10WLA Book Club

Witi Ihimaera,  The Whale Rider —International Edition  (Reed Publishing, 2003), pp. 154. Ihimaera is arguably the most influential Maori author in existence, publishing the first collection of short stories by a Maori writer called  Pounamu Pounamu  in 1972. The following year, he followed suit by being the first Maori to author a novel— Tangi.  However, his  magnum opus  is indubitably his 1987  The Whale Rider.  Fifteen years later the film adaption was released, with the eminent Niki Caro as the supervising director and Keisha Castle-Hughe's entrancing performance as the protagonist. As one commentator accurately observed, "A film so specific to one area, and grounded so firmly in New Zealand and Maori culture, has enthralled audiences from different countries partly because of the universal theme of heroic triumph over adversity, but mainly because of Castle-Hughes' and [Rawiri] Paratene's stunningly natural and utterly convincin...

The Book of Heroic Failures By Stephen Pile The Book of Heroic Failures, was written by Stephen Pile and first published in 1979. This book is essentially a collection of hilarious, ironic and unusual people and events. This sole theme is that of ironic failure, each story being anywhere from a few sentences to several paragraphs. The book itself is split into eleven different sections so that the reader may dip in and out of the book at will, which is a very helpful format considering the layout of the stories. My favourite sections include  the glory of the stage ,  stories we failed to pin down  and  the art of being wrong.  From the poet whose footnotes were longer than his poems, to a bill ruling that the value of pi was four, there is no shortage of entertaining stories within this books pages. To those who wish to read only the best of these stories I would advise that you read some of the longer ones as more tends to go wrong, causing a domino...

Running Girl is a book by Simon Mason about a teenage boy named Garvie Smith, who, despite having the highest IQ ever recorded at his school, is lazy, wags, drinks alcohol, smokes and has terrible grades. He is often just daydreaming and lying on his bed, until the body of his ex-girlfriend, Chloe Dow is pulled out of a pond nearby and he is instantly woken. Despite there already being an Detective Inspector on the case, Garvie starts investigating for himself. He does a lot of sleuthing, disguising, rule breaking, interrupting with official business, and takes many dangerous risks to find out that Chloe was being bothered by many people, and that she hadn't been the innocent beautiful girl the media was portraying her as. But as Garvie gets more and more involved, things get more and more risky and dangerous. I found this book very engaging and enjoyable. The way it was written was easy to read, and there were many twists and turns in the plot where I thought that was the e...