Holiday reading

We've been putting up a few books online recently that make great holiday reading, and it turns out that there's a bit of a shipwreck adventure theme going on, all with a New Zealand focus of course.

First up is François Raynal's Wrecked on a Reef, which recounts the almost two-year stint of Raynal and his shipmates on the Auckland Islands after their ship, the Grafton, is wrecked. Amazingly, the Grafton crew survived their ordeal in relative health and comfort, while unbeknowen to them another group of survivors, who were wrecked later and rescued earlier, almost all died.

This sucess at surviving in an environment where it rains for 30 days a month and there is little to eat except molly mawks and an occasional seal was largely down to Raynal's remarkable talents for improving their conditions in spite of few resources, and they managed to make soap, tan leather, build a comfortable lodge, and make a forge and iron tools.

It's a fantastic read, and ended up being an influence on Jules Verne when he wrote The Mysterious Island. The edition we have online contains fascinating commentaries from Christiane Mortelier, which she has kindly allowed us to republish online.

The Auckland Islands feature again in The Castaways of Disappointment Island, an account of the wreck of the Dundonald, and another great read.

The Auckland Islands were responsible for a significant number of the shipwrecks occuring in New Zealand waters, of which probably the most famous was the wreck of the General Grant. In the days of sailing ships, the quickest route across the Pacific was typically via the latitudes of the Roaring 40s, to the south of New Zealand; however, with the Auckland Islands smack in the middle of the route a number of ships came to grief, and survivors typically had to endure for many months before there was a chance of rescue.

A book covering the fascinating history and geography of the Auckland Islands is Allen Eden's Islands of Despair. He goes into detail about a number of the wrecks, including the General Grant, the Grafton, the Dundonald, the Derry Castle, the Invercauld and others, but also covers the story of the Erlangen, a German steamer which used the Auckland Islands as a base during a successful effort to escape New Zealand waters at the beginning of the Second World War. The Erlangen managed to escape from Otago harbour and reach South America without detection, though even with stopping at the Auckland Islands to cut a large quantity of wood for fuel, the Captain was forced into using many of the wooden fittings on board in order to reach the destination.

A more modern tale of shipwreck disaster is The Wahine Disaster, by Max Lambert and Jim Hartley. The authors, both journalists, do a great job of weaving together the different stories of the survivors and evoking the atmosphere of that tragic day. The result is a book that is highly readable but also quite sobering, and is essential reading for anyone interested in the disaster.

Another book well worth reading that we've had available online for a while now is Elsie K. Morton's Crusoes of Sunday Island, an account of the life of the Bell family on Sunday Island (now known as Raoul Island) in the Kermadecs. What seems at times an ideal, if at times difficult life, is put into contrast by the events at the end of the book which force the family to flee the island.

If shipwreck adventure is not your cup of tea, then you could try some of our more literary additions:

Katherine Mansfield's Novels and Novelists, a collection of reviews Mansfield wrote on leading authors of the day originally published in the Athenæum between April 1919 and December 1920. This work contains 150 reviews of 127 books by authors including Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence and many others.

Pageant, a 1933 (our edition from 1935) New Zealand novel from the pen of Edith Lyttleton (writing as G.B. Lancaster) which sold more than 50,000 copies in the United States alone during the first two years of its release. As Terry Sturm notes in his comprehensive article on Lyttleton's publishing career and her entanglements with publishers and literary agents, "It was by far the most widely read novel ever written by a New Zealander, up to that time." We also have two of Lyttleton's other novels available online: Promenade and The World is Yours.

Jane Mander's The Passionate Puritan, according to the New Zealand Book Council, "is a rather cheerful account of kauri milling, apparently written with an eye on the cinema (‘a mistake’, Mander claimed, she ‘ever afterwards regretted’)". Mander is probably best known for her novel The Story of a New Zealand River, which was adapted for the screen by Jane Campion as The Piano, and which Mansfield rather critically reviews in Novels and Novelists.

Margaret Bullocks's Utu: A Story of Love, Hate and Revenge. Part of the Nineteenth Century New Zealand Novels collection, this edition of Utu has been extensively footnoted and prepared with an introduction to the work of Margaret Bullock by Vicki Hughes, a student from the University of Victoria Department of English postgraduate programme. As Vicki notes, "Deceit, revenge, murder, incest, cannibalism and false identities, Margaret Bullock’s Utu: A Story of Love, Hate and Revenge has it all."

If we're talking favourites, then mine would have to be Raynal's Wrecked on a Reef, which is truly stranger than fiction, and an amazing tale of resourcefulness in the face of adversity.

For Stuart, his choice is Archibald Baxter's We Will Not Cease, an account of the author's horrific treatment during the First World War as a conscientious objector including imprisonment, beating, the infamous "Number 1 Field Punishment" (essentially day-long cruxifiction), and being left for dead on the battlefields of France. It's a truly remarkable book, and one for which the matter-of-fact tone is amazing, given the tribulations that the author experienced.

These books described above are all available as ePub eBooks (and occasionally PDF), downloadable for reading on your mobile device such as the iPhone / iPod Touch, or electronic ink devices such as the ecoReader which VicBooks here at Victoria University is now stocking. While we don't expect too many New Zealanders to be reading ePubs such as those mentioned above this holiday season, if the pace of developments in 2010 is anything like it has been this year, then we think that in twelve months time we'll see quite a few more people downloading ePubs from the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre website.

For us, the rapid acceptance of eBooks has been the biggest surprise of the year, and we're glad that we can help to ensure that New Zealand's historical cultural texts can be represented in this brave new world. We look forward to making many more titles of interest to the New Zealand public freely available online during 2010.

Wishing everyone a relaxing and enjoyable time over the holiday season,

Jason