Whare Korero

This is a self-promotional book, from Reed Publishing, looking back over their long history of publishing books in New Zealand. The form of the books is a review by decade, starting with some cover art. Then a brief introduction to an author and an excerpt of their work.

As one might expect from this type of anthology, the selections and excerpts are not all expected to appeal to each reader. Notwithstanding this there are most of the bigger New Zealand literary names present - James Cowan, James K Baxter, Barry Crump, Mona Anderson, Fleur Adcock, Philip Holden, Janet Frame, Frank Sargeson, Don Grady, Witi Ihimaera,'Big Al' Lester, Bob Jones, and of course, plenty from the prolific AW Reed himself!

It was interesting to see how tightly AW controlled the content in the early days - from maintaining a stable of religious and secular writers to be changing with the times to follow popular lines, and even a significant number of gay fiction titles (the 90's onward).

There were probably a dozen of the excerpts I thought were brilliant, another dozen I read and were ok, and a whole heap I had a go at and moved on.

Would I recommend the book? Probably for those looking for some range in NZ writing (albeit this is only the range published by Reed), or those interested in how the (slowly) changing culture in NZ effected the books and the topics being written about.

Stars is difficult. For the bits I enjoyed 5 stars, for the bits I didn't, 1 star, but overall, I guess 3 stars in between.