Maxine Braham is associate director and movement director of the NBR New Zealand Opera's Genesis Energy season of Macbeth.
The book I love most is ...
Different books warm different parts of your spirit. My top three are Immortality by Milan Kundera (an elegant look at those existential questions), Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh (for glamour and hilarious razor-sharp observations) and Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne (for adorable innocence and some valuable philosophy).
The book I'm reading right now is ...
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri. I enjoyed her Interpreter of Maladies so much on a trip to Myanmar that I rationed the number of pages I read each day because I wanted to make it last longer.
The book that changed me is ...
Reading sometimes gives me new ideas, new ways of looking at things, which I love trying on, like a hat. Sometimes I take the hat off after a while and sometimes the ideas integrate. I can't think of a particular before-and-after experience with a book. The change is more a gentle accumulation of all the fabulous things one has read.
The book I wish I'd never read is ...
I never bother to finish a book I'm not enjoying. I remember hauling my way through Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White at school because I had to, but that was the last time.
* Macbeth opens in Auckland on Saturday, September 18. See nzopera.com
