Books

North & South for me was a refreshing step away from a nightly reading selection heavily featuring robots, treehouses, a hybrid Dogman and flying furballs, and the never-ending speech bubbles that comics afford.

Author and illustrator Sandra Morris has written a delightful and picturesque introduction to the world we live in, the changing seasons, and the animals that coexist with us around the world.

It’s easy to use the book as a talking point about seasons and migration with some of the world’s most wondrous animals, who by their very existence adapt and adjust to the climate and inhabitants around them. The illustrations elevate the words beautifully and are evidence of the author’s many talents.

Most interesting to my eight-year-old was the hoatzin, otherwise known as a stinkbird, as it emits a smell like manure and regurgitates fermented plants to feed its hatchlings. From the pungent aroma of the hoatzin we quickly digressed to conversations about the lifecycle and how prey and predator are ever-changing depending on where you are in the food chain. The awful pungency of the hoatzin means the young chicks are at the mercy of capuchin monkeys, snakes, and birds who are attracted to the smell.

Morris has categorised the animals giving them each a conservation status. The polar bear, for instance, is deemed vulnerable, at high risk of extinction, whereas the green tree python is of low concern with a relatively low risk of extinction. There is a glossary and an index too that will help the most curious of minds to extend their knowledge and vocabulary.

Despite this, my son did become disengaged with the length of North & South and suggested that measurements to show how big the animals are in relation to humans would have been cool. Of course, I hadn’t thought of this, and was reminded how different the world is through a child’s lens and how reading North & South a little and often may just be the way to go.

What makes Alan Bennett’s Two Besides: A Pair of Talking Heads important is the context in which it came to life. The monologues are undoubtedly beautifully written and decidedly iconic, but that they were borne of the pandemic makes them utterly human and essential. Nicholas Hytner’s preface is as much a part of the book as the monologues, for it revisits the process of re-making Talking Heads into a BBC show during the pandemic. He discusses the artistic process and the vital importance art plays, especially theatre with its reliance on physicality, in connecting humanity despite the forced distance of quarantine. His preface is a reflection on how making art is inherently human, and that despite compulsory isolation we remain connected.

The monologues belong to a larger collection of 14, all uncomfortably candid. These two vignettes portray ordinary women, lost and confounded. An Ordinary Woman is a monologue of contrasts. The speaker wrestles with her wants versus what she knows to be acceptable, ordinary. Lust becomes disgust, love devolves into hate, the beautiful mutates into the grotesque, and the abnormal is normalised as she falls in love with the wrong person. The Shrine is a portrait of bereavement. Bennett captures the numbness, emptiness, blandness, and rawness of death. How in overcoming grief your loved one dies twice over. Both monologues are powerful sketches of what it inherently means to be human.

These monologues, already portraits of humanness, were brought to life when our own lives seemed so uncertain, bleak, and detached from one another, making them even more powerful, even more real, even more human. Reading just two made me crave the others. In the context of our larger global story, when we were barred from some of our basic human needs and in which many of us felt less human than ever before, Two Besides: A Pair of Talking Heads becomes a naked portrayal of ourselves, a reminder of our connectedness, our solidarity, and our humanness.

Magic and witches are not normally my bag, but I found this book quite captivating initially. Maria, the lead character, is found as a baby left in the snow by another witch and her story takes flight from there. I got reeled in slowly, despite the magic potions provided in most chapters. Hannah, Maria’s saviour, is the witch all women go to for men troubles, health problems etc. Hannah dishes out potions and probably more importantly, advice. Love potion number nine features in the book, with measures of nine of multiple items including red wine, to be stirred nine times. Some of the potions (old wives’ tales in today’s parlance) are still used today.

There are some gruesome descriptions of both animal and human abuse that I found distressing. But they were witches, and they were different times. Maria’s constant companion is a black crow, a dead giveaway that she’s a witch apparently. Her parents sell her as a maid for a better life and when she’s served her five years, she is free to leave Curaçao to follow her man to Massachusetts via boat. She falls in love age 15 (he’s at least twice her age) and how’s this for speed dating? On their second night together, he vowed he loved her, the third night she was his, on the fourth night he gave her a sapphire, on the fifth a small packet of diamonds and, on the sixth…

Like Hannah, Maria has inherited the gift of helping others and this charming imagery shows how she gains new clients: “The referrals were knots in a rope, buds on a tree, birds that sang to summon others who might need a tonic or a cure.” Alice Hoffman uses old-fashioned language as the novel begins in 1664 and I had to Google ‘scrying’ – foretelling the future.

I found Magic Lessons long and I struggled to stay engaged but wanted to finish it. Obviously, I’m in the minority as the author has 36 published books.

Chosen has been an amazing book to read and brings to light a poetic perspective of Geoff Cochrane’s life. Cochrane writes passionately, expressing the beauty in the ordinary everyday movement of things and coming to terms with ageing and the events leading up to it. In his poems, I felt his joy, sorrow, physical pain, and inner battles with himself.

Starting with his youth, he recollects fond memories of his childhood, the neighbourhood and street that he grew up in, and Wellington in its heyday.

As a young adult, Cochrane recalls his late nights out on the town, his personal habits, and people that have had an impact on his life, whether it be through films, their books, or personal encounters.

Cochrane battles with the realisation of ageing and the fact that his body is starting to let him down, while his mind is still youthful and eager to experience and create more memories.

Knowing that he needs some medical attention but procrastinating a trip to the doctors, he eventually caves and receives both bad and not-so-bad news. This sends him into emotional turmoil regarding his health and he finds it quite ironic that some changes must be made to preserve his mortality.

“Morning drenched grasses. Morning’s grasses, drenched.” Beauty best described through the eyes of Cochrane. His young self observes, appreciates, and absorbs the simplest of surroundings, the natural art on our planet.

While enjoying a cup of coffee at a café, a gentle “soulful pooch” chooses Cochrane out of a crowd to introduce himself to. “He wants to say hello”. Being the one that usually observes his surroundings, he was politely interrupted with a beautiful and uncomplicated meeting of two souls.

The reality of having to acknowledge the inevitable (his life versus death) reveals a battle between fear of death, and coming to terms with accepting the reality of what is to be.

Chosen has been a very easy, yet emotional read. I could relate to Cochrane’s poetry more often than not and reading his point of view was quite intriguing.

Women & Money: Mastering the Struggle can be overly convoluted in parts and with each turn of phrase I’m reminded of reading university textbooks. Though dense and heavy, it is a solid and uncompromising take on all matters financial, the creation of wealth, and the considerations wealth-building requires. Xuccoa knows her subject matter extremely well and uses case studies to help educate. The successes and pitfalls experienced by other women help to personalise circumstances that are relatable.

There’s her simple recommendations and then there’s the complex, but a favourite quick win is her advice to use cash instead of EFTPOS. It’s all too easy to imagine dollars and cents exist in a seemingly endless flow of readily available finance at the sound of plastic being swiped mercilessly through a machine.

Though the title may suggest otherwise, Women & Money is not heavily accented with the woes of women, distinctly disadvantaged by default of their gender. I was able to appreciate where gender may make a difference because of this. Xuccoa’s chapter on Building Today for Tomorrow highlights two of the biggest fears women have: they won’t have enough money to take care of their immediate needs and they’ll be stony broke in their retirement. A sobering thought indeed.

Xuccoa recognises the part emotions play in guiding financial decisions and is encouraging when she speaks to gender differences in investing. Women, she says, are more security-oriented and likely to seek steady returns rather than exceptionally high ones. This leads to them making sound investment choices over time.

Women & Money is about adopting a ‘whole-life’ approach to money and wealth. Taking control and not leaving it to chance or another individual to determine your financial goals and ultimately your financial wellbeing. Whether it’s knowledge or steps to start your own business that you desire, Women & Money transverses it all. By recognising your own habits, educating yourself, and getting on top of cash flow management, anything is possible.

In the early 1970s, no one really thought much about greenhouse gases or the amount of carbon dioxide being pumped into the planet’s atmosphere. Now we’re at a critical juncture where we can’t ignore it.

In his new book, Dave Lowe, author and Nobel Peace Prize winner, tells the story of how he and a small group of scientists spent years trying to answer the question of why the Earth’s climate was changing at such a staggering rate. It would be a journey that would take him halfway around the world and would consume almost his entire working life, but knowing what we know now, it was one definitely worth taking.

This is quite a tale, and Lowe does an impressive job telling it. A big reason for that is because he’s so honest, he never shies away from how it really is. The gist is, we got ourselves into this huge, dangerous mess, and now we have to take steps to fix it. Otherwise, things will get worse for us and the generations that follow.

While I have to admit to not being able to follow all of the science, I understood the scale of the issues facing us. Lowe explains everything in an easy-to-follow way that didn’t bog me down with complicated jargon or scientific terminology. 

I think he has what some people call the ‘common touch’ (an ability to get on with or appeal to ordinary people), which comes out in the way he writes. I appreciated that quality, and I think his style will really appeal to an audience that may not have considered reading up on climate change before, or wanted to but were just intimidated by the subject matter.

Global warming is one of (if not the) biggest threats facing our world today and will be as we keep moving into the 21st century. If you are serious about learning more, and only choose one book to buy, I highly recommend this one.

Fleur Adcock’s poetry left me simply wanting more. The Mermaid’s Purse is imbued with a sense of magical realism. As the reader winds their way through the twists and turns of Adcock’s mind we encounter her memories; meet old friends, attend shows, dinner parties, travel to distant lands while bats and birds fly overhead. The Mermaid’s Purse focuses on memory, tinged with a hint of nostalgia as death, and the predestiny of ageing, dance along the fringes of her poems.

Adcock’s poetry feels like a moment in time, as if she has pulled back the veil shrouding a distant remembrance, and captures the impression of a bygone moment. The Little Theatre Club and In the Cupboard address how a moment is in fact remembered. The latter uses items to evoke a story, the former directly inquires: “how will you remember, my young dears?” Adcock in this particular instance remembers the moment simply through a pair of apple-green tights. Her poems are transient, each one feels like a memory in and of itself.

Many of Adcock’s poems seem to be more about the feeling they evoke rather than the actual subject. Giza for example is not truly about her dress, rather about the memory the dress conjures. Similarly, Porridge tackles grief at the loss of our poet’s friend, using his Pyrex dish as a metonymy for his memory. Perhaps my favourite poem in The Mermaid’s Purse is House, which paints a home through memory, sunsets, kauri flooring, a pōhutukawa planted over the daughter’s umbilical cord, only to conclusively “melt” the house into mere money as the children sell it. Endings seem both a choice and inevitable.

This kind of worldbuilding is almost always reduced to an anticlimax in many of Adcock’s poems, making her collection transformative, circular, and self-aware. Perhaps this tactic is intended to mimic the burden of ageing, something Adcock seems to be reckoning with in her poetry as her words gracefully and rawly wrestle with the inevitable expiration date that is death.

Families are complicated and that is exactly what Jessica Dettmann exposes in her latest novel, This Has Been Absolutely Lovely. The story centres around a large extended family and their struggles surrounding the death of the grandfather. The family events and celebrations that follow are the perfect set-up for serious themes that include heartache, motherhood, unfulfilled dreams, and mental health. It’s not all doom and gloom, as Dettmann does an incredible job of pulling these serious themes together with some witty humour.

The protagonist, Annie, battles endlessly to balance her desire for music stardom with her never-ending duties as a mother. Despite not being a mother, I found the concept of turmoil between one’s pursuit of their dreams and the obligations that come with relationships extremely relatable. Dettmann writes in a poetic way that pulls you tightly into her characters’ psyches.

“She would close her eyes and step off the cliff. Her body hummed with the thrill of the decision. How it would affect her kids, she still didn’t know, but they’d survive. She felt the force of her mother’s unlived dreams behind her, and her daughters’ and her grandparents’ unrealised futures.”

Having said this – and apologies in advance – the characters were absolutely not that lovely for me. With the exception of one or two, I found most of them incredibly irritating and unlikeable. I believe this is what held me back from truly enjoying this book. Selfishness and self-centredness are repeated attributes and felt so turned up at times that they even came off a little unrealistic.

Overall, this book has achieved what it set out to: exposing the complexities and seriousness of family life in an easy-to-read and engaging way. Although I was not fully charmed by the plot, I am certain that this book will tickle many who love dramas and are looking for an easy book to finish and discuss later with friends.

Man Alone tells the story of the main protagonist Johnson who, in the aftermath of World War I, tries to make a new life for himself in New Zealand. We see him drifting from place to place, never staying put for too long and as he calls it, only living for the good times. Unfortunately, the good times soon come to an end, and it isn’t long before Johnson’s way of life is under threat. 

Before you even open the book, your mind is going to be flooded with images of the late, great Barry Crump and the clichéd picture of the southern mountain man: stoic, silent, and individualistic. Johnson exemplifies all of these qualities, minus Crump’s charm and old-fashioned good manners. While I definitely admire him as a character, I just couldn’t get behind him. 

Early on, Johnson is involved in a scuffle during a workers’ protest where he winds up assaulting a policeman, and while making his escape, he steals a hat and scarf from a sleeping vagrant. It is examples like these that made it hard to like him and kept me from seeing him as anything more than a one-dimensional character. Whether that was by design or not, we’ll never know, since Mulgan took his own life in 1945.

Still, I have to acknowledge that Johnson is a product of his time, living in a New Zealand far removed from the one you and I would recognise. Life was harder back then – no internet, no lattes, and if you wanted to fly, you had to have wings! (Domestic travel didn’t become common until the 1950s.)

Ironically, Man Alone’s biggest downfall isn’t in the book itself but its back cover. It essentially gives away the story’s major plot points and unforgivably spoils what could have been a shock ending. 

However, if you can overlook this, then Man Alone is a good example of the literature of its time (1939) and is definitely worth
a look.

For someone who has always been diametrically opposed to science fiction, fantasy, and anything remotely masquerading as such, Monsters in the Garden, with its eclectic mix of short stories and excerpts, was an excellent way to dive right in.

I love that there are names I recognised of well-established New Zealand authors who I have read on occasion, the likes of Margaret Mahy and Witi Ihimaera included. Mahy’s Misrule in Diamond from her unpublished manuscript was everything I never knew I needed: fantasy, princes, court jesters, treacherous siblings, and what could have been a hint of romance that unfortunately may never be explored. I long for what is left of Mahy’s unpublished manuscript and the hidden possibilities within.

Maurice Gee, Keri Hulme, the list goes on. You will find previously unpublished authors sharing their wares here as well. I love the feel of these stories. Phillip Mann flips the lid on iconic characters in The Gospel According to Mickey Mouse, where Mickey Mouse turns dictator and Sherlock Holmes is not as we know him. Editors David Larsen and Elizabeth Knox seem to have no particular rhyme or rhythm to their selection. There’s the weird, the wonderful, and the unsettling in between, all vying for your attention. There’s knitted dolls, and worried sheep. The stories all seem miscellaneous, and perhaps this is what science fiction is all about – strange, weird, assorted, and a challenge to the impossible.

Emma Martin’s In the Forest with Ludmila, about two sisters raised by a disturbed mother and grandmother, felt disconcerting in its violence and unsettling.

I wouldn’t say I am now a convert to all things sci-fi but rather, I’m open to a world where speculative fiction not only lives but thrives; all the better with a uniquely Kiwi feel too. Knox accepts this anthology doesn’t represent all genres, writing “It’s an anthology among anthologies and a good place to start.” For the uninitiated like me, it has been just that.

In a quite extraordinary book about regained fragments of childhood memories, Debora Harding has composed a simply beautiful book about a horrific crime committed against her when she was 14 years old. Her salad days destroyed.

Told in diary form, Harding takes us on a trip of remembered events. This tool is a clever methodology of drawing the reader in. I won’t spoil the reason behind the title of the book other than to say it’s pivotal in Harding’s grasp of who, at the time of the crisis, became her rock.

As horrific as the crime was, and this aspect should never be understated, Harding suffers from self-inflicted victim persecution when told years later that the event never happened. It is Harding’s mother who planted the seeds of doubt in her daughter’s mind as regards the abduction and rape. This might come as a shock as the reader is drawn into a long dark tunnel of her mother’s deteriorating mental health battles. Her father, a man who seems never to lose his temper and has a unique approach to sorting out life’s problems, is quite the opposite. Though later in life he also is diagnosed with bi-polar disorder.

Eventually, this manifests itself in Harding’s mind as she battles melancholy, depression, seizures, and episodes of collapsing. Harding has to question herself, is she following in her mother’s footsteps with this debilitating anxiety?

Years later, a newly married Harding confronts her past. In piecing together the known facts, Harding and her husband Tom delve into old FBI records and eventually, she plucks up the courage to visit her abductor and rapist who is about to be released after serving a jail sentence of 25 years.

She looks at Charles Goodwin and practises what she is going to say to him. In facts she reveals, and I quote, “They say with severe crimes there’s no avoiding the aftermath. What they don’t say is how post-traumatic stress can become a disorder because of your childhood family, the one you’re trying to survive”. A wonderful cathartic book.

“throw your words on the floor, you don’t need them
forget your real name
forget how old you are
your name is denatured, unfit to drink
your words are poison, unfit to eat
assume everyone is watching”.

In the afterword to her first book, How to Take off Your Clothes, Hadassah Grace writes, “I don’t really like a lot of poetry but here I am writing a book of it.” A contradiction characteristic of her debut poetry collection, Grace’s poems juxtapose a diverse range of her experiences. Darting from being raised by Christian folk-singing celebrities to working as a sex worker, these works illustrate that many things, in simultaneity, can be true for one person.

“I don’t do forever
why keep feeding a campfire when you’re not cold anymore
even emails with attachments make me nervous”.

Although contemporary poetry is synonymous with the autobiographical, the heights Grace’s introspection reaches in her poems separates them from anything I have ever read. The result? A peculiar and bold lucidity.

“we are ruined women, and we are here to ruin you

we’ve always been here
the witches you burned because you knew we were magic
swapping our vacuum cleaner for broomsticks
and cackling about castration under the light of the full moon
we’re the girls you said were begging for it, too horny to be forced”.

Grace’s poems remind me of the clarity that strikes while mulling over an argument; here are the words you wish you had thought and dared to say. No ums or aahs.