After the unmitigated disaster that was our winter read of 2012 (I think only one person read Middlemarch), we’re opting for something short and cheerful for our summer read. We want you to help us decide…
Vote for your favourite below and we’ll announce which book we’ll be reading over summer on Thursday, 13 December. To make it easy there’s only two choices.
In my job my greatest hope is to spark people’s interest in books, reading, buying books and talking about them. Here’s a cute story about why it pays to get reading. ..
This week I decided we needed a new feature image on the homepage. I often use Digital New Zealand so did a quick search on ‘reading’ (with the modify/commercial use filters to cover all bases) and came up with the image that’s now on our homepage of a man reading in bed.
Hamish Wright from Wright’s Bookshop in Cambridge emailed me this afternoon to give me the back story on our image. Here’s what he said,
“The “Man reading in bed” that is on the Booksellers website front page is George “Putty” Marston who was on Shackleton’s trip to the South Pole in 1907. Putty was an Art Teacher and was the resident artist on the trip. He turned 26 whilst in the South Pole. They actually produced a book about the trip and Putty designed and illustrated it. It was called Aurora Australis. They produced about 100 of which there are 70 that can be accounted for today.
“They had boxes of books with them on the trip. Dickens, Shakespeare, Browning were amongst the reading material available. Not sure what he was reading [in the photo] but I am sure it was “worthy”…
“With thanks to Neville Peat’s new book Shackleton’s Whiskey where that photo is reproduced and the material came from. I read the book and loved it!”
by Emma McCleary, web editor at Booksellers NZ
We all know that every year – and probably any day now – book lists begin to appear. Christmas is book list central; ideas for Mum, Dad, the cat, the babysitter, that friend you don’t really like anymore but still feel compelled to buy for…
A while back on Twitter someone posted one of those “100 books you should have read if you’ve got any part of a brain” lists. So I decided (along with some online friends) to create our own lists. With titles that we liked. (We mainly decided this because we hadn’t read many books on THE LIST).
My plan is make the final lists available in the lead-up to Christmas as a more conceptually tangential guide to buying books*. Add your own contributions to this and all the lists.
Here’s our books to break your heart list …
*We recommend that if you want a really good recommendation that is suitable to the person you want to buy for then you get in-store and talk to bookshop staff.
by Emma McCleary, web editor at Booksellers NZ
I read an article online recently that said that in years to come a personal library will be as outdated as a house with a stables. Seems a bit extreme … but also a chance to revel in some wonderful personal libraries.
A couple of years ago we ran a ‘New Zealand’s Next Top Bookshelf’ competition – see those amazing shelves here.
The Booksellers NZ 2012 winter read is Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life by George Eliot. If you thought last year’s Anna Karenina was long – this book is about 300 pages longer.
The reason I chose this is because my Mother-in-law suggested it (she’d also discussed it with my brother-in-law who thought it was a good idea too). And Good Reads people also seem to agree it’s a good book. After really enjoying the scenes in Anna Karenina with Kitty, Levin and the peasants I think the provincial life scenes will make for an enjoyable mid-winter companion.
Sign up to be part of the 2012 winter read.
About the winter read
The winter read begins on the shortest day (this year that’s Wednesday, 20 June) and is a very casual affair. Most readers don’t know each other and the reading is very self-directed. We published the names of people taking part on our Winter reading page and once our group is established we set up a Good Reads group for discussion. We also chat on Twitter too.
If you don’t finish the book then it doesn’t matter – lots of people signed up for Anna Karenina (last year’s read) and didn’t finish. And almost everybody who read Wuthering Heights (our summer read) disliked it.
Blogging about Writers & Readers: Kelly Link, Denise Mina and Robert Shearman: Comics, Fantasy & Popular Culture.
Chaired by Dylan Horrocks.
Wednesday 14 March. 3.30pm, The Embassy
This was my favourite of the three events I’ve been to see so far this year. Dylan Horrocks in conversation with Kelly Link (short story writer and editor of anthologies,) Robert Sherman (writer of books with subjects diverse as the entire history of human civilization, a man who falls in love with the talking ghost of Hitler’s childhood pet dog, and critical essays on the X-files,) and Denise Mina, author of detective novels and writer of Hellblazer for a year. Like any good panel discussion, the conversation jumped all over the place, so I’m writing a blog post in bullet points to save myself the difficulty of having to tie it up neatly. So, in no order of importance:
- Robert Shearman talked about the fact that whatever he did in his writing career, he would still never do anything more famous than Dr Who. He is doomed to be haunted by it all his life, and says when he dies they’ll probably put a Dalek on his headstone. “Robert Shearman. He was exterminated,” says Dylan Horrocks. But Robert Shearman says it’s humbling to be part of something with such an enormous history.
- As a child, Kelly Link had a pet boa constrictor called Baby she used to bring to school, wrapped around one leg. It usually didn’t escape.
She says writing comics feels like a physically different experience to writing fiction, and that she thinks the paneling restrictions of a syndicated comic make the experience of writing somewhat similar to that of a haiku or a sonnet. She said a lot of fans were unhappy with a woman writing Hellblazer, because they thought she’d change the character (“and make him drink herbal tea,” says Mina.)
- Robert Sherman talked about writing fantasy, (or ‘the fantastic,’) and described a story he had written where Luxembourg suddenly vanishes overnight. Nobody cares, except for a woman whose husband has gone there on a business trip. He says that he likes to write stories with a reverse twist – to start out with the fantastic and work backwards from there. Rather than ending with a twist, he thinks it’s more startling to begin with an improbable situation, and them slowly narrow in. This way, you can start with some good jokes at the expense of Luxembourg, but then you can add emotional depth, which makes for a much stranger and more compelling story.
She always makes a point of saying she writes comics and detective books, not graphic novels or thrillers. Kelly things that ‘transcending genre,’ is a way of people trying to ‘dignify’ the fact they enjoyed reading a piece of genre fiction. But she also says that snobbery goes both ways, and she’s been told by genre writers that her work doesn’t belong in sci fi. She says it’s important to remember that genre is first and foremost a marketing tool.
- A member of the audience asked Robert Shearman (who was an obsessive fan of Dr Who since childhood) whether he considers himself to be a fan-fic writer. He said that did, but he thought that fan fiction was an intelligent and creative solution to any issues an audience might have with an episode of a show they loved (he mentioned sexism and representation.)
There was lots of other amazing stuff discussed, but it’s disappeared into the black hole of my brain. Denise Mina told a hilarious story about the most irritating man she’s ever met on the plane, (who claimed to be a writer and first introduced himself to her by saying ‘an Irish lass was she,’) but I’ve never been a good joke teller, and if I try to put it down on paper it will bomb. I got my book signed by Kelly Link and she drew a picture of what’s either a dinosaur, or a spiky wolf. Here it is:
by Hera Bird, Administrator at Booksellers NZ and poet.
Blogging about Writers & Readers: Bill Manhire’s Poetry Masterclass
Tuesday 13 March 3.30pm, The Embassy
I went to see the Bill Manhire poetry master class partly out of a perverse sense of curiosity. I suspect that watching people being publicly workshopped is the literary equivalent of sneaking into somebody’s house in the middle of the night and smelling their toothbrush. It’s a bit creepy.
But after doing the MA at Vic last year, it was interesting to see the process from the outside. I was also interested to hear Bill Manhire speak, because although I’ve taken the course, he no longer teaches the MA and probably the most significant interaction I’ve had with him was the time he offered me a miniature samosa at the welcome party (it was delicious by the way.) I only mention this, because this kind of event always makes for an interesting audience.
There were a large number of people directly involved with VUP/the IIML, but there were also a lot of skeptics, come to see what all the fuss was about. (This isn’t just wild speculation, the people in the seats next to me spent the first ten minutes talking about how they weren’t quite sure about this whole Bill Manhire business, but they wanted to see for themselves.) It was a very different kind of crowd from the Kelly Link event, where the front rows were filled with teenage girls eating ice creams. (Kelly Link is the kind of author you can eat ice cream to. I mean this, of course, in the best possible way.)
First the participants each read their poem aloud. Then Bill Manhire commented, followed by the other participants, and then the discussion was opened out to the audience. The writer then had a chance to respond to the feedback.
Alastair said the poems made him think of spring, a member of the audience wanted to include the word ‘billowing,’ one person thought that ‘a fire burns warm and wet in my lungs,’ sounded like bronchitis, and Bill Manhire said he had googled Pocahontas to try and figure out what the meaning of the last line was, but had only found websites telling him that Nancy Reagan was one of Pocahontas’s descendants.
But in saying that, the audience were generous with the three people who had volunteered to publicly have their poetry workshopped. It has to be mentioned how brave Jo Morris, Alastair Galbraith and Vida Zelenka (the three participants) were. It’s hard enough to share your work with an audience of ten people who are in roughly the same position as you, let alone an audience of two hundred and fifty potential skeptics.
Workshops work best when they’re built on trust and bribery (preferably in the form of scones.) But despite the different setting, I thought the workshop was pretty true to what I had experienced at the IIML (except without endless digressions about whether or not the man on page three would really have been riding a skateboard, because did skateboards really exist back then? And are there really that many palm trees are there in Los Angeles, or is that just what cop shows want us to believe?)
by Hera Bird, Administrator at Booksellers NZ and poet
IMAGE: Kelly Link from the Writers & Readers website
Blogging about Writers & Readers: Are we the last real book readers?
Monday 12 March 12.30pm, Downstage Theatre
Well, shame on me for thinking the audience might be a little scant for a debate about whether ‘we are the last generation of real readers.’ Quite the opposite. The Downstage theatre was packed with ‘real readers,’ perhaps drawn by the credibility of the panellists as much as the topic.
Fergus Barrowman, Tilly Lloyd and Denise Mina were there to represent the holy trinity of the publisher, bookseller and (last but not least) author.
Kathryn Ryan, the lively and amusing chair of this session, began by listing a few of her favourite things about the physical book, including texture, tactility and of course odour! Kathryn appealed to the ‘book sniffers’ among the audience, saying the first thing she does is ‘sniff the book.’ I don’t know if a nod to ‘Smell the Glove’ from Spinal Tap was intentional here, but I’d love to see a mockumentary on bookselling in these troubled times as ‘a mighty wind’ blows through our sector…
Tilly Lloyd was first to speak, acknowledging the familiar faces in the audience from the ‘analogue appreciation society.’ Tilly went over the highlights from Unity’s own list (compiled over a few chardonnays) on the stellar qualities of the book: surveillance free, shareable, memory evoking, bendable, rippable and Lydia Wevers term ‘heft’ all featured. She concluded that we don’t look at bookshelves with disinterest, before addressing that gnarly word ‘real’ and the arrogance of the analogue assumption. What makes a real reader anyway?
Tilly’s answer was the definitive answer of the panel. ‘No, we are NOT the last generation of real readers.’ The book will make it back to the future. No-one knows exactly what it will look like. Tilly mentioned hardbacks the equivalent of ‘Crown Lynn with words.’ Comparisons to Vinyl were inevitable. Denise Mina – the author – might have been the most positive speaker of all three, saying the form will be transformed; although certainly none of the panellists were pessimists by any stretch of the imagination.
Tilly envisaged a ‘disharmonious’ but mutually inclusive future for the e-book and the p-book. Tilly herself refuses to demote the book to being called the p-book. (A qualm I noticed Fergus did not share). Tilly had some great quotes about the ‘distributor’ of our times.
At one point Denise rallied the crowd: ‘Amazon really is the devil and we need to stand up to them.’
Summing up our current set of anxieties Tilly said, ‘booksellers fear the death of the street, publishers fear obsolescence and authors fear working for free.’
The matter of money was well tackled by Denise Mina who spoke last, bringing us all back down to reality – most authors aren’t making a living from their work anyway. Professional writers in the UK make an average of about 6,000 pounds a year. Only 5 authors in Scotland make over 100,000 pounds a year. (I will mention that a UK bookseller probably struggles to make between 15,000 – 18,000 pounds a year working full time.)
Denise said ‘no one would be stupid enough to do this for the money.’ She was referring to authors, but I think that statement covers bookselling too. Continue reading
Blogging about Writers & Readers: Emerging Writers
Monday 12 March 12.30pm, Aratoi, Masterton
I’ve never been to a big-city Writers & Readers event so I don’t know what I’m missing out on although Twitter tells me they have floral arrangements.
Sounds fancy.
Driving to Masterton yesterday I listened to a piece on Radio NZ about the recently-announced proposed staff cuts at MFAT, which was described as having ‘a sophisticated work force.’
Sophisticated is a word that creeps me out and instantly makes me feel inadequate. A bit dorky, parochial, regionalist … more my kind of words.
I was right at home at the Masterton run of Emerging Writers. We sat in a wonderful old chapel within Aratoi Museum surrounded by art of the region; people came in quietly and without gusto and the chair (David Hedley of the wonderful Hedley’s bookshop) called people by name when they wanted to ask a question. That, the polite reverence of the audience, the couple of husbands who’d clearly been dragged along (there’s always at least one at Wairarapa events) and David’s reference to Eleanor Catton being a ‘young lady’ gave this an air of a warm family event.
I kind of felt we should have been sitting on mismatched sofas with tea and shortbread.
Hamish Clayton (Wulf), Craig Cliff (A Man Melting) and Eleanor Catton (The Rehearsal) were on the bill – talking about their work as ‘emerging writers.’ Given their string of awards and accomplishments I did wonder when they could shuck off that mantle although as Hamish Clayton pointed out they were still ‘new’ enough to have had the good grace to read each other’s work before appearing together.
As Hamish Clayton spoke about developing his work it struck me that what he was really speaking about was being open to opportunity. Wulf began in a way from a friend’s off-hand remark about a much-loved poem (Wulf and Eadwacer) needing to be made into a novel… the Wulf from a walk in the Botanic Gardens at dusk where shadows and tree stumps create their own characters. Opportunity and seeing the familiar in new ways: not trying to develop a new voice for Te Rauparaha; picking up the New Zealand landscape as a central character instead.
Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal began life as a dramatic monologue for a friend (side note writers: make friends with people – it will help your career), which was put away unfinished, then pulled out when Catton was looking for submission material for her application to IIML.
Catton treated the book’s development like she was writing a play and ‘playing roles’ continued as a key theme. As she tells it, just like a theatrical performance “sometimes you’re privileged to see inside the characters heads, other times you just see their actions.”
Asked about her time in Iowa she said she realised while there that our writers have an enormous freedom in what they’re doing.
Craig Cliff used to be all the about the numbers and the spreadsheets: writing more than 800,000 words in 2008, using Excel to work out correlating themes in his short stories to develop the evolutionary chain running through A Man Melting.
He says that while publishers were reluctant to take short stories when he was approaching them, “short stories are in ruddy health at the moment.”
He cites Pip Adam, Tina Makeriti and Alice Tawhai as short story writers to read.
“You can fit a short story collection into your life.” A longer story at lunchtime, a quick one on the bus to work…
These days he’s more a 100-200 words a day guy; working on his third novel (he’s thankful that the first two won’t see the light of day) he’s setting it in the past and trying to carve out a niche that is different.
Footnote: You often see in affluent towns and suburbs (Greytown, Thorndon) little footpath bowls of water for thirsty dogs. I suggest a similar scenario for Writers & Readers events where the age of the audience is in the cough-prone demographic (60+)… sponsored water bottles at events would add a new marketing angle and put a stop to the regularly fits of dry-throat-coughing that regularly disturbed this event.
by Emma McCleary, Web Editor at Booksellers NZ
IMAGE: L-R Hamish Clayton, Craig Cliff and Eleanor Catton from the Writers & Readers website
Blogging about Writers & Readers: Fantasy and Magic Realism
Monday 12 March 12.30pm, The Embassy
If you’ve ever read anything by Kelly Link before, you’ll know she’s interested in the business of being dead. I don’t know what percentage of her stories feature some kind of reanimated corpse, but it’s definitely high.
At the Writers & Readers session Kelly Link read an excerpt from one of her stories about a boy who digs up the corpse of his girlfriend, who is pissed off at being exhumed and follows him around for the rest of the story. When asked why she had so much interest in the undead, Kelly Link said she had a friend who’s job it was to clear out the houses of dead people for a living. These people were usually hoarders, and it was his job to sift through their rubbish. At this point, I was pretty sure her story was going to involve one of the aforementioned dead people coming back from the grave to avenge the disposal of all their stuff, but it turned out her friend just salvaged a lot of old zombie movies, which they watched together. (Do old people really hoard zombie movies?)
But Kelly Link says she’s always careful not to reveal too much about the dead. She talked about her experience teaching a class of college kids who weren’t into reading. She said that the thing that the kids were most interested to find out was whether the characters in their books were good people or bad people, and whether good things or bad things happen to them at the end. She said this was frustrating for her, and one of the things she now tries to do is write stories where that question is never easy to answer, but the stories are so entertaining that people have to keep reading them regardless.
In describing Kelly Link, people often start by talking about genre. Her Wikipedia page describes her work as “slipstream or magic realism: a combination of science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery and realism.” I’d personally add a bit of fairy tale and black comedy to that list.
I usually don’t like talking about genre because it’s pretty unhelpful most of the time (unless you’re trying to shelve something,) but Kelly Link is totally untroubled by being categorized – after working in a bookstore for years she understands the importance of finding the right readers, and she said she’s learned to enjoy the experience. She’s even hilariously had calls from people who have discovered her book “Magic for Beginners” in the non fiction/ occult section of their local bookstore.
Even her writing style is unorthodox. She talked about how she often writes sitting at a table with Holly Black and Cassandra Clare, (two famous YA/fantasy authors,) and when any of them get stuck, they just pass their laptop over, and someone else will work on it instead. She said the key to being a good editor is not to try and turn someone else’s work into your own, but to really think about what they’re trying to achieve, and go from there.That’s one of the things I like about Kelly Link. She works collaboratively with her writing community.
Before she was widely published, she created a zine with her husband called “Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet,” publishing work by writers that kind of fell between the cracks of genre. She’s also currently involved in republishing novels by favourite science fiction and fantasy authors that have been out of print for years. One of her first books, ‘Magic for Beginners,” is available as an –e-book for free download on her website: http://kellylink.net/
by Hera Bird, Administrator at Booksellers NZ and poet
IMAGE: Kelly Link from the Writers & Readers website
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