Well, we’ve all got our Writers and Readers Festival programmes and have flicked through with cries of delight, then set them aside to book later… no! Book now! Now! Having been on the thin end of festival bookings I feel duty bound to urge sedentary Aucklanders to do it early and allow the horribly stressed organisers to breathe a sigh of relief. They’ve put together a truly sublime feast of literary succulence this year and they deserve our utmost support. Besides, with the likes of Tim Winton, Richard Ford, Richard E Grant, Kate Grenville, and Lionel Shriver plus a myriad of top-shelf Kiwi talent, there will be sell-outs, of that I am sure…

Meanwhile, I’ve got excited butterflies in my tummy right now at the thought of going to see/hear Lloyd Jones and Damien Wilkins tonight in Auckland. They’ll be at the St Columba Centre in Ponsonby. But you’ll get an extra chance to see Lloyd tomorrow night in Devonport if you’re quick and both blokes will be washing up back in Wellington on 26 April. The Book Council have got all sorts of other stuff coming up too – an historical session with Deborah Challinor (just reading her new book Fire at the moment, lovely bit of girly history just like Union Belle) and others discuss their genre, a couple of teenage boy sessions, and a mid-winter gig with the likes of Kevin Ireland, Paula Green and Chris Cole Catley.

So Easter – I find all that chocolate creates a wicked post-sugar-high brown-out, so a bit of light reading is probably in order. The Best New Zealand Poems 06 put together by Anne Kennedy and Robert Sullivan is proving excellent ‘dipping’ material. I like Paula Green’s line ‘I crouch on the bent page like a displaced comma’ (I’ll be seeing her tonight, she’s interviewing Lloyd and Damien) and Gregory O’Brien’s fish with their ‘detachable heads’ and ‘shining fuselage’. Lovely.

What else... es-pat Paula Morris has ‘finally broken down and started a blog’ – a breakdown such as this is, as we know, the last resort of the terminally whatever. It’s groovy, with references for NZers and her New Orleans neighbours alike. Her latest post has a great link to a Guardian letter to the editor by Ian McEwan about a review of his latest book. Classic stuff. I’m going to be interviewing Paula once I’ve received her latest book, Trendy But Casual and have read it. Crikey but that girl’s got a hell of a backstory…

And whilst we’re on the subject of blogs, NZ Book Month have again started up their series of blogs by local lit-types, with Graeme Lay and Nicky Pellegrino on the case, and James George about to join the fray. So he says… think he’s fallen off the planet. And yes, for those of you champing at the bit, judges will indeed soon be announced for The Six Pack 2007! Just waiting on the last one… but it’s looking good.

Finally for the reading list, a link to a Listener article which was recently pointed out to me and which I hugely enjoyed. All about Dunedin’s University Bookshop, and written by local enthusiast (and uber-poet Brian Turner), it goes to show how epic independent bookshops in this comparatively young country can be. I want to work there.