It's NZ Book Month!

It's time for the book nerd in me to celebrate my love of books! Her in NZ, it's Book Month, with a bunch of bookish events happening around the country, touring authors and people just generally loving and appreciating books. So I thought I would give myself a little interview to start things off - feel free to join in on your own blog or in the comments, even if your not from NZ, I'd love to hear from you!

What have you just finished reading?
Flashback Forward by John Cairney

What did you think?
Started of brilliantly, then went downhill from there with weak characters, dislocation from the central issues and an anticlimax.

What are you reading now?
The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield.

What do you think?
I fell in love with Katherine Mansfield after watching the movie about her early life, called Bliss, and I do love her writing, although I haven't read much of it yet - I've only just started.

Top five favourite books?
Outlander by Diana Gabaldon, One Day by David Nicholls, Water for Elephants by Sarah Gruen, Goodbye Sarajevo by Atka Reid and Hana Schofield, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D Sallinger.

Favourite book that's been made into a movie?
The romantic in me says The Notebook... but Water for Elephants was truly amazing.

What's on your 2013 To Be Read list?
They're all New Zealand books, because I just decided to explore a bit of my local literature for a change: The Edge of the Alphabet by Janet Frame, Scented Gardens for the Blind by Janet Frame, I got his Blood on me by Lawrence Patchett, Tamar, White Feathers, Blue Smoke (series) by Deborah Challinor, The Girl Below by Bianca Zander.

What's your favourite place to read?
I can read anywhere really - growing up in a noisy family I trained myself to be able to read even when the TV was blaring, siblings arguing, mum cooking dinner. But in summer I do enjoy a nice comfy chair outside in the sun with a glass of orange juice beside me and in winter it's always nice to curl up in front of the heater in mountains of blankets and a cup of tea. Simple pleasures really.

What was your favourite book as a child?
That would have to be Go Dog Go! Even though Dad would read it to me like, every night, I still got so freakin' excited when he would slooooooowly turn the last page and there it was, A DOG PARTY!

If you could be any character from a book, who would you be and why?
Claire from the Outlander series because she's just so damn fearless! And she's married to Jamie Fraser..

Review: Flashback Forward

Like The Blasphemer (which I'm sure I wrote a review for but can't find), this was a book I really, really wanted to like, but in the end, it could have been so much better.

Tam Cochrane is a sickly lad, confined to his bed in Glasgow in the 1880s. His only experience of adventure and the outside world is through books - that is until his father decides to sell up and head for New Zealand. As they take the four-month journey by ship, Tam's health begins to improve, and with it signs of a new Tam, fully engaging in the real world. After arriving in their new country, the family heads to Rotorua and Tarawera, only to be caught in the volcanic eruption of 1886. Having been concussed, Tam wakes up, groggy but still the fit young man he'd been growing into, except he finds he is in Napier, emerging from the ruins of the 1931 earthquake. What has happened to the last 45 years? Why is he still a young man? And who is the other Tam Cochrane, now living like a recluse back in Glasgow? An intriguing story, it is set among the cataclysmic events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and deals with identity, with finding out who we really are in life and with living it to the full.

It started brilliantly, full of all the elements I love in a good story: identity, struggle, change, disaster, and best of all, time travel. However, as the story went on... and on... those elements seemed to disappear, and the most exciting element, the time travel, became a bit of an afterthought for the main character, something that wasn't very important but had me as the reader screaming out for a resolution which never came. I didn't need to know why he travelled through time, I just needed to know what would happen if the two Tam Cochrane's met, and also why it was Napier's earthquake he ended up in.
I could understand a lot of the author's intentions, but I found Tam was lacking in a lot of normal human emotion. He didn't miss his family much, he didn't fight for the love of his life hard enough, and he didn't try hard enough to find out what the hell happened to him and why, so for me, the character just wasn't strong enough, wasn't deep enough.
The way the author conveyed time passing also puzzled me. All in one page Tam could fall asleep, then wake up and a year had passed - no breaks in the chapters to indicate the author was skipping ahead, sometimes it was a case of one minute he's 18, nek minute, 25...
Also, like The Blasphemer, it all ended in such a rush with so many things left unresolved, which was just not okay.
So as much as I wanted to like Flashback Forward, I wish it was so much more.
Oh well, onto the next one! Janet Frame or Katherine Mansfield... hhmm who to pick...

The NZ fiction journey begins

Since I've finally finished reading Nancy Wake - which I wanted to finish by the end of 2012 but just didn't get round to it - my NZ fiction journey can begin!
You have seen me mention it before, but just to recap... I am reading only New Zealand fiction this year for three reasons: #1 I feel like we give international authors too much of the spotlight, with our books squished into dusty back shelves in our own book stores. #2 I want to become a New Zealand author one day, and I'm working on an epic three-part series called Missing Since Tuesday, so I want to learn what I can from those who have gone before me. #3 Apart from maybe reading something by a NZ author in school (which I can't remember but I'm sure it must have been in the curriculum somewhere), I have never read a book by a New Zealand author and of that I'm a little ashamed.

So here I go, and I'm starting with a lesser-known book called Flashback Forward by John Cairney. I should probably start with something a little more well known, but I've just been hankering to get into this one since I bought it over a year ago, so I'm starting with it.

Here's what it's about:

Tam Cochrane is a sickly lad, confined to his bed in Glasgow in the 1880s. His only experience of adventure and the outside world is through books - that is until his father decides to sell up and head for New Zealand. As they take the four-month journey by ship, Tam's health begins to improve, and with it signs of a new Tam, fully engaging in the real world. After arriving in their new country, the family heads to Rotorua and Tarawera, only to be caught in the volcanic eruption of 1886. Having been concussed, Tam wakes up, groggy but still the fit young man he'd been growing into, except he finds he is in Napier, emerging from the ruins of the 1931 earthquake. What has happened to the last 45 years? Why is he still a young man? And who is the other Tam Cochrane, now living like a recluse back in Glasgow? An intriguing story, it is set among the cataclysmic events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and deals with identity, with finding out who we really are in life and with living it to the full.

Synopsis from Google Books