What I’m Reading Renee Rowland
I’ve been listening to The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green, who usually writes YA fiction, but has put his pen to a collection of essays reviewing elements of humankind, much like we might flick off a Google review of a cafe.
Green gives everything from the Qwerty keyboard to Covid a rating out of five stars and narrates the audiobook version himself. It’s funny, but also surprisingly profound and heartfelt.
I’ve read Animal by Lisa Taddeo, her first foray into fiction. Calling it an ‘‘angry woman’’ story doesn’t do it justice, and you know Taddeo is massaging bigger issues through a tight, savage story of a really broken, sad and p ..... off woman.
Between novels, I’m biting my way through Owen Marshall’s short story collection, The Author’s Cut. I think Marshall is one of New Zealand’s best living writers and the opening story – a murder set in the Mackenzie region – is the basis for a new Hollywood film. It is terrific and gives me chills whenever I drive down the state highway featured in the story.
I’ve been given an advanced copy of Sally Rooney’s much anticipated third novel Beautiful World, Where Are You. It’s divine and intense and like Normal People, I don’t want it to end. I’m looking forward to talking about this book with everyone when it’s published in September.
The Bookseller of Florence by Ross King is about books and bookshops in 15th century Renaissance Florence, arguably the most transformative moment in a cultural and technological revolution. From papyrus scrolls to parchment codices to the printing press and all the popes and princes in between – it is a wonderfully fascinating doorstop of a book.
Braided through all my reading for the last couple of months has been a poetry collection called A Vase and a Vast Sea, edited by Jenny Nimon. It’s battered and bruised from accompanying me everywhere. A travel-sized treasure chest of words.