Category: non-fiction

Always Home, Always Homesick

Always Home, Always Homesick, by Hannah Kent

Why fall in love with Iceland? Hannah Kent counts the ways. As a young Australian woman she picks up the default option of a Rotary exchange to Iceland, spends the first few months in a cold house with a cold family and an inhospitable frozen land, but after a while, both Hannah an Iceland thaw. She works hard to learn the language “my conversation has always been pockmarked with grammatical error and the foreigner’s manner of jamming in known vocabulary at the expense of clarity and precision”, makes some friends, and moves in with a new family who became her greatest support and friends for life. She falls in love with Iceland itself.

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Bad Archive – book review

Bad Archive, by Flora Feltham

Here’s another interesting look at how we view history, seems very much the topic du jour (see What We Can Know), this time by local author Flora Feltham, contained in a set of wandering essays that I enjoyed tremendously. Just the title, Bad Archive, tells you that this is going to be an opinionated work with something awry – slanting truths perhaps, ironic labels on ordinary things. Just the way I like my archives.

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A Different Kind of Power – book review

A Different Kind of Power, by Jacinda Ardern

I didn’t know political biographies could be like this. There’s not a nasty bone in its body. I haven’t read a book so uplifting for a long time but I shouldn’t be surprised. I mean, Jacinda Ardern’s signature is kindness. No one was expecting she’d take the opportunity now she has left office and living overseas to get stuck into the dozens of goons she must have had to deal with on a daily basis.

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Norwegian Wood, chopping, stacking and drying wood the Scandinavian way – book review

Norwegian Wood, by Lars Mytting

This is one of the most relaxing and enjoyable books I know. Odd, because it is full of men with axes living in freezing temperatures in remote forests, involving strenuous physical labour. All the hard work is for the benefit of the person snug by the fireside, tucked away from the harsh world outside. That’s us. The lucky readers.

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The Chthonic Cycle – book review

The Chthonic Cycle, by Una Cruickshank

First a huge congratulations for the presentation of this book and it’s glorious fold out covers, featuring Sasha Francis’s artistic impression of its themes. It sums them up, natural forces, re-birth, jewels, fossils, water, all strewn together across the page, interconnected and tantalising. Most of the stuff pictured I don’t recognise and nor would I if it were under my feet – how many of us have walked past a lump of ambergris in the sand or sat on a rock hiding a small fortune of ammonites? This book is full of things you may have missed.

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From the Big Bang to God–book review

From the Big Bang to God, by Lloyd Geering

Not the usual sort of book I would pick up, but I have a wonderful book club who extend me, and this is a case in point. Loved the big issues like evolution and the start of everything and where did life come from and all that. Good choice for a book club as a discussion sparker. So, did Lloyd Geering come up with any answers?

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Empire City

Empire City by John E Martin

It would be silly to call this a ‘review’ of Empire City, as it will take me a few years to get through this tome properly, but I am so happy to have it, to drool over it and to put it on my desk as a kind of dual use research/paperweight. I bought it last week from Unity in Wellington on a recommendation from an historian without a second thought and then realised it weighed nearly 1.7kg and I was on a trip around the motu with only carry-on luggage. Worth every lug.

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Grand – book review

Grand, becoming my mother’s daughter by Noelle McCarthy

Memoirs are so deeply personal they make me terrified. I can’t imagine ever wanting to write one. Now I know so much about Noelle McCarthy she’s no longer just that engaging, Irish voice on the radio. We’re so much closer than that. Things got personal very fast. I feel I’ve seen her naked. Why do people do this?

Saying that, it’s terrific for a reader. Who doesn’t want to wander through someone else’s thoughts for a while? Especially someone this smart and interesting. We can access their memories, become a voyeur of their lives. Judge them. A memoir is very different to a story (fact or fiction) told about someone else; psychologically a totally different thing. Noelle (usually I refer to an author by surname, but we’re intimates) tells us how she sees herself, with access to all that interior landscape. OK, so the book is ostensibly about her mother, but it’s about her. Noelle McCarthy. What a great woman.

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Mrs Jewell cast reincarnated

They’ve come back as keas

Members of the crew of wrecked General Grant have been reincarnated as kea. I can’t begin to explain how happy this makes me.

‘Sanguily The Cuban‘ has just been spotted near Jordan Stream, Mid South Island, exhibiting such behaviour as: Feeding on berries, flying, playing. Came and went for about 2 hours. It’s him, for sure.

This is the work of my friend Lulu Jordan, who eats adventure for breakfast, and in January took part in a project tagging keas, earning naming rights. She took the characters from my novel, Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant, matched them with a bird, and released them into the wild. She manages to squeeze such interesting work in between hunting tar in the mountains and 23 days rafting the Grand Canyon. Lulu is one of the coolest people I know.

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Worse things happen at sea–book review

Worse things happen at sea, by John McCrystal

Worse things happen at sea is probably the most appropriate book title ever. Whatever catastrophe happens on land you can crank up the Richter scale of disaster if it happens out on the briny. Flood, fire, psychopath, injury, grandstanding, storm, starvation, getting lost – put a ship in the background of any of these and they become so, so much worse.

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