This book is quite different to Essex Serpent. If you loved Essex Serpent‘s raw vitality & personalities conflicting - think of this as melancholy, solitary souls looking for life‘s purpose amongst small tragedies. Its nowhere near as epic and there‘s a ton of philosophising. And i loved it, but in an entirely different way. Perry‘s writing and characters just appeal to me, even when the storyline isnt always smooth. ⬇️

Thank you for putting this on my radar @Megabooks 💕
A thought provoking story of a young woman coming to realise her entrapment in christian patriarchy. Cait‘s father became increasingly controlling as she grew up and more committed to the concept of “stay at home daughters”. If youre interested in how misogyny can thrive within religion this is a fascinating personal account - from entrapment to realisation to dealing with PTSD after leaving.

I havent read enough non fiction this year so i picked this up. This is one of those “WTF” books where i was constantly reading bits to my husband - saying “listen to this, you won‘t believe it”. It turns out that when Dutertes said in the election campaign that he would kill a lot of people, it wasnt an exaggeration. The drug war he initiated created state sponsored killing squads, with no requirements for justice or legal process ⬇️

Went to Waiheke Island last week for a day trip and just as we pulled in to Palm Beach, three small orcas had come into the bay to swim and play! It might look like a shark fin here (its one small orca fin in front of a larger one) but they were rolling about and obviously playing and a young man was swimming amongst them for a short while. (And its winter!) A very cool and unexpected sighting.

A 5 star read for me. I do love a novel that follows a family over generations (i guess its a family saga but you spend most of the book w the middle generation). I have 3 sisters & a big family & while they‘re nothing like the Padvanos, i appreciated watching the dynamics over the years & patterns repeating. A warm hearted book with family drama, rifts and finding forgiveness along the way.

And i want to read 34. This NYT list is a good reminder of some of the books that have fallen off my radar!

For the first quarter of this book i thought it might be too twee for me - but then i warmed to the characters and devoured the rest of this heart warming story. It really is a light mystery with a touch of romance - and lots of illustrated cryptic puzzles to solve! (Although i didnt bother trying to solve many of them and it was still a good experience) Clayton is a foundling left on the steps of The Fellowship ⬇️

Hekla is a young woman in 1960s Iceland. She is named after a volcano, and like her namesake so much is going on under the calm surface. Hekla is a writer but it seems only men can be? Olafsdottir writes in an observational way - we hear what people say to Hekla, see what she sees and we notice the hypocrisy, but we are left to imagine what Hekla is thinking. I like this style of writing and the way it makes the reader try to figure out Hekla. ⬇️

I think i stacked this book thanks to a review by @Megabooks Meg, it was so good! Sarah Polley looks at six dangerous episodes of her life - from being on a film set as a child actor, to a difficult birth, to an accident causing severe concussion. In each episode she examines herself, her family, her memory - with intelligence, humility and grace. There is wonderful honesty and insight and i felt “seen” for my own vulnerable episodes. ⬇️

Happy Matariki!

Mānawa maiea te putanga o Matariki
Celebrate the rising of Matariki

Matariki is the Māori name for the cluster of stars, that rises in midwinter and for many Māori, heralds the start of the new year.
The return of the cluster is commemorated by Te Rā Aro ki Matariki 2024, which happens on Friday, June 28, this year
It just became a national holiday for us Kiwis in 2022 so many of us are only now learning its significance.

I loved this book! Pin is an 11yo Sikh girl living in Singapore dealing with the difficulties of being a scholarship kid at a private school. But this story is predominantly about Pin trying to figure out her mother, a woman with secrets who is looked down upon by the local Sikh community & who expresses her feelings predominantly through the food she cooks. This is a great book for foodies! The writing is beautiful ⬇️

Spending time with the crotchety Vera Stanhope is always good fun, so i tore through this (number 4 in the series) in two days. There‘s always something a little far fetched in most good mysteries but as long as the characters are well done, I dont mind at all. This one starts when Vera stumbles upon a body in the steam room of her gym.
And i think this is my last autumn leaves photo - must officially be winter now!

Book 3 in the Salvagers trilogy - and its so filled with battles and near death escapes that ive been biting my nails and sweating hoping this ragtag crew (found family for sure) manage to destroy the bad guys and save the universe despite everything being against them!
Ok - sounds like every Space Movie ever but its beautifully done, the characters are quirky, cool and wonderful, & the mix of magic and tech gives it a special edge.

Thank you so much for the birthday present @CarolynM 💕 I am very excited about this book after loving Too Much Lip. (Possibly the most memorable book ive read in the past 5 years!) And i am a big, big fan of raspberry with chocolate! Thank you for a lovely surprise on a gray wintery day💕

I know im late to the party with this one but i finally got here. Ive rated it 5 stars because its completely unique, its masterfully done, and i feel like the last third took my head off! Its as if with Yellowface someone said to Kuang “write a 5 star contemporary novel about publishing that perfectly demonstrates appropriation” and on Babel “write a 5 star historical dark academia novel that demonstrates colonialism and capitalism” ⬇️

My reading theme for 2024 seems to be revisiting & finishing series - just where my reading whims have taken me. This is the 3rd book in French‘s Dublin Murder Squad. Each book takes on a new protagonist from the Dublin Squad - this time it‘s Frank Mackey - and boy does he have some emotional baggage! A body turns up and it upends a number of things in Frank‘s past. Great to get immersed into a dysfunctional family when its done so well ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

When your favourite fantasy world gets a second trilogy go around - you cross your fingers & hope 🤞

And sometimes you get lucky! While this takes a little while to get going - we have to catch up w our old friends and see where they‘ve settled - the newer, younger characters are so fascinating and flawed. Once their stories start to impact on the original characters, it gets really interesting. A great return to a brilliantly imagined world.

I dont think ive ever seen my neighborhood so red and orange before!
This book hit me just right. You don‘t often see a male+female friendship shown as something deep and complex, and watch it play out over decades. Sam and Sadie are best friends as children and business partners as adults, designing video games. There is also a lot about gaming in here - not my jam IRL but i found it engaging and interesting. A book with a lot of heart. ⬇️

I enjoyed Fox‘s first biography so much i decided i would read the others this year. A lot of this is about his fight for stem cell research and getting involved in politics in the early 2000s. Less dramatic than his first bio, but Michael‘s philosophy on life, his humility and the way he approached confrontations with grace for the other side, makes this an inspirational read for me.

Thoroughly enjoyable Hercule Poirot mystery. I guessed part of the denouement but not all of it! It was an original set up which i really liked. My favourite is still The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. And here are some autumn leaves for you from the Sunday markets 🍃🍂🍁

Sometimes you just need a ragtag crew of war hardened space pirates to blast the crap out of a planet‘s worth of despots to make you feel better. 🙌
Book 2 in the Salvagers series. Kind of like a queer Firefly with a bit of magic alongside the futuristic tech. Lots of plot, lots of battles (mostly close combat) completely absorbing.

Well i just bailed on another book so i have nothing to tell you about!
Instead here is a walk i just took on the weekend. Most of the decent sized hills around Tamaki Makaurau Auckland are extinct/dormant volcanoes. They are culturally and spiritually very important to tangata whenua (Maori) and a few years ago most of them were given into iwi control. Still open to visit but respectfully - and no cars. ⬇️

#tuesdaytunes
You know when your music streaming service plays you music based on other stuff you like? I think thats how i only recently stumbled onto Troye Sivan‘s 2018 album Bloom, but in particular this song Seventeen Ive been playing and replaying.
“I went out looking for love when i was seventeen. Maybe a little too young but it was real to me” 💔 https://youtu.be/4pxdGNVqwnA?si=dl5a39kjaU-NxKkm

I needed an easy read & this fitted the bill perfectly. A fantasy that reads like a modern fairytale with found family & great side characters. Marra is the youngest princess of the Harbour Kingdom. Her oldest sister is promised to the Prince of a more powerful neighbour kingdom. When her sister dies Marra suspects something is terribly wrong. This is lighter and faster moving than it might sound. Sweet with some bone magic & a few ghosts.

A beautifully written book about a young woman who sublimates her own scientific ambitions in order to accompany her older “scientific genius” husband working in Los Alamos in the 1940s. There is some lovely nature writing in here as she continues to spend time watching birds in New Mexico. For all that this sounds like my kind of quiet thoughtful book, i struggled to connect with the protagonist and her timidity. Probably me and not the book!

Just finished watching the Netflix version of 3 Body Problem and thoroughly enjoyed it - although of course the books are better. As @vivastory said in his review they had to make changes for cost and marketing reasons. In my heart i always want the entire complexity on screen with no conjoining of characters - but thats never possible. I loved seeing the game in full glory, and the Ye Wenjie section was PERFECT. Love Benedict Wong too 🙌

This is a short, fast moving piece of noir crime fiction from 1943. Its deliciously dark, a man and a woman join to commit a crime - possibly the perfect crime. Will they be caught? Can they trust each other?
This is a great single afternoon read - you wont get hugely involved with the characters - but enjoy the plot and the style.

Sometimes i read a book about one historic period and it makes mention of preceding events i know next to nothing about, so then i have to read another book! This is about William of Orange and Mary, daughter of James II, who after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 became joint monarches of England. This had just the right level of detail for me - thorough but included enough personal and domestic detail to stop it being too dry. A fascinating read

I so enjoyed Translation State that i jumped into Provenance, another stand alone novel in the same universe. Again we‘re getting to know other cultures and species - this time its the Hwae and the Geck. Im kinda fond of the Geck - aquatic aliens who stay in water on their ships and interact with humans on land by piloting mechanical spidery things. Theyre kind of grumpy and demand humans stay consistent to their stated ethics 😂 ⬇️

Havent read much romance lately so i thought i would try Ali Hazelwood for a change. Really enjoyed the academic setting and the light humorous writing style. The set-up has lots of tropes but it has a sense of humour about using them. Im often wary of the “young girl whose life is chaotic” character falling for “older more successful cold guy ” but Hazelwood makes it clear that Olive is driven & successful too & she instigates most action.

Photo: Lake Tekapo, NZ

This book was a RIDE - reminded me of Foundation - the way we move forward & see how humanity changes based on decisions in the past. This is a galactic chess game, earth playing a civilisation it knows little about, and scientists and military creating strategies with little to go on. I dont even try to understand the science, just the big picture of each manoeuvre. Completely absorbing - i loved it even more than Book 1.

Look what i just pre-ordered! The debut short story collection of our very own Litten @RohitSawant
A reviewer on Good Reads describes it as “a rich collection of tales from the place where weird fiction interacts with horror” and from the blurb
“Anomalous physics, a cosmic game of dice, a mobile bookstore from an outer world” “certain to please both aficionados of weird fiction and readers of Stephen King alike”
Cant wait!

Possibly the best bar for Littens in New Zealand is The Library Bar in Wellington. Lots of spaces to read! Lots of old books! Very cool staff who look like they know a book or two or three…

I love how vintage everything is including the jazz they were playing.

Forgot to post this when i was there but highly recommend if youre an NZ Litten or visiting 😍

I absolutely loved this. Went into it knowing nothing (which is my preference) and started out thinking okay this is a relationship novel with a messed up and unlikeable young protagonist. I guess im up for that. And then she made hilarious dark & deadpan remarks to her sister that honestly cracked me up. And then we get her childhood backstory and then we watch her unravel….⬇️

Just serving you up more beach photos - i never get bored taking photos of this stuff!
I loved the Raddch series by Ann Leckie and now she sets us back in this universe with 3 new characters & we learn more about the Presger & other (human & non-human) civilisations that are not Raadchai. It feels a little Becky Chamber-ish in a “lets understand our differences” way - which i love. Its fascinating to get more insight into this complex universe ⬇️

Finally getting to this debut novel from 2018. It was fascinating to view the protagonist from the internal view of the spirits that occupy her body. I had read reviews where people found this bizarre and confronting. I guess my worldview has been widened by my other reading because it didnt seem so strange - very interesting and engaging. Have you read this @Reggie ?

Thanks to reviews from @Ruthiella @batsy and @erzascarletbookgasm for putting this on my TBR 😘

Scratch beneath the surface of a pretty little English village and you get a variety of small minded self centred people being nasty to each other. But could one of them go as far as murder? We know right from the first sentence who has murder on his mind but the delight of this book is the dark humour as the plot unfolds ⬇️

I was checking out my family tree on Ancestry (its been years since i worked on it!) and got excited when i found records for one of the ships my ancestors came to NZ on - the Roman Emperor in 1860. When i googled that i found one of the men onboard was Samuel Butler who wrote this book. So i get to read a few chapters about what the crossing was like for them! Thank you internet, youve been very helpful today ☺️

I was looking for a book about women‘s lives in 18th century England and found this one which led me down so many fascinating rabbit holes. The 4 Lennox sisters are unique in that they had a huge correspondence with a lot of intimate detail from the 1750s to 1830. By telling the story of each family Tillyard covers important historical events as well as the social context. We have elopements, adultery, ⬇️

A wee #bookhaul from Wellington. I found three Secret Seven hardbacks from the 1960s with paper dustjackets in a great condition. A Nesbit book I‘d been looking for and a Borrowers hardback that is in much better condition than the old paperback on my shelf. And an Angela Thirkell i have been eyeing up online 😍 There would have been more but i was sharing one suitcase with my husband 🤪!

Finished listening to this audiobook in such a cute little cafe.
This is definitely a memoir for foodies to enjoy. Tucci adores food and his descriptions of food and cooking are SO mouth watering. He shares memories around food from times spent with family, friends and on movie sets. He briefly covers his first wife‘s death and his own cancer diagnosis but this is not a memoir for sharing every emotion - and I appreciated his restraint. ⬇️

In Wellington ostensibly for work. May have wandered into a bookshop. May have issues getting my suitcase closed. 😝😝😝 Unfortunately did not have room for all these Pollyannas!

Thank you for the gift of this book @CarolynM It was such a wild ride and kept me horrified in the best kind of way.. This book is a vehicle for Kuang to explore a variety of terrible behaviors. Beyond the protagonist‘s actions to the way in which an industry can pay lip service to and build PR around diversity while the real power and money still funnels through the existing channels. (The meeting with the Hollywood guys 🤯) ⬇️

I read this book after watching @shawnmooney interview the author and finding her very interesting. I picked it up thinking ill read a few pages - and didnt stop until i was halfway!
We spend the book in Marge‘s head - she is a bus driver, a strong, self reliant woman who falls in love with Peg, a bundle of thought and energy. Marge‘s examination of their relationship and it‘s ups and downs is unfailingly honest ⬇️

Had to jump in for #TuesdayTunes thanks to @TieDyeDude for thinking of it!

Two years ago my daughter introduced me to Kpop and now it is most of what i listen to. Amazing dance tracks, beautiful ballads, the most incredible dance moves … whats not to love??? This is NMIXX and a current fave song is Home. On Spotify https://open.spotify.com/track/0nYtg6MqCDmolLI5vsSAy1?si=ql4DaQPdRnmrrf-GzWCPWQ&...

Finally getting around to reading this Kiwi author. And it was a masterpiece IMO. Yes the subject matter is harrowing (the wife of a Nazi officer living next door to the Buchenwald work camp meets a doctor who is an inmate) but seeing these horrors from the perspectives of some of those who were nearby asks fresh questions. The format is also clever - we have the perspective of the wife and doctor but also the Nazi husband and the villagers nearby

Published in 2002, its taken me over 21 years to get to this book! You get a taste of the 80s and 90s, Michael‘s childhood and time in Hollywood - but of course so much of this is about his Parkinsons diagnosis and dealing both with that and his turbulent “young Hollywood star” lifestyle. I was amazed at the perspective he had for 2002, not just in considering illness and his life purpose but also understanding ⬇️

1970s Uruguay in the midst of a dictatorship where family members disappear, where curfews keep people indoors and where secrets could get you killed - five queer women take a huge chance to escape to a deserted seaside village for a week where they can be free to speak and love openly. But can one week change anything? This novel is filled with heat - both passion and rage. All five characters are unforgettable I ADORED this book!

Listened to this read by Meryl Streep which was fantastic. The set up here is a mother telling her grown children about her past as a young actress. There was so much i could recognise in having an adult child and talking to them about your past - Patchett made me laugh so much and feel so much for the joys and frustrations in those relationships. Its a contemplative book with a lot of heart. Image is a river rather than a lake! Waipapa River

Felt like something sweet and picked this based on the reviews from the #furrowedmiddlebrowclub It was so sweet and i really enjoyed the insight into the way department stores used to work and the jolly antics of this spry little family. Of course being a “good girl” is the idea being celebrated here and its all a bit of a fairytale - but lightly done and with plenty of humour. ⬇️