This is not the end of the book

Posted 1:08pm Sunday 6th July 2014

Rumours of the death of the book have been grossly exaggerated. In this book-length discussion, Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière celebrate the book by delving into its history and speculating on its inevitable future, since, as Eco says early on: “The book is like the spoon […] Once invented, it Read more...

Beautiful Ruins - By Jess Walter

Posted 4:26pm Sunday 6th October 2013

Beautiful Ruins opens with its hero, Pasquale, first laying eyes on the sumptuously beautiful Dee Moray, an American actress who comes to Pasquale’s tiny Italian village by boat, borne across the Mediterranean like a Botticelli Venus. You then cut to Hollywood 40 years later, to a bored studio Read more...

Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls

Posted 3:50pm Sunday 4th August 2013

This entertaining read is the newest collection of short essays from humourist and writer David Sedaris, who burst onto the scene with his second book Me Talk Pretty One Day. As with his previous essay collections, Sedaris’ essays cover his childhood in North Carolina, the state of present-day Read more...

Mrs Dalloway

Posted 4:00pm Sunday 5th May 2013

Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway begins like this: “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” This opening sentence is about as simple as this book gets. From here, we are plunged headfirst into this swirling, teeming-with-life ocean of a book. At its most basic, Mrs Dalloway is a Read more...

Lives We Leave Behind

Posted 5:43pm Sunday 17th March 2013

Lives We Leave Behind, the newest release from Dunedin author Maxine Alterio, begins with a quote from Catherine Black, a nurse who served during World War I. “You could not go through the things we went through,” Black writes, “see the things we saw, and remain the same. You went into it young and Read more...

Little Sister

Posted 4:03pm Sunday 9th September 2012

There are two sentences – or beginnings of sentences, anyway – in Julian Novitz’s psychological thriller Little Sister that encapsulate everything this novel is about. The first, “To live is to battle with trollfolk”, from Henrik Ibsen, is quoted by the alarmingly volatile teenager Shane. The second Read more...

The Hut Builder

Posted 5:14pm Sunday 15th July 2012

It’s fair to describe Dunedin author Laurence Fearnley’s novel The Hut Builder as a portrait of the artist as a young Kiwi man. A character study rendered in luscious prose, The Hut Builder follows central character Boden Black from his early years as a 1940s rural Cantabrian with a love of poetry Read more...

Women In Love

Posted 8:39pm Sunday 3rd June 2012

Despite its title, D.H. Lawrence’s 1920 novel Women In Love is not — I repeat, NOT — a romantic book. If anything, it gives romance of the roses-and-Valentines-Day variety a swift and decisive slap in the face. Though it is mostly about relationships between men and women, what Lawrence is really Read more...

Bossypants

Posted 12:51am Monday 7th May 2012

Oh, Miss Tina, will you marry me? Who’s this Tina, you ask? That’d be Tina Fey, former Saturday Night Live writer, 30 Rock creator, all-round comedienne and now, thanks to her debut book Bossypants, pants-splittingly funny author. Part sardonic memoir, part behind-the-scenes tour, and part Read more...

Mysteries of Lisbon

Posted 4:56pm Sunday 29th April 2012

Mysteries of Lisbon is a long movie – as it should be. Based on the nineteenth-century classic Portuguese novel Os Mistérios de Lisboa, this film adaptation’s length enables the novel’s full scope to be explored – in particular its intertwining stories, multiple locations and fabulous, romantic Read more...