The reader: Rachel Hills

Very early on in our working relationship I accidentally  sent an email to Rachel that was about her and not for her. The contents of that email (intended for another writer in the room) was something along the lines of "this girl is amazing!" (instead of going behind her back these days I'm just honest and tell her how much I like her work directly to her face/email address). Rachel is an extremely talented blogger and writer. Her work has been published in Vogue, CLEO, SMH, New Matilda and Sunday LIfe. Her story ideas are always original and thoughtful and her writing is whip smart, on trend and always inspiring. Rachel has just moved to London where she's freelance writing and working on a book about Gen Y, sex an identity. These are her five favourite books.

This Restless Life by Brigid Delaney

This Restless Life is one of those special books that really taps into the contemporary experience, in a manner that’s ambitious but not wanky. I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve spruiked it to, and the number of conversations with friends it has been relevant to. It’s a meditation on the impermanence lack of certainty that  characterises the lives of today’s twenty- and thirtysomethings, grounded in personal stories about love, work and travel. It’s hard to do it justice in a paragraph – check out my review for Sydney Morning Herald for more detail.

Tete-a-Tete: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre

by Hazel Rowley

I read this book while backpacking around the United States in 2006. I love it because it captures the kind of life I aspire to live – creative, adventurous and deeply grounded in relationships and community.

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

This isn’t McEwan’s most famous book, but it is my favourite. It tells the story of a pair of early-1960s newlyweds, set primarily on the night of their wedding, but also contextualised with stories from their courtship and the night before they met. At its core, it’s a tale of sexual repression, which at times is so intimate you feel dirty for reading it (in an emotional rather than a porny way). But it also speaks to the ways in which our lives are determined by history and circumstance, and how one act – or failure to act - can change everything.

The Whole Woman by Germaine Greer and The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf

Many people dismiss Germs as a crazy old bat, but my first thought on reading her late 1990s-update on The Female Eunach was that she was right about everything. Greer was the first person to make feminism seem interesting and relevant to my life, serving up fresh explanations for everything from why my friends liked to proclaim loudly that they ate “sooo much”, to ladette culture, to singledom, to the marginalisation of mothers.

I read Wolf’s The Beauty Myth a couple of years later, at the peak of my own body image issues. A long time has passed since then, but it still stands out to me as a brilliant example of powerful writing and philosophical analysis on a deeply personal issue. Both of these books are huge role models for my own attempts at book writing.