Canvas recommends: best books for Christmas giving

Rakiura Stewart Island. Photo / Jeremy Pierce For Travel - Oct 26

Give these luscious books to the ones you love this Christmas. By Sarah Daniell, Joanna Wane, Greg Bruce and Eleanor Black

Rooms: Portraits of remarkable New Zealand interiors

by Jane Ussher and John Walsh

(Massey University Press, $85)

Rooms, by Jane Ussher and John Walsh

For the first three decades of her career, photographer Jane Ussher specialised in portraits of people. In this sumptuous new collection of her work, they are entirely absent, other than in the occasional painting or framed photograph. Yet the spaces she presents hum with life, as if the occupant has merely stepped out for a moment. These rooms — Edwardian to art deco; restrained or almost baroque — are homes, not sterile museum pieces.

That ability to capture the echoes of a human presence mirrors Ussher’s first real foray into “interiors”, the extraordinary 2012 study, Still Life: Inside the Antarctic Huts of Scott and Shackleton. Here, those sepia tones give way to a saturation of colour in 300-plus images, shot on a Hasselblad camera using only available light. Historic homes (Dunedin’s Olveston and Larnach Castle, Kawau Island’s Mansion House), and architectural masterpieces (William Holman, James Chapman-Taylor) sit alongside city apartments and even a 1950s bach.

What unites the disparate interiors, notes architectural writer John Walsh in his opening essay, is the effort that has been expended in creating domestic environments that express the sensibility of their inhabitants. Ussher describes them as rooms that have been curated, rather than designed, by people who collect with both intelligence and restraint. “New Zealand is full of individuals who go off on tangents and fill their houses with extraordinary things.” - Joanna Wane

The Climate Book

edited by Greta Thunberg

(Allen Lane, $65)

The Climate Book, edited by Greta Thunberg

If there is one thing I want for Christmas this year it is for climate change to become our Number 1 issue, and it is with that in mind that I heartily recommend Greta Thunberg’s latest project. The Climate Book is a compendium of essays by scientists, activists, health experts and reporters divided into practical sections such as “How Climate Works” and “What We Must Do Now”. It is destined to serve as a household resource for all generations, explaining our crisis clearly and persuasively while hitting on all the key notes – the impact of consumerism, the problem with our food systems, climate apathy, the inequality of climate change impact. Each section opens with an introductory essay by Thunberg, who employs her characteristic clarity: “Is our goal to safeguard present and future living conditions, or is it to maintain a high-consumption way of life?”

The designers have done a stellar job of making an appealing object out of a work that could have been simply depressing. The few photos chosen are strangely beautiful – frozen bubbles of methane in a Russian lake and sled dogs splashing through meltwater in Greenland, for example – and the text is broken up by lots of graphs and tables to help make sense of the science. The stripey cover is a powerful illustration of climate change in action, depicting global temperatures from 1634 to 2021, with blue stripes representing cooler years and red stripes warmer years. This is a book you will leave on the coffee table and dip in and out of for years to come. - Eleanor Black

A Book of Days

by Patti Smith

(Bloomsbury, $43)

A Book of Days, by Patti Smith

Frida Kahlo’s crutches caught my eye. Simple, harsh, wooden tools leaning against a wall. I had recently seen this very photograph by Patti Smith at Te Toi Tāmaki Auckland Art Gallery, in an exhibition of Kahlo and Diego Rivera. The caption in Patti Smith’s covetable hardback A Book Of Days reads: “July 7: Frida’s crutches. The ground shook where she stepped.”

Smith is at once economic and poetic in her observations that accompany 365 images - grand-scale and intimate - taken in a single year, inspired by her Instagram. A Book of Days is a window into the artist’s world (her artistry, lovers, family and friends) and an historical record. There are exquisite epitaphs and portraits of geniuses and giants: Martin Luther King, Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Sylvia Plath, Lou Reed, and of course, Robert Mapplethorpe. There’s a humble headstone of Albert Camus and small, secret talismans that provide a map of her life. The entry for December 10 is a “treasured possession - small and complex born - written in the hand of Emily Dickinson”.

There’s a bonus “further reading” list of some of those featured - William Burroughs, Joan Didion, et al.

Patti Smith - musician, poet, artist - is the personification of cool but there is not a trace of aloofness or cynicism in her observations of social media and of humanity; she captures the big and the small with a sharp, curious eye and holds it all gently in her hands. Timeless. Comforting. Whimsical. Moving. A forever book for weird times. For any time. - Sarah Daniell

Rugby Head: A man, a game, a life, a shambles

by Greg Bruce

(Penguin, $35)

Rugby Head: A man, a game, a life, a shambles, by Greg Bruce

Women do it all the time, but it’s rare to see a man flay himself open so publicly and in such excruciating detail as Greg Bruce does in this intimate dissection of a life often torturously lived. A collection of essays chronicled loosely alongside his obsession with rugby, it’s also really funny. And it’s okay to find yourself laughing out loud at his miseries and misfortunes because he’s my colleague at Canvas, so I know things have turned out pretty well for him, actually — although he still carries that insecure, bullied, self-loathing, redheaded boy inside him and you’ll want to give that poor kid a hug.

The opening chapter, Buck’s Nut, is devoted to the mythology around All Black Buck Shelford playing on with a split testicle and to the shiftiness of memory, a recurring theme. The next two chapters are titled Loser, part one and part two. The loss in part two is the death of his divorced parents, two and a half years apart, a grief complicated by his dad’s alcoholism.

To me, that’s what makes this book so precious — fearlessly (shamelessly) exposing the vulnerabilities tied up in the whole notion of “masculinity”, especially in a rugby-obsessed culture like ours. Men need to acknowledge and confront this kind of stuff. I bet most will recognise some of themselves, or their own sons, in it. No wonder John Campbell endorses Rugby Head so enthusiastically on the cover. It’s maaarvellous. - Joanna Wane

You Probably Think This Song Is About You

by Kate Camp

(Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35)

You Probably Think This Song Is About You, by Kate Camp

This is the rock ’n’ roll memoir we didn’t expect from Kate Camp, treasured poet and essayist, communications boss at Te Papa, and long-time recommender of classic books on RNZ. You Probably Think This Song Is About You is a frank and touching account of Camp’s girlhood and young womanhood in Wellington in the 80s and 90s. The amount of casual violence and danger is startling. She is sexually assaulted. She is arrested. She drinks until she can’t stand up, sustaining “drinking injuries” and wetting herself. Her boyfriend goes to prison. Her mother suffers a home invasion. At 15 her confidante is a 41-year-old drug dealer.

Young Camp navigates it all with astonishing vim and good fortune, a function, she says now, of her privilege as a white middle-class girl, although she downplays her own bravery in managing difficult situations. (Try to get through the essay on infertility with dry eyes.) But what really sets this book apart is the quality of the writing and the warmth of the author’s attitude towards herself and all those past people who made mistakes way back when. In a year of superb memoirs, this is a standout. - Eleanor Black

Grand

by Noelle McCarthy

(Penguin, $35)

Grand, by Noelle McCarthy

As a literary topic, alcoholism can be so mundane. The accumulation of betrayals and abdications of responsibility by sufferers often mess up lives - both their own and those of the people closest to them – in ways that are typically deeply unsatisfying because they’re so pernicious and therefore lacking in big dramatic moments. Exactly the same description could be applied to the subject of parental relationships. So writing about both in one book would seem to present a particular challenge.

There are no especially big moments in Grand, no dramatic set pieces where everything falls apart or comes back together. Instead, it offers a steady accumulation of the details of life, death, birth, more life, and so on: There is nothing new under the sun, we are doomed to repeat ourselves, the eternal recurrence and so on. Given its lack of big narrative spikes, it is a suspiciously compelling book and the reason for that, I think, is that Noelle McCarthy has worked so hard to understand both life in general and her place in it specifically. A good memoir is not the product of a writer who’s lived an interesting life, it’s the product of a writer who can make a life interesting. Grand is a very good memoir. - Greg Bruce

Rakiura: The Wild Landscapes of Stewart Island

by Rob Brown

(Potton & Burton, $65)

Rakiura: The Wild Landscapes of Stewart Island, by Rob Brown

It took three flights to get from Auckland via Christchurch and Invercargill to Rakiura, making it a trip of more connections than many places far beyond Aotearoa. But such is the draw of this wild, enigmatic island across the formidable Foveaux Strait - and I have always been drawn to the outer extremities. I remember catching my breath when first seeing the beach - golden sands and the blue water of Paterson Inlet. It looked like a dazzling tropical beach, so bright it almost hurt to gaze on it. The temperature of the water though - another story. You do not linger there without a wetsuit.

But the place calls you. And if you do not or cannot take the journey, there is this book, by landscape photographer Rob Brown. He takes the reader right to the primordial landscape that owes more to the forces of nature than it does the hand of human beings. The images are double-take surreal, capturing a beauty of an otherworld that - surely - exists only in the imagination. The dancing colours of the harakeke; the perfectly formed kiwi footprints on the golden sand at Mason Bay; bull kelp in The Gutter, like the ocean’s fingers, beckoning; the contrasts and the light. Brown captures all this over two distinct periods using analogue film, and more recently, a Nikon digital. The result is a glorious ode to a precious place that must be preserved. For more on Rakiura, see our edited extract on pages 26-27. - Sarah Daniell

A History of New Zealand in 100 Objects

by Jock Phillips

(Penguin, $55)

A History of New Zealand in 100 Objects, by Jock Phillips

This is a shameless rip-off of the BBC series A History of the World in 100 Objects, but if history has taught us anything, it’s that we are doomed to repeat ourselves. Unlike so much else, though, this is at least an endeavour worth repeating. Grand histories like these are important for our understanding of our world and how we’ve messed it up so badly that it’s now all but ruined. They feel good in our hands in the bookshop and look great on our bookshelves but they’re much harder to pick up than a good novel and even harder to keep going on. This is not so much a problem with the writing as with the subject matter: The events of the world or even a single country don’t lend themselves to a coherent and compelling narrative – not a real one anyway.

Breaking the whole into 100 small slices makes the work both more approachable and readable. The objects offer a concrete platform from which Jock Phillips is able to weave stories that offer both insight and satisfying narrative payoffs. For instance, in back-to-back chapters later in the book, he covers the rise of new-right economics and the history of personal computers. That sentence alone is so boring as to put most readers to sleep, but the economics chapter takes as its object a protest poster and the PC chapter a New Zealand computer that nearly changed the world, offering both a point of intrigue and a jumping-off point for great stories. - Greg Bruce