What I’m reading: Sabrina Meyer
Istarted reading Te Kaihau: The Windeater because I remembered I liked Keri Hulme after reading the Bone People earlier last year. I quickly realised I was wrong – I don’t like her, I love her, and although many a novel or series steals my heart, an author never has before her.
Although many short story collections have a variety of hit-andmiss stories for me, there were only three in this that I didn’t love. It was also lovely to see her diverse range of characters and settings, as well as discovering her recurrent themes and motifs. It’s her representation of reluctant parenthood, or specifically motherhood, that really intrigues me, showing a part of our society often overlooked in all the fiction I see with happy, albeit struggling, parentage.
I love her because she’s real. She doesn’t throw together harrowing stories because she wants you to hurt for the sake of emotion, she creates stories around reality and life and sometimes they aren’t pleasant, sometimes they’re a fist to the gut, bruising you because you know she’s right. While she can indulge in fantasy there’s still a strong vein of reality.
My recommendations, if you read only a sample are: One Whale, Singing and While My Guitar Gently Sings. For lovers of The Bone People, A Drift in a Dream is a prologue of sorts to that.
As a librarian during a summer reading challenge, I’ve been challenging myself to find books from every area of the library that I work with on a daily basis. It’s been fun reading what those around me are reading, sometimes challenging myself to read beyond my usual tastes and indulging in the childhood nostalgia of book challenges.