Auckland Writers Festival 2014: "Mirrorworlds" with Cornelia Funke

Guest post by Claire Gummer, Readers Services, Central City Library.

I came to the Auckland Writers Festival session with fantasy writer Cornelia Funke prepared for anything – and in particular for taking notes. Yet on pulling my writing equipment out of my backpack I found that the lead of not just one but both my shiny red pencils had broken. Funke could surely create some otherworldly explanation or solution; I simply had to hope my memory would serve me when I wrote about her “Mirrorworlds” session for Books in the City.

Funke, a vibrant 55-year-old, is German. While she can definitely be described as funky, she pronounces the ‘u’ in her name like the ‘oo’ in ‘book’ (rather than the ‘u’ in ‘fun’) and the ‘e’ like ‘er’ in ‘booker’. Her English is better than most native speakers’, though she still writes – handwrites, actually – in her first language. She describes her English translator as a little old lady who lives in Cambridge, England, and who is wonderful at suggesting words that capture the essence of characters more effectively than a direct translation, which might sound clunky in our language. So in the German edition of her novel Dragon Rider, for instance, her characters Sorrel, Twigleg and Firedrake have completely different names.

Funke’s readers are mainly children and young adults. As she says, however, grown-ups are permitted to enjoy her books as well, and more than a sprinkling of these were present at the session I attended. Interestingly, though, her questioners at the end – when audience members were invited to take a turn at the microphone – were a succession of school students whose communication skills would shame most adults. (Perhaps they had come better prepared than I.) Funke’s interviewer at the festival was also very articulate and perceptive. She was Dr Anna Smith, who teaches children’s literature, adolescent fiction and contemporary ‘supernatural’ texts at the University of Canterbury. Never again let it be said that children’s lit is for writers and readers who are less than intellectually adept!

Some people will have heard of Funke through the film adaptation of Inkheart, the first novel in her ‘Inkworld’ series. But please don’t judge her books on the basis of the movie, which she found very disappointing despite the sincerity and creative energy of its makers. The author is willing to engage with technology – she has recently released an iPad app relating to Mirrorworlds – but it seems she won’t fall for Hollywood again, and neither should we: it’s better to explore the books.

Years ago I read Funke’s first novel to be translated into English, The Thief Lord, and loved it. It’s taken me a long time to come back for seconds but now I’m reading her second ‘Reckless’ novel, Fearless, in which “Jacob Reckless faces death in the world on the other side of the mirror” (I can’t put it better than the blurb). The story and the language crackle and fizz with energy, and in person Cornelia Funke is similar. She is quite the dynamo, appropriately so, as in English ‘Funke’ means ‘Spark’. It’s a brilliant name … I wonder if, like lots of other clever things, she made it up?

Funke’s books are available at Auckland Libraries, when they’re not out on loan to her substantial number of local followers. Library members can also check out some interesting reviews and other information by signing into and searching the Literature Resource Center in our Digital Library.

Auckland Writers Festival 2014: "An hour with Lloyd Jones"

Guest post by Blair, Readers Services, Central Library.

"They fuck you up, your mum and dad
They may not mean to but they do,
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you."

This Philip Larkin poem, as read by Peter Wells, set the tone for an engaging hour with Lloyd Jones. The subject of the discussion was Jones’s candid memoir, A History of Silence. Set against the destruction of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, Jones’s book attempts to unearth the foundations of his family. The task was made difficult by his parents' belief that ‘you are what you make yourself’. In the Jones family the past was rarely, if ever, discussed.

Jones revealed that despite this ethos, his parents were clearly products of their troubled past. His mother’s extreme sensitivity, for example, was a direct result of her upbringing as an abandoned, illegitimate child. Jones’s grandmother, Maude, was vilified by her daughter. To Lloyd and his siblings, she became almost mythic - a caricature of an evil absentee mother. However, Jones discovered that Maude was far more complex than his mother believed. Her actions also stemmed from a troubled past, a past she too tried to bury.

Jones was an articulate and witty speaker, but the highlight of the event was his two readings from A History of Silence. His evocative, dreamy prose perfectly captured the themes of the book and was a real pleasure to listen to.

Auckland Writers Festival 2014: "The Politics of Prophets" with Reza Aslan

Guest post by Hamish, Readers Services, Central City Library.

Reza Aslan is a religion scholar who writes for a mainstream audience without speaking down to them. He comes from “a long line of lukewarm religious people and zealous atheists”. He moved from Iran to California as a 7 year-old and spent the Iran hostage crisis pretending to be Mexican.

Aslan spoke at the Auckland Writers Festival with Waikato Religious Studies professor, Douglas Pratt. Some of the points he raised were:

-   Worldwide, religion is more a matter of identity and community than belief.

-   The power of scripture is infinitely malleable. He pointed out that slave-owners and abolitionists use the same bible and the same verses to argue their cases. In the USA there is a shift in thinking on environmentalism amongst conservative evangelical Christians. Previously they have believed nature is here for our use so we should use it as much as possible, but now younger conservative Christians are pushing scriptures about humans being stewards of the environment. He says religions can adapt to the environmental crisis in the same way religion adapted to the knowledge of the earth not being flat.

-   Religion is a language made up of symbols and metaphors of faith. As an experiment he said the phrase “I am washed by the blood of the lamb” and asked audience members to put their hands up if they understood the phrase. Many of the people who put their hands up felt connected as a community with others who had their hands up, while many who didn't understand the phrase felt as if it was in a foreign language.

-   All of Jesus of Nazareth’s statements were inherently political.

-   There is a chasm between the Christ of faith and the Christ of history. He writes about this in depth in his recent book Zealot: the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth. 

-   Iran and Saudi Arabia are fostering religious violence between Shia and Sunni across the world. The fighting is about group identity, rather than about who succeeded the prophet in the 7th century.

-   He is not convinced of the effectiveness of interfaith councils. He believes organisations such as the Interfaith Youth Core which get people of different faiths to perform charitable actions together build more interfaith connectivity than formal dialog does. He mentioned that USA is the most religious country in the developed world and also the most religiously diverse, so it has an important role to play in building interfaith connectivity.

Reza opened the floor to a generous 45 minutes of questions, which were sometimes interesting and sometimes long rants disguised as questions. He tore apart one questioner’s idea that Islam was inherently vengeful and Christianity inherently forgiving. In answer to a question about religions causing violence, he pointed out that the most bestial acts of violence in human history have been carried out by secular regimes of the 20th Century. While religious violence is bad, he said that humans will kill each other for any reason.

As an atheist, I’ve found Reza Aslan’s books give a fascinating insight into the way the world works, and are much more illuminating than the books from the overrated “new atheism” movement.

Auckland Writers Festival 2014: "An Interior Life: Rod Moss"

Guest post by Theo terBorg, Manager Collections Development, Auckland Libraries.

I went to this session out of a mixed interest in painting and aboriginal culture. I had recently watched the DVD of First Australians: the untold story of Australia, and wondered how this story has continued into the present. I guess this session answered my question.

Rod Moss by Shaan Raza

Rod Moss comes across as a modest, quietly spoken man, compassionate but with a strong will. His close friendships with Aboriginal people in Alice Springs and in particular the local Arrernte people have given him insights into both their ways of being and his own.

Rod talked about the veils between the two cultures and the racism that moves in both directions. It is the Aboriginal people, however, who live without proper housing, health care and education. And with alcoholism and substance abuse.

Rod’s painting is anchored in this reality. He works slowly from photos and works with local Aboriginal people. For the painting "Law Courts Alice Springs"(1999), viewable on his website, Rod asked local Aboriginal people to model, which they were keen to do.

Both Rod’s books, The Hard Light of Day and One Thousand Cuts: Life and Art in Central Australia include a selection of his paintings.

It is also timely that the Auckland Art Gallery is presently showing the exhibition My Country: Contemporary Art from Black Australia.

Stephanie Johnson did well in asking some probing and also some very personal questions, including questions about his personal relationships and why they failed, and why he has not had an Aboriginal partner. Rod answered these questions honestly, commenting that as he reveals the lives of other people, he should do the same for his own life.

Rod Moss’s work reminds me of the work of Sally Morgan (author of My Place) and Bruce Chatwin (author of The Songlines).

This is important work as these untold stories must be told so that the lives of Aboriginal people can be improved.

Auckland Writers Festival 2014: ‘Why Architecture (and Trains, Planes and Shops) Matter" with Jonathan Glancey

Guest post by Ana, Readers Services, Central City Library.

I went to hear Jonathan Glancey, architecture critic and writer whose most recent book is Modern architecture: the structures which shaped the modern world, in conversation with University of Auckland architecture lecturer Bill McKay.

Jonathan Glancey

As soon as the session started, I got the impression that Jonathan Glancey was not very comfortable in modern society. This is an outline of his comments:

We live in the age of globalization where the game is making money. But some people make money while some people go broke. Capitalism triumphed over socialism, and all we do now is consume. Previously developers went to the architect to draw plans for cities and buildings; now the architect goes to the developers.

Globalization is a monstrosity: we have skyscrapers and brutal skylines where all cities resemble each other. It’s a very powerful force but the buildings, instead of having character, get more and more banal. Buildings can expand the imagination, but they can also do the opposite: put kids in square boxes in schools, classrooms, and retail centres, and you’ll kill their imagination. It is important to start educating people early, and fortunately there are now programmes to bring architecture into schools. Let children experience beautiful buildings, and teach them to take care of the environment. For a child this becomes a life-expanding experience.

Politicians have a lot to answer for regarding the environment today. In Auckland we have many boxes: the Harvey Normans, the Esquires Cafés, Insurance companies, all just big boxes. Auckland is a real shock for the foreign visitor, a huge sprawl with a very complex land pattern. One gets no sense of a city, although this is a very particular country with great vegetation. One solution would be to have sky gardens and integrate them into our buildings.

We all have to engage. We are responsible for our architecture and we have a voice. What is the role of the architecture critic? - to make one think about the uses of buildings, of creating a local identity, and not just making money. This matters because if not one loses one’s soul.

The same thing applies with trains and planes: we need planes and trains that are skilfully crafted. These days we spend many hours travelling and we need air conditioned, comfortable trains. Planes can be deadly: lack of oxygen, dull food, smells, crowded toilets, seats with increasingly less leg-room. Airports are like big cities now and the traveller needs to feel comfortable, with good seats, nice places to eat, and so on.

To conclude, Glancey talked about digitization, which he says sounds “exciting” - but as you get older you need to look deeper. Alll this talk that ‘digitization has made the world more democratic’ is nonsense. Things have got both faster and weaker. The image of architecture as a bright cultural image is false. Many great buildings are subdued. He doesn’t like twitter either -- he says he is not a bird, and he cannot waste time in nonsense.

During “Question Time” someone asked Jonathan what he could see in terms of the future of architecture. He said that we need to look to the past, to the ancient cities and how really advanced they were - with irrigation, heating, running water. Nowadays we need buildings that fit into the landscape. Look back and see what we can learn from it ( the Maori would agree with him).

Another person asked him if he had any suggestions about the Auckland Unitary Plan, which doesn’t appear to be a cohesive plan (at which everyone applauded) and he gave as examples of great cities Barcelona - which he said is a great, dynamic and exciting city with little, tiny developments everywhere - and Genova.

All in all it was an interesting presentation. Knowing very little about architecture, although I like buildings, I really enjoyed his ideas and how he presented them.

Auckland Writers Festival 2014: An evening with Alexander McCall Smith

Alexander McCall Smith rubbed his hands; adjusted his capacious waistcoat; laughed all over himself, from his shoes to his organ of benevolence... Actually that's old Fezziwig in The Christmas Carol who did that, but Alexander McCall Smith, it occurred to me as he chatted amiably with Jim Mora, amused by his own jokes to the point that I nearly missed several punchlines from his chortling with laughter as he pronounced them, has a lot in common with old Fezziwig. Did old Fezziwig's fiddler tune like 50 stomach aches? At a recent perforance of McCall Smith's "Really Terrible Orchestra", an amateur orchestra of mostly clarinets he formed some years ago, "we had a standing ovation --- or a really quick departure!"

The evening's surprise, for me, at least:  McCall Smith has a New Zealand connection in the family. His grandfather was a doctor who emigrated to New Zealand and helped set up a free health service in the Hokianga. He too was a writer, the author of Notes from a Back Blocker, "and not satisfied with that", his grandson gleefully continues, "he wrote More Notes from a Back Blocker". No, the library unfortunately does not have a copy -- I checked.

I don't know off the top of my head how many books Alexander McCall Smith has written among his many (and all immensely popular) series, The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, ‎The 44 Scotland Street series, The Isabel Dalhousie Series, and now Corduroy Mansions, but he is a very prolific writer. He tells us that he writes 1000 words an hour. "Not anyone can do that. Flaubert wrote [beat, beat] five words a day."   "I suffer from a condition called Serial Novelisation", he confides. "There's nothing you can do about it -- you write serial novels and then you die."

He stands up (metaphorically only, he is reclining at a 45 degree angle in his ASB Theatre armchair, legs stretched out before him) for his happy endings. "My books have happy endings. I know that the world is a vale of tears, but we have to be able to have happy endings."

Overall, and it's something which shines through in creations like Mma Precious Ramotswe, the woman who set up the "No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" in Gaborone, Botswana (he taught us how to pronounce her name: just say 'ma' but make the 'm' longer), one of the things he most appreciates is kindness. "I like to write about kindness and I like to write about people who exercise it."

Auckland Writers Festival 2014: NZ Listener Gala Night

The buzz went up, the lights came down, and Anne O'Brien emerged from the wings of the ASB Theatre to welcome us, do the Opening Night honours, and, with a turn of phrase I quite liked, wish that we all might "travel lighter and richer" over the next four days, before leaving the lectern to Carol Hirschfeld, our presenter for the evening.

And then, it happened. There was Carol, happily reciting her rosary of adjectives  -- "enticing", "surprising", "provocative" -- when all of a sudden she up and telescoped into a little Carol a tenth the size. It was just like Alice in Wonderland and the "Eat me" cake. I was so surprised I lost track of the adjectives, which, impressively, were still coming, and just stared.

True story.

Well, all right. After a moment, I realised what had happened. From my seat up in the balcony, I had been watching not Carol, but her huge, true-to-life image on the large screen, so true-to-life I hadn't consciously registered that it was an image. And as I sat there, lulled by Carol's impeccably modulated tones, my eyes had idly slid down and encountered the real Carol, a thumbnail in comparison.


"True Stories Told Live: Truth and Lies" was the evening's theme: eight writers from the Festival line-up, one after the other under the stage lights (and on the big screen), each with a story to tell. There was a lot of joshing from the writers about the true-false dichotomy, although every reader present, if they thought about it, could have told you that to make such distinctions, in literature, is to fool oneself.

The first story was told by the Nigerian "word and graphic artist" Inua Ellams, and it was about the end of a story -- the time a girlfriend broke up with him. "Three months from now, we're going to laugh about this", were the bravely spoken words, but the next day "I was all runs and cold". The doctor, putting away her stethoscope, said to him, "There's nothing physically wrong. What's been happening with you?"

"I said, 'Breaking up with my girlfriend.' She said 'Oh! It's heartbreak!'"

Marti Friedlander came darkly out and huskily announced,  "So many stories to tell at my age -- obviously!" Her bottom line on truth and lies was  "They tell you not to tell lies, but I've told them all my life and they were fantastic, actually!"

Huw Lewis-Jones, an action-lover whose books are on explorers, Everest expeditions, polar regions and so forth, had a notable line when he referred what the taxi driver had said to him on his way in, when he was feeling nervous: "You'll be all right, mate, just talk about Hobbits!"

A.M. Homes had a story from her book The Mistress's Daughter, in which she described what happened when her biological father unexpectedly appeared in her life, thirty years or so after her birth. "Tell me a llittle about you," she had asked him. What he came up with was  "I'm not circumsised".

Irvine Welsh's eyes glinted as he told the story of an evil, over-steroided cat named Twinkle, set, surprisingly, in Illinois, and with a surprise ending.

Sarah-Kate Lynch was even more surprising. Why do they give her books such awful covers? How are we to guess that she wields such wicked humour? This is a woman who dreamed of killing Bono (I've dreamed of him going and living in some far off place where there are no media whatsoever, but never of killing him) and says she felt bad for him, and for half of Africa.  

(credit Graham Clarke)

After the sorbet interlude of a sad musing on family and place from Yasmine El Rashidi, the feast swept to its finale with a shaggy-dog story set in Tuscany from that grand raconteur Alexander McCall Smith, involving his unplanned use of a bulldozer to get from Pisa, where his flight from Scotland had landed, to Montalcino, his vacation destination.

"It's  a very good way to see the country- it's slow and lets you look about. And the bits you don't like you can remove!"

A bright and auspicious start to AWF 2014!

Auckland Writers Festival 2014: it's here!

The French have a saying for it.  

En mai, fais ce qu'il te plaît! 

Which means "In May, do as you please!"

Book Festivals are the perfect occasion for overindulging, and I will certainly be doing so at AWF 2014.

I've got 15 events on my list, starting with the New Zealand Listener Gala Night: "True Stories Told Live: Truth and Lies", to which I'll be heading off as soon as I hit "Publish", and I'll be posting the low-downs as soon as I ever can, and another 15 librarians or more are lined up for guest posts capturing the colours of the events they're attending.

So if you're sorry you couldn't be there, or you were there but couldn't be at two events at the same time, drop in here as the reports come in, for a whiff of Eau de AWF, a meal at 4 starred Food for Thought, and a wild slalom down Monte Literati!

Nominating "Hemingway's Boat" for the Three Tokes Award

This is not another post about a literary award. This one's about a literary anti-award.

1890s The Overcoat  (Lizok's Bookshelf)

My love for Russian literature has led me to some strange and suggestive territories, none of them involving a geographical presence in Russia, note. I was conveyed to the latest of these outposts by reading Lizok's Bookshelf, a blog by Lisa Hayden Espenschade, a writer, translator, and Russian teacher who "loves reading Russian fiction, particularly novels", and as seems more true with Russian literature lovers than any other type of literature lover, I therefore instantly knew her to be a true comrade and worth frequenting. Which I did, and this is what I learned.

Apparently, there's an award in Russia called the Абзац (Absats) Literary Anti-award, which is awarded yearly to four books: one for 'Worst proofreading,' one for 'Worst translation', one for 'Worst editing' and one for "Complete violation of all norms of publishing'. Unlike many of Britain's coveted prizes, eg Baileys, Man Booker, and the recently noted here Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse, Absats is not the name of a sponsor, but a Russian word meaning "indentation" or "paragraph".

The Indentation anti-award?

As so often happens in the Russian sphere, things were denser and more turbid than they seemed at first sight.

"When I looked for good ways to translate абзац for you [writes Lisa], I found some typical slang definitions that fit nicely with what I heard so often, basically “the end of something,” something peculiar, or a sort of intensifier that expresses emotion. This pretty much sums up my coworker’s uses of the word. Russian Internet searches turned up other alleged slang uses of абзац: to denote three puffs/tokes or some sort of 220 millimeter missile."

There you have it. Of course I had to see what books had been deemed Three Toke books (is this like our 'three on a match'?) but, shock! a check of zapaday revealed that this year's award had been cancelled! So we'll have to wait until next year to see if Absats comes up with a book to top the 2008 winner cited by Lizok's Bookshelf, a book called How to Seduce Any Man, which had been plagiarised from the book How to Make Anyone Fall in Love with You.

In the meantime, I've got what I adjudicate a Four Toke Fail. It's in Hemingway's boat: everything he loved in life, and lost, 1934-1961, by Paul Hendrickson, a very good book lent to me by my friend the fine poet and erstwhile tall-ship sailor Bob Orr. It's Knopf who would have picked up the statuette for this one.

It's the 1930s and Hemingway's staying in Bimini on his beloved boat, the Pilar. He's recently had his favoured safari partner Bror Blixen, famed for his big-game hunting skills and his philandering, also Isak Dinesen's ex-husband, and Blixen's third wife Eva to stay. Eva is Swedish, an ex-race car driver, flirtatious, always skimpily dressed (for the era), and had been assigned sleeping quarters adjacent to Papa's, although the general impression is that the two had shared his.

On Bimini dock. L to R: Unidentified man, Eva Blixen, Pauline Pfeiffer (Mrs. Hemingway), Hemingway, Bror Blixen. Ernest Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston

And here it comes, page 250:

After the visit, the couple had moved on to New York, from which the Baroness Blixen wrote Hem a letter, "on the engraved hotel stationery of the Waldorf-Astoria. ...Eva was leaving for Sweden - whether with Blix or without him wasn't clear from the letter - but she planned to return to Africa at summer's end. 'Do come clown in the autumn,"she said.' "

"Do come clown in the autumn"? Do you mean to tell me not a single person looked at that and thought "Come clown? Gosh, that's an odd thing to write to a tough guy like Ernest Hemingway. Could this be a mistaken reading of the careless handwriting of a woman swigging her sixth or seventh gin of the day? Maybe, hmm, it was a loopy 'd' and not a 'cl'?"

Or, as Knopf would have it, "her sixth or seventh gin of the clay!"

Hemingway clowning in Africa?

A literary award called the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize? Seriously?

Yes. And comically, too. The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize is a literary award for the best comic fiction of the year, sponsored by-- you guessed it -- the Champagne house Bollinger, suitably sparkling, and Everyman's Library, which has been busy for some time publishing handsome new editions of all of P.G. Wodehouse's novels and stories. You may have seen their characteristic covers by Andrzej Klimowski winking at you from the recommended shelf at your library.

The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize winner receives large amounts of Bollinger champagne (this year a jeroboam of Bollinger Special Cuvée and a case of Bollinger La Grande Année), and a set of the Everyman Wodehouse collection, over 90 books so far.

In addition and best of all, in "true Wodehousian style", as the Everyman's Library website puts it, each year the winner is also presented with a "local pig" of the Gloucestershire Old Spot variety, which has been given the name of the winning novel. Presumably these are different pigs, and not just the original Old Spot rebaptised.
.

In this context, I was pleased to learn that the winning book in 2012 was Terry Pratchett's Snuff, and that in 2001 Jonathan Coe won with The rotters' club.

This year's shortlist, announced Wednesday, while not perhaps such a rich mine for pigs' names, has the distinction of including Sebastian Faulks's sequel-homage to PG Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Wedding Bells, which The Guardian praised as a "gentle, funny, knowing act of tribute".


The other shortlisted titles are:

Mad About the Boy, Helen Fielding's third novel about Bridget Jones,

The Last Word by Hanif Kureishi, which I haven't read, but if it's anything like his satire of London popular culture in the sixties and seventies, The Buddha of Suburbia, which I have read, it would get my vote,

Straight White Male by John Niven, a "no-holds-barred look into the mid-life crisis and the contemporary male sexual psyche" says the library catalogue, topics I think no one can dispute are great favourites among today's satirisers, particularly, perhaps, those who were taught at their creative writing classes to "Write what you know" (a line I wish I'd come up with, and unfortunately can't remember who did),

The Thrill of it All  by the Irish novelist Joseph O’Connor, described on his website as "a warm-hearted, funny and deeply moving novel for anyone that’s ever loved a song",

Lost For Words by Edward St Aubyn, according to its publisher a "hilariously smart send-up of a certain major British literary award", presumably not the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, though it would be wonderful if it were.

Whether the pig will be a straight white male, lost for words, or something else, will become known on 19th May.

In the meantime, Wodehouse fans can amuse themselves with this very interesting and well-illustrated commentary on P.G. Wodehouse covers old and new, from Caustic Cover Critic.

"They're wonderful in bed!" Previewing AWF 2014

The approach of Auckland Writers Festival 2014 has Booklovers in the City abuzz. Central City Library is running a Festival Preview series, featuring some of the city's more noted booklovers regaling audiences with their takes on the line-up. This guest post by Joanne Drayton, author of The search for Anne Perry and Ngaio Marsh: her life in crime, recapitulates the entertaining presentation with which she kicked off the series.


Dr. Joanne Drayton's "Full Story" on AWF 2014

Outside Bennetts Bookshop in Wellington, I read their thought for the week. The words of American historian Marilyn Young:

"If I ever get married, it will probably be to a book. I’m always falling in love with them and they’re wonderful in bed."

Joanne Drayton
(photo by Cass Power)

I was left pondering the awesome power of books. For they exist in two worlds: in the twilight of private life (in moments of quiet reading) and in the full blaze of public scrutiny (in press and magazine reviews). We read them as individuals, but also as part of the mob, with a “thumbs-up”, “thumbs-down” mentality. Reading books is essentially a private experience that plugs us into the public grid, connecting the individual to a greater matrix. So if we were to look for the source of their power, it is in their capacity to connect two worlds: the private and the public domain.

Books move us, they change us, they excite us in bed the way nothing else can (almost). In the ephemeral word of voice-mail and electronic messages, the published word speaks to us with a sense of permanence, in a coveted pact of isolation, at its best in a one-on-one relationship between writer and reader. Few other things rely on such intimacy: few other things touch us in such a personal way. But at the same time they have the power to shape our cultural memory; to assume the voice of ‘authority’ in the highly contested and contentious area of cultural activity, to tell our histories, to establish our iconic heroes – the famous and the infamous – to define our identities, and to tell us who we are.

The Auckland Writers Festival is a time when the private and public worlds of books collide. What a responsibility!

It is a banquet. A feast of Words, Ideas, People and Personalities – and someone’s just handed you a half sized dinner plate! You know, the ones always handed to ‘the women’ at family get-togethers and bar-b-ques.

So how do you make a choice when there's so much choice?

 I decided to work out what thrills me the most. A quick look through the programme and I had my answers…

MURDER
FEMINISM
CREATIVITY

Not necessarily in that order …

Camilla Lackberg

One
CAMILLA LACKBERG, SCANDINAVIAN CRIME QUEEN
43: Saturday May 17 2.30-3.30pm, ASB Theatre, Aotea Centre.

Why?

Because I’m fascinated by the whole crime phenomenon – why is it so popular, why has it infested popular television with almost the same degree of pestilence as cooking programmes? Why are people fascinated? Why does it grip all kinds of audiences from the Lords and landed gentry to the average and ordinary – like me?

Because I’m amazed by the virtuosity of the Norse … of the “Scandi-Noir pantheon”, as it says in the catalogue. Think of the greats that have come out of this part of the world – Stieg Larsson’s Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander. And now, a Scandinavian Crime Queen -- Camilla Lackberg, sometimes called the Swedish Agatha Christie.

Lackberg became a writer after her family enrolled her in a creative writing course as a Christmas present: "For me, actually, specific images – snapshots – come first, and then the story starts to come together from those bits and pieces. I am very visual when I write, I 'see' the story in pictures and writing a book is like having a movie running in my head 24/7." Imagine how harrowing that must be!

But this is what I find fascinating … what interests her most of all (and me too), is the psychology of it all: ‘Just how horrible people can be!’ And where does this come from? And why? Each time a great crime doyenne sits down to write a new book, they visit this fundamental question, which I think remains the greatest mystery of all!

(This is fiction, but if you want to explore the politics of these issues in history, I think Reza Aslan’s session "The Politics of the Prophets" looks absolutely fascinating, too… 63: Sunday May 18 11:30am - 12:30pm, ASB Theatre, Aotea Centre)



Two

GENDER DIVIDES 68: Sunday May 18, 1.00-2.00 pm, ASB Theatre, Aotea Centre

Why?

Well, here are the issues on the table for discussion:

• Gender 
• Politics
• Feminism
• Sexual violence

and

• Twerking!

Twerking (I learned with the help of Wikipedia) is a type of dancing in which an individual, usually a female, dances to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low squatting stance. Though the term seems to be of uncertain origin, common assumption suggest it is a contraction of “footwork” and a portmanteau of the words "twist" and "jerk". And just in case you didn’t know, the word was a runner-up in the Oxford Dictionaries "Word of the Year 2013".

While I can’t guarantee there will be a demonstration (perhaps with twerking on the table, this would have worked better as a workshop than a panel discussion), but this and more will be discussed by a stunning panel that includes:

Eleanor Catton

• Eleanor Catton, who has her own amazing session Our Booker Winner (53: Saturday 17 May, 5.30-6.30pm, ASB Theatre, Aotea Centre). Author of The Luminaries and Man Booker Prize winner for 2013.

• Jessica Jackley, an American businesswoman and entrepreneur. Jessica was the co-founder and CEO of ProFounder, a platform that provided tools for small business entrepreneurs in the USA to access start-up capital through crowd funding and community involvement. She is married to Reza Aslan (whose session I have already mentioned).

Ngahuia Te Awekotuku

• Dame Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, Professor of Research at the School of Māori and Pacific Development, at the University of Waikato – and such a good choice.

• Sandi Toksvig, who is a Danish/British writer and comedian who is a regular participant in QI and Whose Line Is It Anyway? And is chair of The News Quiz on the BBC’s Radio 4. Just 3 words: Funny, fascinating and smart!!

Three
EXPLORING THE CREATIVE PROCESS: WORKSHOP WITH MICHAEL LEUNIG
68: Sunday May 18, 1.00-2.00 pm, ASB Theatre, Aotea Centre

Michael Leunig: Self portrait

Why?

Because I love the combination of

• Cartoons
• Writing
• Painting
• Philosophy
• Poetry

And these are the qualities, the abilities, the special talents that Michael Leunig brings together in a workshop that is essentially about two things: Creativity and You. This is a workshop where you can discuss and explore the creative process with a practitioner who has shared and told stories in ways that we can learn from and learn about.


Whatever you put on your plate … make sure it sustains you imaginatively, creatively, and intellectually … because the choice is yours!

Joanne Drayton

Next AWF preview is 22 April, 5:30-6:30 pm, with Carole Beu, book  reviewer and owner of the Women's Bookshop, and Iain Sharp, writer, former Books editor at Metro Magazine and the Sunday Star Times, and Manuscripts Librarian at Auckland Libraries Sir George Grey Special Collections. Central City Library, 44-46 Lorne St. Free entrance.

Winning with Poo: thoughts on the Diagram Oddest Title Prize 2014

"A little madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King"

(Emily Dickinson #1333)

At 36, the Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year may be the youngest among the many eccentric traditions of the British springtime, centuries behind cheese-rolling, the Nutters Dance, and the Hare Pie Scramble, but it need harbour no inferiority complex. The prize, which is awarded annually by the book industry trade magazine The Bookseller, lacks neither for prestige -- in fact its custodian, The Bookseller's "legendary" diarist Horace Bent refers to it as "my prestigious prize" - nor for popularity. More people voted for the Diagram of Diagrams, won by Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, than voted for the Booker of Bookers, won by Salman Rushdie.

Greek Rural Postmen and Their  Cancellation Numbers obviously merits its star status, but the Diagram Prize has called our attention to many sleeper glories over the years, including these, a few of my personal favourites:

How to Avoid Huge Ships
Designing High Performance Stiffened Structures
People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It
Highlights in the History of Concrete


which are now joined by the 2014 winner

      How to Poo on a Date

Subtitled The Lovers' Guide to Toilet Etiquette, this book answers "one of the most important questions that has played [sic] on the mind of mankind for centuries", according to its publishers.

The runners-up are:

Pie-ography
Subtitles are de rigueur with odd titles and are usually prosaic, as in the case above. But Pie-ography's subtitle, When Pie Meets Biography, is perhaps even more satisfyingly odd than the title.

"Anger" van Damme

How to Pray When You're Pissed at God
Here it was the publisher's blurb which was odder than the title. "Have you ever gotten pissed off at God? Moses did. So did Jesus and Anger van rear," I read.

Anger van Rear? Who's that? Some Jean-Claude van Damme rip off?

Reading on, all was revealed. That "van" was just a typo: "Anger van rear its ugly head" the line went on to say. Indeed it van. And proofreaders bow theirs.

The Origin of Feces
 Subtitle: What excrement tells us about evolution, ecology, and a sustainable society

Are Trout South African?
Subtitle: Stories of Fish, Places and People. 

and the one I voted for:

Working Class Cats
subtitle: The Bodega Cats of New York City

Tom Tivman, Features Editor at The Bookseller, was plumping for Working Class Cats to win as well, describing it as "a blend of feline heroism, Brooklyn hipster chic and Soviet realism".

You can get an idea of what's in the book by visiting the facebook page of this laudable awareness-raising initiative supporting "NYC cats who don't get paid for their labour", which contains gems such as:

"ScuzzBucket from Bleeker Street Records wins the fatty award, hands down."

So there you have it, a shortlist which Tivnan announced as one which "taps into the zeitgeist", with something for everyone, from internet cat-watchers to fans of foodie shows, and, "And we have two books about poo".

And this is where I come to the question "playing" on my mind, I might even say "preying" on my mind (but not "praying", pissed off or not):

Is Poo odd?

Although last year's Goblinproofing One's Chicken Coop-led shortlist did feature a number of titles on topics of perennial interest and oddity such as penises, knitting and Nazism, and none at all on human waste, the previous year it was again poo, in the guise of Cooking with Poo, which took the prize. Horace Bent recalled "a long tradition" when he announced this year's winner on Twitter, adding in How to Shit in the Woods ('89 winner) and American Bottom Archaeology ('93).

This pairing exactly illustrates my point. Is that first title really odd, or just a title containing a word which clamours for attention? My hunch is that as with people, the truly odd are always the ones who are not aware of being odd:  the aristocrat who goes around in glasses held together with tape, the grown man in front of you in the line for ice-cream, asking a lot of questions about the chocolate dip as the movie is about to start. In fact, the second of those titles, American Bottom Archaeology is wonderful to us in the same proportion as it was ordinary for its authors. American Bottom Archaeology is, they go on to tell us in their subtitle, simply A Summary of the FAI-270 Project Contribution to the Culture History of the Mississippi River Valley.

That's how I see it anyway. I am clearly a minority, given that the Diagram Prize is selected by public vote. In the old days, in the nude mice days and the lengthwise rolling days, Horace Bent decided the prize. He seems as chipper as ever when announcing the outcomes, but he has over the years let slip a comment or two about his dislike for the "intentionally rude".

A pity I didn't come across this 2013 title in time or I could have nominated it:  How To Seduce Women With Good Spelling, subtitled The Three Words You Can Learn To Spell Right Now In Order To Become A More Successful Lover, available on Amazon for kindle (never more apt), author a certain "Emma R".

Emma R? Emma R? Why does this sound familiar?

 Why of course!

Emma Rouault was the name of that irrepressible reader of romantic novels who made the big mistake of marrying the dull, definitely not odd, Charles Bovary.