Three top reads for the weekend. Photos / supplied
Three top reads for the weekend. Photos / supplied
In Creative Writer’s Sourcebook (Exisle), John Gillard surveys 50 great authors, including Nabokov, Atwood, Austen, Camus, Katherine Mansfield and Lynley Dodd, and sets writing exercises based on their work. The exercises, alongside the potted bios and style and oeuvre summaries, will probably appeal most to younger writers wanting to explorethe Western canon without too much dread.
Creative Writer's Sourcebook: Great for inspiring young writers. Photo / supplied
The decades from 1920 to 2000 were really the golden years of New Zealand’s newspapers, as Ian F Grant’s Pressing On (Fraser Books) argues. Most towns and cities had at least one paid daily newspaper. In those early days, radio and TV were still many years away, so newspapers had healthy advertising revenue, audiences and often influence. But, in time, the larger papers slowly edged out the smaller ones, and the NZ Press Association arguably inhibited independent ventures. The many were eventually merged into the few, forming large national newspaper groups, and then along came the internet. As with his earlier Lasting Impressions, which covered the years 1840-1920, Grant comprehensively tracks all these changes, as well as the editors and personalities of the papers, evolving technologies and political winds of the times.
Pressing On tracks the changes in our media landscape. Photo / supplied
Earth, by John Boyne (Doubleday) is the second of a planned quartet of linked novels named after the elements. Water arrived late last year and Fire and Air are due over the next year. It’s a fast and fluid read about two footballers who are in the dock charged with sexual assault. One is Evan Keogh, a young closeted Irishman with a bullying father who wanted to be an artist but is more gifted with the boot. The truths and untruths told in the courtroom will change his and his mate Robbie’s – and the victim Lauren’s – life forever.
