Craig Cliff

Copy-paste this for New Zealand, eh (and no doubt a few other purportedly green island nations) 😬🐄🚙💩

Wouldn’t it be lovely to live up to our ad campaigns and film exports, and the gorgeous images we slap on our products, and all the stories we tell our kids about how this is a great place to live?

Screenshot of Slow Down: the degrowth manifesto by Kohei Saito (audiobook) from the Libby App

Screenshot of The Shetland Way by Marianne Brown (audiobook) from the Libby App

Screenshot of Flesh by David Szalay (audiobook) from the Libby App

Screenshot of The Bookshop Detectives: Dead Girl Gone (audiobook) from the BorrowBox App. Book 1 was okay. Listening to Book 2 now but kinda losing interest...

#61-#64 I've only read two books in the Booker Longlist so far, but really rooting for Szalay...

Photo of the poetry collection A Lack of Good Sons by Jake Arthur

Screenshot of Pure Innocent Fun by Ira Madison III (audiobook) from the Libby App

Screenshot of Well Met by Jen DeLuca (audiobook) from the Libby App

Screenshot of A Beautiful Family by Jennifer Trevelyan (audiobook) from the Libby App - for some reason the cover still says Coming Soon, lol.

Catch-up time again... #57-#60

Friday packages are the best. Can now plug those unsightly gaps in my Geoff Cochrane collection! Thanks @thwupbooks.bsky.social

Motherfucking wind farms…

How clear and simple data visualizations bring the climate crisis home Climate change is a slow-moving disaster. We need graphics that capture both its pace and its impact.

Amazing visualizations..share these with any climate change skeptical friends. 🧪

thebulletin.org/2025/07/how-...

You could borrow it via WCL and the Libby app, once the 19 people ahead of you in the queue are done 😅

no, monks can't fly, you're probably thinking of air friars

Short story: Collective Tissue, by Craig Cliff

25 attempts at a biography of the legendary Terry Voss

The Forgotten Forest by Robert Vennell. Screenshot from the Libby app. Probably better as an illustration physical book, or a guided meditation.

Playworld by Adam Ross. Screenshot from the Libby app. Felt like a novel written by someone immersed in the college creative writing industrial machine who takes a long time between books. Oh wait...

The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe. Screenshot from the Libby app. I read lots of Coe around the time of Like a Fiery Elephant and The Rotters Club. Nice to see him still punning with structure and tackling the Liz Truss era.

The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon. Screenshot from the Libby app. Note to audiobook producers: when you have an hourlong foreword, it helps to let the listener know who wrote the foreword at the beginning rather than the end (Reader, it was Satre).

#53-56 Highlight from this bunch: The Proof of My Innocence

Star Gazers by Duncan Sarkies. Photo of hard copy, which I've reviewed for Landfall Review Online.

The Demolition of the Century by Duncan Sarkies. Photo of physical book.

How to Hold a Cockroach: a book for those who are free and don't know it. Screenshot of audiobook in Libby app. This is classic self-help grifter BS, and so excruciatingly repetitive it becomes funny, until it becomes excruciating again. Still don't know if Maxwell has even read Kafka (seems unlikely).

Universality by Natasha Brown. Screenshot of audiobook in the Libby app. Loved Assembly. This one felt like a long book that had been compressed to the point it loses all fidelity.

#49-52

Photo of Landfall 249 (hard copy of literary journal), which features my story-in-bio notes, 'Connective Tissue'.

Careless People: A story of where I used to work by Sarah Wynn-Williams. Screenshot of audiobook in the Libby app.

Courting the Wild Twin by Martin Shaw. Screenshot of audiobook in the Libby app.

Pounamu Pounamu by Witi Ihimaera. Screenshot of audiobook (English edition) in the Libby app.

#44-48 (Been neglecting this thread but not the TBR pile)...

Tried spotting hoiho 🐧 on this, the shortest day of the year, at Roaring Bay in the Catlins, but no dice

Writer Maurice Gee has died The prolific and unassuming writer died in Nelson.

Farewell to the great Maurice Gee. His novels go on looking clearly at the world and introducing us to ourselves.
www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/3607...

GenAI is Our Polyester The best way to understand generative AI art and aesthetics is to consider how previous "synthetics" lost value in the long-run For the first half of the 20th century, white-collar workers wore busin...

The optimist in me says this 'Gen-AI as Polyester' take sounds likely.
Unfortunately, having just read "Careless People" and watched "Mountainhead", I'm 99% pessimist today.
AI art is only a stage-gate to somewhere much darker.
culture.ghost.io/genai-is-our...

Was visible to the naked eye, but not as vivid as captured on my wife's iPhone. My android? yeah, nah

Aurora from Blackhead Beach, Dunedin

#41-#44 Can confirm The Book of Guilt is worth the hype. Actually, a strong quarter here.

The making of another major motion picture masterpiece by Tom Hanks. Screenshot of Borrowbox app.

On the calculation of volume, part one, by Solvej Balle. Screenshot of Libby app

Recognising the stranger: on Palestine and narrative by Isabella Hammad. Screenshot of the Libby app.

Kāwai: for such a time as this by Montry Soutar. Screenshot of the Libby app.

#37-#40 Recent audiobook listening...

Dodgers broadcast was discussing the science behind the perception of time between children and adults. After hearing the explanation, the color commentator pauses and asks, "Am I gonna feel any better?"

Andy Pages then smashes a dinger into space, thus ending the existential crisis on commentary.

Pretty Ugly (short stories) by Kirsty Gunn. So cool Otago University Press is publishing story collections now (albeit very slowly)

Middle Youth by Morgan Bach (poetry)

Biter by Claudia Jardin (poetry) - book and some stones from Marshall Bay beach

he's so MASC by Chris Tse (poetry)

#33-#36 Physical books by NZ authors read in Aparima Riverton this week.

Hine Toa: A Story of Bravery by Ngāhuia the Awekōtuku. Screenshot of audiobook in Libby app.

Rejection: fiction by Tony Tulathimutte. Screenshot of audiobook in Libby app.

The Axeman's Carnival by Catherine Chudgey. Screenshot of audiobook in Libby app.

The Serviceberry: an economy of gifts and abundance by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Screenshot of audiobook in Libby app.

#29-#32 in my 2025 in reading. All audiobooks. Still thinking about Rejection (lol). Tony Tulathimutte really went there!

Sunrise this morning at Mitchell's Bay, Aparima Riverton

It has always been important to count blessings... Like discovering your wife's second cousin has a crib in Aparima Riverton and it's available this week.

A photo of people and their bikes queuing for free hot drinks from Grid Coffee Roasters van, and free h-vis gear from the DCC, and free bike check ups from Bike House mechanics, in front of the University of Otago tohu on the corner of Cumberland Street and St David Street, Dunedin.

Still bathing in the afterglow of a fantastic morning event on campus, a collab with the DCC. The end of daylight saving doesn't have to be the end of active commuting!

Stoner by John Williams. Novel, US. Screenshot of audiobook on Spotify App. A little late to the revival, or maybe I'm the start of the 3rd wave, but v v v v v good.

Going Zero by Anthony McCarten. Novel, NZ. Screenshot of audiobook on Libby App. Felt like it should have been a TV series, but also understandable why it wasn't.

Gliff by Ali Smith. Novel, UK. Screenshot of audiobook on Spotify App. Triggering (not just in the title's similarity to my name) in the way Ali Smith can be: the slide to techno-authoritarianism shown from the other side, clear-eyed and pun-filled.

And #26-#28 to close out the first quarter of 2025

Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit by Emma Neale. Poetry, NZ. Photo of the front cover blending seamlessly into my dining room curtains.

Juice by Tim Winton. Novel, Aus. Screenshot of audiobook on Libby App. Good book in the end, marred by the fact the narrator said cachet instead of cache 90% of the time (post-apocalptic, so lots of caching)... Couldn't even be consistently wrong.

The reluctant fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. Novel, Pakistan/UK. Screenshot of audiobook on Libby App.

Several short sentences about writing by Evelyn Klinkenborg. Non-fiction, US. Screenshot of audiobook on Spotify App. Loved the final section where VK dissects subpar sentences.

And #22-#25. My daughter's class had to memorise a sonnet by Shakespeare, so I learnt one of Neale's poems...The young house surgeon / jogs the tree canopied avenue (etc)

Everything I know about love by Dolly Alderton. Non-fiction, UK. Screenshot of audiobook on Libby App.

Total F*ucking Godhead: The biography of Chris Cornell by Corbin Reid. Non-fiction, US. Screenshot of audiobook on Spotify.

Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah. Novel, Tanzania/UK. Photo of cover of Advance Review Copy (my review is in this week's Listener).

The extraordinary disappointments of Leopold Berry, Sunderworld v-01, by Ransom Riggs. Novel, US. Screenshot of audiobook on Libby App.

Been neglecting this thread but not the reading... here's #18-#21

Argh... "aproprose".

Trying to enjoy [sic] a post-climate apocalypse audiobook, but keep getting thrown by mispronunciations. Who says dungarees with a soft "g"? And my guy keeps saying "cachet" when he means "cache". What surprises will the remaining 11 hours hold?

Love stories like Bill Fay. 41 year gap between 2nd and 3rd albums. And what a return. Plus a further two albums (and maybe more posthumously). R.I.P. Bill. There is a valley