What I'm reading: Himali McInnes

Himali McInnes. Photo / Alex Carter

My constant intention is to read more non-fiction. My bedside table is littered with half-finished excellent non-fiction works that I will get back to some day (Natives by Akala, Factfulness by Hans Rosling, etc).

Meanwhile, I romp through fiction. Arms Race, a collection of short stories by Nic Low (an author of Ngāi Tahu and European descent), was a compelling read. Sharply written, laced with dark humour and with fantastically clever plots. I particularly loved the short story Rush, where indigenous sovereignty over the land angers the populace.

The Freedom Artist, by Ben Okri, was slow going at first, but it's a beguiling story, set in a twilight world of tightened and meaningless governmental control. Okri's prose is beautiful and he writes with a social justice thrust cloaked in magical realism, which I like.

I'm now halfway through A Mistake, by Carl Shuker. This former editor at the British Medical Journal has written a chilling story that must resonate with both medical and non-medical readers alike. After all, each of us will almost certainly one day be a patient, and will be asked to entrust our health to a medical professional.

Shuker details the tension of the operating theatre well; the split-second decision making, the hierarchies, the fear as things start to go wrong. His protagonist, Liz Taylor, is a female surgeon; the archetype of toughness and bluntness but not entirely devoid of kindness. Her gender exposes her to another layer of tension in what is still a male-dominated field. So she perhaps feels she has to be louder and simply better than her colleagues in order to feel equal.

I still remember the hesitancy and fear I felt as a medical student, while assisting surgeons in theatre. Hold a clamp wrong and the operating field fills with blood. Move too slowly and someone barks at you. At least I never experienced the ignominy of fainting on to the operating table while assisting in theatre, as one of my classmates did.

Surgery is a tensile field of medicine, filled with greatness but with the potential for things to go seriously wrong. Shuker's book documents the physician's perspective superbly, interspersed with detailed vignettes about the series of errors that led to the Challenger disaster in 1986. It's a good contrast in systemic failings, placed alongside a very human story.

Poetry anthology More Than a Roof: Housing, in poems and prose (Landing Press, $25)

Himali McInnes contributed to the poetry anthology More Than a Roof: Housing, in poems and prose (Landing Press, $25). Her book of essays The Unexpected Patient (Aotearoa Books, $37) came out in September.