Top picks from Carole Beu's recent reading

Book Watch

Carole Beu owns and runs The Women’s Bookshop (http://www.womensbookshop.co.nz/) on Auckland’s Ponsonby Rd. These are the top picks from her recent reading:

My reading has been dominated by brilliant New Zealand women recently.

Fosterling (Vintage, $29.99) by quiet, lyrical Emma Neale from Dunedin is an extraordinary novel. Bu is a strange young man, over seven feet tall and covered in a fine pelt of hair, highly educated even though he was raised in the remote wilds of Southland. Society’s reactions to him are fascinating, appalling and engrossing. Because his character development is so well done, you grow to care deeply about him. Full of beautiful imagery, this is highly original, daring writing.

The Open Accounts of an Honesty Box (Earl of Seacliffe Art Workshop, $35) by Aucklander Julie Helean, is fun. Jinx is a builder who is made redundant from her job teaching construction at Unitec. She leaves her bunch of lesbian friends behind and takes off in her van. In Central Otago she is coaxed by a group of local women into building a public toilet! Well-written, full of delightful characters, this is highly entertaining.

The striking tales in Sue Orr’s new collection From Under the Overcoat (Vintage, $29.99) stand alone as modern stories but each also salutes an earlier masterpiece by such writers as Mansfield, Joyce, and Chekov. Sue is the current Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellow and writer Fiona Kidman has described these stories as “high-wire risk-taking that succeeds magnificently.”

And one international novel – Lisa Genova’s Still Alice, about early onset Alzheimers, was a New York Times bestseller. Her new novel Left Neglected (Penguin, $40) is an intriguing exploration of a particular brain injury that results in complete lack of awareness of one’s left side. Sarah is a high-flying executive and mother who leads a frenetic life – until she picks up her cell phone while driving her car. Genova is a neuroscientist and this is gripping reading.
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The book I love most is......…Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger. I first read this book when I was 17 and it was exactly what I needed to read at that moment in my life. I felt then, and still feel all these years later, very connected to the characters - particularly Franny, and her journey. I love her sensibility, and that of the whole Glass family, who are smart, fierce with their love, funny and eccentric. I read an article recently that said Salinger's stories are metaphysical works for humanity, and I’d agree. Franny and Zooey is about the soul. It is a book to comfort you when you are lost and keep you company when you feel alone. I was given a hard cover first edition nearly a decade ago and it’s the most precious thing I own.

The book I'm reading right now is..............The Passage by Justin Cronin. I don't usually read books of this genre - a kind of horror, thriller, fantasy amalgamation - and am finding it challenging because I can't fully engage with the created world. I am also fed up with vampires, and sick of the apocalypse. But it is incredibly addictive and imaginative – I can’t put it down and think about it all the time. Paradox!

The book I'd like to read next is....The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Death, Dinner, Baseball, Travels, the Art of Writing, and Everything Else in the World Since 1953. Fortunately I was given it for my birthday! Amazing authors, amazing subject matter…. I can't wait!

The book that changed me is…........Probably The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. When I read it the first time I was gob smacked. I couldn’t believe all those human thoughts that whistle through our brains were there on the page. Franzen is the most acute and adept observer, and somehow when I read The Corrections I feel there is a part of me in every character. I can't figure out how he does it. Franzen changed the way I see writing.

The book I wish I'd never read is......…Monster Love by Carol Topolski. It is extremely visceral and well drawn, but I can't read stories where children are harmed like the child in that book. Some of the images are burned in my mind, and still sicken me. I wish I could get rid of them. I deliberately lost that book.

The above two columns were first published in the Herald on Sunday yesterday, 20 March 2011, and are reproduced with permission of Herald on Sunday Books Editor Nicky Pellegrino.