Vanda Symon has a nice review of North Pole South Pole by Gillian Turner – sounds like a great non-fiction read.

The Well Read Kitty has another review up for The Nile – and this sounds like an amazing read.

The Vicbooks blog has a great post about the news that Hodder want to update Enid Blyton. And why did I not know about the Vicbooks website – it’s fantastic, people!

So, the 2010 Man Booker Prize longlist of 13 titles has been announced and the … nominees… are (dundahdahDAH!):

Peter Carey Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber and Faber)

Emma Donoghue Room (Pan MacMillan – Picador)

Helen Dunmore The Betrayal (Penguin – Fig Tree)

Damon Galgut In a Strange Room (Grove Atlantic – Atlantic Books)

Howard Jacobson The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury)

Andrea Levy The Long Song
(Headline Publishing Group – Headline Review)

Tom McCarthy C (Random House – Jonathan Cape)

David Mitchell The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet  (Hodder & Stoughton – Sceptre)

Lisa Moore February (Random House – Chatto & Windus)

Paul Murray Skippy Dies (Penguin – Hamish Hamilton)

Rose Tremain Trespass (Random House – Chatto & Windus)

Christos Tsiolkas The Slap (Grove Atlantic – Tuskar Rock)

Alan Warner The Stars in the Bright Sky
(Random House – Jonathan Cape)

Oh my! I haven’t read any of these! And I call myself a book reviewer … PAH! Though, in my saving grace, I do have a copy of the book that should win and yes I’m saying that even though I haven’t read it yet, but come on y’all it’s David Mitchell and that man is a fricken genius writer and one of the best of our time, and I have no problems stating that categorically, at all.

Inhale.

I have been holding off on reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet because I know it’s going to be brilliant and once you’ve read it… you’ve read it. You can’t ever read it for the first time again. Ever! And I’m waiting for just the right moment when I can sink into it and splash around like a duckling in a rain puddle on a summer’s day.

Plus the cover of the edition I have – she is gorgeous. I have reproduced it below in all it’s colour glory, but, oh! I cannot reproduce the way it feels, the slight gloss on the blue, the smell, the anticipation! I love this book like it’s an actual living, breathing thing… and that’s before I’ve read it. (Get that, e-book pushers? Yeah, you heard me.)

Ah, Penguin. It’s a rollercoaster ride with you, isn’t it? So far this year I’ve loved a book, hated a book, and now back to love. And there’s all those odd goings-on with plagiarism and such. They’re like the Microsoft of New Zealand publishing.

But, on to Cannibal Jack. What a great book! What a great story! What a great character! Jacky Marmon was a “Pakeha-Maori”, born in Sydney to Irish parents who first jumped ship around 1817 to live with Maori around Kerikeri River and other Ngapuhi hapu around the Bay of Islands. Eventually he ended up with Hongi Hika, survived the Musket Wars and settled in the Hokianga, much later becoming involved with Hone Heke.

Cannibal Jack has a great narrative flow – based on two versions of Marmon’s supposed “autobiography” that were published in New Zealand newspapers around the time of his death in 1880, it intersperses sections from these with Bentley’s detailed research into the truer story of Marmon’s life. This allows Bentley to highlight and use the more flowery and, frankly, adventurous account of Marmon with the drier details of, for example, ship movements around New Zealand, missionary reports and other, more reliable, sources of historical data.

And it presents a fascinating portrait of Pakeha early involvement with Maori and the way those Pakeha viewed Maori as individuals and as a people. There is lots of detail of Maori life pre-colonisation, and some great examples of Pakeha misinterpretations of Maori concepts of tapu, muru and mana. Bentley also does a skilful job of interpreting Marmon’s stories to tease out the details of Pakeha feelings towards the Maori “way of life” and show us why the histories of Pakeha-Maori like Marmon are still so relevant today.

Marmon became a subject of much myth and speculation by other Pakeha in colonial New Zealand, mostly due to his wild tales of engaging in cannibalism and… yeah, okay, it was mostly the cannibalism. Let’s face it, even now cannibalism has a particular hold on the collective gory imagination of just about every culture in this world, and whether Marmon witnessed and was really involved with quite as much cannibalistic practice as he claimed would have to be open to conjecture, as Bentley makes pretty clear. What isn’t in doubt, however, is that Marmon’s editors/ghost writers knew that including as many details as they could attribute to Marmon’s flippant stories of such things, or embellish, was a great way to ensure readership!

Cannibal Jack is also wonderfully illustrated with both recognisable and less well-known images from early Pakeha history. I hope the story of early Maori and Pakeha interactions is as intriguing for other readers as it is for me – because really this is the story of why we are now who we are. Once we were people on opposite sides of the world, and when we came together we muddled through mutual captivation and confusion to some semblance of a nation and culture of our own. Histories like this can only help that grow even more. Three cheers.

Soulless, Changeless, Blameless

Aha! I slay me.

Changeless and Soulless have bounced around the interwebs for a while so I thought I’d dive in and have a read – Changeless was the first title to become available for me at the library so, despite it being the second in the series, I took it. I’ve been told I really should have read Soulless and I will be when it becomes available.

Anyway, actual book? A fun piece of fluffery. Frippery even. Don’t expect much (which I kind of made the mistake of doing), don’t expect writing that extends beyond exposition and you’ll be fine.

Does that make me sound like a total po-faced killjoy? Because it reads like it does.

Some of the supposed language tics annoyed the frick out of me, the plot was a little slow to begin with but improved immensely, I’m not one for cliffhanger endings, I enjoyed a lot of the humour, I engaged more with the characters as the book progressed, I’m happy to read the others (but not looking to run out and buy them), I didn’t love it like I thought I would but I’m willing to look into a bit more of the genre (steampunk. I believe).

Changeless was fun. Is what I’m trying to say.

I think I need to relax more.

Blog reader recommendation for the win! Thanks Craig for recommending Jaime Hernandez – upon which I ran right out to the library and got this title (I’m so suggestible). I didn’t like this quite as much as Strangers in Paradise but to be fair that is more a matter of some personal taste around narrative and not a negative comment on this title.

Locas II is wild, a bit crazy, awesomely illustrated, sad and fun. I can’t comment a lot on the storyline because this is the first Jaime Hernandez I’ve read so these characters are all new to me. The story swings from female character centred to male character centred and, really, that just makes it so enjoyable to read, compared to the “action” graphic novel genre. Is that a genre? If not I just made it up – but do you know what I mean? Manly action hero stuff – a lot of which is good but a lot of which is crap.

Tamburlaine Must Die by Louise Welsh

I thoroughly enjoyed my first read of Louise Welsh earlier this year, so I was keen to get this out of the library when I spotted it purely by chance! And I’m glad I did as it is definitely a worthwhile read, a short novel speculating on the last days of Christopher Marlowe (a contemporary of Shakespeare) who was stabbed and died under circumstances that were mysterious at the time and have become increasingly mysterious over the centuries.

Welsh explores this mystery and gives us an entertaining story at the same time – which seems to be Welsh’s modus operandi and the reader is all the better for it!

A great short read – perfect for a little weekend quiet time.

Three Shadows by Cyril Pedrosa

Duuhuuhuuhuude… *sobs uncontrollably*

So there’s this lovely little family with this cute little kid and then these shadows appear and then the mother freaks out and then the father freaks out and then he takes the cute little kid and flees and… and… and… *breaks down again*

*deep breath*

It’s a great looking graphic novel and the story is sweet and poignant and devastating and really, if you have kids or are just really, really attached to them then make sure you read this with a box of tissues handy.

*sniffle*

The Widow’s Daughter by Nicholas Edlin, Penguin, RRP $30, ISBN 9780143204091, Available now.

This review that has been haunting my brain for a few days now – well, ever since I finished The Widow’s Daughter. This should be a great book and I should have liked it – it has a great premise, it’s a debut novel, but the writing is technically good, it has a strong New Zealand connection… but nothing about it came together. And so much about it left me cold and wondering why I was reading it.

The Widow’s Daughter focuses on Peter Sokol – American marine and surgeon who arrives in Auckland in the early 1940s and becomes involved with a mysterious, self-proclaimed British family through a growing attraction/love/obsession for their daughter, Emily.

Much mystery then ensues, and the book switches between this setting and the Californian coast in the 70s, where Sokol lives with his partner and works as an artist - and the release of a new book written by a fellow Marine and essentially telling what Sokol believes is his story becomes the catalyst for revisiting within himself his time in New Zealand.

One of the downfalls is this switching between the two stories – particularly in the initial stages of the book, the chapters are quite short and there just isn’t enough time in each era to become comfortable and enthralled – or to take in what’s happening and become connected to events, locations and the characters. And it’s this sense of connection (which can really sort out the great books from the okay books) which then becomes a major problem later on.

I felt no connection to the characters in The Widow’s Daughter and little connection to the location or story. I found myself being less interested in the characters as the book went on – which is bottom about face, right? But the characters were cold, and unpleasant without charm. With this happening it then became difficult to connect to the location (despite a very obvious reason for why it should have been an easy connection – one of the reasons I wanted to read The Widow’s Daughter in the first place) and to the story – if I’m not caring about these characters I’m not caring about where they’re going, what will happen to them before they get there – and I had no emotional involvement in any possible redemption/epiphany of any of them. 

The depiction of Auckland begins charmingly and truthfully with a focus on the nature of the light in New Zealand – sharp, hard, all-revealing and dazzling. I had a moment of “yes!” that got drowned out by the repetition of this insight – again and again and again and again and… again. Oh wait, metaphorical, right? *sigh* And any reader looking for an interesting sense of place from the setting of New Zealand, or any authentic sounding voice of the inhabitants, will finish very disappointed. Beyond the tidbit about Victoria Park being a rubbish tip/burner (again, repeated too many times) there is little detail about either the New Zealand/Auckland of the time or the Americans who found themselves there. One finished with the impression that the Kiwis at the time were all boofheads and the Americans were all drunks who spent all of their days with prostitutes. Really?

In the final equation I was simply frustrated and annoyed by The Widow’s Daughter. At heart it is not a badly written book but it all feels a bit like a show. In a twist the tagline on the cover – “When love becomes obsession” – ends up being quite apt – a meaningless phrase that doesn’t seem to have had a lot of time put into it or a critical eye cast over it.

I’ll email you shortly!

And the loser is… me. For not announcing this on Tuesday night like I was supposed to. No excuses – epic fail on my part.

I’m so sorry you guys!

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman There can’t be many people who don’t know the story of Maus but in case you don’t, it’s a retelling of the Holocaust with the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats. At least that’s what the basic overviews will tell you but what they don’t tell you is it’s so much more than that. Without wanting to sound flippant there has evolved certain tropes around cultural explorations of the Holocaust in our society – Maus ignores and explodes all of these.

It’s heartrending in its factual account of the lives of Spiegelman’s parents, Vladek and Anja, and their survival through WWII and Auschwitz, and the portrayal of Art’s relationship with his father Vladek. There’s no glossing over the dark realities in order to portray the easy dichotomy of Nazi=bad, everyone else=good. It was war.

Chaucer by Peter Ackroyd. On a completely different note, Chaucer is a brief biography of … Chaucer (surprising, non?). I have really enjoyed Ackroyd’s previous novels and non-fiction (London in particular is a work of stunning history) but this was unfortunately pedestrian. Bah.

The Colour of Magic graphic novel. Not Terry Pratchett but the next best thing! Pretty enjoyable actually, though I always find with graphic novel adaptations that you wish they didn’t rush through them so fast. Would it be so hard to do an indepth version? Or perhaps that’s not the point. Fun, even if the illustrations could never match (in my mind) Josh Kirby’s fantastic cover art for the pre-2001 Discworld books.

Random list randomizer went crazy!

Chris is the winner of Shadow Sister

Sandra is the winner of Thief

Marcushobson is the winner of A Matter of Life and Death

I’ll email all of you for your postal addresses. Thanks again everyone, and don’t forget you can still win Gunshot Road or The Crime of Huey Dunstan.