Tue22Sep
Start where Bradbury starts: one small act of looking, then a story about a girl who sees too much at once.
22 September – 31 December 2026
A hundred and one nights, running to the end of the year. Every night a poem, then a short story or an essay, turn and turn about. Fifteen weeks, each built around one idea, so the two pieces on any given night talk to each other.
162 of the 202 pieces open straight onto the full text, on a link that has been checked. The rest are marked find a copy. Roughly a quarter of the programme is Australian, marked with an AU flag.
One poem a night, one short story a night, one essay a night, for the next 1,000 nights. At the end of a thousand nights, Jesus God, you'll be full of stuff, won't you?Ray Bradbury
Bradbury's whole point: the program is an attention exercise before it is a reading list.
Start where Bradbury starts: one small act of looking, then a story about a girl who sees too much at once.
A man weeping in Martin Place, and a moth dying on a windowsill. Both about public grief and private attention.
Hopkins on dappled things; Chekhov on a wager about capital punishment. You will have views on the second.
Sixteen words, then the best essay written about seeing something you cannot describe.
The two poles of early Australian writing on one night: Neilson's shimmer, Lawson's flat hard light.
Bishop looks until the rainbow arrives. Orwell explains the four motives, including the ugly ones.
Landscape, and the particular difficulty of writing about this one.
Wright on the ceremony that is gone; Baynton on the bush with none of Lawson's mateship left in it.
The poem every Australian half-knows, then Clarke's 1876 'weird melancholy' essay that invented how we describe this continent.
Tableland country and a Nebraska farm. Both about land as accumulated human time.
Short night. Read the Statement properly rather than from memory, and notice how much of it is a legal document.
Heaney's spade and pen; Lawrence's mining village. The best thing he wrote before the novels got in the way.
Frost sends you back to a vanished farm; Leopold watches a green fire die in a wolf's eyes. Three pages that founded an ethic.
Murray's definition of a national virtue, and Lawson's funeral where nobody can remember the dead man's name.
Craft, drudgery, vocation, and the people who refuse to do any of it.
Piercy wants to pull like an ox; Morris distinguishes work worth doing from work that merely exhausts.
The long one this week, and unavoidable for a lawyer. A chambers, a copyist, and a refusal that has no legal remedy.
Larkin on why he cannot shout 'stuff your pension'. Graham on why your calendar is eating the work. Short, useful night.
'They have eaten me alive.' Then the greatest story ever written about a civil servant and a piece of clothing.
Szymborska audits humanity by percentage; Gawande shows how a nine-item list beat a generation of expertise.
Suffering happening while someone else is eating. Baynton's version is set on a train to a station job.
Lawson at twenty-one, counting the unemployed past his window in Sydney. Then Menzies' 1942 radio talk building a political class out of the middle. Read them against each other.
Your own field, seen from outside it. The week to read slowly.
Two pages total. The parable from The Trial is the shortest complete statement of procedural despair ever written.
'And art made tongue-tied by authority.' Then Hayne in 2006 on Dixon's strict legalism, half a century on. Dixon's own 1955 address sits behind a publisher; this quotes it properly and argues with it.
Wright on inherited guilt she cannot put down; Bierce on a summary execution and the mind's last three seconds.
Two attempts at the same move: naming a country's failure as a way of claiming it. Keating's is 1,100 words.
Wilde from inside the prison he was sent to. Glaspell on two women assembling a murder case the investigating men cannot see.
Yeats on a terrible beauty. Orwell on the prose that hides what it is doing. Your team should probably read the second one.
Slessor's elegy for a drowned friend is the best Australian poem of the century. Baynton's story is the bleakest. Heavy Sunday.
The oldest subject in poetry and the one that most resists sentiment.
Blake's question, then Berger's answer: we put them in zoos at exactly the moment they stopped looking back.
A kestrel holding in the wind, then a man and a dog at seventy-five below. The dog is the one with judgment.
Wallace was sent to cover a food festival and filed a moral philosophy paper. The footnotes are the essay.
Brolgas dancing, and the just-so story about the one animal that never signed the contract.
Blake's four-line shrug about mortality; Muir following a small bird that walks underwater, in prose that never stops enjoying itself.
A hawk with no arguments, and a bereaved man drowning an insect in ink. Six pages that will stay with you.
Murray writes the whole poem in the first person plural of a herd. Then Thoreau on sauntering, which is longer than you expect.
Halloween week. Ghosts, dread, and what the living owe the dead.
The carriage ride, then the house that comes down. Poe at full pressure.
Brennan's homeless voice on the roads at night, the strangest thing in early Australian verse. Montaigne rehearses for the end.
Thomas raging at his father's death; Dickens writing the best ghost story in English in about twenty pages.
Donne argues death out of existence. De Quincey explains, in six pages, why a knock at a door is the most frightening sound in Shakespeare.
Halloween eve. Both are about wanting the dead back and being answered.
Halloween. De la Mare's empty house, then Lovecraft's opening claim that fear of the unknown is the oldest emotion.
All Saints' Day. Stevenson's epitaph, then Lawson's shepherd burying a mate while talking to a corpse and a dog.
Science and scale: the view from very far away and very long ago.
Whitman walks out of the lecture; Feynman's 1974 Caltech address on the kind of integrity that means not fooling yourself.
Four in the morning, and the end of the world observed from Mars with professional detachment.
Plants older than the continent, then Wigner's genuinely unsettling 1960 question about why the numbers work at all.
The long night this week. Forster predicted the whole thing in 1909, including the video calls and the disdain for direct experience.
'It is like what we imagine knowledge to be.' Eiseley floats down the Platte and thinks about water and time.
Keats wants out of the body. Wells builds the sighted man a valley where his advantage is a disease.
Hope's migrating bird losing the magnetic thread. Joy's 2000 Wired essay, which has aged into something you should probably have read by now.
What gets handed down, wanted or not.
'What did I know, what did I know.' Then Joyce's boy at the closing bazaar. Both about love recognised too late.
Larkin's eight lines, then Baldwin burying his father on the day of the Harlem riot. The longest read this week and the best.
A poem people still argue about, and Cather's boy who cannot live inside his father's street.
Harwood's child shoots an owl and learns something permanent. White takes his son to the lake and feels the chill of his own mortality.
Short night. Wilbur listening at his daughter's door; Chopin's widow, free for about an hour.
Wright on conception; Pearson's 2014 eulogy, which is the finest piece of Australian public speech this century.
Heaney's last line is the whole poem. Rudd's Dad and Dave, before the caricature set in, clearing scrub with nothing.
Remembrance Day week. The literature of aftermath rather than battle.
Remembrance week opens with the two most-taught pieces in the canon. Read them again anyway; they are taught for a reason.
'Someone, it seems, has time for this' is the coldest line in Australian poetry. O'Flaherty's story is four pages and lands like a hammer.
Manifold's elegy for a Queenslander killed on Crete. Hersey's 'A Noiseless Flash' follows six people through one morning.
Larkin on the queues in 1914, 'never such innocence again'. Pirandello's carriage full of parents, five pages, devastating.
Owen's sonnet, then James in 1910 asking what could possibly replace war's hold on people. Still unanswered.
Reed's rifle drill against the garden. O'Connor's captors and hostages who have become friendly, and then orders arrive.
Dawe's Vietnam poem, all participles and body bags. Grant's 2015 debate speech, delivered in under nine minutes.
Mostly the failures. The good ones are rarely the interesting ones.
The definition of constancy, then Chekhov's adulterers discovering, to their horror, that it is real.
Cummings at his least mannered. Woolf being turned off the grass at Oxbridge, which is where the argument starts.
The villanelle that pretends to be fine, and the conversation at the station where nobody says the word.
Harwood's pianist with a dead mouse and a burnt pot. Stevenson at twenty-six, insufferably happy, and right.
Short night. Walcott on greeting yourself; Chopin on a woman who calculates and very nearly gets away with it.
'Time was away and somewhere else.' Then Didion on being twenty-eight in New York and knowing it is over.
McAuley on parents who never said anything: 'they never quarrelled in the English style'. One of the saddest Australian poems. Mansfield finishes the week off.
Satire, protest and the long argument about who gets what.
Auden's bureaucratic eulogy, then the most sustained piece of deadpan in English. Notice how long Swift holds the register.
Robinson's sixteen lines about a man everybody envied. Maupassant's ten pages about a woman who borrows one thing.
Mind-forged manacles, then Wilde's argument that the point of abolishing poverty is to make individualism possible. Longer than you think.
'We'll all be rooned.' Then Tolstoy's peasant running a circuit for as much land as he can walk in a day.
Clough rewrites the commandments for a commercial age: 'thou shalt not covet, but tradition approves all forms of competition'. Keynes in 1930 predicting we would all work fifteen hours a week by now.
The long one. Fitzgerald's chateau on a mountain of diamond, and what the owner is willing to do to keep it quiet.
Hope's 'second-hand Europeans' pullulating on alien shores, then the speech that ended twenty-three years of government. Read them as a pair.
Obsession, self-deception, and narrators you cannot trust.
Two men explaining themselves at length. Neither should be believed.
Twelve lines, then Hazlitt's essay that starts with a spider and ends somewhere genuinely alarming about human nature.
The lake, the terrible fish, and then the most claustrophobic short story in the language.
The dramatic monologue that taught everyone how to do it. Then Fitzgerald in Esquire, 1936, dismantling himself in public.
Frost walking past the watchman. Gogol's civil servant whose nose is outranking him around St Petersburg.
The retreating sea of faith, then Burton's preface to The Anatomy of Melancholy: 1621, and still the funniest book about depression.
'You find it ugly, I find it lovely.' Then Mrs Spicer, and the phrase 'past carin''. Lawson's hardest story.
Writers on writing, and the strange business of making things up.
'A poem should not mean but be.' Le Guin argues the first tool was a bag, not a spear, and that this changes what stories are for.
A jar reorganises Tennessee. A library contains every possible book and is therefore useless. Short, dense night.
'Poetry makes nothing happen.' Then Eliot's 1919 essay that rearranged the whole idea of where a writer stands.
Stevens' singer making the sea. James on why the genuine aristocrats are useless as models and the cockney girl is perfect.
'I, too, dislike it.' Didion on why she writes things down, and how little it has to do with accuracy.
Dawe on Victorian babies wrapped in club colours, a genuinely funny poem. Thurber's four pages of daydream. Light night before Christmas week.
Murray on the Gladesville Bridge as architecture and myth. Malouf on how a consciousness gets made in a place. Both are about inventing a country.
Christmas week, kept deliberately warmer.
Cavafy on the journey being the point. O. Henry's combs and watch chain, which survives being famous.
Hardy half-believing the oxen kneel at midnight. Stevenson on being decent without being pleased with yourself about it.
The long night of the whole program, and worth clearing the evening for. 'Snow was general all over Ireland.'
Christmas Eve. Kavanagh's father playing the melodeon, Thomas's useful and useless presents. Read the Thomas aloud if anyone will let you.
Christmas Day, kept easy. Paterson's clerk in his dingy little office, and Howells' cautionary tale about getting exactly what you asked for.
Boxing Day. Larkin on a house left as it was, Hazlitt on the pleasure of travelling alone. A quiet, slightly selfish pair.
Kendall's water and bellbirds, then the Lawson story where somebody actually gets the thing they wanted. Rare, and earned.
Four nights on time running out, finishing on New Year's Eve.
Hardy wrote this at the close of the nineteenth century, on the last day of it. Seneca: it is not that we have little time, but that we waste much.
Tennyson's New Year section from In Memoriam, and O. Henry's painted leaf on the wall.
'I am not done with my changes.' Emerson is long and worth it on the second-last night.
New Year's Eve. 'To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.' Then Asimov on entropy, seven scenes, and the only possible last line. Bradbury would approve.