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    How to Read a Book
    How to Read a Book
    How to Read a Book
    Ebook131 pages3 hours

    How to Read a Book

    By Kelly Ana Morey

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    About this ebook

    An award-winning novelist reveals the books that have captivated her and the influence they have had on her life and writing. Highlighting a true love affair with books, this story emphasizes the transformative power of the written word.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAwa Press
    Release dateAug 1, 2016
    ISBN9781927249376
    How to Read a Book
    Author

    Kelly Ana Morey

    Kelly Ana Morey is a New Zealand writer living in Kaipara. She is the author of five novels. Her latest book, Daylight Second, a novel about Phar Lap, was published in 2016. Kelly was born in 1968 of Ngati Kuri, Te Rarawa and Te Aupouri descent.

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    • 4/5
      I just chanced on this book in the library sale, 50c well spent, worth much much more. I was captivated by it. It is part Bio, part 'How to read a Book' and part 'How Kelly writes ...'.
      Very enjoyable ... The book came about when she was invited to vote in yet another 'Best 100 Books Ever Written' ...
      You just know that these lists will be filled with best sellers not 'Best Books Ever Written'. Like Kelly I largely ignore best sellers, I keep my eyes pealed and ears tuned for other recomendations, like books that motivated great writers.
      Anyway Kelly is living and writing an interesting life. Throughout discussing books she is reading or has discarded.
      A lively read. And she presents her 'Best 100 books' at the end.

    Book preview

    How to Read a Book - Kelly Ana Morey

    For my mother, in appreciation for the novel DNA

    Read, read everything

    WILLIAM FAULKNER

    About the Author

    KELLY ANA MOREY was born in New Zealand in 1968. After a peripatetic childhood in Papua New Guinea, she spent five years boarding at New Plymouth Girls’ High School and a decade and a bit going to university. In 2000, having completed a Master of Arts in art history, she discovered herself unemployed and living in the Far North, and started writing a novel. In 2003 Bloom was published to great critical acclaim, and in 2004 it won the NZSA Hubert Church Award for Best First Work of Fiction at the Montana Book Awards. Morey’s second novel, Grace is Gone, was published in 2004 and became a finalist in the prestigious Kiriyama Prize. Kelly Ana Morey received the Todd New Writers’ Bursary in 2003 and the inaugural Janet Frame prize for fiction in 2005. She is currently writing her third novel.

    ‘What is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversation?’ Lewis Carroll

    LEWIS CARROLL

    I'll take you there

    Why aren’t Judith Krantz and Shirley Conran on any of my prescribed reading lists, I ponder idly at the end of the school year, as I fill out enrolment forms for university. Not only are my favourite authors absent, but with the exception of Jane Austen and assorted Brontës there isn’t a single name I recognise among the many, many novels I will have to read between the beginning of the academic year and those far-off, unimaginable and sadly inevitable exams.

    A summer later my friend Catherine and I joint-purchase the texts for Stage I: Twentieth Century Literature with the fervour of the newly enrolled. Back in the hostel, I go through the pile and pull out Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and begin to read. It doesn’t take long: it’s a slim book.

    What a joy it would be to claim now that as a result of this early introduction to Literature with a capital L, my life changed irrevocably. But the truth is I had no idea what the novel was about. Not a skerrick, not a scrap, not an inkling. Of course, if I had bothered to haul my arse into the three lectures on what I now know is a very fine piece of work (and a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre) things might have been oh so terribly different. However.

    I was 17 years old and, let’s face it, had not an original thought in my head. And suddenly I was being confronted with books about ideas, language, meaning. All things I didn’t understand. The one thing I thought I knew about myself – ‘reader’ – had become a fiction. So I gave up. Just like that.

    It’s strange that I would have even considered myself a ‘reader’ at that point in my life because in truth, if my friends Judith and Shirley were anything to go by, I really wasn’t. I didn’t have a passion for literature. Didn’t even know what it was, to be honest. I hadn’t suckled at the breast of Marcel Proust, or read Dostoevsky in the original before cutting adult teeth. True, Wilbur Smith had featured heavily in my pre-teen reading, but that wasn’t quite the same.

    A university education is an anomaly in my family, but books aren’t. My mother’s side, in particular, are readers. However, just being a reader, a person who reads books, doesn’t make you well read. Lots of people read, and not too many of them care about Literature. They are blissfully ignorant of Virginia Woolf’s role in the birth of modernism, or the influence of Saul Bellow on twentieth century American fiction. They’d be hard-pressed to critically dissect a Carson McCullers novel. In truth, I didn’t really learn to read until I was in my early thirties, which was fairly problematic considering I had chosen to do English at university. I didn’t get the novels we were charged with studying. It was that simple. They were boring, I thought. Nowhere near as much fun as a Judith or a Shirley. But that was then and this is now.

    It would be close to a decade before books once more began to make sense, the way my faithful old pony books had in my childhood and the ‘four girls with a secret’ books had in my teens. The journey back to reader would be long and arduous, with just enough moments of perfect clarity to keep me hooked. It would involve more than a few attempts at a classical education, courtesy of various universities, a fair bit of waitressing, and an embarrassing amount of unemployment. There was even a bit of writing in there. Not much, but enough.

    This book is about reading, but it is also about writing. I make no apology for this. Every book has a writer. The novel you choose in a bookstore or tug off a library shelf is not an orphan. Somebody made up this whole world entirely for your edification. And that same somebody wants you to fall in love with this thing of words they crafted with their bare hands. At best, a book is the product of a thousand infinitesimal choices, all designed to seduce the reader and make redundant the outside world. To read it is to enter not just the tidy, contained world on the printed page, but the ragged, chaotic universe that lies behind it.

    The genesis for this book was a chance conversation – isn’t it always? – and a bit of fortuitous timing. A national newspaper was compiling one of those tedious lists of the Best 100 Books Ever Written. Members of the public were instructed to send in their top ten, which many did. However I didn’t: apart from such lists always being annoyingly predictable, I figured as I had only lived half my life – fingers crossed – I could honestly select only five books, and at least two had to be children’s. There seemed no point, then. My Friend Flicka was never going to make the Top 100 in competition with the likes of The Lord of the Rings, The Da Vinci Code and the Bible. However, the exercise did get me thinking about the books that had been important to me over the past 30 or so years since I first figured out how to decipher words on a printed page. Had these books, some good and some so awfully bad, made me the writer I was today?

    Then Awa Press came calling, and over the course of a few emails I managed to convince not only them but also myself that people could be interested in the influence of literary luminaries such as Jilly Cooper and Agatha Christie on the work of a writer such as me, that they might want to know about books that had been transformative, and others that had been merely useful one way or another. One of the reasons writers read so avidly is because we’re looking for solutions to our own writerly problems. I’m not above pinching off other writers. Theft? Plagiarism? Au contraire: these days we call it post-modernism. It’s not only perfectly acceptable, but frankly de rigueur. Hence the many very strange novels floating around, written by ‘bright young things’ – the kind of novels that are almost impossible to comprehend because they are about so many things the notion of plot has become almost redundant. Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love and The Bluebird Café by Carmel Bird are the current favourites in my endlessly expanding collection of ever-so-odd books.

    I would sooner read a timetable or a catalogue than nothing at all

    W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

    Blood and Guts in High School

    Ennui, superciliousness, nicotine and trashy novels had threatened to dominate my teenage years. My mother incarcerated me in a boarding school for

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