According to some notable Australians (in alphabetical order)

Part 1 here

Part 2 here

Part 3 here

Part 4 here

Part 5 here

In Part 6 Nam Le writes (and how well he does it) here

Nam Le, writer: In the couple of years since I first read William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central, it has taken nightmare root and bloomed in my mind; I felt forced to revisit it this year. What to say? It lives, this novel, and hurts, and hurts, pulling its pain from the nerves of history, its every sentence a “steel fruit of a tree of flame”. “An artist must believe as easily and deeply as a child cries,” Vollmann avers. “What’s creation but self-enacted belief?” What belief Vollmann manifests in this book, what faith that the deepest, dimmest corners of 20th-century totalitarianism may be yet honoured by human consciousness, yet attended by fiction; yet how he punishes his own belief, purging it of all easiness, conscripting every tool and tack available — historical interpolation, heartbreak, metaphor, phantasmagoria — to concede his characters their full moral context. Germans, Soviets, artists, generals, sleepwalkers and realists: all are subjected, all enacted. Shostakovich will never again sound the same. Flesh and fire and metal. Vollmann has confirmed himself as the auditor of violence par excellence of our age. Here are his findings.

Part 7 here

Part 8 here Nicholas Rothwell writes

Nicolas Rothwell, The Australian: How rich and strange the pleasures of reading, how unfathomable the books that make an appeal at once to the mind and heart. Scores of subtle, well-written, well-argued, well-edited volumes poured from the presses and e-presses this year, but one above all lodged in my memory: the compendious and ever delightful collection of essays by Sinologist extraordinaire Simon Leys. His The Hall of Uselessness would win me through its title alone, but its contents are equally beguiling: essays on Malraux and Orwell, Mao and Magellan, on the aesthetic status of calligraphy, on the sea and its fascinations. Leys offers his thoughts on a dazzling range of subjects, diverting here and there, leading his companion readers on a meandering, engaging trail. The individual pieces are the portrait of a life: they are fragments, but they form a whole. The book is much concerned with the trappings of civilisation, but what is civilisation but a coat slung over the elusive workings of the heart? Leys singles out The Student, Chekhov’s favourite short story, for attention: after grief, and broodings on truth and beauty, it ends, for no clear reason, on an upbeat note: “And life seemed enchanting, miraculous, imbued with exalted significance.”

Part 9 here