{"id":1565,"date":"2025-09-04T15:20:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-04T15:20:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/1565\/"},"modified":"2025-09-04T15:20:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-04T15:20:09","slug":"janet-frame-all-the-way-baby-shayne-carter-on-his-life-in-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/1565\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Janet Frame all the way baby\u2019: Shayne Carter on his life in books"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome to The Spinoff Books Confessional<\/a>, in which we get to know the reading habits of Aotearoa writers, and guests. This week: musician Shayne Carter.<\/p>\n

The book I wish I\u2019d written<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never wished I\u2019d written someone else\u2019s book \u2013 or song. People should be left alone to rule. One book I would highlight though is The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson which is a bad ass, hard boiled, noir up the wazoo tale of a psychopathic sheriff written in the 50s. The language is so spare and intense. Zero frills, zero frippery. The economy in this book makes simplicity legit.<\/p>\n

Everyone should read<\/p>\n

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. I\u2019m supposed to write at least three sentences about these. There you go.<\/p>\n

The book I want to be buried with<\/p>\n

Could possibly go the way of Charles Valentine Alkan, the genius French musician and writer of impossibly virtuosic keyboard works. He was buried with books when a bookcase fell on top of him causing fatal injuries. To make it more macabre, when this happened, he was halfway through translating the bible into French. Something to do across those languid Parisian nights, I guess. The piano works he wrote before the accident are absolutely blazing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The first book I remember reading by myself<\/p>\n

Probably a Dick Francis belter because as a child I was obsessed with horse racing and fantasised about being a stable hand and shifting hay. The only AI prompt I\u2019ve ever written was \u201cShark Wins Grand National Steeplechase\u201d which resulted in a very realistic rendering with the shark halfway over a fence. <\/p>\n

There are no sharks in Dick Francis novels except for the crooked bookies, although apparently his wife wrote a lot of his material so maybe the shark was Dick Francis.<\/p>\n

\"ThreeFrom left to right: the book Shayne Carter (sort of) wishes he\u2019d written; the book that haunts him; and the book he thinks we should all read.
\nThe book that haunts me<\/p>\n

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert was a beautiful book but I found the fate of Emma Bovary sad and unfair and it upset me for several days. She was just a person looking for a better life. <\/p>\n

Encounter with an author<\/p>\n

Have had several encounters with authors. The impression I\u2019m left with is that they\u2019re nerds like musicians, but not as well dressed. Also \u2013 noted while wandering around book festivals \u2013 very harsh critics! Writers \u2013 so opinionated!<\/p>\n

Greatest New Zealand book<\/p>\n

The Janet Frame autobiographies all the way baby. So singular and \u2026 thoughtful. Her poetic forensics. I love how interested she is and how she dresses nondescript streets and buildings I\u2019m familiar with, with atmosphere and magic.<\/p>\n

\"ThreeFrom left to right: Shayne Carter\u2019s greatest New Zealand book\/s; the book he\u2019s reading now; and the book he never admits he\u2019s read.
\nThe book I never admit I\u2019ve read<\/p>\n

Everything A Teenage Boy Should Know written by a Christian doctor to guide young boys through puberty. My parents bought the book from a door-to-door salesman because obviously they thought it might help. They told me to ignore the chapter about masturbation \u2013 how it was bad and gave you warts and stuff \u2013 which was quite liberal of my parents.<\/p>\n

Utopia or dystopia<\/p>\n

Dozed off during both Dune movies and kept sleeping despite all the banging. That sleep was utopian. Guess it\u2019s utopia then. <\/p>\n

Fiction or nonfiction<\/p>\n

Leant into nonfiction for a long time because it\u2019s interesting why people end up doing great or despicable things. It\u2019s usually because of something that happened at school. I like biography by witness \u2013 a favourite example being the Muhammad Ali biography by Thomas Hauser \u2013 where every event has multiple viewpoints and the reader is left to make up their own mind.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Another nonfiction book I would recommend, even though it\u2019s bleak as, is Into That Darkness by Gitta Sereny where she interviews the commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp. It\u2019s one of the great examples of grown-up journalism where she just lets him talk and bury himself. It\u2019s kind of a forerunner to the Prince Andrew interview, or the one Anika Moa did with David Seymour. Also a big fan of Sea Biscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand which is brilliantly put together and feels like time travel. The closing sentence is so modest and plain and incredibly moving.<\/p>\n

The book I wish would be adapted for film or TV<\/p>\n

The Spike Milligan Letters. Spike Milligan sits at a desk writing, guffawing away. Laughs extra hard as he scribbles his third sentence.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019m reading right now<\/p>\n

Caledonian Road by Andrew O\u2019Hagan. I hadn\u2019t read anything of his until I came across a piece he\u2019d written for the London Review of Books about the Republican Party Convention in 2024. His description of Don Jr \u2013 \u201ca colossus of nothing\u201d \u2013 is perfect.<\/p>\n

Shayne Carter will appear at Great Sounds Great<\/a> on Saturday, September 6 in Wellington.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Welcome to The Spinoff Books Confessional, in which we get to know the reading habits of Aotearoa writers,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1566,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[489,156,111,139,69,2506,2507],"class_list":{"0":"post-1565","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz","13":"tag-shayne-carter","14":"tag-the-spinoff-books-confessional"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1565\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}