MEDIA DIET
By:
July 26, 2026
A weekly series exploring the media “input” of a group of people — HILOBROW’s friends and contributors — whose “output” we admire.
Vanessa has been a valued HILOBROW contributor since 2017. Her first post was on the topic of DARK MATTER. Her most recent contributions to this publication include: THE YOUNG ONES | WHAT HAVE I DONE TO DESERVE THIS? | IN SEARCH OF….
Sydney…
HILOBROW: What forms of media do you “take in” the most regularly/frequently, during a typical day or week?
VANESSA BERRY: The media that I enjoy the most is of the analogue kind, with an element of chance in finding or following it. The first thing I do in the morning is switch on the kitchen radio. This means flicking an actual switch on a portable radio/CD/cassette player, of the sort common about 25 years ago: bulbous, grey plastic, fly-eye speakers. I usually listen to a local Sydney community station, 2SER, which has niche music programs (garage punk, swing and jazz live recordings from the early 20th century, jangle pop). I never know exactly what I’ll hear when I switch it on, and love the thought of other people, in other kitchens elsewhere in the city, listening to the same broadcast.
My house is full of books and paper ephemera, and I am constantly on the lookout for more in secondhand bookstores, thrift stores, or street library boxes, hoping for something unexpected and interesting. My reading centers around memoir and autofiction, but I’m drawn to anything that has a strong voice and a touch of the unusual and I love to find an author who is new to me and has a substantial back catalogue. I’ve recently been reading my way through Barbara Comyns’ novels. I was turned onto them by my friend Anwen (who is also a brilliant writer, the author of No Document, published by Transit in 2022). We go for walks by the river and talk about what we’ve been reading. Lately, that has been Comyns’ concurrently bleak and perky novels. Her Our Spoons Came from Woolworths (1950), for example, begins, ‘I told Helen my story and she went home and cried’.
HILOBROW: What are your reading habits?
VANESSA BERRY: Usually I spend my nights reading books, as that’s when I have time to, but I’d read all day long if I could. Reading is my lifelong love, and I’ve always chosen books over any other media (although music, at times, has been a close second).
Beside the bed and the couch, my usual reading locations, are multiple stacks of my active books: just finished, currently reading, to be read. I’ll be reading one book solidly at any one time but also dip into others in the pile, which can be of the literary kind (Janet Frame’s The Pocket Mirror, or On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle, or Litany for the Long Moment by Mary Kim Arnold, to select a few from my current bedside pile), or maybe a cat memoir (May Sarton’s The Fur Person) or something miscellaneous.
In our small house my partner and I have maximized our bookshelf space to accommodate a prodigious and varied book collection: The Romance of the Fungus World, The Torquemada Puzzle Book, Stereoscopic Adventures in Hell, Rustic Adornments for Homes of Taste… The theme to our collection, if I had to come up with one, is ‘niche interests’.
HILOBROW: Do you subscribe to any magazines or newsletters that you’d strongly recommend?
VANESSA BERRY: Mostly my reading of this more ephemeral kind is zines, which have been a constant in my life since the 1990s. Most of all, I love a long-running personal zine series, such as You Can’t Get There From Here by Carrie McNinch, or the weekly letter zine YOU (every week since November 2001!), or Rut zine by Bianca Martin, or Bridges zine by Emma D. But specific zines can be hard to track down, which is all a part of what makes them the defiantly underground media that they are. I recommend any zine in which someone writes about their life in the open, connective, idiosyncratic way that is unique to this format.
HILOBROW: What work of literature (old or new) would you recommend to someone trying to make sense of today’s world?
VANESSA BERRY: The best recommendation I have is the delirious immediacy of Clarice’s Lispector’s Agua Viva, a novel in the form of an incessant litany of instants. About the impossibility of ever capturing the present, it has the same feeling of the constantly escaping moment that is very much that of the present-day world as I experience it. ‘Is it a lot of work to look after the world?’ Lispector asks. It is, yes, but it is the work that we must do.
MEDIA DIET series: MATTHEW BATTLES | ADRIENNE CREW | HOLLY INTERLANDI | CAROLYN KELLOGG | MARK KINGWELL | FLOURISH KLINK | ADAM McGOVERN | CHARLIE MITCHELL | TOM NEALON | ANNIE NOCENTI | GARY PANTER | LYNN PERIL | JONATHAN PINCHERA | NICHOLAS ROMBES | CARLO ROTELLA | LUCY SANTE | SETH | MIKE WATT | JUDITH ZISSMAN | & more to come! Visit the SERIES INDEX.