Karl's Reading List

Published by Auckland University Press: Auckland, NZ, 2021 (2020). I am fascinated by the historical figure Te Rauparaha, one of the greatest of the Maori warrior chiefs who were living around the time of the first European settlers. Te Rauparaha achieved a lot in his life, particularly in the area of warfare, and as such he is a very controversial figure (depending on which iwi you talk to). Born as the youngest child in his family (when younger children were not expected to do as much) Te Rauparaha led his tribe, Ngati Toa, to settle Kapiti Island, and from there launched a series of campaigns which ended up conquering much of the lower North Island and the majority of the South Island! He is most famous now for writing the haka 'Ka Mate' (sung by the All Blacks), but his life has so much more to it than just that! This manuscript, translated carefully from te Reo (and with extensive editorial notes) by Ross Calman, was written by Te Rauparaha's son Tamihana Te Rauparaha....

Published by The Reader's Digest Association, Inc./Academy Chicago Publishers: USA, 1991. Volume 1 of 'Academy Mystery Novellas.' This is a collection of four novellas (longer than a short story; shorter than a novel) bound together in a single volume, each on the theme of - you guessed it - women sleuths. The four novellas here are each quite different, with the only common elements being their mystery fiction genre and their use of a female protagonist. Even their time periods are different; the first three were originally published in the 1930s while the fourth was published in the 1980s. This means that the first three seem a bit dated at times - one case would have been easy to solve if DNA testing had been available. To give a brief review of each novella: 'The Toys of Death', by G.D.H. Cole and Margaret Cole, has a famous (and fairly unpleasant) author found dead in his study. Although a well-known detective is on the scene to begin with, and is able to prove...

Published by Hodder Moa Beckett Publishers Limited: Auckland, NZ, 1997. First published by Barry Crump Associates Ltd, 1988. A collection of short stories and poems by Crump. Some elements are a little dated/offensive by modern standards, but otherwise they are an interesting mix of stories, covering a lot more genres than I expected.  'Warm Beer' is a ghost story with a punch of an ending. 'That Way' is a dark drama involving a ruthless man quick to kill his pets. 'Cave' is a slightly supernatural poem involving possible time travel. More than one story has a protagonist contemplating, if not outright committing murder!  And of course, there are a number of the humorous slice-of-rural-life yarns that Crump was well known for. My favourites include 'Overheard in the Pub' which tells a shaggy dog story about a live fish being transported in a four-gallon kerosene tin through the outback, 'Double Scotch', in which the protagonist believes his publi...

Published by Vintage Books/Penguin Random House LLC: New York, 2023. 'A Mr Darcy and Miss Tilney Mystery' Book 2. Preceded by ' The Murder of Mr Wickham. ' As mentioned above, this book is a sequel to The Murder of Mr Wickham and is the third book I have read (counting its predecessor and the un-connected  Death Comes to Pemberley ) in the growing sub-genre of 'Jane Austen murder mysteries.' Jonathan Darcy (son of FitzWilliam and Elizabeth Darcy from Pride and Prejudice ) and Juliet Tilney (daughter of Henry and Catherine Tilney from Northanger Abbey ) reunite in the village of Barton and once again are faced with a murder to solve, this time of Sophia Willoughby (from Sense and Sensibility ).  Suspects include many of the characters from that novel, along with some of the school friends of Sophia's husband John Willoughby, a trio comprised of Jonathan Darcy himself, Mr Follett and Mr Bamber. With Willoughby being a very unlikeable figure, the investigation...

Published by Te Herenga Waka University Press: Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, 2023. Eleanor Catton has the privilege of writing one of the few Booker books I can actually say I enjoyed! She is also a Kiwi author, which works well for the current reading challenge I am a part of. Birnam Wood is Catton's third book, and follows a group of 'eco-activists' who plant gardens in 'wasted spaces' throughout various cities, using reserves, the sides of motorways, unsuspecting people's backyards etc. The group calls themselves 'Birnam Wood' after the wood from Macbeth, which "moved"... Birnam Wood the group consider themselves to be planting 'moving' gardens. Through a series of circumstances, the founder of the group, Mira, meets Robert Lemoine, a shady American billionaire, who offers the group the chance to scale their operations way up (by planting the property of the recently knighted Sir Owen and Lady Jill Darvish), and possibly even be...

Published by Penguin Books: North Shore, Auckland, NZ, 2006. I am currently involved in a national Teacher's Reading Challenge, in which books by New Zealand authors gain double points... so you'll be seeing a few more Kiwi authors over the next few months. This book, which was nominated for a Booker prize but didn't win, was lent to me by a co-worker who had just finished it. Her comment to me was that it felt a bit like a Pacific To Kill a Mockingbird, in the way the protagonist (a young girl) was witnessing dramatic and 'adult' events but interpreting them through the eyes of an innocent child. This is an apt description.  For the Teacher's Reading Challenge, I wrote a few notes on my thoughts while reading: "sweet - happy - nice - interesting - OMGWHATSHAPPENINGMAKEITSTOP!! - epilogue."  This is also an apt description. Mister Pip is told through the eyes of Matilda, a young girl from Bougainville in Papua New Guinea. When a civil war breaks out an...

Published by Picador: London, UK, 2001. First published 1971. An odd book, containing three different narratives (along with separate prologue and epilogue narratives) all on the theme of feeling displaced in a different culture and environment.  The first main story is told from the perspective of Santosh, an Indian servant who moves to America, only to find himself questioning his life choices. The next story follows a West Indian man who travels to England to support his brother, only to become disillusioned and eventually murder someone.  The third main narrative - which is the longest and also the titular 'In a Free State' - follows follows two English expats - Bobby and Linda - as they road trip south through a progressively more war-torn African nation. On the way we learn a lot about each character - mostly through their conversations - and witness their interactions with each other and those around them. As with many of the  Booker books I have read, there is an ...

Published in an omnibus edition "The Essential Crump Collection" containing: "A Good Keen Man"; " Bastards I Have Met "; " Wild Pork and Watercress ", by Hodder Moa Beckett Publishers Limited: Auckland, NZ, 2003. Originally published 1971. This is the third Barry Crump book I've reviewed here, after Gold and Greenstone and Wild Pork and Watercress . Unlike those other two books, this book (I'm not really all that comfortable with the title) is a collection of short stories, rather than an ongoing (loose) narrative. The thread tying these stories together is that they are all nominally (as the title suggests) b*stards that Crump has 'met'. He arranges the book alphabetically, with one b*stard for each letter of the alphabet (plus a few spares he adds in at the end), even going so far as to create a "Latin" name for each 'species' of b*stard he mentions (such as Bastardus loafus for a 'Lazy B*stard'). Desp...

Published by Flame Tree 451: London, UK, 2013. Originally published 1796. Dickens needs to be read at a particular pace, but when I get on the right wavelength I love his writing. This book opens with a section over a page long which just describes the London fog, and yet it is a beautifully written section that even manages to say something about the various locations and characters that the fog rolls through.  Bleak House  is a great mix of comedy, tragedy, light romance and biting satire, as indeed many of Dickens' best works are. This particular novel focuses on a never-ending court case, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, to which all of our main characters are linked in some way. A mysterious figure known only as 'Nemo' is found dead, and something about his handwriting seems to link him to the cold and distant Lady Dedlock. Meanwhile, Esther Summerson, a young woman of uncertain parentage, navigates her new life as ward of and housekeeper to John Jarndyce, as well as perhaps som...

Published by Alma Books, 2017. First published 1902. No, this is not a Stephen King novel. Rather, this very sweet and silly story follows the titular five children (Cyril, Anthea, Robert and Jane, along with their baby brother, whom they call 'Lamb') as they discover a "sand fairy" or "Psammead" living in a gravel pit near their home. The Psammead can grant wishes that last until sunset, and agrees - reluctantly - to give the children one wish per day. The remainder of the book details each wish the children make, followed up with how the wish invariably goes wrong. Wishing for money, for example, leads to the children receiving old golden coins that they struggle to change for anything useful. Wishing for wings leads them to being trapped on a roof after sunset.  Each chapter is fairly self-contained, outlining a single wish and its consequences, although some elements of continuity do build up over time. The humour in the book comes from the situations an...

Published by Red Fox/Random House Children's Publishers UK: London, England, 2012 (1993). First published 1949 or 1951. Book 1 in the 'Adventure' series. Followed by ' South Sea Adventure. ' This is the first in a series of 14 novels written by adventurer Willard Price. I remember reading them when I was younger, and have slowly built up my collection of the series over time. I actually started reading this book with Elise, but after a few chapters it hadn't gripped us as a 'shared' book, so we put it aside and then I picked it up again more recently. The book stars brothers Hal and Roger Hunt, in their late and mid teens respectively, who, with their father John, are travelling into the Amazon to capture a variety of animals for zoos, circuses and the like. Already this is a mildly uncomfortable topic for modern sensibilities; it gets even more so when the Hunts purchase a shrunken head from a native village for a museum of natural history. "At fir...

Published as an audiobook by Blackstone Audio Inc., 14-08-2015. Narrated by Lewis Grenville. Originally published 2007. This book, subtitled Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down, is fairly accurately titled! We get a history of piracy in the Caribbean, as well as a look at some of the events and individuals that inspired the Caribbean pirates - learning, as an example, of the pirate stronghold of Madagascar. The 'republic' of the title is the town of Nassau on the island of New Providence, where a pirate society of sorts existed for quite some time. The book is full of fascinating information, and doubles as a biography of the most prominent pirates, including Charles Vane, Henry Avery, and Blackbeard (Edward Thatch). Each pirate's individual personality and goals come across well, with Vane easily the most violent of the main pirates. Some moments surprise, such as when one of the most successful pirates is killed b...

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing: London, Berlin, New York, 2008. This short poetic book is the sequel to the short poetic book  Love That Dog, a book I have previously read (though apparently long enough ago that it's not on any of my reading lists!). In Love That Dog we are introduced to Jack, a student who struggles to engage with English in any way (it appears he is somewhat on the spectrum). His teacher, Miss Stretchberry, introduces him to poetry through having him write a journal (which we read as the book) and through looking at poems about dogs (which Jack loves). Hate That Cat picks up the following year, with Jack once again writing a journal in Miss Stretchberry's class, once again resisting writing poetry about anything but dogs (especially not about cats, which a Jack hates ) and now grieving the loss of his dog, Sky. Of course, his teacher slowly stretches him into learning new poetic features and challenges his assumptions about cats. As with Love That Dog, t...

Published by Marshall, Morgan & Scott, Ltd: London, Edinburgh, 1948. In 2018, after I had started keeping a book list but before I started reviewing them, I read the book Full Surrender by J Edwin Orr. I remember enjoying it, and even collected a few quotes from it in my quote database, including: "Too often prayer is a one-sided affair, degenerating into "Listen, Lord, Thy servant speaketh" instead of "Speak, Lord, Thy servant heareth." ( Full Surrender, page 16). Having just finished The Reason for God and looking for another theology book, I noticed I Saw No Tears on my shelf and decided to give it a go. With an author I had enjoyed before and a quite biblical title, I was ready for another meaty challenge to my faith. I was surprised, then, to find that I Saw No Tears is a book of memoirs, rather than theology, outlining some of Orr's experiences as an army chaplain during World War 2. I guess this disappointed me a little, but what disappointed me...

Published by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd: London, 2017 (2008). I first realised I was going to enjoy this book when I opened to the introduction and saw that the first epigraph was a quote from Darth Vader. Timothy Keller was a well-known theologian and pastor who died earlier this year. Browsing in Manna (my local Christian book store) I saw this book on display and decided to give it a go.  It was really worth the read. Keller outlines the reasons for belief in God in general and Christianity in particular, pushing back against common secular arguments thoroughly and firmly, while still maintaining a spirit of dialogue. In opening the book, for example, he argues that believers should be more open to admit doubt ( "A faith without some doubts is like a human body without any antibodies in it. People who blithely go through life too busy or indifferent to ask hard questions about why they believe as they do will find themselves defenceless against either the experience of tragedy ...

Published by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.: Carol Stream, Illinois, 2008. For my birthday last year I was given this devotional, by an author I had never heard of, and started reading it sometime later in September. I have quite a hit-and-miss record with devotionals; they are often a bit glib or cliche for me and I struggle to stick with them. This devotional, however, quickly appealed to me and although I'm not sure exactly what day I started reading it last year, I know I have now read every entry in it. What I like about this devotional is that it is quite ready to dig into deeper theology, occasionally even into commentary! An example of a good challenge (from only the second day of the year!): "Many believers get caught up in getting the most out of their salvation. Few move on to giving the most out of their salvation. But those who do will realize one of the many paradoxes of the Kingdom: Giving it all results in getting it all. A heart poured out in praise results in...

Published by Fontana Books: London and Glasgow, 1974 (1959). First published 1957. Recently Elise and I welcomed our first child into the world! Super exciting! Baby and mum are both healthy, although some complications during delivery meant that we ended up staying in hospital longer than expected. I grabbed this book from the hospital book exchange and managed to read the entire thing before we went home (you know, in between supporting Elise with her recovery). The setting of this mystery is a small village in South East England, where the "Dance of the Five Sons" is performed each Winter Solstice by William Andersen and his five sons. The dance - a Morris dance/Mummers play/sword dance steeped in ritual and tradition - involves a moment where 'the Fool' (played by William) is 'beheaded', only to be resurrected later in the play. However, by the end of the dance it is discovered that William has indeed been beheaded, and Inspector Alleyn is called in to dis...

Published by Marshall Cavendish Ltd: London/Barcelona, 1987. First published 1857. Book 2 in 'The Chronicles of Barsetshire.' Preceded by ' The Warden. ' Followed by 'Doctor Thorne.' I quite enjoy picking up a book and having no idea what to expect. With older novels this can also extend to not knowing whether an author was well-known in their day or what genre to expect. This is the first Anthony Trollope book I have ever read, and all I knew about him before reading was that I sometimes saw books by him for sale at the annual Founders Park Book Fair in the classics section. With Barchester Towers I had only the cover to give me further insight; the cover has a picture of an elderly clergyman and a woman on the cover, so I felt confident it had something to do with at least one clergyman. I was right on the clergy front, but what I didn't expect was that Trollope is very funny! Elise will attest that I sniggered or chuckled out loud at various times through...

Published by Morgan Rice (self-published), 2013. Book 1 in 'The Sorcerer's Ring.'  Audiobook version uploaded to Spotify 18 September 2013.  Narrated by Wayne Farrell. Elise found this book when we had finished Sense and Sensibility and were looking for a new audiobook. The appeal was a) it was fantasy and b) it was a free audiobook. With only those two pieces of information we decided to give it a go. I have since also learned that c) it was Morgan Rice's first novel, and to be honest d) it shows. The book is very cliché - not necessarily a bad thing. Our protagonist, Thorgrin (often just Thor) is the youngest son in a small village, working as a shepherd for his unloving father and bullying older brothers. He wants to join the king's legion, but is forbidden to due to his age and standing within his family. When he comes of age Thor refuses to be overlooked and leaves home, journeying to King's Court in order to prove himself. This he does, making some strong ...

Published by Puffin Books/Penguin Random House UK: Great Britain, 2013 (2007). Book 3 in the 'Percy Jackson' series. Preceded by ' Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters .' Followed by 'Percy Jackson and the Battle of the Labyrinth.' After The Sea of Monsters left me a little underwhelmed, it has taken me a while to revisit the Percy Jackson series. However, finding this third book in a book exchange seemed like a good sign. The Titan's Curse is a much stronger entry in the series, and as I suspected, the pieces that were moved into place in Sea of Monsters now begin to play a more prominent role. Thalia, for example, is a great new addition to the series - as a daughter of Zeus who feels she has been let down by her father once too often, it makes sense that in certain moments she is tempted to mistrust the gods in general. Other new characters in this book include twin siblings Bianca and Nico, who have a somewhat mysterious past, and the hunters of Artemis...