Victor Rodger had an awful epiphany a few years ago outside a Paris bookshop: that he's not going to get to read all the books he wants to in his lifetime.
I'm a gypsy so I don't actually own my own bookshelf. But this year I'm the writer in residence at Victoria University so I've taken full advantage of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf here. I have a few of my favourites on the shelves: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee,
The Road by Cormac McCarthy and Beloved by Toni Morrison.
The book I loved the most as a kid was Struwwelpeter, a collection of morality tales written in the 19th century that featured a lot of death and dismemberment. My favourite was the one where three little racists taunt a black kid and then a socially-conscious giant dips them in ink.
I had an awful epiphany a few years ago in Paris outside the Shakespeare and Company bookshop: that I'm not going to get to read all the books I want to in my lifetime. These days, if I don't immediately fall into the world of a book I don't persevere; life's too short.
Earlier this year I had to do a talk at the Dunedin Writers Festival about the book that changed me. I selected Another Country by James Baldwin. I was struggling with being both gay and Samoan when I read it at high school and that book came along at the exact right time. I'm really looking forward to seeing the upcoming, documentary about Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, at the New Zealand International Film Festival.
My favourite history book? I'm going to cheat and say A Pictorial History of the Talkies. It's a movie book, filled with pictures of films and film stars and I pored over it again and again as a kid. I remember being intrigued by some of the then-exotic names like Fellini, Jodorowsky and Bertolucci and trying to make sense of some of the stills from films I hadn't seen at that stage: Why does Susannah York looks so sad in They Shoot Horses Don't They? Why does Sandy Dennis have her hands over her ears in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
