books
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Flying to Pauanui
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1 min read
I made a late entry in the comment thread of the year over at Dim Post, a challenge to “submit a paragraph in which Shelley writes a passage from a classic New Zealand novel in her own inimitable style,” referring to the Herald’s Remuera housewife on Valium / crack columnist Shelly Bridgeman. My paragraph is…
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Auckland, Aotearoa Gill
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2 min read
An evening with AA Gill, Auckland Readers & Writers Festival 13 May 2011 AA Gill, the man himself, dismantler of restaurants and sharpest dictaphone in the west strolled slowly on stage suited and booted, ready to talk. And talk he did, about food, criticism, his mother, his father, television,travel and his previous life as a…
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Two things too small for posts of their own
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1 min read
One: I’ve signed up at goodreads.com. My first review is of Donald Sturrock’s Road Dahl bio Storyteller. I recommend it, and wrote a review over there. Most interesting to me was Dahl’s view of himself as an outsider, never conforming to any individual’s or the literary establishment’s expectations, and the fact that he came to…
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Two short book reviews
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1 min read
Holly wood Animal: A memior by Joe Eszterhaus Basic Instinct writer Eszterhaus stars in his own life history, a life divided between his two children and wife he was steadily growing apart from, and Hollywood, where he ruled the roost by producing hot script after hot script. I preferred reading about his time in the…
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Came A Hot Friday – short book review
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1 min read
This book has everything – heavy drinking, sex, violence, crime and gambling, all packed into one weekend in a couple of small towns in Taranaki. The characters and writing are colorful, to say the least, and there’s some surprisingly evocative passages about the atmospheric countryside, and portraits of minor characters’ lives. Ronald Hugh Morrieson, a…
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Two more very short book reviews
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1 min read
Chad Taylor – Heaven Again, Chad Taylor puts you right into a fictional Auckland that makes it seem much more dangerous and sexy than the one I live in. Apparently Taylor was doing a long walk along K Road and New North Road every evening when he was writing this, and it feels spot on,…
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To-read pile, back under control
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0 min read
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Three very short book reviews
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1 min read
On Beauty – Zadie Smith Apparently a homage to Howards End, On Beauty is the story of a washed out English professor, his family, his deadly rival and how it all breaks down deliciously. Its sexier than Smith’s other books, but has the usual lyrical writing you want to nick. Recommended. The Corrections – Jonathan…
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Book review – A Fraction Of The Whole – Steve Toltz
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1 min read
If this review was AFOTW, it would be 1500 words long and mention books I’d read as a lad, books my uncle read, and books I might read in the future. At 700 pages, you could say this novel is a ramble, and sustaining the tone and pace over that length is challenging, to say…
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Read: The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith
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1 min read
It may have been a mistake to read this right after White Teeth. The Autograph Man is on a completely different scale to its predecessor, the narrative taking only a couple of weeks and centering around one main character, Alex Li-Tandem, an autograph collector who loses his father in the opening chapter. Alex lacks charm…