What I’m Reading Jessica Godfrey
Running a bookshop, I am in the most heavenly position to access advance reader copies and shelves simply brimming with wonderful reads. I have never done the buying, so I can still open up shipments and walk along the display cases and be surprised about what’s on offer. New releases and the extensive backlist too. It’s going to take some adjustment to not have that soon.
Vic Books has a glorious selection of local books, and over the past year these have really stood out for me.
Grand by Noelle McCarthy. That won’t be a surprise for many as the book has impressed the Ockham Book Awards’ judges sufficiently to be a finalist. Memoir is something New Zealand writers are really excelling at. A future awards category of its own perhaps! For those of us with charismatic and complicated mothers this book is everything.
It’s perhaps why I am also so drawn to People Person by Joanna Cho, a poet who constantly draws on the hilarious exchanges she has with her own mother. I’ve been kind of in love with Jo Cho since her MA graduation reading at Vic Books in 2020 and am delighted that her debut is a prescribed text for ENGL330 Postcolonial literature.
Mokorua – My Story of Moko Kauae, by Ariana Tikao and Matt Calman. We hosted an unforgettable launch of this hardback. It’s such a private and intimate book that at once symbolises a more public journey of the revival of te reo, tikanga and identity. It’s so beautiful.
The Shards is Bret Easton Ellis’ first novel in 13 years. For me, BEE has the power to evoke nostalgia for a time and a scene that I never actually knew – 1980s privileged LA.