A Year of Reading Oceania

It all started in 2012 with a small group in Goodreads, who wanted to read 52 books "Around the World." I started collecting books for that challenge in October 2011 and haven't looked back! I have yet to read a book from every country, and unlike Ann Morgan, the reader who got a lot of attention this year for a similar project she completed in a year, I am taking my sweet time about it. I'm not limiting myself to one title per country, just at least one. And if I get attached to a place, I stay there in my reading.

I have joined a few more groups in Goodreads that urge me forward in my reading. One of the most useful has been "The World's Literature," as it focuses on a new part of the continent every year. When I first joined we read Japan (2012), then Turkey (2013), then Iceland (2014). This year for the first time they chose to read a larger region - Oceania and Southeast Asia. I narrowed it farther to just Oceania (apart from one country that is arguably in both regions) because I felt like Southeast Asia could have its own year. I have grown to let their choices be a very vague guide to my reading. I don't necessarily read along with all the selections, but still discuss my reading with the group. Sometimes I join in with a group read when it fits my mood or a country I still need to cover.

This year, I read thirty-six books from Oceania. What an amazing time I've had. I have no idea how to put it into words so for now I will make a list by country (the image is organized by date finished, most recent upper left.) I plan to reflect more on it on the next Reading Envy podcast, posting the first Tuesday of January. I will say that when I set out to do this, I intentionally did not read much from Australia, feeling as if I had done quite a bit of this already from Booker Prize winners to silly Phryne Fisher mysteries. I wanted to dig into places I had never been in my reading. Other than the Theroux I still haven't read a book from every country in Oceania. I will return to those at some point, but next year finds me moving to a new region of the world!

I also spent the year experimenting with baked goods from Oceania. You can read about those projects over on JennyBakes. With no further delay, my Oceania list of books!

Australia
Sentenced to Life: Poems by Clive James (my review)
Lost & Found by Brooke Davis (my review)

Indonesia (part is in Oceania!)
Indonesian Cooking: Satays, Sambals and More by Dina Yuen (my review)
This Earth of Mankind by Pramoedya Ananta Toer (my review)

New Guinea (West Papua, part of Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea)
The Asmat of New Guinea: the journal of Michael Clark Rockefeller, with his ethnographic notes and photos made among the Asmat people during two expeditions in 1961 by Michael C. Rockefeller (my review)
Euphoria by Lily King (my review)
Four Corners: A Journey into the Heart of Papua New Guinea by Kira Salak (my review)
From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The Social World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea  by Paige West (my review)
Garden of War: Life and Death in The New Guinea Stone Age by Robert Gardner (my review)
Growing Up in New Guinea by Margaret Mead (my review)
Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff (my review)
Michael Rockefeller: New Guinea Photographs, 1961 by Kevin Brubriski (my review)
Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primitive Art by Carl Hoffman  (my review)
Secret Places: My Life in New York and New Guinea by Tobias Schneebaum (my review)
Where the Spirits Dwell: An Odyssey in the Jungle of New Guinea by Tobias Schneebaum (my review)
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? by Jared Diamond (my review)

 New Zealand
The Aloe by Katherine Mansfield (my review)
An Angel at My Table by Janet Frame (autobiography #2) (my review)
Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century by Peter Graham (my review)
The Bone People by Keri Hulme (my review)
Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story by Christina Thomson (my review)
The Envoy from Mirror City by Janet Frame (autobiography #3) (my review)
Faces in the Water by Janet Frame (my review)
Hot October: An autobiographical story by Lauris Edmond (my review)
A Man Lay Dead: Inspector Roderick Alleyn #1 by Ngaio Marsh (my review)
New and Selected Poems by Lauris Dorothy Edmond (my review)
Once Were Warriors by Alan Duff (my review)
One Whale, Singing (Stories From New Zealand) by various (my review)
Potiki by Patricia Grace (my review)
To the Is-Land by Janet Frame (autobiography #1) (my review)
The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera (my review)
When Sun And Moon Collide by Briar Grace-Smith (my review)
Wulf by Hamish Clayton (my review)

Pitcairn Island
Serpent in Paradise by Dea Birkett (my review)

Samoa
The Adventures of Vela by Albert Wendt (my review)
Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation by Margaret Mead (my review)

Various
The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific by Paul Theroux (my review)

Library Books Mid-December 2015

These piles represent the second half of (New Zealand) November and the beginning of the last month of the year, where I know I will have more time to read over the holidays but the interlibrary loan deadlines happen early. So get ready. I actually had to take pictures in batches because I checked out and finished so many already, and then got a bunch more.

The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera
Potiki by Patricia Grace
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
Far Eastern Cookery by Elinor Burt
The Adventures of Vela by Albert Wendt
When Sun And Moon Collide by Briar Grace-Smith
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco
Sam Choy's Polynesian Kitchen by Sam Choy
The Ethnomusicologists' Cookbook by X Williams

The Williams, Choy, and Burt were research for cooking baking in Oceania, to coincide with my reading. The Burt was useless, more like mid-19th century processed food recipes with a few Polynesian ingredients like canned pineapple. I loved the Williams and will probably need to own it - each featured country also has a bibliography of recommended readings (usually ethnographies) and music to listen to. It was a great connection to my former life in an ethnomusicology grad program.

I went to the stacks to pull a few books from New Zealand. If you know the Library of Congress system at all, you know that literature is shelved first by country and then by author. I grabbed the Grace-Smith and Ihimaera but then just a few shelves away found the Wendt. I had a brief lapse where I forgot I wasn't including Southeast Asia in this year's big reading project; Ilustrado has been returned to the library and will wait for another year. I requested the Grace through interlibrary loan after the recommendation from a Goodreads friend.

I wanted to read the Dick before watching the television series, although now that I have finished the book and started the show, I know that they are vaguely related. One does not necessarily need to be consumed before the other. Ah well. It wasn't my favorite Philip K. Dick novel but it was fine. I finished the Nelson this weekend - this book I got through interlibrary loan after Carrie Brownstein mentioned it in the Q&A of her audiobook recording for Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl.

 
Sons for the Return Home by Albert Wendt
Dear Thief by Samantha Harvey
The Spell of the Pacific by Stroven & Day
Fortune Smiles: Stories by Adam Johnson
African Kitchen by Josie Fison
The Soul of a New Cuisine: A Discovery of the Foods and Flavors of Africa by Marcus Samuelsson

The bottom two cookbooks give a clue about next year's regional reading project. The Wendt and Stroven are both for reading Oceania - the large tomb is a result of reading a mention of it in a book I recently finished - Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All.  The Harvey was one of the many books listed in the Tournament of Books Longlist for 2016, and sounded interesting. I also hadn't heard of it yet, while many of their books were known to me.

New Zealand November

With only two months left of my project to read books from and set in Oceania, I needed to make a few plans. A retired professor, who had spent considerable time in Australia, has loaned me a few books from her collection, and I had a few more on my shelf. Her contributions were almost all memoirs by female New Zealanders, and one of those stories has also been made into a movie!

Authors from New Zealand I have already read:
Eleanor Catton - I read The Rehearsal and started the Booker-Prize winning The Luminaries
Emily Perkins - I read The Forrests last year
Katherine Mansfield - I read The Aloe earlier this year (discussed on Episode 033 of the podcast)

I would really like to read more from Katherine Mansfield! My library has a bunch of volumes of her short stories, even her letters, so that is promising.

Books I have on hand that I plan to try:

One Whale, Singing by Marion McLeod and Lydia Wevers
The Bone People by Keri Hume (Booker Prize winner!)
Hot October by Lauris Edmond
Bonfires in the rain by Lauris Edmond
The quick world by Lauris Edmond
Once Were Warriors by Alan Duff
An Autobiography by Janet Frame

Despite the fact that I'd be lucky to get through the stack I already have, I have other ideas for what I would like to read during New Zealand November. I have never read anything from Maori authors, and feel like it only makes sense to do so, but I'm not sure where to begin. I've heard good things about Clayton Hamish, so I went ahead and requested Wulf from the library. I'd like to read some of Janet Frame's fiction, some of Lauris Edmond's poetry, and more from Katherine Mansfield. One of Rose Tremain's novels, The Colour, is historical fiction set in New Zealand but the author herself is not from NZ. Into The River by Ted Dawe has had a lot of press because it was banned throughout the entire country of New Zealand in a move that seemed to belong more in the 1910s, but I'm not sure if it's considered "good" or just "banned." 

One thing that really strikes me is that most of these authors are female! That is surprising but there are enough male authors around the world that I do not feel the need to balance this one out. Do you have any favorites from New Zealand? Anything I'm missing? What about food? I've made pavlova and have plans for a few more baked goods.