As part of their curatorial duties The Drones have also picked a list of Books to recommend to attendees of I'll Be Your Mirror Melbourne, which you can see below. As part of the festival we are very glad to announce that Courtney Collins and Don Walker will be doing readings and Q&As at 4pm on Sunday. Hear stories of wild times, both real and imagined, as Don Walker reads from his memoir Shots and Courtney Collins reads from her debut novel The Burial. Stick around for a rollicking audience Q & A and a discussion about the music at the heart of the books.

	Atomised / Les Particules elementaires (author: Michel Houellebecq, publisher: Random House Australia) Buy It Half-brothers Michel and Bruno have a mother in common but little else. Michel is a molecular biologist, a thinker and idealist, a man with no erotic life to speak of and little in the way of human society. Bruno, by contrast, is a libertine, though more in theory than in practice, his endless lust is all too rarely reciprocated. Both are symptomatic members of our atomised society, where religion has given way to shallow 'new age' philosophies and love to meaningless sexual connections. Atomised (Les Particules elementaires) tells the stories of the two brothers, but the real subject of the novel is the dismantling of contemporary society and its assumptions, its political incorrectness, and its caustic and penetrating asides on everything from anthropology to the problem pages of girls' magazines. A dissection of modern lives and loves. By turns funny, acid, infuriating, didactic, touching and visceral.
	The Burial (author: Courtney Collins, publisher: Allen & Unwin) Buy It A breathtakingly brilliant debut novel in the tradition of Cormac McCarthy - inspired by Australia's last bushranger, young woman Jessie Hickman. It is the dawn of the twentieth century in Australia and a woman has done an unspeakable thing. Twenty-two-year-old Jessie has served a two-year sentence for horse rustling. As a condition of her release she is apprenticed to Fitzgerald 'Fitz' Henry, who wants a woman to allay his loneliness in a valley populated by embittered ex-soldiers. Fitz wastes no time in blackmailing Jessie and involving her in his business of horse rustling and cattle duffing. When Fitz is wounded in an accident he hires Aboriginal stockman, Jack Brown, to steal horses with Jessie. Soon both Jack Brown and Jessie are struggling against the oppressive and deadening grip of Fitz. One catastrophic night turns Jessie's life on its head and she must flee for her life. From her lonely outpost, the mountains beckon as a place to escape. First she must bury the evidence. But how do you bury the evidence when the evidence is part of yourself? Inspired by the life of Jessie Hickman, legendary twentieth-century bushranger, The Burial is a stunning debut novel, a work of haunting originality and power.
	A Confederacy Of Dunces (author: John Kennedy Toole, publisher: Penguin) Buy It Meet Ignatius J. Reilly: flatulent, eloquent and pretty much unemployable... The ordinary folk of New Orleans seem to think he is unhinged as well. Ignatius ignores them as he heaves his vast bulk through the city's fleshpots in a noble crusade against vice, modernity and ignorance. But his momma has a nasty surprise in store for him. Ignatius must get a job. Undaunted, he uses his new-found employment to further his mission - and now he has a pirate costume and a hot-dog cart to do it with...
	For Whom The Bell Tolls (author: Ernest Hemingway, publisher: Random House Australia) Buy It In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the good fight,"For Whom the Bell Tolls.The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. In his portrayal of Jordan's love for the beautiful Maria and his superb account of El Sordo's last stand, in his brilliant travesty of La Pasionaria and his unwillingness to believe in blind faith, Hemingway surpasses his achievement inThe Sun Also RisesandA Farewell to Armsto create a work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving, and wise. "If the function of a writer is to reveal reality," Maxwell Perkins wrote Hemingway after reading the manuscript, "no one ever so completely performed it." Greater in power, broader in scope, and more intensely emotional than any of the author's previous works, it stands as one of the best war novels of all time.
	Guignol's Band (author: Louis Ferdinand Celine, publisher: Bloomsbury) Buy It First published in 1944 but dealing with events taking place during the First World War, 'Guignol's Band' follows the narrator's meanderings through London after he has been demobilized due to a war injury. The result is a portrayal of the English capital's seedy underworld, people by prostitutes, pimps and schemers.
	Shots (author: Don Walker, publisher: Black Inc.) Buy It This extraordinary memoir begins with Don Walker's early life in rural Australia and ends in the late '80s. In mesmerising prose, Walker evokes childhood and youth, wild times in the '70s, life on the road and in Kings Cross, music-making and more. Shots is a stunningly original book, a set of word picture 'shots' that conjure up the lowlife and back roads of Australia.
	The Sirens Of Titan (author: Kurt Vonnegut, publisher: Gollancz) Buy It When Winston Niles Rumfoord flies his spaceship into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum he is converted into pure energy and only materializes when his waveforms intercept Earth or some other planet. As a result, he only gets home to Newport, Rhode Island, once every fifty-nine days and then only for an hour. But at least, as a consolation, he now knows everything that has ever happened and everything that ever will be. He knows, for instance, that his wife is going to Mars to mate with Malachi Constant, the richest man in the world. He also knows that on Titan - one of Saturn's moons - is an alien from the planet Tralfamadore, who has been waiting 200,000 years for a spare part for his grounded spacecraft...
	Straw Dogs (author: John Gray, publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux) Buy It The British bestseller Straw Dogs is an exciting, radical work of philosophy, which sets out to challenge our most cherished assumptions about what it means to be human. From Plato to Christianity, from the Enlightenment to Nietzsche and Marx, the Western tradition has been based on arrogant and erroneous beliefs about human beings and their place in the world. Philosophies such as liberalism and Marxism think of humankind as a species whose destiny is to transcend natural limits and conquer the Earth. John Gray argues that this belief in human difference is a dangerous illusion and explores how the world and human life look once humanism has been finally abandoned. The result is an exhilarating, sometimes disturbing book that leads the reader to question our deepest-held beliefs. Will Self, in the New Statesman, called Straw Dogs his book of the year: "I read it once, I read it twice and took notes... I thought it that good." "Nothing will get you thinking as much as this brilliant book" (Sunday Telegraph).
	The Third Policeman (author: Flann O Brien, publisher: Harper Collins) Buy It A masterpiece of black humour from the renown comic and acclaimed author of 'At Swim-Two-Birds' - Flann O'Brien. A thriller, a hilarious comic satire about an archetypal village police force, a surrealistic vision of eternity, the story of a tender, brief, unrequited love affair between a man and his bicycle, and a chilling fable of unending guilt, 'The Third Policeman' is comparable only to Alice in Wonderland as an allegory of the absurd. Distinguished by endless comic invention and its delicate balancing of logic and fantasy, 'The Third Policeman' is unique in the English language.