Thirty-six books I haven't read

Aiaiaiaiaiiiiiiiiii.

I say this because I’ve just counted how many unread books are sitting, pages all crisp and un-dog-eared, on my bookshelf.

Thirty-six.  Aiaiaiaiaiiiiiiiiii.

So I’m going to cheat. B*gger the books I’ve been reading. Here’s what I’ve been avoiding. Grouped into loose categories and accompanied by a few dog-ate-my-homework excuses.

Should have read yonks ago

London the Biography – long
The Corner – do five seasons of The Wire get me out of jail free?
Homicide  – as above
The Glass Bead Game – the prologue is TEDIOUS
Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy – should read something on the financial crisis… but is this The One?
The Map that Changed the World ­– borrowed … must read and post back
Baby No-Eyes – I quite like Patricia Grace… no excuse to hand
The Complete Polysyllabic Spree
How to be Alone – one and a half essays into it… must try harder.  See New Year’s resolutions
The Three Musketeers – waiting for someone else to finish it. YOU know who you are 

Still on the shelf for the sake of appearance
Balzac: Nine Tales from Les Contes Drolatiques – sounds hard
The Great War for Civilisation – has the moment passed?

Erring too much on the side of non-fiction and other unlikely contenders…
The Collapse of Globalism
Brothers Grimm Complete Fairy Stories  – ‘and then the soldier cut off the witch’s head’… tedious
Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You  – I bet it can
Dreams from my Father – sorry Mr President… I do hear you have a particular way with words
Stonefish – dunno, didn’t read The Bone People…
A Short History of Nearly Everything – got the text message bed-time version back in 2005
No 1. Ladies Detective Agency  – sigh
The Trouble with Physics  – it sounds too, too difficult, is the trouble
Wool to Weta 
Hitler’s Empire – he was a bad man…

Left by a friend, sibling or parent
The Unconsoled
Tales from Firozsha Baag
Touching from a Distance
The Harmony Silk Factory

The Art of Power

Baudolino

Meh!
John the Revelator – sorry McGee
Blood River – ditto
The Binding Chair
Prochownik’s Dream

On the shelf fewer than six months
A History of God
Mao: the Unknown Story
Out of Mao’s Shadow
Alone in Berlin

American Psycho killer, qu'est-ce que c'est?

American Psycho killer, the Talking Heads might warble sinisterly over Patrick Bateman’s six-foot Duntech Sovereign 2001 speakers in Brazilian rosewood… qu'est-ce que c'est?

Qu'est-ce que c'est, indeed, Mr Easton Ellis… qu'est-ce que c'est?

Brutal, clever, despicable and funny. One of the better (near best) and one of the worst books I’ve read.

You know the premise, you’ve probably seen Christian Bale (perfectly cast, I bet) as Patrick Bateman: Wall Street wealthy, obsessed with luxury goods, restaurant reservations, torture, mutilation and murder (animals, children, women, homeless people, he’s not picky – though he seems to leave blokes with jobs alone, give or take a work rival and a taxi driver).

Despite this year marking its 20^th birthday, it felt like a pretty contemporary read. The technology, fashion and music are old but the themes are familiar: a glut of vapid pop culture, a recession, a rise in homelessness to match it, a load of moneyed chaps in designer pinstripes who protest they’ve got nothing to do with it all (Bateman goes a step further and gouges out a homeless man’s eye). Trade Bateman’s Sony Walkman for an iPod touch, swap Les Misérables for the Glee soundtrack and abracadabra alacazam … it could be 2011, no?

And so, the book hypothesizes, satirically: preppy consumerism and bland vanilla culture spawns knife-wielding psychosis (I was so bored listening to Genesis, Whitney Houston and the English cast of Les Mis on CD that I just had to kill someone…) or perhaps just that such a culture could disguise such a psychosis.

At any rate, living in a city that pays a fair bit of homage to the bling (I present you with the queues outside Chanel in Tsim Sha Tsui on 23 December) it feels very relevant.

So what did I like? The obsessive descriptions of who furniture, clothes and anything else consumable was ‘by’; Patrick’s fixation with his David Onica painting (right before he kills his ex with a nail gun, she lets slip that he’s hung it upside down); the routine mistaken identity – all the guys he knows have the same haircuts, suits, girls...

But of course I hated the decapitation, the cannibalism and vicious violence against women and particularly, the scene with the rat. Though the title gives it away, right? It’s a book about a psycho killer, the violence is there for a reason. Is it gratuitous? Yes. Did I stop reading it word for word towards the end? Yes. If I were his editor, would I have asked Bret Easton Ellis to take out some of the gory bits? Probably not. And do I think it would be a better book without it? No.

So… if you don’t have the stomach for gut-drenched horror, I say run, run, run, run, run, run, run awaaaaaay from part-time banker, full-time homicidal maniac and Talking Heads fan Patrick Bateman. If you’re okay with skim reading, and the blackest of black-hearted satire then I say do it (read it in the afternoon when it’s sunny and you know the world is not such a bad place).

Apologies to Christian Bale, I don't think I'll ever be able to watch the movie. I couldn’t handle the rat scene.

Rolled up rugs, ticket stubs and other literary festivities

A few months ago I stuck up my hand and volunteered to help out at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival.

An act of altruism? Yes, well sort of...

An act of miserly cunning motivated by the desire to hear some people I’d heard of and admired (if not yet actually read) as well as some I hadn’t heard of but hoped to admire, without paying for a ticket? Yes, well sort of…

Motivation aside, the festival rolled round two weeks ago. I’ve had an enjoyable fortnight taking ticket stubs, picking up authors from hotels, passing microphones round rooms full of eager audience members, pointing out the loos, finding out where the loos are in order to point them out, putting up banners, pulling down banners and writing and issuing poorly spelled receipts for on-the-door tickets.

And an even better time… hearing Emma Donoghue talk about her research techniques (rolling her five year old up in a rug to see whether he could escape), sipping coffee listening to Amitav Ghosh’s thoughts on the Opium Wars, environmental destruction and whether his kids have read his books, flagging Jeffery Archer to hear Craig Silvey and Brian Castro at the Australian Consular General’s stunning (and difficult to find) Repulse Bay residence, and hearing Ex-Aussie PM Kevin Rudd’s daughter Jessica talk about why the label chick-lit doesn’t offend her.

Oh yeah, and all this means I’ve added the following to my gots-ta-read list:

1. Room (wasn’t going to do it, but if Ms Donoghue’s son is really putting all that effort into making sure his Mum’s stories are properly researched then I’ll give it a go – plus it sounds less Flowers in the Attic and more, umm, charming than I was expecting given the subject matter. Hooray)
2.  Burying the Bones – Hilary Spurling’s biography of West Virginian born, China-raised Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Pearl Buck whose 1931 novel The Good Earth changed the way many Americans thought of China and the Chinese
3. The Good Earth – I have it on good authority (Hilary Spurling’s) that it’s as wonderful a read today as it was in 1931
4. Rhubarb and Jasper Jones – both by Australian author Craig Silvey. Silvey is one of those rare people who just knew what they wanted to do when they grew up. He shunned University and age 19 sat down to write. He’s been awarded the prizes to suggest he definitely did the write thing…
5. When a Billion Chinese Jump – part travelogue, part environmental missive. Terracotta Warriors and the Great Wall? Nope. When Jonathan Watts toured China he sought out evidence of the environmental degradation the country’s rapid industrialization has wreaked on its landscape. The book examines the environmental issues facing China as well as the intriguing line-up of characters Watts met along the way. 

Adventures in the all-American arts

Mortality, Hitchcock and the metaphysical; beauty in New York; and democratic adventures in the brave new world of Jackson’s America... all-American and art focused is the best way to sum up my reading over the last few weeks.  The books and the case for each, below.

The book: By Nightfall

The case: reflecting on art and beauty and reaffirming that I’m lucky to be an only child...  Peter Harris is a forty-three year old art dealer searching for the real deal: an artist who creates masterful and beautiful art. Instead his search leads him towards his wife’s beautiful but troubled f***-up of a younger brother. Unsettling from the moment you clock where Peter may be headed, the novel is itself a thing of beauty, filled with the kind of longing and resignation with which you’d rather not identify. The plethora of literary and artistic references Michael Cunningham has loaded into his prose can occasionally grate, but if you make like me, eschew Wikipedia and embrace your ignorance it’s still a compelling read.

The book: Parrot and Olivier in America

The case: My book group didn’t like it (pretty unanimously) but I thought it was wonderful. These things are subjective you say? No, it’s clear that they are wrong. From the celerifere sketch on page 2, I was riveted. Peter Carey was inspired by the writings of French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville and has created his own guillotine-scarred aristocrat, Olivier de Garmont, loosely based on Tocqueville. As the title suggests, he partners Olivier with Parrot, an English servant with a chequered background in art and printing via Botany Bay and sends them off to America together, unhappily, to witness democracy in action. The result is a cheeky, surprising and colourfully written tale, using language that’s florid in an enticing, entertaining, never (though I must admit that the book group don’t agree with me) boring way.

The book: Point Omega
The case: Don DeLillo’s latest novel is a long, short read: at only 148 pages it took me the better part of a week to finish. It's inspired by, and opens and closes with scenes that take place at, an installation of 24 Hour Psycho, an artwork which slows the Hitchcock film down to run over 24 hours. Part murder mystery, part reflection on the metaphysical, Point Omega requires careful reading. DeLillo decelerates his characters, their thoughts and actions, shepherding them out into a desert location where the days run into each other and life is drawn out. Overall, interesting if not exactly enjoyable.

World Book Night, NZ Book Month and the HK International Literary Festival

Silent reading is out. Boisterous sharing of books, reading out loud and talking excitedly about writing is in pretty much everywhere (or at least in the three places that mean the most to me).


Hong Kong: March 8 to 18 is the Hong Kong International Literary Festival... there's a great line up of authors and events and I, for one, am very excited. The full line up is available on http://www.festival.org.hk


New Zealand: March is NZ Book Month, a time to celebrate Kiwi authors and read their books. With Whitcoulls in administration and Christchurch booksellers struggling with the tragedy of the Christchurch earthquake it's been a difficult time for the Kiwi book industry. Pay homage to Christchurch, help out a local bookshop and read a cracking good yarn, by buying a book by the likes of Christchurch writers Ngaio Marsh or Margaret Mahy. The NZ Book Council website also has an excellent resource with files on over 500 Kiwi authors and their books if you're looking to introduce yourself to a new-to-you Kiwi author. 


London: the stage is being set in Trafalgar Square for World Book Night on March 4. Go join the masses, get your hands on a free book and stay up all night reading it with the likes of Margaret Atwood.

The won thing: celebrating Shaun Tan

Forget Natalie Portman, Colin Firth and The King’s Speech. The Oscar win everyone should be talking about is The Lost Thing’s win for best short animation.  There’s a particular rabbit-shaped place in my heart for Australian picture book illustrator and Lost Thing creator Shaun Tan. So this morning, when I heard he’d won, I gave myself a little high five and pulled some of his books down to re-examine them and wonder at his creative genius.

If you want to wonder at them yourself – or at least wonder at some of his works of mechanical, architectural and zoological fantasy – noodle over to http://www.shauntan.net. For me, while The Lost Thing (the book on which his Oscar winning short is based) is both intriguing and beautiful, Tan’s two best works are The Arrival and The Rabbits.

The Arrival really is a picture book. Using not a word throughout, it tells the story of an immigrant leaving his family and home to journey to a new land. Tan’s fantastical creatures and buildings are at their most effective, showing how much of a stranger in a strange land, how lost and uncertain the Arrival feels in his new country.

In The Rabbits Tan provides the illustrations for Tomorrow When the War Began author John Marsden’s text.  The Rabbits is really an allegory for the colonisation of Australia and Tan’s illustrations give Marsden’s words real power. Make sure you’re sitting down when you get to the page with the words ‘and they stole our children’. 

Social media mooch round-up

Mooching around social media sites and other book blogs this week I've caught me these links:

1.    On my to-read list: Swamplandia! and People of Paper
2.    Reading the Oscar nominees like a book
3.    Rubber duckie, you're the one...
4.    iPrince of Denmark... Hamlet's playlist
5.    Extracting odd titles: Managing a Dental Practice: The Genghis Kahn Way 

Escaping escapism, the brilliant, the clear and the erudite: The Shia Revival

‘You should read this’, my brother-in-law said, pointing to his well-thumbed copy of Vali Nasr’s The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future. I knew, even before he said it that he was right, I should. The book had ‘The New York Times Bestseller’ stamped across the top in a font small enough, and tasteful enough, to ensure it wouldn’t be mistaken for a less serious sort of bestseller. On its back cover a number of prominent commentators were quoted, saying things like ‘brilliant, clear and erudite’.

I knew I should read it, but I was fairly certain I wouldn’t. It looked a bit hard and no matter how much I’d like to think I’m the sort of person who reads ‘brilliant, clear and erudite’ books, unfortunately I’m a bit slippery when it comes to non-fiction. Characters and plot matter to me and I often give the non-fiction section in bookshops the cold shoulder. I tell myself that without a storyline I won’t retain the information a book has to offer. This is, it turns out, itself fiction – a self-spun story to excuse my slightly escapist reading habits.

Two years after my brother-in-law recommended it, I reluctantly pulled the copy of The Shia Revival he’d left with us from the bookshelf. He was right, it is a book that should be read. It gives what I can only describe as an, ahem, ‘brilliant, clear and erudite’ explanation of the sectarian differences within Islam: who the Sunnis and Shiites are, what they believe respectively and how that has led to conflict both historically and recently. Stuff I didn’t know. Stuff I’m embarrassed not to have known and stuff that, when relayed to my Dad as information I hadn’t known, made him shake his head in disbelief. He didn’t call me an eejit, but perhaps he should have.

And all of this stuff is told in such a way to make it thoroughly digestible – there are plenty of anecdotes (keeping my thirst for story-telling sated) and plenty of footnote referenced detail. In many ways the book is a history of the Middle East, Vali Nasr explains the differences in Islam that arose after the prophet Muhammad’s death (put far too simply, Sunnis and Shiites differ in who they believe was Muhammad’s rightful successor); the wax and wane of secular Arab nationalism; Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini; and the political and religious workings within Iraq post Saddam Hussein. Iraq has a Shia majority but the Sunni minority or secular Ba’athists, for a long time, held most of the power. The changes brought about by the US invasion in 2003, Nasr argues have paved the way for a new Middle East and a potential shift, or shifts, in the balance of power between Sunnis and Shiites. All issues I’m ill-equipped to describe – and in many ways I feel I have little right to review a book that does describe them. For a properly equipped review, I’d recommend the New York Times review (it is, remember, their bestseller).

I should have read it back in 2008. It’s now slightly out of date: the edition I have was published in 2007 and things have moved quickly. An additional chapter covering the last three years would be helpful. But the explanation of the differences between Sunnis and Shiites alone has gone a long way to helping me watch and read about recent events in the Middle East, with a better understanding of the region. Glued to Al Jazeera over the past weeks, I’ve watched reports on the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings and in particular reports on unrest in Bahrain, where a Shia majority population is ruled by a Sunni monarchy, and thought I probably owe my brother-in-law a belated thank you.

First top list for the Year of the Rabbit

A Friday top ten (five was too tricky). Book-related news and websites from the week: 

1. The New York Times reading list for the Egypt crisis
2. Dating experience or pithy reads? Kindle Singles launched
3. Surprise best-seller: US federal Financial Crisis Inquiry Report sells out of first print run
4. Eau du sexy librarian
5. Gatsby gets the Strictly Ballroom treatment
6. Ten PM Question wins 2011 Margaret Mahy Medal
7. Gossip Girl meets American Psycho 
8. Two dimensional: Rumsfeld's memoir or Britney Spears' comic book biography? 
9. Hot dogs for Plath: famous author doodles
10. And because Valentine's Day is (almost) upon us, some vintage rrrrrrrromance covers

And it hasn't escaped me that Chinese New Year is upon us. In celebration I'm pulling Wild Swans from the shelf.  I've been meaning to read it for quite some time. And the time, it seems, is the Year of the Rabbit.

The Finkler Question: judging the Booker by its cover

I’ve got something like another 1170 books to read over the next forty-five years. I admit that I’ve made that projection based on a few loose ideas. It presupposes that several things will come to pass: the predictions of a fortune-teller who told my seven year old self I’d live to 75; that I’ll continue to read, on average, a book a fortnight; and a probably naïve assumption that reading, in something like its current format, is an activity people will continue to do – that eBook sales having surpassed paperback sales on Amazon, as is currently being reported all over the media – won’t in turn be surpassed by sales of some sort of information chip we’ll all have inserted into our elbows or under our eyelids or up our nostrils.

But pretend we’re on stable ground here and that my projection is likely.  1170… it’s quite a big number. But it’s still only a fraction of all the books available to be read. Last year Google projected (and I’m fairly confident they didn’t rely on any palm-reading or crystal ball gazing to come up with their number) that there were 129,864,880 books out there in the world. So if all publishing had stopped last year when Google made their projection, with my 1170 books, I would only ever be able to read 0.000009 per cent of the whole. As it is, publishers continue to release new titles and so my little fraction, as each year slips by, will become smaller and smaller. What’s my point? Even though I have a lot of books to choose, there are so many more to choose from. I’d like to minimise my future fractiousness by using my fraction for good – well for my own good. On good books, as I judge them.

Generally I choose what I’m going to read next by one of two methods. First on recommendation (and here I’m lumping together reviews, word-of-mouth and book prizes) and second by looking at a book’s cover and deciding whether it, umm, speaks to me.

Which brings me to what I’d like to say about last year’s Man Booker Prize winner, Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question. I judged it by its cover and it fell short. Really. I picked it up in bookshops in both Auckland and London and speak to me it did not. The back cover mentions recently widowed men reminiscing in an apartment, a mugging outside a violin shop, and a change in a character’s sense of self. The front cover includes a coat rail, a hat and a coat. Neither did anything for me.  And then, of course, a panel of five literary types gave it a prize. But still I didn’t want to read it because the cover image was boring and the text on the back made me feel somehow removed from its topic.

In December, it arrived under my Christmas tree, wrapped and with a label bearing my name, so I read it and it is, of course, very good. It is about everything the back cover mentions. It’s about old blokes reminiscing, it’s about two widowers and one never-married wanna-be widower and their friendship. More than anything, it’s about anti-semitism and being Jewish. Granted, as a Pakeha kiwi girl of no particular religious background, had Bloomsbury put that on the back cover, I could still have said it had no personal relevance for me. But this is a book that deals with issues that we all think are important and relevant. It could be called The Gaza Question (though perhaps three old men discussing Gaza also sounds like a turn-off). It’s not. The Finkler Question is, as all the post-prize media suggested, very witty. Its characters are wonderfully, awkwardly human. The only point I can put my finger on that ties my feelings about the text into my feelings about the cover is that occasionally, like Jacobson’s main character Julian Treslove, I felt on the outer: unequipped to pass judgement on some of the issues raised (for example Finkler’s leadership of Jewish pro-Palestinian group ASHamed Jews). At times, I also wondered whether the traits described as quintessentially Jewish were described wholly in jest, half in jest or in all seriousness. But despite these feelings, and its dull cover, The Finkler Question won me over. While I was reading it, I wanted to have with me always so that I could whip it out and continue reading whenever a spare moment arose.

So what am I getting at? Is it that I should stop judging books by their covers? I don’t think so. As evidenced by my reticence to read The Finkler Question even post Booker win (often a prize win makes a book a sure thing in my eyes), the cover test is pretty important to me. There is something wonderful about standing in a bookshop surrounded by colour and design and finding myself drawn to a book. Maybe the e-book format will help with that, but until my reading becomes wholly Kindle-based (note to self: first buy a Kindle) I think a fair whack of my 1170 future reads will be chosen by their covers. Which probably means I’ll make a few mistakes, but also means my bookshelf will, at least in my own eyes, be quite, quite beautiful. I suppose the only real point I could say I’m making (though I’m not – I’ve only just thought it through) is that occasionally it might be worth buying someone a book you’ve enjoyed that they think they won’t like, just to see. Or perhaps don’t – after all, they’ve probably only got another 1000 books to read.