Heidi Thomson

interreading your Lyrical Ballads with the 1798 one, expecting to come across 'Anecdote for Fathers, Shewing How the Art of Lying May Be Taught' in 'The Tobacco Tin' -- it feels a bit like reading two beautiful volumes at once

beautifully antipodean

Marilyn Waring: Librarians’ work is essential – and still treated as expendable After hearing their testimony to the People's Select Committee, I'm outraged at how brutally librarians' right to equal pay was legislated away.

Librarians rock

Opinion: Marilyn Waring: Librarians’ work is essential – and still treated as expendable thespinoff.co.nz/society/04-0...

'tax increases, radicalism, and chaos'
finally, can't wait, bring it on

What I read in 2025 (34):
George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss
I kept this one for last. Reliably reduces me to tears. About the myriad ways in which Maggie Tulliver gets sabotaged, harassed, bullied, gaslit, humiliated, hated, thwarted, condescended to, annihilated, killed. A very tough read.

Help Me Hera: A festive miscellany of advice A smorgasbord of wisdom for almost every possible situation.

Thank you Spinoff for another terrific year of journalism

Help Me Hera: A festive miscellany of advice thespinoff.co.nz/society/18-1...

Such an important thread about the value of the Total Mobility scheme! We need to fight to get this properly funded - no cap on costs, easier to book, round trips made possible. This matters! Let's make it an election issue!

What I read in 2025 (33):
George Eliot's Romola

Eliot sounds different in this novel. Set in the final years of 15th century Florence. The setting of 'big' historical events (Savonarola's impact) reveals Victorian problems: women hero-worshipping sour fathers who don't deserve it, charming bounders

What I read in 2025 (32):
Richard Powers' Playground
Polymath Powers tackles everything beautifully, yet again. Centred on the pacific ocean and the human inability not to fuck it up, but also generous about creatures' passions and play. And I am always nostalgic for the University of Illinois.

What I read in 2025 (31):
William Hazlitt's The Round Table

Keats loved it and so did I. 'Lord Shaftesbury somewhere remarks that a great many people pass for very good-natured persons, for no other reason than because they care about nobody but themselves.' Sharp, opinionated, and proud of it.

What I read in 2025 (30):
George Eliot's Felix Holt: The Radical

Published in 1866 but set in 1832, at the time of the First Reform Bill, with a focus on the fraught elections. Signals for the need of much deeper change in order to make elections work. Also, the empty lives of intelligent women.

What I read in 2025 (29):
Laurence Fearnley's At the Grand Glacier Hotel

Nobody does atmosphere like Fearnley and I love all her writing for it. Unflinching about physical recovery and emotional vulnerability, this is the 'sound' novel in the series. Great sounds, highlighting even greater silences

'Mad' not 'Made'

What I read in 2025 (28):
Benji Waterhouse's You Don't Have to Be Made to Work Here: A Psychiatrist's Life

The title says it all. Vignettes of psychiatric cases, including of the writer and his family. Exposes the problems in the system, but really, this is something Benji had to write to live.

What I read in 2025 (27):
Amy Bloom's I'll Be Right Here

About the long interconnected lives of Gazala, Samir, Anna and Alma. From World War Two in France, across the horror of the colonial wars in Algeria, to more settled lives in NYC and Poughkeepsie. Big sweep but it's the details that matter.

What I read in 2025 (26):
George Eliot's Silas Marner

I ignored this book too long. About the lonely life of an ostracised weaver who has a form of epilepsy and who seeks refuge in counting his gold. One day his trove is stolen and a golden-haired toddler walks into his life. Quietly stunning.

Elegiac all the way through, a chiaroscuro

What I read in 2025 (25):
Alan Hollinghurst's Our Evenings

A wordsmith of the highest order. Class, race, sexuality are all high stakes in this narrative centred on a son and his mother. Brilliant dark humour about the violence of class in particular.

What I read in 2025 (24):
Patrick Grant's Less

I'm a big fan of The Great British Sewing Bee and its judges Esme Young and Patrick Grant. 'Less' puts the boot into mindless clothing consumerism, fast fashion, and the dark underbelly of its industries. Love the emphasis on quality and repairing

What I read in 2025 (23):
Grant Robertson's Anything Could Happen: A Memoir

He would have made a fine prime minister. A rollicking memoir, particularly fascinating about his family and Dunedin student years. The best bit: a man who's truly supportive of female colleagues without making it about him

What I read in 2025 (22):
Lucy O'Hagan's Everything but the Medicine

On what it is like to be a caring GP in Aotearoa New Zealand. O'Hagan includes her experience of burnout. Required reading for anyone contemplating General Practice as a specialisation. Moving, beautiful, and yes, funny.

What I read in 2025 (21):
Ali Mau's No Words For This

Actually, there are words for this and fortunately Ali Mau is brave enough to express them. The disturbing truths of family life, couched in the narrative of a career in the 'sexist badlands' of journalism. Compelling and wise.

What I read in 2025 (20):
Ivor Popovich's A Dim Prognosis: Our Health System in Crisis-And a Doctor's View on How to Fix It

You have to read this too. An account from the coal face about the dire state of our health system. Could we please start with an online national patient database that works?

What I read in 2025 (19):
Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate
The British version of Fitzgerald's 'careless people' but narrated by an insider who sees through them, up to a point. The casual upper class tolerance of just about anything disguises a deep disconnection and sadness. Ever so jolly.

What I read in 2025 (18):
Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers
Victorian ecclesiastical shenanigans at their finest. Backstabbing, toadying, gossiping, courting. To rule the world from the pulpit. I always forget how funny and finely tuned Trollope is. La Signora Madeline Vesey Neroni is a triumph.

What I read in 2025 (17):
Sarah Wynn-Williams' Careless People

F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'careless people' are alive and well and scary. Wynn-Williams' account of her former workplace Facebook lifts the lid on the toxic digital bro culture at the highest level. Very dangerous people with too much power

What I read in 2025 (16):
Andrew Lownie's Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York
Disgusting. I'm waiting for 'a glorious Phantom' to 'illumine our tempestuous day'
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring;
(Shelley, 'England in 1819')

What I read in 2025 (15):
Elizabeth Strout's Tell Me Everything
Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge connect with each other through story telling. The reader's sympathy is drawn to Bob Burgess who sneakily smokes and loves Lucy. Somehow his wife Margaret is unaware of both these things. Really?

What I read in 2025 (14)
John Keats's 1820 volume, 'Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems'

The other poems include Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to Psyche, To Autumn, Ode on Melancholy, Hyperion. He's 24. Eight months later he is dead. He is among the English poets

What I read in 2025 (13)

Susie Ferguson's Bloody Minded: War, Womanhood, and Finding My Voice

What's putting on a flak jacket as a war correspondent compared to the daily horror of endometriosis, lack of diagnosis, lack of care? Fierce and intelligent about the forms of PTSD that women live with