What’s your favourite New Zealand book?
Posted 18 September 2008 // Helen Rickerby
Lynley Dodd reading one of her books
There are lots of ways you can celebrate New Zealand Book Month.
You can attend one of the many events around the country, you can visit the New Zealand Book Month blogs on the official website, and you can read 30 reasons to love NZ books and writing on NZHistory.net and have a go at their book month quiz.
And you can tell us what your favourite New Zealand book is, and why!
To get the ball rolling: I think my favourite New Zealand book is Plumb by Maurice Gee. This novel had a big impact on me when I first read it, back in my second year at university. I’d been going through a bit of a religious crisis, and Plumb deals with a lot of similar issues, so resonated with me. It’s a skilfully written novel about important and deep stuff, but has characters that are very real and particular – not just puppets to make a point. Thinking about it now makes me want to go and re-read it (again).
Other favourite books are The Curative by Charlotte Randall, the Hairy Maclary books by Lynley Dodd, and more poetry than I can list, so I’ll just mention Catullus for Children by Anna Jackson.
Your turn…
My favourite New Zealand book- the one that comes to mind first- and one I have read at least a dozen times is Under the Mountain by Maurice Gee. I don’t read any books time and time again the way I did when I was at school- I’m not sure why- but this probably means that any book I chose as my favourite would have to be one I read when I was young.
I loved the 1982 mini series; it was the reason I bought the book, with hard-earned book vouchers I had won in a local colouring competition. And you know the way that books are always so much better then a film- it was true in this case too: adventure, boats, islands, Wilberforces, and that awesome slide into the sea.
And I’ve just finished in My Father’s Den- another Gee book- of course I saw the film first…
Edmonds Cookbook
Because:
• It’s the best selling book in NZ history – 3 million copies sold.
• I got one the first year I went flatting and it’s dog-eared, has burn marks and liberal splatters of chocolate cake batter – but I won’t get a new one.
• I used to love looking through my mum’s Edmonds – it had colour photos of some really hideous looking 1970s foods.
• The “international food” sections are an absolute hoot.
• The pavlova recipe always works.
• Ditto the scones.
• Nothing beats the self-saucing chocolate pudding recipe.
• The beautiful art deco front cover.
• It has a sense of history.
How to watch a bird by Steve Braunias
No. 10 in The Ginger Series, published by Awa Press, Wellington, 2007
I was sitting outside a kiosk in Promenade Park, Maldon, Essex, talking to a colleague. I was the event manager for the park and he the facilities manager. A family guy had died in the lake the year before after diving in and hitting his head on a submerged post and we were trying to figure out how to rip the lake out without losing the ’star’ attraction of our estuarine park.
And then a starling flew down and sat on the back of the chair next to me, twittering away. I completely lost my thread and later it dawned on me that this was not uncommon.
My interest in birds had begun at the age of seven, with David, a handsome nine-year-old cockatiel breeder who lived two doors down. As a thirty-year-old now, watching birds had long been more of an obsession than a hobby and, in the same way that my husband’s gargantuan collection of books was his ‘anchor’, birds were mine. Wherever I am, as long as there are birds, I feel at home.
I bought this book out of intrigue for the personal account of a man’s journey from being vaguely aware of birds, to full metamorphosis as a birder. It was thrilling, and in addition I was introduced to some native species and stellar names in NZ ornithology.
It is an easy read and Braunias’ growing passion is contagious. But perhaps his greatest gift to the reader is the sense that you don’t just have to ‘do’ bird watching but that even as you walk through a city square, navigating your way through a herd of grazing pigeons, watching birds is an essential part of feeling alive.
My favourite NZ book is the last one I read and enjoyed. And I should admit that I don’t read a large number of New Zealand books.
But I read Eleanor Catton’s novel The rehearsal recently, and I thought it was one of the smartest, best written and most fascinating books I’d read for some time. Much has been made of the fact that the author is ‘only’ 22, and that the book is not sufficiently emotionally engaging; gosh, when one of the characters dies we hardly care or even notice! However in my view this is entirely the author’s intention. It’s a highly intelligent and articulate novel, clear-eyed but not without compassion, and the prose is a joy in itself. Since it’s about schoolgirls and actors, its tone and language is entirely appropriate. It’s artful but still authentic, and, I think, emotionally convincing. A breath of fresh air and such good writing. This writer is smart.
Stands up well beside my other recent NZ fave: Craig Sherbourne’s Muck. Having spent a lot of the last year reading about the ‘shower of fertility’ and other disgusting animal behaviour, I found this novel/memoir - which combines dairy farming with an unremittingly intense and unforgiving portrait of a self-loathing teenager and his dysfunctional parents – a particularly apposite corrective. Though I had to put it down from time to time as it was so corrosively mean. I’ll never look at a cow the same way again. Udder shudder.
Here’s another I like: Maurice Gee’s A special flower, which was published in 1965 and never reprinted. A nasty little study of puritan narrowmindedness set in Auckland’s eastern suburbs. A wonderfully convincing and tough central figure – Coralie, the girl who knows what she wants and she bloody well goes out and gets it. She’s the life force – not attractive, but vital and unstoppable. We admire her despite almost everything she does. And as in all of his books, Gee has a way of painting even the most unsympathetic of subsidiary characters that invokes our recognition of their humanity though we wish to turn away.
But maybe my favorite NZ book is Robert Creeley’s Hello (1976). Life, love, literature, landscape, through the eye [sic] of one of the 20th century’s most interesting poets, a lovely book printed by Alan Loney. Silliest lines: ‘Don’t take | the steak | I ain’t Dunedin.’
But hey:
(‘So there’, online at the NZ Electronic Poetry Centre)
Just recently picked up a copy of “The Kia Ora Coo-ee”, a reprint of the magazines for the ANZACs in the Middle East in 1918.
Love anything Janet Frame wrote too.
Reading through “A Concise History of NZ” by Philippa Mein Smith at the moment, very interesting!
I’m not a great reader, and hardly ever read fiction, but the last NZ book that really excited me was “Lake of Coal: The Disappearance of a Mining Township” by David Cook. I reviewed it here - http://lumiere.net.nz/reader/arts.php/item/1138. What grabbed me about this book was the wonderful combination of photography, history, and design. Cook spent 20 years photographing in and around Rotowaro in the Waikato, as the town was depopulated to allow mining underneath the town. Cook describes the project as “a visual ethnography of the place from the beginning of the upheaval to when Rotowaro, as a town, as a place of peoples, ceased to exist.” Alongside Cook’s fantastic photography there are the very personal stories of some of the last residents of the town talking about the upheaval of the move and the affect on their lives since. The smart and subtle design by Jonty Valentine is the icing on the cake of a under-valued but important book about an important part of New Zealand’s history.
“Faces in the Water” - Janet Frame
“Nest in a Falling Tree” - Joy Cowley
“The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont” - Martin Edmond
“How to Look at a Painting” - Justin Paton
They are all books I have read many times over. I don’t do that with many books either
This is a very difficult question. But… I think I have to go with Black Oxen by Elizabeth Knox. It is a massive book (my favourite kind). It covers so much amazing ground and is an imaginary world that draws you in and pushes you back and astounds you. I was disoriented, amazed and drawn in by it. I read it in 2001 and it is still with me.
How to Look at a Painting by Justin Paton (http://www.awapress.com/products/published/books/thegingerseries/howtolookatapainting) I think is beautifully written and completely inspiring.
I really enjoyed Elizabeth Knox’s Dreamquake and Dreamhunter because they were fabulously escapist.
My favourite all-time NZ book though is Janet Frame’s Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun simply because it just fills me with joy.
When you’re young everything makes so much more of an impression. So I’m fronting up and saying it must be Baxter’s ‘Jerusalem Sonnets.’ Go on, read them aloud!