Ideas for Christmas Reading

Can’t think of what to read over the break or in need of some gift inspiration? Here are a few ideas from vicbooks.

Ed King, David Guterson

‘This is such a clever idea for a novel that it’s a wonder no one has thought of it before. Or if they had, perhaps they would have decided against it, because it’s so hard to pull off. David Guterson, author of the best-selling and much-loved Snow Falling on Cedars, has written the 21st-century novel of Oedipus Rex, a “myth for our times”. Ed King: get what he did with the title? It’s the story of a baby boy given up for adoption, who goes on to become one of the world’s richest and most powerful men. While, of course, killing his father and sleeping with his mother along the way.

There is so much going on in this novel, packed as it is with cultural references and knowing winks to the zeitgeist, that it’s worthy of several spin-off mini-series. I lost my way a few times but was – mostly – pulled back on course by Guterson’s seductive, if occasionally smug, storytelling. And if you’re thinking of flipping forward to the chapter “where a mother has sex with her son”, Guterson has already got your number. (But it’s on page 240.)’ Source: The Guardian

The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories, Don Delillo

Biases up front: I love Don Delillo – White Noise was my gateway drug, Mao II gave me a taste for it and Underworld (oh Underworld…) was the point of no return. His short, rich sentences, the paradoxical dialogue and easy insight, never laboured or didactic, often jumps from the page into the pleasure centre of my brain.

The Angel Esmeralda is Delillo’s first short story collection and it is all I hoped for. Collected over the last three decades it takes the chaos and unease of the world and filters it through his characters’ need for understanding and patterns – the gaps between these realities, carved out by his words, is where the beauty of Delillo’s writing lies.

His words touch on the weft of reality, his characters describing our distance from it, be it near or far. There’s confusion and love, fear and posture. In the title story, Nuns and passers-by seek the sacred in understanding the senseless death of a homeless girl. Arguing inmates, pre-teen stock market analysts, moralising bomber pilots; Delillo is wry, inventive and elegant.

Just try one – how could it hurt?

The Art Museum

“The Art Museum” is the finest art collection ever assembled between two covers. This revolutionary and unprecedented virtual art museum in a book, features 1,000 oversized pages of over 2,500 works of art. It is the most comprehensive and visually spectacular history of world art ever published. Ten years in the making, this unique book was created with a global team of 100 specialists in art history, who have collected together important works as they might be displayed in the ideal museum for the art lover. Unrestricted by the constraints of physical space, this volume contains an unprecedented wealth of masterworks spanning three millennia and culled from 650 museums, galleries and private collections from 60 countries to tell the history of world art…This is the only museum to house Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa,” a collection of Rembrandt’s finest self portraits, Vel zquez’s “Las Meninas” and Picasso’s “Guernica,” as well as ceramics from China, Hokusai’s woodblock prints, gold artefacts from Peru, and works by Jackson Pollock in one place.With intelligent in-depth text throughout, explanatory labels for each artwork, a comprehensive glossary and detailed location maps, “The Art Museum,” is accessible for everyone from casual art fans to experts in the field. Source: BetterWorldBooks

Twelve Minutes of Love. A Tango Story, Kapka Kassabova

‘An exquisitely crafted blending of travelogue, memoir, dance history and some seriously good writing on the human condition, it delves deep into the obsessive nature of tango fanatics and vividly depicts a world full of beauty and heartbreak, of love and loss. The 12 minutes of love that the title refers to is the length of time that it takes for a succession of tango dances.

This mix of travel writing, personal experience and history is something that Kapka Kassabova has done before, and she’s frankly brilliant at it. Bulgarian by birth, she was raised in New Zealand and has spent her adult life dealing with some heavy duty wanderlust, winding up in Edinburgh most recently. In her 2008 memoir Street Without a Name, she revisited Bulgaria, a trip that was bittersweet to say the least. A similar mix of conflicting emotions pervades Twelve Minutes of Love, in which the author details her decade-long obsession with tango, and travels the world in search of the perfect dancefloor embrace, confusing lust for love and sex for dancing along the way.

Twelve Minutes of Love is sharp, clever and engaging, a wonderful mix of self-deprecating humour and genuine insight. Kassabova brings the people and places she encounters to life with vivid precision, and strikes a near perfect balance between her own personal experiences and the wider context of the dance.

The complex psychology of tango is picked apart, and the combination of physical, mental and emotional extremes on display on the world’s tango dancefloors is startling.’ Source: The Independent

Blue Nights, Joan Didion

It was with the expectation of infinite sadness I started Blue Nights. I don’t like biographies, at least of the living, knowing so much about someone leaves me arid. Yet 2005’s The Year of Magical Thinking, its Spartan beauty, stark and essential pain, compelled me to read Blue Nights. It was meant to be about the death of Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo. It is about far more: Mortality and memory, the life left behind and the life departed. Can you assess the life, let alone the death, of someone vital to your existence? What spaces are left vacant in their passing?

Death and mourning doesn’t make for happy reading, but when difficult and piercing subject matter is written about with such skill and honesty it offers us a companionship and capacity for reflection that we can take with us into our own lives when we ourselves are confronted with pain and loss.
Didion has created, through an evocation of memory, an aching, hopeful revocation of mortality. It is an incantation, beautiful and staggeringly complete, of a life. The wonder of it is that, in the end, I didn’t know whose: Didion’s or her daughters. They are inseparable.

Janet Frame: In Her Own Words

‘It is the desire really to make myself a first person. For many years I was a third person – as children are, ‘they’, ‘she’, and as probably oppressed minorities become, ‘they’.

- Janet Frame, radio interview about writing her autobiography (1983)

‘For the first time ever, this collection brings together Janet Frame’s published short non-fiction in one collected volume, as well as material never seen before. Letters spanning 50 years of Frame’s life are published alongside essays, reviews, speeches and extracts from interviews. This startling collection provides an unprecedented range of factual writings about herself, her life and her work. It reveals many aspects Janet Frame’s character that will challenge some long-standing myths and preconceptions about New Zealand’s most famous author.’

Go the F@#k to Sleep , Adam Mansbach

It started with a sardonic comment on a Facebook page and transformed into the Indie publishing sensation of the year. Go the F**k to Sleep is a bedtime book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don’t always send a toddler sailing blissfully off to dreamland. Profane, affectionate, and radically honest, Adam Mansbach’s verses perfectly capture the familiar (and unspoken) tribulations of putting your little angel down for the night. In the process, they open up a conversation about parenting, granting us permission to admit our frustrations, and laugh at their absurdity. With illustrations by Ricardo Cortes, Go the F**k to Sleep is beautiful, subversive and pants-wettingly funny – a book for parents new, old and expectant. You probably should not read it to your children.

Free Range in the City, Annabel Langbein

If you loved Annabel Langbein The Free Range Cook, you’ll adore this new book. Annabel invites you into her city home and shows how her free range cooking style can help you create a sustainable lifestyle in the city. With over 150 delicious recipes and menus for every occasion, Annabel Langbein Free Range in the City is more than just another cookbook – it’s a recipe for living well in today’s busy world.

Blue Nights by Joan Didion – A Review

Blue Nights

by Joan Didion, $34.99

‘Several days before Christmas 2003, Joan Didion’s only daughter, Quintana, fell seriously ill. In 2010, Didion marked the sixth anniversary of her daughter’s death. Blue Nights is a shatteringly honest examination of Joan Didion’s life as a mother, a woman and a writer.’

It was with the expectation of infinite sadness I started Blue Nights. I don’t like biographies, at least of the living, knowing so much, however biased, about someone leaves me arid. Yet 2005’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion’s recounting of the year following the death of her husband, with its Spartan beauty, stark and essential pain, compelled me to read Blue Nights. It was meant to be about the death of Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo. It is about far more: mortality and memory, the life left behind and the life departed. Didion’s austere, incisive writing seems to ask how one can assess the life, let alone the death, of someone vital to your existence. What spaces are left vacant in their passing?

Death and mourning doesn’t make for happy reading, but when difficult and piercing subject matter is written about with such skill and honesty it offers us a companionship and capacity for reflection that we can take with us when we ourselves are confronted with pain and loss.

How can I convince you that this is vital reading? This act of remembrance and re-visitation of experience, all reconsidered and weighed with a yearning, heartfelt intellectual struggle to understand, will tear and heal something in you. Didion has created, through an evocation of memory, an aching, hopeful revocation of mortality. It is an incantation, beautiful and staggeringly complete, of a life. The wonder of it is that, in the end, I didn’t know whose: Didion’s or her daughters. They are inseparable.

Marcus Greville

Buy this book online and we will ship it anywhere in NZ, freight free.

Book Launch – The Same As Yes, by Joan Fleming

'The Same As Yes' by Joan Fleming

This wonderful collection  of poetry, by debut author Joan Fleming, will be launched by Victoria University Press here at vicbooks on Thursday the 17th of November, at 6pm. Please come along and enjoy the atmosphere, the words and some refreshments.

All Hallow’s Read

In support of Neil Gaiman’s All Hallow’s Read initiative, and with Halloween coming up on Monday, here are some of my top scary book picks:

Struwwelpeter  By Heinrich Hoffmann

Written in 1845, and containing some glaringly un-PC  sections when viewed through the lens of modern society, Struwwelpeter is one of the only children’s picture books that I would call terrifying.  Full of morality tales, Hoffman depicts children suffering dismemberment as a punishment for thumb-sucking, immolation as a consequence of playing with matches, and affliction with a wasting disease as a result of not eating what’s been given to them.  I’d class this one as more of a curiosity for teens and adults than as something I’d give to children the age it was originally written for.

The Radleys  By Matt Haig

Not your typical blood-sucker novel, The Radleys follows a pair of suburban-dwelling vampires who raise their children to believe that they are human.  When their daughter gets into a physical altercation resulting in bloodflow, all is suddenly and tragically revealed, with very complicated consequences; a great story about the line between morality and denying your true nature.

World War Z  By Max Brooks, $23.99

The first truly impressive zombie novel to hit my radar, World War Z documents the human war against the infected from many perspectives, in many nations.  Politics and cultural differences are interwoven throughout, making World War Z the must-read zombie novel for history buffs and current affairs enthusiasts.

Warm Bodies  By Isaac Marion, $29.99

Traditionally zombies do little besides eating human flesh and groaning “braaaains, braaaains.”  But when you spend all day shuffling back and forth, entrails hanging from your lips, not remembering who you were, or even what your name was, what happens when you meet a human girl and suddenly start to care if she lives or dies?  Can purpose cure you?  Told from the zombie’s point of view, this fantastically different take on the Z word is really a thought-provoking discussion about the dangers of apathy.

Zombies Vs. Unicorns  Edited by Holly Black and Justine Larbalestier, $23.99

I don’t usually read short story collections, but this one, compiled by many talented writers of Young Adult literature, is both captivating and somewhat tongue-in-cheek.  The stories are alternately zombie and unicorn-centric, with both sub-genres well represented.  In the end, however, I’d have to say that zombies win the day.

The Graveyard Book  By Neil Gaiman, $21.99

An All Hallow’s Read list would be incomplete without at least one title by Gaiman.  The Graveyard Book, like Coraline before it, brings creepy to a younger audience.  Because the main character, Bod, grows up among ghosts, with the real dangers of the novel lying outside the gates of the cemetery, The Graveyard Book manages to be dark while also making traditionally scary things feel safe.

 

I don’t want to go into this last one too much because it seems like an obvious choice, but I should mention that Salem’s Lot by Stephen King is the only book that has made me, a determinedly non-religious individual, go to bed wearing a cross.  To be fair, I was still a teenager at the time and was home alone with a fat and scary novel, a windy night, and a very creaky house.

Happy All Hallow’s Reading Everybody.

Liz Gillett

vic and VUP – it’s a Facebook thing of prizes and free stuff.

vicbooks and Victoria University Press have teamed up to bring you six weeks of give-aways and prizes. We take alternate weeks to offer different prizes – and there is no limit to the number of times you can enter. Sure, It’s a shameless pyramid scheme that includes bribery, Facebook and The Dark Arts (one of those things is a fabrication), but it also has the added perk of showing off the excellent books VUP publish, and we sell. Not to mention the free stuff, which is also good.

Here’s what you do: Get your friends to Like vicbooks and VUP on Facebook, then they leave a comment on our wall saying you sent them, and you’ll go into the draw to win. (They can then send their friends and so on and so on, until we rule Facebook and give away every single book in the world).

This week it’s our turn to give away the goodies, so do the Like thing and you could win one of 5 spot prizes during the week – hint, there will be coffee, VUP books and other VUP books involved.

This week’s draw closes on Friday October 28th, at 5pm. The more friends you send the better your chances.

Julian Barnes Wins the Booker!

There’s a sense of redemption about this win for Julian Barnes – firstly it somewhat redeems the Man Booker judges (they’ve been taking a fair amount of flak for their shortlist choices, all populist and common and things of that flavour) and, secondly, and far more importantly, it gives Julian Barnes the big Booker Prize tick. It was the fourth time Barnes had been shortlisted, plus, this year, he was the bookie’s favourite, so it all kind of added up to the Kiss of Death (the bookie’s favourite never wins – convenient much?). But with The Sense of an Ending, Barnes finally has the coveted prize.

See this link to buy the book (while stock lasts – the publisher is out of stock and furiously reprinting to meet the surge of Booker demand).

Here’s what the BBC had to say of the win, as well as The Guardian. There’s a wonderful interview with Barnes at the Paris Review, and, just to round it all out, here’s a neat little summary of Booker Prize Facts And Why You Should Care Who Wins by the Huffington Post.

Why I’m Stoked with Al Brown – a Review

Stoked: Cooking with Fire

by Al Brown, photography by Kieran Scott

RRP $70 vicbooks  price $59.99

I read cookbooks in bed like novels and consider my self to be pretty good in the kitchen. I cook everyday for my family, trying to get enough green stuff on the plate and not having too many take-aways. My two boys eat all of my meals (mostly) without complaint, though the recent pumpkin and pea curry was a struggle and even I am sick of my vegetable soup. The meals they enjoy the most (Dad included) are the simple meat and 3 veg ones; crumbed schnitzel and coleslaw, roast chicken with Nigella’s stuffing, roast lamb and always my mother-in-law’s roast potatoes. When eating out, my eldest will make a beeline for the kranksy sandwich dripping with sauce, onions and mustard.

Whilst I’m happy enough with my cooking (and I think I’m a pretty good baker so no issues there) it does get a bit bland, lacking as it does the deep savouriness and depth of flavour of the well-cooked restaurant meal I sometimes crave. Now I know that restaurant chefs have all day to slowly simmer stocks, while having access to cuts of meat and essential bones that I would have to give up my day job in order to procure and deploy. But all the same I want more from my cooking and, with Al Brown’s new cook book, I think I’ve found it.

Stoked: Cooking with Fire is just the thing. It’s a book about meat and how to cook it: pork, beef, lamb and birds all get their own chapter. There’s  a chapter on Hunting, Fishing and Foraging which, if I’m honest, I’ll probably skip – but the manly shots of men being manly, with dead pigs on their backs, destined for the transformative flames of deliciousness, carry their own promise and interest.

One of the great things about this book, as well as Al’s earlier book Go Fish are the sides. Whilst the meat is central the sides are dishes in their own right, and will easily accommodate non-meat eaters. All the recipes sound delicious and are packed with flavour, every one making my mouth salivate.

There’s a lot more to this book, not least how to cook with fire and the evocative photography of the NZ high country – there’s plenty to get lost in. Did I mention production quality - the postcards, the ‘charred’ cover and the dust jacket as poster are really cool.

But right now I’m gearing up for a meat fest. Thanks Al, I’m stoked.

vicbooks will send Stoked and Go Fish freight free anywhere in NZ

Inheritance by Chris Paolini – free book offer

Pre-order your copy of the final installment of the Inheritance saga by Chris Paolini ($38, releasing on November 9th) and receive, there and then, a free hardback copy of Terry Pratchett’s I Shall Wear Midnight. Just drop into one of our vicbooks stores – Kelburn campus or Pipitea, in Rutherford House – place your order and walk away with a free copy of I Shall Wear Midnight.

You can also order a copy online and we will send you a copy of both books, freight free anywhere in NZ, when Inheritance is released on November 9th.

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Book Launch: Observations by Russell Campbell

vicbooks is proud to be hosting Victoria University Press’ launch of Observations: Studies in NZ Documentary by Russell Campbell.

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As New Zealanders we have varied and conflicting ideas of who we are, some of the most striking of these come through the formation of documentary film narratives. From war to politics to social revolution, inside sports and the arts, film makers have been watching and recording it all. Russell Campbell delves into the fact and formulation of our ideas of ourselves through the recording and harnessing of images, how the national identity is notionalised and cemented, how film was influenced by our experiences and how it in turn influences the idea that come next.

The launch will take place at vicbooks, in the Student Union Building on campus (see image above), at 6pm on Thursday the 13th of October. Come along and enjoy the book, the launch, some nibbles and something to drink.

Brother/Sister: a review

Brother/Sister

By Sean Olin, $26.00

Newly released Young Adult novel Brother/Sister is the story of Will and Asheley, two teenage siblings with an alcoholic mother and an absentee father.  A psychological thriller, it puts the reader on edge, constantly guessing what the truth is, and which characters are in danger – or dangerous.  Although the framework of the novel is initially distracting, with a few unbelievable components, the dramatic action of the story quickly envelops the reader, resulting in a tale that is compelling, complex, and surprising at all the right moments.

The premise of the narration, police interviewing Will and Asheley about the murder of Asheley’s boyfriend, is rather contrived.  You can’t help but feel that a police detective would have little interest in the level of detail the siblings provide about their lives.  Also, when Will and Asheley’s mother gets carted away to rehab, it’s inconceivable that California’s Child Protective Services don’t become involved.  However, once you suspend your disbelief about how alone in the world Will and Asheley are, it is incredibly easy to become entranced by the psychological complexity of Brother/Sister.  The drama of the novel centres on Will’s mental well being, or lack thereof.  Within the first ten pages he admits to killing Asheley’s boyfriend.  From this point on, the real saga of the novel is Will’s evolving psychological state.

Throughout Brother/Sister, it’s easy to be less concerned about what is happening to the people Will hurts, and more concerned about figuring out what kind of disorder he has, if any.  At various points he appears somewhat autistic, at other times bipolar, and intermittently outright psychotic.  The trick author Sean Olin plays is making the reader jump between believing these possible diagnoses and thinking that maybe Will is just a boy who has been affected by growing up in a terrible home situation.  At the same time that you are struggling with this issue, the other half of your brain is trying to sort out how Will views his relationship with Asheley.  It’s obvious from the start that there is something inappropriate, or at least unconventional, about his affection for his sister, but as the reader is constrained to what Will and Asheley are each willing to say about it, you’re forced to put together an image from patchwork scraps.  The piecemeal nature of the narrative’s revelations makes the novel’s psychological puzzles fantastically engrossing, as you wait to see if Will is going to completely flip out, or turn out to be fairly normal after all.  The inconsistencies between Will and Asheley’s versions of the story serve to further heighten this feeling.

In the midst of its psychological drama, Brother/Sister also captures the social confusion of high school; of trying to navigate in a group of people who you suspect only sort of understand you.  Asheley is presented as the normal teen caught in abnormal circumstances.  Mired in her co-dependent relationship with her brother, Asheley also deals with the same issues that many teen girls are exposed to, like a boyfriend who can be a bit too pushy and hands-y, and the hazards of trying to break into a popular group of friends who, in the end, probably don’t deserve the effort.  With the juxtaposition of Asheley and Will as narrators, you get to experience not only the thriller side of the story, but also connection to a character who is absolutely relatable, an outsider itching to get in, on most levels just trying to make it through what life is throwing at her.

Another prevalent theme of the novel is the fantasies that we build around the people we love.  For Asheley, the object of fantasy is her absent father.  She really wants to believe that even though he left when she was a toddler, he still loves her and cares what is happening to her, that someday he will come and rescue her and her brother from their broken lives.  For Will, the object is Asheley, her innocence and naiveté, her desire to see only the good in people, his need to protect these qualities, to keep her safe from the evil intentions of others.  Both Asheley and Will let these fantasies drive their thoughts and actions, leaving them open to manipulation as they wrap themselves up in a world that, to some degree, isn’t real.   The compelling portrayal of these fantasies leaves the reader wondering how accurate their own understanding of other people is.  In the end, Brother/Sister is a novel that uses dramatic tension and complex characters to make the reader examine his or her own psychological profile.

Throughout the novel Olin’s writing style does everything it should.  The voices of the teenage characters are believable and the narration proceeds in a seamless flow, even when switching perspective.  The result is total immersion.  Like a feedback loop, the story’s action keeps driving you forward, grasping for the answers that surely must lie just on the far leaf of the next page turn.

                                                                                                           Liz Gillett

Paperback, $26.00.  Buy this book and we will send it freight free anywhere in NZ.