The books I love... Germaine Greer

Legendary feminist and author Germaine Greer, whose latest book is White Beech: The Rainforest Years, shares her favourite reads. 

The Getting Of Wisdom by Australian author Henry Handel Richardson, published in 1910, is the story of how a passionate 12-year-old girl grew into a calculating young woman as a result of her experiences at a second-rate girls' school. Henry Handel was actually Ethel Richardson and she attended the school in which she sets the story.

What's remarkable about Such Is Life by Joseph Furphy is that the book’s narrator never quite understands what's going on. The reader soon begins to doubt him and begins to guess the real truth behind the events he consistently misinterprets. 

I could pick anything by Charles Dickens but will say Dombey And Son. I can never read how little Florence Dombey sat on the stairs in the dark outside her father's counting-room waiting and hoping for him to notice her (in vain) without feeling my eyes prickle. Not many authors have dared to deal with the love of daughters for their fathers; Dickens could handle anything.

Benang: From The Heart by Kim Scott is not an easy read, but it is awesome. Like the author, the narrator is a descendant of both white and black in Western Australia. His art – he is a singer – is like Aboriginal art, managed and packaged by whites, and even he doesn't know which bits of it (and him) are black and which aren't.