Literary Melbourne

Melbourne's reputation as Australia's cultural hub, Sydney's quirky baby brother, precedes itself and so, really, I liked Melbourne before I even arrived. Of course the city boasts more than just galleries and graffiti, it's home to the Southern Hemisphere's largest open-air market, the Queen Victoria Markets and regularly hosts huge sporting events from the Australian Open to Formula 1 to the Ashes.

My first stop, though, was always going to be the Victoria State Library. Wow. What a beautiful building. "Not many books..." I heard my sister muttering, confused as she looked through my photos. Maybe not where I was taking the photos - I was pretty distracted by the huge octagonal atrium - but behind the walls there was plenty of reading material I can assure you, a reasonably strong collection...

It's understandable why the main hall would distract me, though. It is a five-storey, octagonal room, gleaming white with rows of old hardback books framing the balconies of each floor. Looking down you see gleaming wooden benches all splaying out from the centre in a star shape and, looking up, the sunshine brings light to this huge room through a vast glass dome. The ultimate geek session for me as I genuinely felt jealous of the students knuckling down, researching endless essays on subjects that will never help them in the 'real world' but are just so pretentiously, bullshittingly awesome to write.

Melbourne is definitely a book-loving city, with the library, yes, but also the Melbourne Writers Festival, which runs every August, and tons of independent book stores. I quite accidentally stumbled across the adorable City Basement Books on Flinders Street in Melbourne's CBD. I think it's probably impossible for me to just walk past a shop that smells of books. Even if there were no books in it. Luckily this secondhand book store, despite its recent battles with a burst pipe, had an impressive range of titles that would have felt quite at home on Charing Cross Road.

Most recently, it was perhaps The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas that really put Australia's most southern city on the literary map. There are of course numerous of writers, though, who have been writing about Melbourne. For starters, The Slap was Tsiolkas' sixth novel. Have a read of this article in the Sydney Morning Herald about a survey looking at books that locals feel best sum up Melbourne: Melbourne by the Book.