Otahuhu College

38,689 pages read and 3,595 team points

Team members

BTL

3,343 pts

(3,328 pages read)

Floating in a most peculiar way

By Louis Chude-Sokei

4 stars

A memoir by a man (now a professor of the literature of the Black diaspora) about growing up with famous Nigerian parentage and a Jamaican accent he wants to hide in a dangerous part of Los Angeles. He's clearly had a very interesting life but he seemed to skip over some key bits (how, exactly, did he get from getting in fights to going to university?). And the prose was sometimes confusing - did he really think all that through as a child? Or is his adult self reflecting back?
World Without End

By Ken Follet

4 stars

Great book for a plane journey to America - no way to run out of book before the end of the journey! Not quite as good as the first one, Pillars of the Earth, but the medieval setting is very real and the characters are interesting.
Beauty

By Robin McKinley

4 stars

Pleasant, happy retelling of Beauty and the Beast with (a bit of) a feminist spin.
The Wayfinder

By Adam Johnson

5 stars

Wow, great book. Set in an undated but pre-European Tongan-dominated Pacific, featuring parrots, poetry and dances, lost islands, various nasty people and a few beautiful souls. Johnson has clearly done heaps and heaps of research - he's not Pasifika himself, but I learned more about island cultures from this novel than I have from a year teaching in a Pasifika-dominated school. And it's not going to make you miss the good old days!
Ghosts of Gondwana

By George Gibbs

5 stars

Super interesting, but even though it's intended for lay readers, it's still dense. Read as much as I could while I was at someone else's bach with it!
Eragon

By Christopher Paolini

4 stars

I thought it was better as an adult than when I read it as a child! The human relationships are pretty real.
The Nutmeg's Curse

By Amitav Ghosh

3 stars

Starts well, with an intense story about Dutch colonisation in the 'nutmeg islands' of Indonesia, and then goes on to urge some interesting thoughts about European colonialism, a mindset toward planetary resources, and the current climate crisis. But it felt increasingly waffle-y, without the clear evidence of the first chapter. Didn't finish, but did make me think.
Bound by Knighthood

By Nicki Chapelway

3 stars

Not bad, some good ideas about how magic operates.

13 - 0 - 1

Add pages read

Otahuhu College

38,689 pages read and 3,595 team points

Team members

R D Mattocks

Duynhocath

RThomason

HanaGW

BTL

EmNorgsBish

Alaa

srhart

FionaN

HMY

Joanne

Kenelwe

ReneeL

BTL

Floating in a most peculiar way

World Without End

Beauty

The Wayfinder

Ghosts of Gondwana

Eragon

The Nutmeg's Curse

Bound by Knighthood

Otahuhu College

38,689 pages read and 3,595 team points

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