Karl's Reading List

Published by William Heinemann Ltd: London & Toronto, 1936. First published 1927. This is a slow paced and episodic book, following two Catholic priests seeking to establish and grow the diocese of New Mexico in the earliest days of the state. With both main characters apparently loosely based on historical figures, and with many other historical figures making an appearance, it is an interesting look at a specific part of religious history. It is also a book that grew on me. I really struggled to get into it's rhythm to start with, and actually put it down for a number of months before picking it up again. However, as the episodes (and the years of the narrative) continue, the characters of Father Latour and Father Vaillant do become more rounded. Vaillant is the more charismatic and evangelistic of the pair, whereas Latour (who is destined to become the titular Archbishop) is the more methodical, administrative and intellectual.  The book unfolds various stories at a gradual ...

Published by Picador/Pan Macmillan Ltd: London, 2007. First published 2006. I feel a bit bad leaving this one unfinished, because it is a very well-written book. I pushed on with it for almost half of the book's length. But... I just can't... It's so bleak. I need hope in what I read. I cannot handle the level of bleakness of something like this. It is one of the reasons I don't enjoy zombie fiction either - there is no hope in those worlds, just an ongoing spectre of death hanging over everything. A father and son make their way through a post-apocalyptic world. Everything is dead. Society is fallen. The few remaining humans have mostly turned to cannibalism. The father and son have a gun with two bullets left. They are making their way south, hoping for somewhere safe. It's heavy. It's disturbing. And now that I am a father with a young son, I feel this book - the weight of its emotions. And, I just can't... ...I can't imagine such a world... I totally...

Published by The Copy Press: Nelson, NZ, 2017. This is a self-published novel by someone who I remember as a teacher's aide at the highschool I went to. Self-published novels are generally a little bit less well edited, or have some sort of structural or pacing issues that 'properly' published novels can avoid, and this does have elements of that. However, once that has been put aside, the story itself is quite fun. The title works in two ways: it is the title of a film being shot within the context of the book (of whom the two main actors become part of the plot) and it is also a commentary on the main family of the narrative. Our main narrator, Prudence, and her sisters Faith, Hope, Charity and Honesty, all feature as important characters, and all have personalities that directly clash with their names. Their brother, Aslan, features far less but it is mentioned that, desptie having the weirdest name, he is the most normal of the family. Prudence shows her 'imprudent...

Published by Picador/Pan Macmillan: London, 2025. First published by Doubleday/Penguin Random House: New York, 2024. Last year this book was all the rage; a retelling of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but told from the perspective of the runaway slave known as N-Word Jim, it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction . And... that's all you need to know about the difference between those two awards! James is a well-told, interesting, thought-provoking read, with quite 'angry' undertones, but not generally crossing the line into sordid or unpleasant. If it had, maybe it would have won the Booker Prize as well. Maybe a little harsh, considering that this year I have also read The Remains of the Day , which is one of my favourite Booker Prize -winning novels. But, having now read five Pulitzer Prize  winners and only having given up on one of those so far ( The Grapes of Wrath ), the percentage of "readable and inter...

Published by Tyndale Momentum/Tyndale Oublishing House: Carol Stream, Illinois, 2013. Over the years I have read a number of biographies of Christians living under persecution. Some, like The Heavenly Man by Brother Yun or The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom are able to describe horrific situations, including torture, which still being uplifting. Others, like Eyes of the Tailless Animals by Lee Soon-ok, lean so far into the unpleasantness of the situation that they become difficult to read, even while still sharing important stories.  Captive in Iran is another story of living under persecution, and it is not a spoiler to say that the authors recount their time in prison in Iran - after all, it's right there in the title! However, whether through God's grace or through trying to avoid offending the readers' sensibilities (or some other reason?) the authors do something I haven't seen before - they make their suffering in prison not really 'as intense' as I wou...

Published by Steele Roberts Ltd: Wellington, Aotearoa NZ, 2008 (2001). This short book is a series of poems in which the author (as the title suggests) attempts to explain poetry to his father, a builder and more 'traditionally manly' Kiwi bloke (at least, the poems suggest this), using the medium of poetry to do so . The poems within are less self-contained poems than you would usually get in a collection, then. Instead, they all seek to explain a concept of poetry in a poetic fashion. We get poems with titles like 'The shape of words', 'The word as a means of communication' or even 'A set of instructions to be used when reading a poem', most of which take their title as a launchpad for a poetic/figurative unpacking of the concept in question. There are biblical allusions, lots of metaphors about building materials, and occasional touches of humour, such as when the poem 'The word as a memory' ends a list of relatively heard-felt connotations of...

Published by Metaphorosis Publishing, 2026. Edited by B Morris Allen. Short story collections are interesting to read cover-to-cover. No matter how good the collection is, there will always be some that grab your attention more than others, particularly if the collection is from a number of authors, rather than one. Trunk is one such collection, and what makes it an even more intriguing beast is that the connective tissue between these stories (other than they fact that they all fall into the fantasy or science-fiction genres) is that, in order to be considered for inclusion, the stories must have been rejected for publication multiple times. Each story ends with a short blurb about the author, followed by the history of rejection for the story that you have just read. Almost by necessity, then, the stories in this collection are a little odd, a little 'out there', a bit different in some way to your 'standard' short story, although most of them did hold my interest to ...