Reading Inspiration
Are you looking for what is currently popular? Are you looking for new books in your favourite genre, or for a new author you may like? Whatever reading inspiration you need, this page will be able to direct you to the resources you need.
Better Reading
Better Reading is an Australian community focused on helping readers of all ages find the best books to read. The main way Better Reading suggests books is through their books lists. Through these, you can find recommended reading on specific themes. They also have weekly bestseller lists, for different demographics.
Goodreads
Goodreads is a popular website for readers and recommendations. Here you can track and review the books you read. They have thousands of lists of book recommendations on a wide variety of topics. They also host the annual Goodreads Choice Awards, where the winners are determined by readers.
Difficult Topics
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Looking at the mechanics of addition, this book covers all forms it can take and suggests that self-understanding is the first step to breaking free.
Revover!: This book ignores the ‘addiction as a disease’ view and takes a holistic approach to understanding and beating addictions.
Alzheimer’s Disease: This book looks at the latest research on prevention strategies, and ways to stop the progress of Alzheimer’s. It provides plans, advice, and case studies.
Before Dementia: Through 20 questions, this book explores what dementia is, how to prevent it, and how to manage if you have a
diagnosis.
Connecting in the Land of Dementia: This book provides practical ideas for activities that caregivers can use to engage with those who have dementia.
Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s: This book explores the stages and symptoms, what to expect, what services are available, and what treatments are available.
The First Survivors of Alzheimer’s: This book provides first-person accounts from people who recovered from Alzheimer’s, and how they did it.
Not Right in the Head: This autobiography explores how humour helped a person deal with their parent’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis and subsequent decline.
Save Your Brain: This book presents the strategies one can employ to prevent dementia and cognitive decline.
The XX Brain: This book looks at how women’s brains are more susceptible to cognitive decline, and provides advice on how to prevent these issues.
Anger Management for Everyone: This book looks at what can make us more likely to be angry and provides skills to help manage your anger when it arises.
I Hate Everything!: This book for young children provides a fictional story of an angry person but provides activities and ideas on how things could be different.
A Volcano in My Tummy: This children’s book provides exercises to help them constructively deal with their anger.
When Anxiety Makes You Angry: Aimed at teenage readers, this book explores how anxiety can make anger worse, and provides healthy coping strategies.
Avoiding Anxiety in Autistic Adults: This book provides advice to autistic adults on how to minimise the anxiety in their lives.
Beating Stress and Anxiety: This book will help tweens identify the signs of stress and anxiety and provides advice on what to do.
Little Meerkat’s Big Panic: This children’s book shows how to calm down again when they are anxious.
Love in, Love Out: This book shows parents how to identify anxiety in children, and how to help them to manage it.
The Mind Strength Method: Supported by case studies, this book provides a practical toolkit for moving beyond anxiety.
Overcoming Social Anxiety and Shyness: This book examines how crippling social anxiety and shyness can be, while providing advice on how to overcome it.
The Parent’s Guide to Managing Anxiety in Children with Autism: This book explains why children with autism experience anxiety and looks at how parents can best support them.
Rewire Your Anxious Brain for Teens: This book explains anxiety to teenagers and provides them with the tools they need to manage it.
Body Image
Bodies are Cool: This children’s book is all about embracing body positivity, no matter how you look.
Eating Disorders
A Short Introduction to Understanding and Supporting Children with Eating Disorders: This book explains the different eating disorders, while providing advice on how to recognise the symptoms and support young people through them.
Self Esteem
Being You is Enough: This children’s book emphasises self-acceptance and positive thinking.
How to Deal with Low Self-Esteem: This book provides practical advice to overcoming low self-esteem.
Kid Confidence: This book provides strategies for parents to help their children make connections and improve their self-esteem.
Smile: This graphic novel tells a story about how a girl’s dental problems impact on her appearance and how she feels about herself.
12 Hacks to Beat Bullying: This book provides simple steps for children to deal with bullies and peer pressure.
Bully Poof Kids: This books provides parents with strategies to raise children who can deal with bullies, and what they can do if their child is being bullied.
Dealing with Bullying: This children’s book provides seven case studies of different bullying issues.
Emotionally Resilient Tweens and Teens: This book helps parents to arm their teenage children with the tools they need to combat bullying.
Pushing isn’t Funny: This book introduces young children to the concept of physical bullying.
Sometimes Jokes aren’t Funny: This book introduces young children to the concept of indirect bullying.
Teasing isn’t Funny: This book introduces young children to the concept of emotional bullying.
The Cancer Companion: This book looks at the difficult emotions a cancer diagnosis brings and helps you to manage these.
Cancer Survival Strategies: This book will teach you how to use your body’s natural mechanisms to improve your chances of fighting-off cancer.
Dancing at the Pity Party: This graphic novel tells the author’s true story from her mother’s cancer diagnosis to the funeral.
My Mum’s Got Cancer: This children’s book can help parents to start a discussion about a cancer diagnosis.
You Can Conquer Cancer: This book provides a holistic approach to fighting cancer.
Survive and Thrive!: This inspirational biography provides the stories of several people who each survived their own battles with cancer.
Carefrontation: This book explains how adults can recover from their past abuse and reclaim their lives.
Childhood Disrupted: This book explains how the effects of childhood abuse can cause health issues as an adult, and shows how to repair this damage.
I Said No!: This book teaches children about setting healthy boundaries and how to deal with inappropriate behaviour.
Someone Should Have Told Me: This is a book for adults to share with children. It helps to warn children of the potential dangers and how to avoid them, as well as what adults can do to help children exposed to pornography or who disclose abuse.
Surviving & Moving On: This book helps people who experienced childhood sexual abuse to understand its effects and begin healing.
Yes! No!: This children’s book introduces the concept of consent and normalises asking for permission.
Dancing at the Pity Party: This graphic novel tells the author’s true story from her mother’s cancer diagnosis to the funeral.
The Grief Recovery Handbook for Pet Loss: This book looks at the unique relationships we have with pets, and the grief that comes from
their loss.
Life After Suicide: This book looks at the unique difficulties of grieving a loved one lost to suicide.
Pastures of Healing: This memoir looks at how the author recovered from the grief of losing his daughter to a serial killer.
You are not Alone: Based on a variety of people’s experiences of grief, this book looks at how we deal with it.
What Happens When a Loved One Dies: This children’s book can help adults to guide conversations around death and grief.
Cheer the F**k Up: This memoir recounts the author’s experience with depression, and how friends helped him through it.
How to Stop Feeling so Damned Depressed: This book will help men change how they look at depression and how to solve it.
Girl Over the Edge: This memoir recounts one woman’s experience with depression.
I’m Fine: This memoir tells of one woman’s experiences, and denials, of postnatal depression.
Mending the Mind: This book explains the causes, symptoms, and treatment for depression in plain language.
When Someone You Know has Depression: This book provides advice on how to care for someone close to you who has depression or bipolar disorder.
Dying
The Art of Dying Well: This book explores maintaining a high quality of life from old age to illness to death.
Beginnings and Endings with Lifetimes in Between: This children’s book presents like as a beginning, a middle, and an end, with death simply the final stage of life.
The Complete Book of Funeral Planning: This book presents everything you need to know in planning a funeral, whether your own or for a loved one.
Living is Dying: This book examines a range of Buddhist teachings around death to present a spiritual path to prepare for it.
What Happens When a Loved One Dies: This children’s book can help adults to guide conversations around death and grief.
Estate Planning
The Australian Guide to Wills and Estate Planning: This book collects everything you need to know about preparing your estate and writing your will in Australia.
Understanding Wills and Estate Planning: This book takes the complicated legal process of Power of Attourney, estate planning, and writing a will, and presents them in common language.
Separation and Divorce: This book explains everything you need to know of the Australian legal processes around separation and divorce.
Surviving Your Split: A practical and humorous guide on navigating divorce and creating a new life afterwards.
When Parents Part: This book looks at how divorce can harm childhood development, and provides advice on how to avoid this.
When Parent Separate: This children’s book provides practical advice on how children can deal with common issues from separation.
Why Don’t We All Live Together Anymore?: This children’s book presents a wide range of common situations and questions children may come across through a separation or divorce.
No Visible Bruises: This book explores the extent of domestic violence in society and exposes some of the myths surrounding it.
See What You Made Me Do: This book looks at not only the violence impacted on people, but the control that stops them from speaking about it, and what a successful intervention would look like.
The Infertility Trap: This book explores the factors that lead to infertility and how they are becoming more prevalent.
Two Week Wait: This graphic novel explores the joys and sorrows of IVF.
The Whole Fertility Plan: This book looks at the factors that influence fertility and helps you to maximise your chances to conceive.
General
Breaking Badly: This memoir recounts the experience of having a nervous breakdown.
A Mind Like Mine: This book attempts to break the stigma around mental health by looking at 21 famous people who experienced mental health issues in their lives.
Own Yourself: This book looks at alternative treatments for mental health issues.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Reclaiming Life After Trauma: Combining Western therapy with Eastern teaching and yoga practice, this book provides tools to help manage PTST.
Self-Harm and Suicidal Thoughts
Overcoming Self-Harm and Suicidal Thoughts: This book provides advice to adults on how to support teenagers who are self-harming or having suicidal thoughts.
The Brink of Being: This book provides context and consolation for those who have lost a pregnancy, or those who have someone close to them who has.
Hard to Bear: This book explores the ways our society fails people who have experienced a miscarriage and proposes a better way.
The Worst Girl Gang Ever: Written by people who have experienced miscarriages, this book the tools and support you need after experiencing this loss.
Your Guide to Miscarriage: This book provides guidance on navigating the time after a miscarriage, as well as hope for future pregnancies.
General
Me, Myself and I: This book aims to answer all the questions children have about growing up.
So That’s What’s Happening!: This book provides accurate and age-appropriate information about what changes during puberty, and why it is happening.
Boys
A Guy’s Guide to Puberty: This book explains the changes of male puberty and how to care for the changing body.
What’s Happening to Me?: This book looks at the physical changes of male puberty, and the emotional effects it can cause.
Girls
A Girl’s Guide to Puberty: This book explains the changes of female puberty and how to care for the changing body.
What’s Happening to Me?: This book looks at the physical changes of female puberty, and the emotional effects it can cause.
Other Websites We Recommend
Fantastic Fiction
Great resource for author bibliographies and book series. Frequent updates on new releases and good Australian content.
Book Riot
An independent, editorial book site with a focus on reading diversity. The home of the annual Read Harder challenge, which poses 24 reading prompts to expand your reading over the year.
Library Thing
Catalogue your own book collection online; connect with people who read the same things; find suggestions for similar books you may like.
Good Reading Magazine
Good Reading is an Australian book review magazine. Copies can be found in our library, or digitally through our eResources.
Whichbook
A whole lot of fun to use! Use the sliders to create your own lists. A UK site where you can browse the Guest Lists and Whichbook Lists.