What I’m Reading Philippa Werry

Lately I’ve been reading a mishmash of books from our shelves and books that people in our bubble had out from the library.

Sometimes those two sources meshed brilliantly. The Barbizon by Paulina Bren is the story of the famous women’s-only hotel, built on the Upper East Side of New York in the 1920s when young women flocking to the city for work needed a safe place to stay.

Its 700 tiny rooms housed students from the Katie Gibbs Secretarial School, aspiring actresses and models and artists, and – every July – an excited group of guest editors for Mademoiselle magazine.

In July 1953, one of those guest editors was Sylvia Plath, who wrote about the experience 10 years later in The Bell Jar. (That was the book from our shelves).

It’s intriguing to read about the same incidents – the caviar scooped up at dinner, the rose photograph, the clothes hurled from the rooftop – as described by Paulina Bren, and then again in The Bell Jar (where the Barbizon is renamed the Amazon).

Another combination that echoed each other nicely were Tina Makereti’s Where the Rekohu Bone Sings and Fleur Beale’s new YA novel

The Calling.

These two books made me think about people and places in New Zealand in a different way: in The Calling, Mother Mary Aubert (not at all how I imagined her) and her mission station at Jerusalem, and in Where the Rekohu Bone Sings, the Chatham Islands/Rekohu, today and in the past.

Both books included scenes of late 19th century Wellington (even a street in my own suburb) and I liked the way they explored themes of family history and how it shapes and influences the path you take in the world.