Busytown: Holiday reading lust
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@Hilary - that would be Erich Kästner (thanks Wikipedia - I had forgotten!)
Ah visits to the library as a child... Friday evenings after school - we were allowed three books each, the first of which I would be halfway through by the time we got home.
I was such a speedy reader I often ran out before the following Friday came around, so I would move on to my dad's books. He was a sci-fi fan, so I read a whole lot of Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke et al - as well as Flashman whom he absolutely adored.
Some of the odder books on my parents bookshelves that I devoured at around age 10 included Animal Farm which I assumed was a story about farm animals and was completely devastated when Boxer died - and a strange old book called The Coral Island by RM Ballantyne which was first published in 1857 and details the adventures of three boys who are shipwrecked on a Polynesian island - complete with pirates and cannibalistic locals. I always loved the idea of the candle-nut tree and the breadfruit tree - but wasn't so keen on the idea of "long pig".
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Ah visits to the library as a child... Friday evenings after school - we were allowed three books each, the first of which I would be halfway through by the time we got home.
Snap re: the Friday evening library visit thing - only in my case it was every second Friday.
It was a small town and there were two librarians - the nice one let me look in the adult section: the horrible one didn't. They worked alternating Fridays.
It wasn't as if I was looking for novels with rude bits - I was mostly after non fiction. History, politics, etc.
The library was very small: it would fit twice fit into Arty Bees and there would probably still be room for the lav. But I discovered this wonderful thing called Interloan, where you could order books that weren't even in the library.
So I'd come in on Friday and the nice librarian - Mrs Rattray - would get this massive ledger out from under the desk and ask me what I was ordering this week. I can still hear the thump of the ledger as she dumped it on the desktop. The things that stick in your mind...
But people like Mrs Rattray are godsends to bored bookish kids with unusual interests, aren't they?
I think I just decided who my Christmas Eve toast will be to....
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a strange old book called The Coral Island by RM Ballantyne which was first published in 1857 and details the adventures of three boys who are shipwrecked on a Polynesian island
From the age of about... eight? my daughter has read this book several times a year. It's the copy my brothers had when they were kids. She also loves her grandfather's battered old copy of The Fox and the Hound.
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Best Christmas wishes to all the children's librarians out there, active, retired, and still to be.
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My Mum was a children's librarian all through my childhood so I had the run of the place, including all the backrooms and the stuff left from when the museum had been housed in the same building, which was absolute bliss. People who grew up in Nelson in the 70s and 80s still remember her storytimes with enormous fondness.
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Best Christmas wishes to all the children's librarians out there, active, retired, and still to be.
Yes!
I want to especially send warm fuzzies to Mrs Hindmarsh, Mrs Fellowes and the rest of the librarians I grew up with at Miramar Library. Thank you for always having a book recommendation for me. Thank you for listening to my garbled and incorrect plot descriptions and always, always magically coming up with the book I meant. Thank you for giving me the run of the library and reserving your secret looks at my parents for "this is crap and not worth her time", never ever "this is too old for her". Thank you for letting me fill out my own cards and teaching me to use the microfiche, making me feel adult and trusted. Thank you thank you thank you thank you.
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I want to especially send warm fuzzies to Mrs Hindmarsh, Mrs Fellowes and the rest of the librarians I grew up with at Miramar Library.
I'm still bitter at this library from 1993, when I came 'home' from my first year at university - my parents had moved from Auckland to Wellington that year - and tried to sign up to the library, to be told that I needed a letter addressed to me at my new address - which having arrived at it the day before, I didn't have.
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a letter addressed to me at my new address
Pretty much every large public library system in NZ has this rule because of the 'residents and ratepayers' membership thing, so you should broaden your focus and be more generally bitter at libraries. If you need tips, ask me. I am the bitterest almost-MLIS-graduate of them all. :)
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Pretty much every large public library system in NZ has this rule because of the 'residents and ratepayers' membership thing, so you should broaden your focus and be more generally bitter at libraries.
Once you're in, though, it's very easy to stay in. I maintained membership at the Wellington and Christchurch city libraries for several years after I'd left Wellington, which proved useful on extended visits to family. Quite possibly I still have it.
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Late to the party as usual.
The Little Stranger = my best book of the last two years at least. It has everything that I look for in a good book, and deals with some current obsessions (spooky old houses, uncertainties).
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I love The Little Stranger too. I have feasted on Sarah Waters since The LS: Fingersmith, Tipping the Velvet and Affinity. Someone said she is a great storyteller and I think that's true. I have to say, though, I am uneasy with her endings. Too happy or too sad.
Have just finished The Anthologist, my Xmas book. It had a twee writing style but overall it thrilled and inspired me to read poetry - even to try to write it! It's in defence of rhyme in poetry. In the course of the novel the writer quotes a number of rhyming lines from Dryden to Ludacris and they are soooo good.
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Once you're in, though, it's very easy to stay in. I maintained membership at the Wellington and Christchurch city libraries for several years after I'd left Wellington, which proved useful on extended visits to family.
I may or may not have done this for a certain public library with lions out the front and spies everywhere.
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I'm now about 2/3rds of the way through The Little Stranger. Waters has such an amazing touch with dialogue, it always feels so real and authentic to the time of whichever book you're reading.
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Just got my own copy of Encircled Lands by Judith Binney. That's some heavy material. No, I mean it weighs 2.4kgs! Yes I weighed it, so?
Also got Glenn Colquhoun & Nigel Brown's North South. Discovered Dr Colquhoun after reading a transcript of a talk he gave at a conference entitled
The Therapeutic Uses of Ache, which was reprinted in Scoop in November. Reports from the conference were that people went out searching for tissues, and could be heard sobbing in the bathroom.Lovely illustrations in the new book too.
By the way, over here Russell mentioned an article written by Sir Doug Myers which said;
...he declared that libraries were not a public good, and that it was of no benefit to him that some poor bastard read a book.
Brewing beer, which built his empire extracting money from these poor bastards - good. Reading books - bad.
Hmm, something fundamentally wrong with this argument. Sorry for the thread merger, but as we were discussing Libraries, thought it seemed apposite.
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At the risk of offending many people, I would like to report that I have just read and enjoyed The Trowenna Sea. I wanted to make my own assessment (and much my professional life has been in New Zealand history). OK, it was apparently written in haste and a bit carelessly, and there are bits that grate, but the story and the telling is great.
Maybe it was because I recently visited Tasmania and got interested in its history. Maybe it is the theme of dispossession which flows through the novel, encompassing the Highland clearances, child miners robbed of their childhoods, transportation of prisoners from their homelands, genocide of the Tasmanian aboriginal population, civil war in Rhodesia, missing body parts, as well as, of course, Maori from their land. The stories behind the struggle over land in the Hutt Valley, known as the Battle of Boulcott’s farm, and the Wairau ‘incident’, are grippingly retold from a Maori perspective. And for once the New Zealand Company and Governor Grey are the villains, while Governor Fitzroy and the liberalism of the major pakeha characters receive sympathetic treatment.
As the action gallops along The Trowenna Sea takes on colonialism, sexism, racism, able-ism, homophobia and also has some digs at capitalism. And while the main character of Te Umuroa is a bit romanticised, the stroppy female lead would be right at home with some of those early settlers whose letters and diaries we still have. The epilogue of the recent repatriation of Te Umuroa’s remains to Whanganui is very moving.
So I hope it is re-written to address the unattributed sources and then made into a mini-series.
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The epilogue of the recent repatriation of Te Umuroa’s remains to Whanganui is very moving.
And, sadly, riddled with plagiarism.
Which is kind of rich in a novel about dispossession.
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Just finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Bit slow, I know. Some friends saw the movie and said it was 'Swedish', and 'Authentic'. Frankly, that scares the hell out of me.
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Discovered Dr Colquhoun after reading a transcript of a talk he gave at a conference entitled The Therapeutic Uses of Ache, which was reprinted in Scoop in November.
Bloody hell - thanks so much for that link.
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I've just had an argument with my son about Dragon Tattoo. I quite enjoyed it but found the plot twists unconvincing. He maintains that I'm not looking at it as a genre book; I can't compare it to my favourite novels etc. No, it's not my genre and I certainly won't be reading the 2nd and 3rd books.
Film sounds better than the book!?? -
Bloody hell - thanks so much for that link.
Your welcome. Was starting to think no one had noticed. Quite an amazing piece of writing in it's own right, IMhO. But thinking of the audience it was delivered to, bloody remarkable really.
I quite enjoyed it but found the plot twists unconvincing.
Hmm, I think our experiences were quite different. It certainly dragged me through at a fairly break-neck pass towards the end, and the plot twists didn't bother me so much. Might wait for the DVD, although the subtitles will be smaller then.
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Was starting to think no one had noticed.
It's brilliant isn't it. I reckon a quote can help others decide whether to go there. In Colquhoun's case, it's hard to pick just one and I'm sure not going to try excerpting any of his delicate personal observations. Wholeheartedly recommend reading it all. Taonga.
There is a desperate beauty in the failing body. Being afforded the view is one of the great privileges of medicine. Breasts fall, bellies sag, the skin fills with subtle arcs and whorls as though it was sketched. Bones become more prominent. Eyes wetten, yellow and seem to protrude as though we are weathered back to something older and more eternal and more humble. Immortality can be hard to live with. Flesh seems relieved in the end to be rid of the responsibility. This is the beauty of the tide gone out over the tight lap of the sea against its belt. Sometimes people seem to make an appearance in their own skin for the first time as though they were stepping out from behind a curtain to take a bow.
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Over time our sorrows accumulate. Ache becomes part of our shape – a weird anatomy. It can be felt, seen, perceived and mapped by those who know its language. We wear those we have loved in the same way. Sometimes they protrude and bump into people on their way past. Sometimes we bend around their invisibility and others only notice that we walk funny.
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I've just had an argument with my son about Dragon Tattoo. I quite enjoyed it but found the plot twists unconvincing. He maintains that I'm not looking at it as a genre book; I can't compare it to my favourite novels etc.
But, Cecelia's Son, if you're working in the thriller/mystery genre the one thing you can't afford is a slack or poorly worked out plot. Agatha Christie was hardly the most elegant prose stylist out there, and her characterisation could most charitably be described as "functional", but her plots at their best were water-tight. She got you looking in the wrong direction every time, but she played fair.
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But, Cecelia's Son, if you're working in the thriller/mystery genre the one thing you can't afford is a slack or poorly worked out plot.
Are you saying GWDT (I'm feeling lazy) had a slack and poorly worked out plot? Interesting thought, as my take was the traditional rules were hard to apply, as the weak characterisations of implausible suspects for an implausible crime (should I have given a spoiler alert?) seemed almost integral to the 'unconvincing' plot.
And in spite of all this, it worked, IMhO.
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Are you saying GWDT (I'm feeling lazy) had a slack and poorly worked out plot?
I couldn't honestly say -- my one effort at reading the damn thing ground to a halt around page fifty. (To be fair, I did have a cold at the time so the fault could be mine.)
But if Cecelia's son says you can't judge a genre novel by "literary"/'Mainstream" standards (an idea I'd have issues with, but I digress) then I think it's fair comment to point out that one of the conventions of the mystery/thriller genre is a tight plot that's at least internally coherent. Don't think C. was convinced it really worked on that score.
And if you enjoyed it, then 'Girl' worked on the most fundamental level. Never under-estimate the power of the sheer pleasure.
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Craig, I nearly gave up after about 50 pages too but went back to it after reading another more congenial book. It gripped me okay. But I don't think the author laid down the pathway for the killer in such a way that everything clicked into place when the reader discovered who he was. And without giving the show away, I can say that there was an antipodean link which was sooo corny I groaned.
Now this is all in my snobby English teacher opinion. My son actually said "They're (the 3 books) rubbish" but as entertaining thrillers they're compelling. The literary Geiger counter tells me that GWDT doesn't measure up to good modern literary standards and as an example of its genre does not encourage me to read any more stories of this type.
But I have to factor a certain prejudice and personal snobbery into this. I'm not necessarily a good judge because I have such preconceived ideas. I went to see Avatar today and actually quite enjoyed it but was picking it to bits in my mind as I viewed. There was a corny line from Michelle Roderique to a US General (?) "You're not the only one with a gun, bitch."
And indeed I did enjoy some of the domestic detail and minutiae of GWDT.
Enough. I'm raving. Time to get back into the garden and attack the agapanthus instead of innocent books and films.
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