After spending a few days up in Tauranga last week, I seem to be in the grip of the reading bug again, which is nice. There are a number of books I’ve picked up since the end of last year that have been left to languish, so I’ll enjoy progressively working through them. As a taste of said literary works, I offer the following, starting from the top: Raymond Chandler’s Lady In the Lake : I’m a big fan of his earlier books and it seemed a shame to stop there. Haven’t started this one as yet so don’t know a lot more about it beyond it revolving around Chandler’s central character, hard-boiled PI, Phillip Marlowe. It helps that I have a real soft spot for crime novels built around damaged detectives working in corrupt and morally-bankrupt worlds. Wilkie Collins’ The Haunted Hotel : I mainly got this because I have trouble leaving a store with only one item, and the premise of a ghost story built around guilt and the consequences of past actions. Fingers crossed it is a good read. Geoff Dyer’s Jeff In Venice, Death In Varanasi : I woke up one hungover morning with a napkin that had the title of this book written on it in handwriting I didn’t recognise, and few memories of the night before. That I was looking to be in Venice later this year for the Venice Biennale and the book apparently covers what happens at the Biennale, I figured “why not”. Martin Cruz Smith’s Stalin’s Ghost : the sixth book in the series based around Russian Investigator Arkady Renko, I have actually finished reading this since taking the photo of the pile. Probably the weakest in the series and far too close in timeline and setting to the follow-up Three Stations, it was an enjoyable read all the same. I wouldn’t recommend this book or the series to anyone unless they had a thing for depressing crime novels and didn’t mind the indignity of occasionally indulging in airport fiction. Arnaldur Indridason’s Jar City : this is the first book in the series of Icelandic crime novels by Indridason. The hot guy at the bookstore said I’d be into this if I liked Martin Cruz Smith. It’s going well so far, but it doesn’t read entirely well with the sentence structure and phrasing leaving me wondering if something has been lost in the translation. It also, rather annoyingly, gives great importance to things that the book refuses to describe. We’ll have to see how it goes. Sherman Alexie’s War Dances : the latest collection of his Native American-centric short stories. I’ve enjoyed his previous work enormously, even if his previous collection, Ten Little Indians, did belabour the victim of white society angle a bit much. Martin Cruz Smith’s Three Stations : the seventh book in the series and surprisingly enjoyable despite being a narrative on the decline of capitalist Russia, teenage prostitution, gangs of street kids and the inability of the state to deal with anything even vaguely reasonably. The end was probably the weakest aspect of the book, requiring a greater suspension of belief than even I could muster. Joe Pere’s Wiremu Pere : this is a biography of my ancestor, Wi Pere, a man whose legacy I derive an enormous amount of pride and exhaustion. My interest in reading this however is less to understand who he was, but more to acknowledge the effort my dad put into making this a reality. He pretty much burnt himself out rewriting what was originally a doctoral thesis into a pretty decent book that will make things a lot easier for my generation. Put simply, my dad is awesome. Also: Joe Pere is my uncle who wrote the doctoral thesis that became this book. Greg and Lucy Malouf’s Saraban : the latest in the cookbooks they’ve released in recent years. Where their previous books have focussed on Lebanon and Turkey, Saraban instead focusses on Persia. It is a good sign that I’ve marked a third of the recipes as things I’d like to try making myself. Now I just need my own kitchen and the freedom to just plough and see what works and what doesn’t. Paul Budnitz’s I Am Plastic, Too : the second anthology from the founder of Kidrobot on the range of urban vinyl art toys that are doing the rounds these days, and boy are there some fantastic toys coming out from Europe and Asia especially. As an added bonus, so much of what features in my own collection is featured throughout the book, which I enjoy immensely. I’m also reading Joey Comeau’s Lockpick Pornography and Bible Camp Bloodbath as e-books on the iphone. So… what are you reading?
