Christmas Book Reviews by Chloe Blades

The Burn Book by Kara Swisher (Hachette, $40)

If you haven’t heard of the formidable tech journalist, Kara Swisher, listen to her podcast with Scott Galloway called Pivot. She’s a fast-paced, terrifyingly quick-witted woman who’s worked at The Wall Street Journal, amongst many other news juggernauts, and chaired the rare interview between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. She debates with fierce fervour and logic on all things tech and politics, and here, in The Burn Book, she takes Silicon’s elite to task on their questionable deals, ethics and morals. Through the conversations and disagreements had first-hand with the likes of Elon Musk (who she used to get along with), Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Zuckerberg (she’s the reason he was soaked in his own sweat on stage), it’s clear she’s not afraid of being disliked and will say it exactly as she sees it. It’s a brilliant read post-US election too, as we watch the President-elect surround himself with unqualified yes-men who make regular appearances in The Burn Book. If they weren’t so dangerously self-serving you could almost feel sorry for these lonely, insecure billionaires.

The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy (Hamish Hamilton, $50)

Deborah Levy is the literary embodiment of my North Star. If she said jump, I’d ask how high. Do you remember Woody Allan’s Midnight in Paris, where a modern-day writer ends up in the 1920s having conversations with Picasso, Hemingway and Fitzgerald? The Position of Spoons is like that, only better, and in essay form, and it traverses the lives of lesser-known artistic geniuses with Levy often giving voice to their thoughts and opinions through the lens of her own experiences. On Violette Leduc’s autobiography, for example, Levy notes that “with words she not so much found the point to life and sharpened life to a point,” which one gets a similar sense of about Levy when reading this collection. In a miraculous, thought-provoking essay titled A-Z of the Death Drive, she documents the fatal crashes of Grace Kelly, Jayne Mansfield, and James Dean, and other car accident attributes like hauntings, horoscopes and highways. Just when you thought she wouldn’t be able to reach greater literary heights than that of Real Estate, the last in her living autobiography trilogy, she brings us this jaw-dropping adventure. It’s so unbelievably random but by the end it makes so much sense. This is for every person who enjoys essays and thoughtfully complex female autobiography.

Japan: An Autobiography by Peter Shaw (Six Point Press, $45) 

New Zealand’s Peter Shaw and Six Point Press have set a high bar for the future of travel writing. Like Peter who “never had a dull day in Japan” even after 28 visits, you won’t find a dull page here. Japan: An Autobiography introduces the relationship early travellers from New Zealand had with the country, showcasing a unique relationship and fascination. It opens with the question “why do you go to Japan?”, and after you’ve turned the last of the 156 pages, and you contemplate the cultural, artistic, social and architectural history tour you’ve just been taken on, you realise that’s why Peter goes and you will want to go too. The colour illustrations add even more depth to Shaw’s erudite musings on Japan’s significant history and its artefacts, such as goshuin drawn by the monk Mamoru at Horin-ji, Arashiyama - which you’ll see is as beautiful as it sounds. I was enthralled by the introduction to the 1,300 Jizo statues at the Zojo-ji temple, who are protectors of “children, the souls of unborn babies and of children who have died before their parents,” and couldn’t believe that for centuries, “Japanese citizens had been forbidden to leave their country in pain of death”. It’s a true appreciation of a country and it makes you feel as though you’re holding a slice of Japan’s heart and soul in your hands. 

Earth by John Boyne (DoubleDay, $35)

If you are, like I was, in need of something spectacular to get you excited again about fiction, John Boyne’s new quartet is the answer. Water was the first to be released and Fire is the latest, but I started with Earth because it was the one in stock at the gorgeous bookshop in Akaroa. Evan is a young, gay professional footballer from Ireland on trial for accessory to rape. Through the chapters set in his past we learn of his rise to football stardom as he reluctantly lives out the dreams of his aggressive father instead of becoming an artist. It is a captivating foray into how someone’s life can be moulded by their talent, the wrong decisions they make, and other people’s actions towards them. Boyne not only puts Evan and the accused rapist, fellow footballer Robbie, on trial, but powerful and wealthy predators, dysfunctional families, the absurdity of football fandom, and the entire system surrounding rape trials. What’s most conflicting is the way Boyne captures the wholeness of a person, their most intimate fears and rejections, desires and ambitions, who’s accused of something abhorrent. This is a short novel with lyrical, succinct prose that will suck you into all its drama and will have you contemplating the devastation of the themes in its wake.

The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie (Fitzcarraldo Editions, $41)

After the French Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux had sex with her lover, Marc Marie, they took photographs of the rooms they’d stripped down in. You’d think that reading a retrospective of what’s happening in someone else’s photos would be as boring as it is when someone recalls a dream that you weren’t in. Yet the candid narration of the moments before and after the photos were taken makes the essays anything but. They provide two beautifully lyrical perspectives of a shared experience and immortalise the sentimentality, craving and ardour savoured for those first years of love. They meditate on the dirty dinner plates in the background, the position of a shoe, and what time of day it must have been based on the crack of light peeping through a window. These turn into musings on what Marc’s shoe trampling on Annie’s bra suggests about masculinity, or how Annie remembers feeling wearing a wig, or not, in front of Marc as she underwent chemotherapy. This is a work of art that only a French Nobel Prize winner could achieve in portraying the beauty and vulnerability of men, women, and sex. This is for you if you’re into high-brow non-fiction and enjoy a deep analysis with artistic black and white photography. 

What I Ate In One Year by Stanley Tucci (Penguin, $50)

Rachel Cooke said in The Guardian, “How many times must we hear how much he loves marinara sauce? Or artichokes? Or aubergine? There are only so many ways to say something is delicious”. What I want to know is, what’s wrong with hearing Stanley Tucci, the wry, witty, cynical Italian-American living in England, telling us about how much he loves an aubergine? If you’re a fan, or buying it for someone who is, they’re not going to be disappointed or phased about his penchant for another marinara sauce. They want the simple pleasure of reading more anecdotes about the unique day-to-day existence of an obviously kind man who knows good food, where to find it, and who to eat it with. There’s a story about a 17 hour flight being delayed because the French were on strike “because their retirement age was probably being raised from thirty five to thirty six”. He’s funny. It’s a good-humoured, blissful reprieve from the serious state of the world. This is for the person who you don’t know what to get but know they need a meditative, escapist read.