From walks to encounters with UFOs, there's plenty to read about this weekend. Photo / Getty Images
From walks to encounters with UFOs, there's plenty to read about this weekend. Photo / Getty Images
Wild Walks Aotearoa (Penguin) is a labour of love in more than one sense. It’s beautifully illustrated and the amount of detail provided by seasoned tramper Hannah-Rose Watt is impressive, from a personal measure of difficulty to a gear guide, first aid, maps and weather. Then there are the 59walks. Divided into ones that can be done with kids, quick walks, multi-day and two levels of toughness, they are mostly in the South Island, and it’s all written in a zippy, knowledgeable style.
While you’re trekking bush and paddock, maybe take along a copy of the well-illustrated A Naturalist’s Guide to the Butterflies & Moths of Aotearoa New Zealand (John Beaufoy). Apparently like many island nations, NZ doesn’t have many butterflies (fewer than 50 species). There are lots of moths, though, all listed here by family, with loads of litter-feeding and moss-feeding types, and, as is usual, more than 90% of our lepidoptera are endemic.
We share a lot of our English with our neighbour to the west. Readers of Australia in 100 Words (NewSouth), by linguist Amanda Laugesen, will readily recognise fair go and bogan. But most of this book of 100 words shows how different it is, whether it’s due to convict settlement or divergent borrowings from native languages. There’s mateship and blackbirding (labour trafficking), tjukurpa (dreamtime) and yidaki (didgeridoo) and budgie smugglers.
If you’ve always instantly dismissed the idea of UFOs, you might wish to check outImminent (HarperCollins). Luis Elizondo is the former head of the Pentagon’s programme for the investigation of what are formally called UAPs or unidentified anomalous phenomena. Elizondo writes about the objects that apparently fly and manoeuvre at impossible speeds, the technology this requires, their apparent human victims, and the personal cost of speaking out.
