Each week, Canvas asks an author what are they are reading. First up, Pip Adam, author of Nothing To See.
I'm reading toward a course I'm doing with one of my favourite writers, Alexander Chee, called The Thief of Lives, about autobiographical fiction. I'm really excited about the course, which is being run through The Shipman Agency. During the pandemic the courses, which are usually run in-person in the United States, have been available online.
For the course we're reading James Baldwin's novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, a short story by F.T. Kola called A Party for the Colonel and George Sand's autobiography, Story of My Life. All of these are amazing and I'm really enjoying them. I think I've always been interested in the autobiographical novel because of the problems it raises for a hard line between fiction and non-fiction. I've been drawn back and back to Ocean Vuong's novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous for these reasons, not really having stopped reading it since I finished it last year.
As well as this list of readings, I've been very grateful for other lists that have come out recently. Jacinta Ruru, Angela Wanhalla and Jeanette Wikaira's article, "Read our words: An anti-racist reading list for New Zealanders" in The Spinoff is incredible and I'm looking forward to working my way through the books they recommend. Kei te Pai Press also has an amazing reading club that offers readings around critical theory and discourse, decolonisation and radical political action.
Finally, I'm really enjoying reading Brannavan Gnanalingam's new novel, Sprigs, which is out this month. It's a book that holds a mirror up to darker and terrible sides of life here and will no doubt spark some much-needed conversation about how we treat each other. Sprigs challenges some of the mainstream stories we tell ourselves as a country designed to maintain current power structures.
