Ross Coulthart is a reporter with the Nine Network's 60 Minutes, and winner of a Logie and the Gold Walkley award. His books include the biography Charles Bean and a revised edition of The Lost Diggers (HarperCollins), about the discovery in France of a trove of photographic plates of World War I Australian soldiers.
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His Dark Materials trilogy
Philip Pullman
I read this as an adult but the trilogy is proof that great books for kids don't need to be patronising or safe. Follow the 12-year-old female heroine Lyla Balacqua or her sidekick Will Parry through this splendidly dangerous multiverse having excellent grown-up adventures. It's a great book for youngsters, but it's also an unforgiving takedown of arrogant institutionalised authoritarian religion and bad science.
American Gods
Neil Gaiman
Few works of fiction have rocked me more. What if, Gaiman's adult-fantasy postulates, the great gods of mythology and fable actually live among us? I worship at the throne of Neil Gaiman. His breathtaking, soaring, imagination plays with the wild and weird just behind the mundane reality of everyday life. It's a wonderful, dangerously subversive, read.
Legacy of Ashes
Tim Weiner
This is the book every journalist dreams of writing. Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Tim Weiner uses mind-bogglingly detailed research to analyse the historical successes and failures of the CIA since its inception after World War II. He shows how, almost without fail, CIA spycraft fails to do what it was intended to. His thesis is that we won the Cold War despite the CIA; that it supported authoritarian regimes as a bulwark against communism, with a tragic legacy that persists today.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Roald Dahl
We all know the story of Willy Wonka and the little boy Charlie Bucket who wins the golden ticket that gives his family access to the mysterious chocolate factory and a lifetime's supply of chocolate. I can remember as a sensitive wee lad chortling as the baddie kids suffered ignominious fates. Dahl knew what all kids know: a little bit of danger, risk and gore is not a bad thing in a story. His books are beautiful to read aloud. They are classics of brevity and wit.
