Autumn Book Club

Well it’s going to be winter shortly making sure we all stay indoors, and if you do find yourself with a fabulous winter cold/flu, then these fabulous new reads from Thread’s Autumn Book Club might help you while away the hours…

Autumn Book Club

Well it’s going to be winter shortly – but reading has been slow going what with a busy work life, and those horrible unwanted colds and coughs that always seem to effect your small people at the beginning of winter. But the rain has arrived, making sure we all stay indoors, and if you do find yourself with a fabulous winter cold/flu, then these might help you while away the hours…

I am going to start with the most depressing. Because I can. Death is never pretty. It just isn’t. It is never (or at least hardly ever) like it is in the movies where the cancer stricken person dies slowly, surrounded by family, in their own homes, with a soft soundtrack in the background and their life partner holding them tenderly. I am sure it happens somewhere, but never often.

’So much for that’ ($38.99) is written by Lionel Shriver (a lady by the way). About death. This is death by cancer, in all its hideous glory. Made all the worse, right from the start, because it is also an intense look at the insurance and medical system in the US. It is a particularly harrowing book, and I didn’t like it AT ALL when I first started it. None of the characters are likeable – and I mean none of them. The lead character is the unusually named Shep Knacker, and he selfishly is obsessed with moving himself to some third world country where he can live off US$5 a day for the rest of his life, in an uncomplicated and frugal manner. His wife is never keen on this idea, and has gone along with him simply to humour him, and because she is convinced he will never do so. But he does. He hands in his notice (to his horrible boss), books his tickets, packs his bags, and informs his wife and their son can either come with him, or stay behind. Unfortunately she has rather unsettling news for him. She has cancer. A rare cancer, and she needs him. Or rather she needs his rather pathetic health plan from work. So he is forced to go back cap in hand and ask for his job back, and no go on his life-changing trip. So begins their long trip with cancer. It is a long book, and some of the detail is a little unnecessary, but by the end I had come to understand and enjoy these brittle, battered characters, and their noisy resolution as they truly assess life, love and cancer. Can’t say I loved it – but I certainly couldn’t put it down toward the end.

The best piece of wardrobe advice I ever got was from Oprah. Yep. And I am not ashamed to admit it. She did this series on de-cluttering your life many moons ago, when I was still living in London. I had a one year old, and every afternoon while she slept, Oprah was my guilty (and cheap) pleasure. The advice was that you wear 20% of your wardrobe 80% of the time, so work out what those pieces are, and why you like them, and you are less likely to make more fashion mistakes. How right she was. Still live by that little gem. But imagine living by EVERY little gem that came out of Oprah’s mouth! Well Robyn Okrant decided she would give it a try for an entire year. Every time Oprah said “you must” or “every woman should”, she decided she would live that advice. The book ‘Living Oprah’ is the result. Ms Okrant is actually a funny writer – quite droll and a tad on the dry side. She needed to be. This could have very easily become a humourless exercise, if you took it a bit too seriously. And at times she did. And that’s where the book lost it’s way a bit. Trying to find too much meaning in what Oprah does. Her conclusions at the end of the book are, well, not exactly earth shattering! The most interesting part was the sheer breadth of what Oprah tries to tackle each year with her shows. And how ardent she is about her ‘work’. She said something very interesting near the end of the book, which is a quote from her speech for her Bob Hope Humanitarian Award, “The greatest pain in life is to be invisible. What I have learned, is that we all want to be heard.” It seems to me, that Oprah must be quietly, in a lot of pain. The book is funny, easy to read – and actually really interesting. Don’t be looking for too many deep insights though.

Now this is an interesting book. Originally touted as ‘based on a true story’, it would now appear, maybe not. The American author, Johanna Moran, wrote the book ‘The Wives of Henry Oades’ ($32.99) based on a case her father had read about in his law school days. But Matt Nippert of the NZ Herald, in an interesting article, has bought up the point that there is no historical backing for this tale in NZ itself. The story is a fairly scandalous one. It is the story of an English family who come to Wellington in the 1800’s. They are separated by warring, utu seeking Maori warriors who take the wife, Margaret and their 4 children as slaves. They are kept for 6 years, and when they are finally released, they return to Wellington to find that their father and husband, Henry Oades, has left for a new life in San Francisco assuming they were dead. Margaret does all she can to follow her husband, and you really get to admire her tenacity and strength of purpose in her journey. She arrives in the US with their remaining children only to find he has married again. The book is mainly about the many court cases they are involved in as they seek to clear their names of bigamy charges, and live a life that only they can find a balance to. It turns out, after a little digging, that historically there is a little information on this court case in the US, but virtually none here in New Zealand. Various respected academics have argued the point that the snatching of a family by Maori would have been huge new here if it had ever happened. There is the possibility that the original newspaper story about the ‘case’ all those years ago, was actually a hoax itself. So the book is now ‘based on a widely publicised and controversial newspaper account’ rather than on fact. For those that like historical dramas, it’s a good book. I usually don’t like costume dramas in any form, but I actually enjoyed this book. It could be slow in places, and the characters a little distantly written, but it is amazing what the author could do with one small newspaper clipping.

Growing old, gracefully, or disgracefully, has never been a hot topic for books. Rosie Thomas is definitely aiming to change this. ‘Lovers and Newcomers’ ($38.99) is not exactly ‘chick lit’, but rather ‘hen-lit’ as someone in my book club said. It is a book for the more mature reader. With a healthy sense of humour, and fun. It is the story of six old college friends who decide to come and live together as they enter their 60’s, at the beautiful country home of Miranda Meadowes. They have rather a delicious time in the beginning, with them all getting on as famously as they originally did, all those years before. But things are never straight forward, and as an Iron Age burial site is discovered on their property, things start to shift. I really enjoyed this book. Not at all hard on the eye or the heart – in fact it has plenty of that (and a few racy bits). It is a perfect easy read, one that is a bit hard to put down, once you get into it. I know airport novel seems to be a curse rather than a blessing – but it is a great one to just sit down, get a bit lost in, and move happily on. Your mum will love it.

Well away from the fiction, and onto some practical stuff! ‘5 ways with…’ ($29.99) is a cookbook written by the rather prolific Christelle Le Ru, a French woman living in the South Island (I am just struck by how boring the names of our islands are: North? South? Do we really have that little imagination? But I digress…) She has divided the book up into chapters on specific ingredients like broccoli, cabbage (there’s a hard one), onions, mince, chicken and so on. Some of the different chapters are stretching it a bit with five different recipes (there seems to be a bit of repetition with lots of versions of gratin), but generally they are interesting and fairly simple. It is not written in the same vein of many of our recent cookbooks, with ‘assembled’ sort of food (salads etc), but rather cooked food of a simple sort, maybe ‘grown up’ is a good way of putting it. I test-drove a few of the recipes, and surprisingly French onion soup was a real winner in our house (especially with our small people surprisingly) on a day when there was literally nothing in the cupboard except… onions. This is where the book comes into its own, when you have lots of one ingredient, and no idea what to do with it. There isn’t a great list of ingredients for each recipe, which keeps it simple. I had Dean Geddes, a personal trainer and nutritionalist who specialises in weight loss for women, to have a gander at the book in terms of its nutritional take. He was pleasantly surprised and pleased with the calibre of the recipes – all pretty well balanced.

And finally for the gentlemen, or their present-buying wives/girlfriends in the audience…Noah Boyd’s ‘The Bricklayer’ ($36.99). I haven’t read the book, but my husband has. He is not a big fiction reader, in fact one of the books by his bed right now is a book called’ Irrational Predictable – the hidden forces that shape our lives’ by Dan Ariely – hardly something to take on holiday with you! In fact, that is about the only time I can get him to read anything other that a text – holiday time. The first thing he grabs before we go on holiday is a ‘Jack Reacher’ novel. He has read all of them. And actually so have I. There is something about the formula of those books – easy and predicable – and we like it. So ‘The Bricklayer’ is pitching itself in that general direction. The back of the book even has an endorsement from Lee Childs who writes the Reacher novels, and Patricia Cornwell who writes the brutal Scarpetta novels. My husband enjoyed the book, though unfortunately felt it didn’t quite make it to ‘Reacher’ territory – but still a smart paced, easy read – perfect to pick up and put down, tho I might mention at this point that he didn’t exactly put the book down that often.

I have three more books to finish off for Winter Book Club: ‘Island beneath the Sea’ by the marvellous Isabel Allende, ‘The Swimmer’ by Roma Tearne who wrote Brixton Beach, and the interesting looking ‘The Stonecutter’ by Camilla Lackberg. I will fill you in when I finish them so watch this space. Happy reading!

By Anya Brighouse, May 2010.