming child soldiers. So began a four-year journey from Ethiopia to Sudan and on to the safety of a Kenyan refugee camp. Together they endured starvation, animal attacks and the horrors of landmines and aerial bombardment. This eyewitness account by Mecak Ajang Alaak’s son, Yuot, is the extraordinary true story of a man who never ceased to believe that the pen is mightier than the gun. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Yuot Alaak about life for the Dinka people of South Sudan before the civil wars, the terrible life for a child soldier, and the wonders of arriving in the city of Adelaide as a Sudanese refugee.
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When nineteen-year-old farm girl Adelaide Hoffman applies for a cadetship at the Gunnawah Gazette, she sees it as her ticket out of a life too small for her. The paper's owner, Valdene Bullark, seeing something of the girl she once was in young Adelaide, puts her straight to work. What starts as a routine assignment covering an irrigation project soon puts Adelaide on the trail of a much bigger story. Water is money in farming communities, and when Adelaide starts asking questions, it's like she's poked a bull ant's nest. Someone will do whatever it takes to stop Adelaide and Val finding out how far the river of corruption and crime runs. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Ronni Salt about her mysterious life on X, the people, the places and exploring beneath the surface of small town life in the Riverina, and why why water and corruption go hand-in-hand.
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Acclaimed wildlife scientist Vanessa Pirotta has been mugged by whales, touched by a baby whale and covered in whale snot. In Humpback Highway, Pirotta dives beneath the surface to reveal the mysterious world of humpback whales — from their life cycle and the challenges humans present, to why whale snot and poo are important for us and the ocean. Plus the cutting-edge new technologies that allow us to see where they swim, listen to them talk and spy on them underwater. Whether you’re a whale lover or you’re simply curious about the underwater world, 'Humpback Highway' will inspire and give you a new respect for these majestic, marine giants. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Vanessa Pirotta about how she became a whale scientist, why Australia's 'humpback highway' is key to understanding whale behaviour, and Vanessa also tells us what kind of parents whales make, and what the future holds for this incredible species.
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'36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem', is a book-length poem that is an urgent, unsettling reckoning with identity and the violence of identity, embedded with racism, oppression and historical trauma. But it also addresses the violence in those assumptions – of being always assumed to be outside one’s home, country, culture or language. And the complex violence, for the diasporic writer who wants to address any of this, of language itself. Making use of multiple tones, moods, masks and camouflages, Le’s poetic debut moves with unpredictable and destabilising energy between the personal and political, honouring every convention of diasporic literature – in a virtuosic array of forms and registers – before shattering the form itself. Like his award-winning book, 'The Boat', '36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem' conjures its own terms of engagement, escapes our traps, slips our certainties. As self-indicting as it is scathing, hilarious as it is desperately moving, this is a singular, breakthrough book. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Nam Le about how his first love has always been poetry rather than the prose of his first book, 'The Boat', how the double-bind of the experience of living in Australia as a man with Vietnamese heritage and how it is reflected in his poetry, how language can be imperialist, even destructive yet continues to shape us as a society and as humans.
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Named after a famous fictional character, librarian Bridget Jones was raised on a remote cattle station, with only her mother’s romance novels for company. Now living alone in Fremantle, Bridget is a hopeless romantic. She also believes that anyone who doesn’t like reading just hasn’t met the right book yet, and that connecting books to their readers is her superpower. If only her love life was that easy. When handsome Italian barista Fabio progresses from flirting with love hearts on her coffee foam to joining the book club she runs at her library, Bridget prays her romance ‘curse’ won’t ruin things. But it’s the attention of her cranky neighbour Sully that seems to be the major obstacle in her life. Why is he going to so much effort to get under her skin? She soon discovers that not all romances start with a meet-cute, but they might just end in happily ever after... In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Rachael Johns about how our idea of libraries as dull places is now a thing of the past, how exploring relationships and friendships are at the heart of what she writes, and why romance fiction endures by changing with the times.
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Compassion continues Julie Janson’s emotional and intense literary exploration of the complex and dangerous lives of Aboriginal women during the 1800s in colonial New South Wales, which she began in Benevolence as a counter narrative to colonial history in Australian literature. Compassion is the dramatised life story of one of Julie Janson’s ancestors who went on trial for stealing livestock in New South Wales, and it is an exciting and violent story of anti-colonial revenge and roaming adventure. A gripping fictive account of Aboriginal life in the 1800s, Compassion follows the life of Duringah, AKA Nell James, the outlaw daughter of the Darug hero of Benevolence, Muraging. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Julie Janson about shaping the character of her ancestor Duringah, and charting her exploits as “the wild native thief”, and how juxtaposing the natural and spiritual worlds of the Darug nation with the terrible reality of life during colonial times illuminates the rich shared history of New South Wales.
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Meg’s life is woven into the fabric of St. Stephens. It’s a tapestry made of two precious children, a hidden truth, and a husband whose ideas of a perfect wife do not match her own. When Meg puts her foot down on a third kid, gets a job, and is empowered by the same book group that was meant to keep her in her place, her marriage begins to disintegrate. Set in a tiny Mormon community, this is a novel about resilience and courage – the fierceness of mother-love and the power that comes with never forgetting who you really are. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Katherine Allum about the desert of the American Southwest as the perfect setting for a novel brimming with tension, what it is feel out-of-place in a mormon community, and the power of mother love in rediscovering one's true identity.
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Matilda, Jo, Penny and Cressy are all women at the top of their game; so imagine their surprise when they start to be personally overlooked and professionally pushed aside by less-qualified men. Only they're not going down without a fight. Society might think the women have passed their amuse-by dates but the Revenge Club have other plans. After all, why go to bed angry when you could stay up and plot diabolical retribution? Let the games begin... In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Kathy Lette about why women are so drawn to revenge, why Australian women make the best heroines and embracing the journey through menopause and discovering the paradise beyond.
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'Refugia' is an unparalleled work of vision and political fury from Noongar and Yawuru poet and scholar Elfie Shiosaki. Inspired by the beeliar (Swan River) and the NASA James Webb Space Telescope’s first year of science, this collection draws on colonial archives to contest the occupation of Noongar Country. As the bicentennial year of the colony of Western Australia approaches, Shiosaki looks to the stars and back to the earth to make sense of memory and the afterlife of imperial violence. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Elfie Shiosaki about her ever-expanding galaxy of stories around the Swan River colony, exploring the history and resilience of Noongar people through her work, and how her research has revealed a new vision for understanding the past and possibilities for the future.
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From balancing on a wingtip to circling with eagles, Take Flight tells the stories of Australian women who have leapt, tumbled and dived, and reached for the stars. Helicopter pilot Alida Soemawinata ascends over Kata Tjuṯa. Paramotor pilot Sacha Dench follows migrating swans from the Arctic tundra to the English countryside. Birdwoman Stef Walter wing walks. Hot air balloonist Donna Tasker glides over Bristol, Myanmar and much of Australia. Gomeroi astrophysicist Krystal De Napoli studies the Seven Sisters in the dark night sky. Aerobatic pilot Emma McDonald debuts her solo routine at an airshow high above the glittering Gold Coast. In Take Flight, author and pilot Kathy Mexted celebrates the determination, skill and expertise of ten women who have beaten the odds to find success and joy in our skies. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Kathy Mexted about how to build a flying family, the passion and inspiration that has driven Australian women to take to the sky, and what it takes to address the risks and overcome the fear of flying in all its manifestations.
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FAQ

How many episodes does Good Reading Podcast have?

Good Reading Podcast currently has 352 episodes available.

What topics does Good Reading Podcast cover?

The podcast is about Podcasts and Arts.

What is the most popular episode on Good Reading Podcast?

The episode title 'Mariah Sweetman on the thrilling story of her great-great grandfather in 'Robert Runs'' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on Good Reading Podcast?

The average episode length on Good Reading Podcast is 23 minutes.

How often are episodes of Good Reading Podcast released?

Episodes of Good Reading Podcast are typically released every 4 days, 1 hour.

When was the first episode of Good Reading Podcast?

The first episode of Good Reading Podcast was released on Jun 22, 2018.

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