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Victorians have spoken, and on Saturday Mrs. Terry Bracks announced the results of the voting for the 'all-time favourites' on the State Library's summer reading program, Reading Victoria.

In descending order from a list of 20 novels set in Victoria, readers placed  the following five:

Perlman, Elliot, Three Dollars

Birch, Tony, Shadow Boxing

Lindsay, Joan, Picnic at Hanging Rock

Johnston, George, My Brother Jack

Ham, Rosalie, The Dressmaker

Tony Birch, Rosalie Ham and Elliott Perlman were present to accept their awards, with publisher Lisa Berryman accepting the award for My Brother Jack. 

Reader recommendations for the reading list next summer include the work of Carole Wilkinson, Peter Mews, Raimond Gaita (nonfiction), Luke Davies, Tom Griffin, Peter Temple, Lily Brett, Gerald Murnane, Hal Porter, Dorothy Porter, Maureen McCarthy, Wendy James, Maurilia Meehan, Martin Boyd and Brian Castro. So it looks like this excellent interactive reading program will be with us for some time yet.

Lynne Hatwell of dovegreyreader goes from strength to strength - don't miss her interview here with Ralph McTell, talking about the inspiration he has drawn from the novels of John Steinbeck and the songs of Woody Guthrie.
Make me a bed right down on his floor, anytime. I am too late this year, but I've registered myself for the Port Fairy Folk Festival, where he is visiting as part of his last world tour later in March.

This blog, from the Kenyon Review, comes highly recommended by Kim of Reading Matters. From there, it's an easy jump to here -Armavirique is the blog of the New Criterion, I did but see it passing by, and managed to find my way back.  Not an easy task when the blogosphere continues to expand.

And wow - I rejigged my bookmarks in Firefox to include the Britblogs' excellent  headlines page, and look what I found on Peter Stothard's blog at the TLS - an early modern philosophy blog! just the thing to keep Alzheimer's at bay for a few more years, and it has a great moniker too.

The British Library's amazing London:A Life In Maps exhibition is also available in a Google Earth format. What a blast.

Found quite by chance on Technorati - TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home, a website and blog 'advocating well-stocked national digital libraries.' Tele-Read is coordinated by David Rothman of Virginia, Monica de Leon of Mexico and Vivek Bhagwatkar of India. Wow. There's one very good article here, admittedly eight years old, by a reference librarian from Tampa, John Iliff, on the implications for libraries of affordable e-books, prompting me to ask, are they simply a good idea that will never happen?

From the Patrick White Readers' Group comes notification that a conference will be held in conjunction with the Sydney Writers' Festival on the man with the beanie. "Patrick White Remembered" will be held on the weekend before the festival, 26-27 May 2006.

Finally, in speaking of those passed more recently, two lovely reminiscences of Elizabeth Jolley have been posted over at Sarsaparillla, by Meredith Jones and Kerryn Goldsworthy.

I'm a bit late to the table with this one, having been asked a couple of weeks ago to get something out - but the books I'm asking you to consider have been around for longer than that, so no great harm's been done, I hope.

Note ye all that voting for your favourite of 20 Victorian (that's set in the Garden State) novels on the State Library of Victoria's Summer Reading program is closing tomorrow.

There's a terrific website here complete with shortlist and blog, and I noted the 20 selected books displayed in tantalising poses at the State Library on Monday, both in the lobby and in the back corner of Mr.Tulk's cafe, enticingly close to a soft bench and a smart table - don't think those copies were for reading with the muffins, though. (Maybe next year??)

I do have a quibble with the list - I hope to see Brian Castro's The Garden Book on this next year, pleeaasse. And while we're at it, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, and Criena Rohan's Down By The Dockside.  Nothing wrong with a really BIG book set in Victoria, is there? Nothing wrong with that at all. Or a book set in country Victoria and beautiful downtown Preston, like Wendy James' Out Of The Silence, which won a Ned Kelly crime writers' award earlier this year.

But it's a lovely initiative,  and was well supported by The Age early in January with five good articles on selected books, complete with interviews with their authors. (Let's face it, it is going to be hard to interview some of my favourite authors of things set in Victoria. Deirdre Cash, who wrote as Criena Rohan, died of cancer in her late thirties, leaving behind two novels and a lost manuscript, and Martin Boyd is no longer with us either.)

The list is impressive, all the more so because there is room for expansion. Victoria's not exactly a huge place, it doesn't teem with writers like the ACT or Tasmania do - or perhaps it always has and always will. For this reminder alone, we should be grateful. And also for the fact that the program was sponsored by several publishers, and that the website has received sparse but useful feedback which should guarantee another fresh, similarly strong reading list next year.