The Great Summer Read crowd (1412 challenges logged so far!) have been taking home some very mysterious bundles -- names like "She walks in beauty", "What I did last summer" and "Expect the unexpected" stick out -- along with the less obscure but certainly even more enticing to some, "Dystopias","Thrillers", and "For the girls".
The key to this challenge is: don't think you have to read everything in the bundle. It's about discovery. You'll discover some you like, and some that aren't for you. That's fine!
How far along do you have to read before you know that a book isn't even going to become something for you?
I'm always hearing people tell with perverse pride about how dogged they are about finishing a book, but I've never seen it as a virtue. More admirable to toss it and move on to something better, I say. Does anyone ever talk about a fabulous meal where the first three courses were unappetizing? On the other hand, there can be some hiccups as you get into a book and it can still turn out to be a thrilling read.
Try the astute rule devised by Nancy Pearl, the American librarian diva, model for the Shushing Librarian action figure and author of the bestselling Book lust, which goes:
You only need to read as many pages as the number you get by subtracting your age from 100, to know for sure if a book is worth continuing.
Basically, by the time you're 99, you'll just need to read the first page.
Or how about defying the received wisdom and choosing a book by its cover? Without even flipping it over to see what it says about the author, or if you recognise the names on the blurbs -- you know, those other guys signed to the same publishing conglomerate, or who taught at the author's creative writing programme.
In today's publishing world, covers are usually going to tell you just as much as the blurbs, and they will always be more imaginative.
Quick! Match these adjectives to the books below. Tantalising. Wrenching. Seventies. Surreal. Was that hard?
If you're looking for something new to read, the best place to start is with the New Titles lists on our website. Because so many new books already have a waiting list when they are delivered to the library, you won't always see them on the shelves. Browsing the lists you'll find a cover photo and a summary for each title, and be able to request it in two clicks. It doesn't always mean going on a wait list -- it could be available, but just at another library, and you'll get it in short order!
The lists include fiction and non-fiction, audiobooks, ebooks, childrens, teens, DVDs, books in other languages and more. The fiction is divided by genre and there are an awesome 20 different lists, including graphic novels with 113 new titles this month, the second highest total after good old "general fiction" (ie non-genre).
If you're looking for non-fiction, there are 39 categories to choose among, including both a Cooking - Cakes and Dessert and a Cooking - Vegetarian, Low-fat, with 27 titles just this month, including one by an Emma Bacon, who clearly does not demonstrate the nominative determinative theory.
There's also a category called Human Society, to distinguish it from, I suppose, books about bees, penguins, bonobos, tetras and the like. I scrolled through books about violence and borders, terrorism and white supremacy, sex and evolution, which got me wondering about that "Human", but I was quickly reassured by encountering a book which promised to show me how to turn grocery shopping, lawn mowing and PowerPoint making into "sources for meaning and joy".
Call out to everyone taking part -- or thinking of taking part -- in the Great Summer Read! Yes, you're still in time to start. There's no registration and you can log a challenge at any time, even on the very last day, 30 January.
And from now until then, we'll be posting tips and reading recommendations for the Great Summer Read challenges here on Books in the City.
Add your own Great Summer Reading experiences into the mix using the comments feature on any of the posts and you can tick off Challenge #10, "Share your read"! (Comments on earlier posts also count - no worries, reader who commented on the Into the River post!)
NB Although only Auckland Libraries members can go in the draw for the Great Summer Read prizes, anyone can enjoy trying the challenges and contributing comments. The more the merrier!
I've been hunting down (aka requesting) and bringing home my candidates for the Great Summer Read challenges and by now have a nice stash:
Karen's bedside table
As you can see, I am a librocubicularist, someone who reads in bed, from the Latin libro, book, and cubiculum, bedchamber. A term invented by Christopher Morley, author of a book I'm going to be reading for the Great Summer Read, or more precisely rereading-- my choice for completing Challenge #4: "Reread a childhood favourite".
Recently I saw a comment on social media where "pastime" was spelled "past time" -- it seems a lovely expression for Challenge #4, where past time and pastime become one and the same.
No I'm not going to say -- yet -- what book I'm using for Challenge #4. Also because I'm thinking of using two books from that same year in my childhood, a favourite year, the year I got my first job in a library.
So keep checking in with Books in the City for ideas for your summer reading -- surely one of the finest pastimes ever!
Time for the book dedications of the year! Not written this year, or not necessarily, but the best I've come across this year. It's a tradition dating back to my very first post for Books in the City, in which -- with the whole world of books available to me as subject matter -- I chose to celebrate the art of the well-written book dedication. That tells you something about my affection for those little solitaires twinkling and winking at us from the centres of white pages.
I'm talking about the best dedications, of course, the ones that speak from the heart with the tongue of a writer, that neither surfeit us with lists (how did that start, those endless pages of acknowledgments in novels, for God's sake!) nor starve us of landmarks, the ones that, despite us knowing they are for a certain someone, we discover are magically also for us.
To the Western Addition library in SF where, as a new mother and immigrant, I found my first home in the USA. Nancy, I hope you remember me. You changed my life forever when you put books in my hands.
A book dedication to a library! I had to start with this one. I've shared dedications to an author's typewriter, and to an airlines whose delayed flight inspired the book in question, but this is the first dedication to a library I've come across, via the San Francisco Public Library's Instagram feed @sfpubliclibrary (Western Addition is one of their branches).
As a librarian, I'm going to say that I'm sure Nancy remembers her.
The post went up as we were counting down to Banned Books Week, which was appropriate given that the author of Thunder Boy Jr isSherman Alexie, whose The absolutely true diary of a part-time Indianis one of the most challenged books in libraries in his country, the USA. The dedication in that semi-autobiographical work also makes a point about home: "For Welpinit and Reardan, my hometowns", it goes, the first being where Alexie grew up, on an Indian reservation in Washington State, and the second the town where he went to High School, his first time off the reservation. Thunder Boy Jr is Alexie's first picture book, about a boy looking for a name of his own; Yuyi Morales is the illustrator. Here's a short trailer from the publisher:
Gloria Steinem was asked by her interviewer at the Auckland Writers Festival this year to talk about the dedication to her new memoir, My life on the road. "Shall I read it out loud?" she rejoined. "I don't want to assume everyone has read my book!"
Her reading of it made exactly my point: great dedications have it all there; they don't need to be commented on.
This book is dedicated to: Dr. John Sharpe of London, who in 1957, a decade before physicians in England could legally perform an abortion for any reason other than the health of the woman, took the considerable risk of referring for an abortion a twenty-two-year-old American on her way to India. Knowing only that she had broken an engagement at home to seek an unknown fate, he said, “You must promise me two things. First you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life". Dear Dr. Sharpe, I believe you, who knew the law was unjust, would not mind if I say this so long after your death: I’ve done the best I could with my life. This book is for you.
3. Jerome K Jerome in Idle thoughts of an idle fellow
After two new books, here's an old one, published in 1886. I knew about this dedication but for the longest time I was mixed up, thinking it was by Italo Svevo, so I could never find it. It could have been by Svevo, who had in common with Jerome K Jerome a love of what in Svevo's native Trieste was referred to with the Austrian term witze, meaning witty paradoxes and contradictions.
TO
THE VERY DEAR AND WELL-BELOVED
FRIEND
OF MY PROSPEROUS AND EVIL DAYS--
TO THE FRIEND
WHO, THOUGH IN THE EARLY STAGES OF OUR ACQUAINTANCESHIP
DID OFTTIMES DISAGREE WITH ME,
HAS SINCE BECOME
TO BE MY VERY WARMEST COMRADE--
TO THE FRIEND
WHO, HOWEVER OFTEN I MAY PUT HIM OUT,
NEVER (NOW)
UPSETS ME IN REVENGE--
TO THE FRIEND
WHO, TREATED WITH MARKED COLDNESS BY ALL THE FEMALE
MEMBERS OF MY HOUSEHOLD,
AND REGARDED WITH SUSPICION
BY MY VERY DOG, NEVERTHELESS SEEMS DAY BY
DAY
TO BE MORE DRAWN BY ME, AND IN RETURN
TO
MORE AND MORE IMPREGNATE ME WITH
THE
ODOUR OF HIS FRIENDSHIP--
TO THE FRIEND
WHO NEVER TELLS ME OF MY FAULTS, NEVER WANTS TO
BORROW
MONEY, AND NEVER TALKS ABOUT HIMSELF--
TO THE COMPANION
OF MY IDLE HOURS,
THE SOOTHER OF MY SORROWS,
THE CONFIDANT OF MY JOYS AND HOPES--
MY OLDEST AND STRONGEST
PIPE,
THIS LITTLE VOLUME
IS
GRATEFULLY AND AFFECTIONATELY
DEDICATED.
Italo Svevo also had a close relationship with tobacco, but in his case it was the cigarette, and in particular the last cigarette. In his book The confessions of Zeno, one of his alter ego Zeno's neuroticisms is to repeatedly smoke the last cigarette, in order to re-experience the joy of quitting. When Svevo was mortally injured in a car accident, he asked at the hospital if he could have a cigarette. His request was denied. Ah, he sighed, that really would have been the last cigarette.
In addition to the dedication, Jerome K Jerome also wrote a fine preface for his book, which I would love to hear read out loud by John Cleese.
One or two friends to whom I showed these papers in MS. having observed that they were not half bad, and some of my relations having promised to buy the book if it ever came out, I feel I have no right to longer delay its issue. But for this, as one may say, public demand, I perhaps should not have ventured to offer these mere "idle thoughts" of mine as mental food for the English-speaking peoples of the earth. What readers ask nowadays in a book is that it should improve, instruct, and elevate. This book wouldn't elevate a cow. I cannot conscientiously recommend it for any useful purposes whatever. All I can suggest is that when you get tired of reading "the best hundred books," you may take this up for half an hour. It will be a change.
This collection of poems by the man who gave us "I never saw a purple cow..." and "If called by a panther, don't anther" is a treasure I found in the Central City Library basement. Although the book was first published in the USA in 1940, our copy is the Australian Edition of May, 1943, a fact which some librarian of the past underlined by recovering the book in wallpaper featuring red and blue stripes interspersed with golden crowns. Not that this would have been her only foray into book preservation. Recovering books in serviceable wallpaper was once a thing in public libraries. I imagine this librarian's ghost floating around in our basement checking up on all her handiwork.
Before disposing of the original cover, the librarian cut out the blurb on its flap and pasted it into the book, turning the book into a sort of time-capsule:
In re-issuing this book in an Australian edition, the publishers are confident that it will add considerably to the gaiety of this land at a time when our sense of humour is in danger of being submerged in a total war effort.
It goes on to cite a poem in the book, a dig at Japanese expansionist tendencies on the eve of Pearl Harbour, which the Australian publishers - how realistically I don't know - hoped the Australians would still be finding funny in 1943.
On the other hand, I myself found a comment apropos of Ogden Nash's death funny enough to note down - or maybe I actually came up with it? It's scribbled in my own hand next to my notes for this post. It'd be nice to think I could be so witty as to quip "Merde! Improperly prepared!" in reaction to learning that one of the most famous rhymers in the history of poetry died from eating improperly prepared coleslaw. Googling brings up nothing. If anyone knows the origin of this genial epigram, please let me know!
I was taking notes because I had discovered that a postage stamp honouring Ogden Nash made history by being the first US postage stamp to contain the word "sex"- "although as a synonym for gender", Wikipedia tells us. Whew!
"It appears under the letter O" the wikipedia pundit continues. With my librarian skills I was able to quickly unearth a reproduction of the stamp, just to check that fact. The pundit had it right.
But I could not believe my eyes when I saw the price of the stamp and realised that this could not have happened in the fifties as I had assumed. In fact, it turned out to be issued in 2002, on the centennial of Nash's birth! What, the word sex made history in 2002? Are we kidding?
The Amarillo, Texas newspaper article where I found this information contained, further along, a telling insight. The other set of new stamps to come out that year was "Discover Canada", highlighting popular tourist attractions. So, images of Foggy Cove and the Icefields Parkway and Buffalo Jump, vying for attention with Nash's racy poem "The Turtle".
The turtle lives 'twixt plated decks
Which practically conceal its sex.
I think it clever of the turtle
In such a fix to be so fertile.
The dedication I found in the book, to Nash's wife, is not scandalous, antic or clever. It's sentimental, a bit reminiscent of the classic era poetry schoolboys of Nash's time (and of my father's, although he was a generation later) used to learn. "Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by..." But it's definitely going straight to the book dedication wall in my pool room.
For Francis And now to settle for the years, That flew like frightened birds; As fee for ten of happiness I offer ten of words.
Yesterday evening at Central Library we celebrated Pride 2016 with our annual Review Revue, an evening of stand-up reviewing with a focus on the world of GLBTIQ literature. "You get up with a book and you have seven minutes to make it notorious" is how we describe it to people we invite to join our line-up of reviewers. And no one says no, which gives you an idea of the atmosphere.
And for an idea of the content, well, you're in for a treat! One of last night's reviewers is a fellow librarian, so he also couldn't say no when I asked him to turn his notes into a post for Books in the City. Here he is and here you go!
I have never been to a Review Revue before. When my colleagues discovered an ancient book review of mine and asked me to speak, I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to sit here and listen to me waffle on about that book I read one summer that I sort of liked because it had a hot guy in it. But hey, I’m here and I’m queer and I’m here to talk to you about a book!
I thought long and hard about a book to read, do I go the popular route and review a classic you’re probably pretending you’ve read? Do I choose a best seller like A little life (which by the way, is totally fantastic and everyone should read)? Do I spend all night extolling the virtues of Maggie Smith (hint, it’ll be longer than 7 minutes)? Do I get up on my soapbox about the gay erotica that the library stocks and why I find it hideous (the inability of so many writers to accurately write gay sex scenes)? Or do I find a hidden gem that many people wouldn’t have heard about and bang on about it for seven minutes until I’ve convinced you to read it?
You guessed it. I’m going to speed review for you a hidden treasure of a book that I read in one night, with lots of tears and smiles, Cinnamon toast and the end of the world by Janet E. Cameron.
Picture yourself as a Russian-Ukrainian Jewish gay teenager in a dead-end small town in Nova Scotia 1987. Can’t do it? Well, meet Stephen Shulevitz, our hero. Three months before graduation he realises that he is in love with his best friend Mark. Mark is straight, dyslexic, from the wrong side of the tracks and doesn’t know what he’d do if he ever met a queer. ‘Probably kill them if they touched me’ is one of his many sweet lines in the book.
What follows from this realisation is Stephen’s coming of age, interspersed with flashbacks to his childhood, to his adolescence with an absent father, and to his ever changing relationship with his dreamy mother.
I don’t really want to tell you any more than that, because it is a fucking fantastic book that should be read by as many people as possible. At times hilarious, at others heartbreaking, it never fails to be unflinchingly honest. From Stephen’s experiences with sex to the horrors of -- and attitudes towards -- AIDS in 1987 to the clichéd but ever fascinating topic of gay men and their mothers, this book covers it all in vivid, graphic detail.
What I do want to focus on in this review is the truth behind this book. I have read many, many novels about gay teenagers discovering who they are, starting at around age 12 when I was first discovering who I was beyond the Saddle Club novels and Cleo magazines. They veered between two extremes.
Some were nauseatingly cutesy romantic (Aristotle and Dante discover the secrets of the Universe, Fan Art, Rainbow Boys, Simon vs The Homo Sapiens agenda) where funnily enough, the best friend is in love with them or SHOCK GASP the cute guy at the back of the bus is actually gay and has been stalking them too. This is heart-warming to read but it is simply not true. These books should come with a "Don’t try this at home" warning, as they’re setting poor questioning teenagers up for failure or worse.
One the other end of the spectrum there is a range of teen reads where life is shit, high school is shit and the focus is on themes of suicide, depression, prostitution and runaways (Money Boi, Bait, Suicide Notes). While again a very real thing in the world for many gay teenagers, it is not always like that, nor is it helpful for books to perpetuate stereotypes and offer ideas like the ones some of these do.
Very few books find that rarely discussed but commonly experienced middle ground in exploring what being a gay teenager is like, and for me it's important to get up on my soapbox about one that does. I find it ironic that I had to go to a book set in 1987, in the middle of the AIDS crisis to do so, but there you go. Without spoiling it for you, it is an open ending, it has a bittersweet tone and it showcases that life for gay teenagers isn’t always about extremes. Often, writers forget that with gay teenagers, and trying to describe their life experiences, the drama is already there, honey. You don’t need to add to it, we’ll do that for you. I love books that focus on the character, rather than the circumstances surrounding them and this book nailed that.
For me, that was my life. As a gay teenager, I didn’t struggle, there were problems, bullies, unrequited crushes and awful experiences with girls -- I won’t lie. But there was no happily ever after as a 15 year old with that cute guy at the back of the bus; there were also no suicide attempts or drug overdose and years in rehab. That’s not to say those things don’t happen or take away from the struggles that people have, but for me, there was none of that.
There was just me, an ordinary gay teenager, trying to find his way in the world with not a lot of advice, a lot of alcohol and plenty of hormones. That’s what this book is about. Simple, plain honest life regardless of sexuality, written in the most beautiful of ways that understands sometimes life is messy, definitely not straight, but with a bit of grit and the odd tear, you’ll get there. I recommend you all read this book, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry and you’ll all wish you knew a small town gay Ukrainian-Russian Jewish teenager like Stephen Shulevitz.
Dubbed by The Times Literary Supplement "Australia's literary microphone mistress", the journalist Ramona Koval has written a book (By the book) in praise of the art of reading. -- From the AWRF 2013 brochure.
Not having lived in these latitudes long enough to have been acquainted with The Book Show and its star Ramona Koval, I ducked into this session more or less on a whim, after bumping into (literally) two librarians I'm fond of, who were happily queuing to see it, and told me why.
A book (By the Book) in praise of the art of reading? I'll queue to that! Ramona Koval? Her as well! Ramona is the name of one of my all time favourite book characters, a strong early influence on my world view: Ramona Quimby, persistent, independent, exasperating, always wanting to know more than she needs to, and, of course, all round annoying little sister to Beezus.
But when Ramona Koval walked out, it was someone else she reminded me of, and it was... Colette! And no sooner had I realised that, than there she was telling the session chair Carole Beu of the Women's Bookshop (you might want to keep that in mind for later) that she loves Colette, that in fact on her computer she keeps a photo of "Colette at 83, with a cake".
Why don't you talk more about yourself in your book? asks Carole, perhaps sensing in the sharing of this confidence an aperture towards the personal. "Well," smiles Ramona, a bit sphinxlike, "The people with whom I've had arrangements are all still alive..." Now that is definitely not channelling Colette, who never let something like that stand in the way of a good story.
Colette
Ramona Koval
But what are the good stories, and why are they good? Here we were treated to some enjoyable skirmishing.
Carole: "I read women's fiction. You don't mention any of the women's fiction I've been reading in the last 20 years."
Ramona says that she likes to read any kind of book - for example, she has lately been reading about Robert Scott!
Carole, firmly: "I would never read a book about Robert Scott."
Ramona: "Well, I picked the best interviews, I don't know, maybe the women weren't as interesting."
Carole: "I'm constantly aware that the balance is skewed in the favour of men."
Ramona: "If somebody's written a book that chimes with me, I don't care who's written it."
Colette: "Women, men, Je m'en fous!" and takes a bite of cake.
Some of the 29 writers included, by the way, are John le Carré, Harold Pinter, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Amos Oz, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jeanette Winterson, PD James, and Hanif Kureishi, who makes a "matter-of-fact revelation that he never reads a book beyond the first 100 pages". Now that chimes with me -- it happens to me, okay, not quite always, maybe two out of three books!
And now, from the series "Every miller draws water to his own mill":
The review of Speaking Volumes from which I gleaned the above information, the work of an Australian journalist named Anneli Wright, ends with this observation: "The single disappointment is the dearth of Australian writers represented among Koval’s handpicked selection of those she deems
remarkable."
I love ports, I collect them like poets collect rivers or some women collect shoes, but they have to be working ports, none of those docks redeveloped into shopping malls for me. I want cargo ships, dirty water slapping on wood pylons, the smell of tar. Papeete, where I was lucky enough to have a stopover this week on my way back from a California Christmas, has always been one of my favourites. I love its gorgeous inhabitants, its slightly shabby air, the sidestreets with the dimly lit haberdashery shops run by incredibly old Chinese couples and bars exuding French pop ballads, the rusting iron work of the waterfront balconies, the market with its tables of pies and rows of pig heads in plastic sacks, bedecked with tinsel now for the holidays.
Whenever I go to another country, I always buy a local paper to read over my first coffee. This can drive people who are with me crazy, for instance if the newspaper is in Greek and they have to listen to my enthusiastic etymological detective work. On this trip, I stopped in Papeete both coming and going, so on my return leg, having already read up on the fisherman who got bitten in the face by a shark and the Tahitian boy who won the French National Under 10 Chess Championship, I went out hunting larger prey. And reader, I found it. La Maison de la Presse, with its natty storefront advertising Tabac-Cigars, Curios-Photos and so on, down to the intriguing Press-Wines.
Inside, behind the calendars and souvenir cigarette lighters, were two stands of very dusty books. Incredibly, it was a Papeete version of the Take 5 promotion we have going at the library over the holidays, where you check out a bundle of 5 books and see what surprises you get. In La Maison de la Presse the books were all tied together in pairs with string. In Take 5, we like to tempt readers with a theme, like “Great love stories”. I couldn’t tell what strategy lay behind these bundles. I noted Gide’s Les Caves du Vaticane tied to Post Mortem by Patricia Cornwell, Treasure Island tied to a Victoria Holt novel; and Voyage au bout de la nuit, Celine’s dark masterpiece, tied up with Rendezvous a New York by someone named Veronica Bald (if I read my scrawl correctly), a “danseuse francaise” who according to the back cover, had made the bad choice to take risks "that had nothing to do with the professional". Celine loved a couple of dancers; in fact, "Voyage to the end of the night" is dedicated to one. Was this intelligent design?
I asked the French shopkeeper sweeping the footpath outside if I could take a picture of the books. “What books?” he said. It was like the “What hump?” moment in Young Frankenstein.Those interesting books over there, I said, pointing. “Oh no no no” he said, clicking his tongue. “Go to Vaima (the big shopping centre in Papeete, where I have never set foot) if you want to take pictures of books”. I thought, what am I not getting?
A few things, I guess, here and there. “Did you go to a porn shop in Papeete?” asked my husband looking at my just downloaded photos on my return. I went to look over his shoulder. It was a photo I’d taken of the back room of another dusty little tabac-curios shop further up the street, where two blond female mannequins trapped in plastic boxes were stacked one on top of the other. I snapped it because it looked so surreal, a parable for token wives or sports girlfriends. In the foreground, unnoticed by me at the time, loomed a cardboard box bearing the words “Exciting love cushion”, complete with bright red illustration. And all I had been looking for was a pack of tissues to deal with the congestion the vicious airplane air conditioning had brought on.
The best part is that I had thought "Isn't it lucky I remembered the word "mouchoirs" so I don't have to mime it". Who knows what I might have been offered. Anyway the mouchoirs were great, folded origami-like in tiny cubic packs. "I love travelling" I thought, and bought two.
