Sunday, April 29, 2012

What I’m reading

James George, who wrote one of my favourite New Zealand novels, Hummingbird, on popular crime fiction – Lee Child, James Lee Burke, Michael Connelly etc. Always good to read a good writer on other good writers.


Keith Kloor, adjunct professor of journalism at New York University, at Discover magazine on green modernism.

Imperator Fish gets all satirical about the media/blogosphere fuss about David Shearer and Grant Robertson. Things have come to a pretty pass when MSM writers base their paid columns on what unpaid bloggers David Farrar, Cameron Slater and Chris Trotter have claimed, based on who knows what. Looking at you, Audrey. And you, Vernon. And you too, Ms Watkins. Things have come to an even prettier pass when the only person to talk sense is Jim Anderton:
“Did you see the polls for Helen Clark? Labour was 16 per cent and Clark 1 per cent. But some of the people now predicting Shearer’s demise also predicted Clark’s demise.”
Good to see that Booksellers NZ is having a think about its Premier Bestsellers promotion. It has been a confusing exercise, and led to this wildly erroneous story in the Herald on 20 March which, to the writer’s credit, was corrected on 30 March. This must be the nail in the coffin:
Major commercial publishers Random, Penguin and Hodder are not currently participating in Premier bestsellers.
Hachette’s Kevin Chapman  told The Read “My view is that it was never a success, and we were half-hearted participants. The important thing would be to have it heavily promoted. It isn’t known by the public and that makes it less than ideal.”
The Listener says, p77 of the current issue, that on Sky tonight, on the ironically titled channel Movie Greats, at 8:30pm we may view King Arthur, starring Clive Owen, Ioan Gruffudd and Keira Knightley. The film would seem not to know its Woads from its Picts, nor the Listener its Europeans from its other Europeans. The billing reads:
In Romainan-occupied Britain, a cavalry officer and his men are sent to rescue an important family from invading Saxons.

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