Welcome to the Reading Doctor!

We introduced this service last year and we welcome your questions again in 2021.

Read more about Dr Louise here. Send us your questions for her by emailing us: communications@read-nz.org

Find the complete list of 2020 Reading Doctor prescriptions here.

Home sweet home

With the property market dominating headlines at the moment, I’ve been thinking about houses in literature, especially those which effectively act as characters in a story, with a distinctive personality, pivotal to plot, and carrying meanings which extend far beyond their walls.

· Elizabeth Bennet’s change of heart towards Darcy is prompted by her visit to Pemberley, in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, in which the house is a potent symbol of generations of wealth, elegance and education.

· Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in the book by Harriet Beecher Stowe, represents the suffering which he experienced there as a slave.

· The Wilcox family home is Howard’s End, in E M Forster’s novel, a too-little appreciated haven of tradition, dignity and harmony in a rapidly changing world.

· Every nine years, on the last Saturday of October, for mysterious reasons and purposes, a guest is summoned to Slade House, in David Mitchell’s unnerving novel.

· The changing fortunes of Tara, a cotton plantation in Georgia in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, are a microcosm of a turbulent period of American history, representing a traditional Southern way of life which disappears over the course of the novel.

· Fiona Farrell tells the story of a Villa at the Edge of the Empire which suffered through the Christchurch earthquakes, and through it tells a larger story of how communities and homes around the world have been rebuilt after devastation.

· In Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, the manor house of Manderley has belonged to the de Winter family for generations; it embodies the past and is a formidable obstacle to forgetting it.

· A small coastal community resists a land developer which threatens to ravage a marae on ancestral lands in Patricia Grace’s Potiki.

· In Emily St John Mandel’s novel, the Hotel Caiette is The Glass Hotel, a secluded five-star glass and cedar palace on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island where lives and fates collide.

· Tom Keely is holed up in a grim high-rise apartment in Tim Winton’s Eyrie, looking down at a society from which he’s retired hurt and angry.

· In the aftermath of a once stellar career and mourning the death of his wife, Alfred Busi is living out his days in their villa by the sea, in The Melody by Jim Crace, though his ambitious nephew has development plans which require him to move on.