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)

Four Months Reading Books Set in New Guinea

One of my goals this year is to read books from Oceania and Southeast Asia.  I started out in Papua New Guinea and never left! For the past four months, books from both sides of the island north of Australia, half in Indonesia and half independent, have sprinkled through my reading list.  I have decided to move on to another part of this region, perhaps Samoa. I forced myself to return the books I meant to read but hadn't started, and to officially abandon the one on my bedside table that I wasn't really into.

New Guinea is the island. Papua New Guinea is the country taking up the eastern half of the island, plus a bunch of tiny islands surrounding it.  West Papua is part of Indonesia, and has previously been known as Irian Jaya among other names.

Before this year, I had read three books set in New Guinea. One was the result of having a mother who was the missions chairperson for the church I grew up in (and we had a whole shelf of missionary narratives from people she had met over the years), two were from my research as an undergraduate in my world music class, and one was from my short-lived one-year stint in a PhD program for Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana, where we read a book on one group of islanders in my Readings in Ethnography class.

1. Peace Child by Don Richardson
2. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression by Steven Feld
3. To Sing with Pigs is Human: The Concept of Person in Papua New Guinea
4. Argonauts of the Western Pacific by Bronislaw Malinowski

The group I joined in Goodreads that has prompted all of these years of focused reading on a country or region is "The World's Literature."  I started out the year reading about one woman's solo journey across New Guinea along with others in that group, and then stayed in the jungle while they moved on to a book from Australia.  I found a book about coffee production in Papua New Guinea that was fascinating, an econoethnography of sorts. I read it while I drank PNG coffee, just for authenticity. A recent book by a journalist about the Michael Rockefeller disappearance jumped me into several related reads. The Salak and Hoffman books had some similarities because neither were interested in becoming an insider the way an anthropologist would do, but still had to make significant adaptations to succeed during the time they spent. Both have rare, adventurous spirits, similar to Rockefeller, only they lived to tell their stories.

1. Four Corners by Kira Salak
2. From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The Social World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea  by Paige West
3. Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primitive Art by Carl Hoffman 
4. Gardens of War: Life and Death in the New Guinea Stone Age by Robert Gardner
5. Michael Rockefeller: New Guinea Photographs, 1961 by Kevin Brubriski
6. 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

Feeling pretty saturated by non-fictional accounts and male authors, I realized I owned an eBook of a recent novel set in New Guinea, which ended up based on the early research trips of Margaret Mead. After reading that I took on two books by a man who fell in love with the people of New Guinea, perhaps more at home among them than his friends in New York. One very early anthropological study was followed by one written in the 21st century (also about other similar societies), and the last book I read from New Guinea was the story of a plane crash during World War II.

1. Euphoria by Lily King
2. Secret Places: My Life in New York and New Guinea by Tobias Schneebaum 
3. Where the Spirits Dwell: An Odyssey in the Jungle of New Guinea by Tobias Schneebaum
4. Growing Up in New Guinea by Margaret Mead
5. The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? by Jared Diamond
6. Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff

Along with the books I DID read are a bunch I didn't.  There are numerous missionary accounts, more books related to Margaret Mead's research and the Rockefeller story, and a novel about a teacher who saves a tribe with Dickens (I started it and it was pretty awful so I quit.)

What I never found - books about New Guinea written by New Guineans. Perhaps that will happen one day.

I also tried a few recipes that came from New Guinea, or attempted replicas thereof.  I believe in immersive reading! Adding the smells, the tastes, the sounds to a reading experience. This is harder to do with New Guinea since so many of the people there have diets composed of what they can grow and harvest. For West Papuans this is sago, harvested from trees and made into balls, supplemented by seafood or grubs depending on the location of the particular people group. For Papua New Guineans, the diet is largely sweet potato and banana, with protein added whenever possible, usually pork (a rare luxury.) The recipes I considered live on a Pinterest board, and some of those are still to come, from other regions of Oceania.

Here is a list of what I actually made:

1. Banana pancakes (recipe; read more on JennyBakes)
2. Baroida Coffee from Counter Culture (single origin beans from PNG)
3. Saksak (tapioca banana dumplings, similar to a sweet sago ball) - recipe
4. Autumnal Veggies in Spiced Coconut Milk (recipe)

Considering how many times fried bananas came up in the Salak (particularly in moments of stress), I am surprised I never made any.