Paper and ink and glue

Watchmen and philosophy

2012-01-19T18:51:00.008+11:00

Last night I finally got around to watching Watchmen, the 2009 film of Alan Moore's comic book. I had been looking forward to it because a few of my philosophical friends had told me that Watchmen is full of interesting philosophical perspectives.

While it's true that you could use the film as a springboard for philosophical discussions (e.g.; which character is more moral: the profoundly detached Dr. Manhattan or the psychopathically utilitarian Ozymandias?), I found myself disappointed on the philosophical front. At first I wasn't sure why, because the film does clearly present a range of philosophically interesting ideas. Today, I finally put my finger on the problem.

Philosophy isn't just ideas. Philosophy is about what we care about.

I loved the way Watchmen was shot, the central idea that people who go in for masked crime-fighting probably aren't in it for pure reasons (liberty, justice and the American dream), the action sequences (I could actually tell what was happening!) and the fabulous opening sequence with the iconic blood-spattered smiley face. What I didn't love was a single one of the characters, the world it was set in or the complexities of the story.

I found myself emotionally detached from the film the entire way through. I didn't care what happened, because the characters were uninteresting and the fictional world unbearably bleak and devoid of hope. I don't know how much of this is due to the original graphic novel, as I haven't yet read it, though I do know the film adaption of Moore's V for Vendetta doesn't commit the same sins. I don't think this is just a matter of my temperament or my particular relationship to the text. Watchmen felt as if the filmmakers were so engrossed in visual mastery and ideas that they forgot to throw in anything to make the viewer care. The world is ugly, the characters lack character. I didn't even catch most of their names, superhero or ordinary. I recall the Comedian, who dies in the first few minutes of the film, and the Silk Spectre, who retires in the opening credits. The main character (who, I discovered through Google, is actually the second Silk Spectre) was unmemorable enough that she remains in my mind 'the chick who played Tess in 27 Dresses'.

In response to this, my literature-loving self screams in protest. This is not the ideal relationship between fiction and philosophy! Fiction can, and often does, make philosophical ideas apparent, but it contributes nothing to philosophy if it doesn't first and foremost make us care. All fiction is philosophy, and films that are overt about it (like Watchmen) often do a terrible job at communicating it. (I blogged here about the relationship between fantasy fiction and philosophy, a relationship which at its best is a match made in Heaven.)

Fiction is the place where philosophy plays the heartstrings.

Philosophy is Gandalf plummeting into blackness because some things are more important than the life of a grand wizard (The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring). Philosophy is Satine and Christian struggling with the conflicts between prostitution and would-be monogamous love (Moulin Rouge). Philosophy is Guido's unshakeable conviction that life is beautiful despite the horrors of WWII (Life is Beautiful). Philosophy is the clash between giving to the poor and obeying the law (any version of Robin Hood). Philosophy is the realisation that love actually is all around (Love Actually). Philosophy is the feminism in freely choosing marriage and a domestic life (Mona Lisa Smile).

Philosophy is intrinsically bound up in what we care about, or it is nothing.

The Sense of an Ending

2012-01-15T17:36:00.000+11:00

My intention to blog once a month was left unfulfilled in December. But then, so are most intentions for December. I have much to blog about (including Google ebooks) but for now, a quick post about a recent Laura Miller article at Salon which can be found here. Miller notes that endings aren't as widely discussed and remembered as beginnings, and invites readers to post their favourite novel endings.

I had to smile when one reader mentioned the last line of C.S. Lewis's Prince Caspian: " 'Bother!' said Edmund. 'I've left my new torch in Narnia.' "

The ending that immediately jumped to mind for me was the deliciously creepy final paragraph of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper': "Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!" (Of course, not so deliciously creepy if you haven't read the story.)

I also love the ending of Neil Gaiman's Stardust, with it's haunting final line: "She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars." But again, the impact of this line is non-existent if you haven't been on the journey, if you are not acquainted with the 'she' in question.

Of course, I adore both endings of The Princess Bride (the Morgenstern ending and the Goldman ending): "I'm not trying to make this a downer, understand. I mean, I really do think that love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops. But I also have to say, for the umpty-umpth time, that life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all."

Sequels: The Sending and The Magician King

2011-11-20T14:58:00.000+11:00

This month I've been reading long-awaited sequels.

Isobelle Carmody's much-anticipated The Sending was finally released at the end of October. Originally planned as the final book of five in the Obernewtyn Chronicles (the first book is Obernewtyn, first published in 1987), The Sending is actually book number six, with book seven, The Red Queen, due next year. I started reading the Obernewtyn Chronicles at about age 16, and have been awaiting a conclusion to the series ever since.

What can I say about The Sending? If, like me, you read and loved the Obernewtyn Chronicles as a teenager, it's definitely worth reading. Isobelle Carmody's prose doesn't exactly sparkle; the plot is poorly paced and the first-person narrative is at times frustrating. However, the characters are the same characters you read about and loved all those years ago. They are dear friends, and the opportunity to once more glimpse them as they live and breathe and dream is welcome. Carmody has not lost touch with her characters over the 25+ years she has spent writing the Obernewtyn Chronicles. I love these characters so much that I read the book in a single sitting.

However, a few warnings: Elspeth, the narrator, remains somewhat short-sighted and often jumps to conclusions on little evidence. This becomes a problem because the narrative is intensely focused on Elspeth's introspection, so the reader is often subjected to several pages of soliloquy in which Elspeth bemoans imagined misfortunes. The focus on introspection also means that the plot moves much more slowly than necessary. The rationale for splitting The Sending into two books (The Sending and The Red Queen) was that there is just too much story to fit into one book, but The Sending could easily have been half the length.

The other long-awaited sequel I read this month is The Magician King by Lev Grossman, sequel to his The Magicians. The Magicians is a little-known but brilliant novel about Quentin Coldwater, a Brooklyn teenager who ends up attending Brakebills, a university of magic. One review I read described The Magicians as 'Harry Potter meets Trainspotting'. There is fantasy, there is magic, but these books are definitely for grown-ups. Read Laura Miller's Salon review of The Magicians here.

In stark contrast to The Sending, Grossman's characters are not always likeable (Quentin can be quite a dick at times), but the plot of The Magician King always moves along. As in The Magicians, Grossman continues to draw on both (quite overtly) Rowling's Harry Potter and (more subtly) Lewis's Narnia, exposing fantasy tropes to the cold light of adult life, making magic uncomfortable and real, yet somehow leaving a sense of wonder. Grossman has a rare talent: he is able to write fiction which is unflinching and sometimes cynical, and to write it in a fantasy novel. This is no broody literary novel with magical elements: Grossman never forgets that he is writing genre fiction, and genre fiction demands to be plot-driven. Give his books a go. You won't regret it.

Pratchett's utopian dystopia

2011-10-09T18:00:00.005+11:00

"Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought.

It always defeats order, because it is better organized." -Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times

"Citizens hate living there and, if they have to move away ... can't wait to get back so they can enjoy hating
living there some more." -Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures

I have been reading a lot of Pratchett this year, and one interesting (and somewhat surprising) theme in the Discworld books keeps sticking out to me. Pratchett's characters are ambitious, they dream of a better world, but whenever a better world comes along they are distinctly uncomfortable with it.

Ankh-Morpork, the biggest city in Discworld, is presented as a kind of utopian dystopia: a place where chaos reigns; where peace is maintained simply because the citizens are used to major political upheaval; you can depend on not being able to trust anyone; you get a receipt for being mugged; the river is so polluted it's deadly and law-enforcement amounts to pitting one criminal against another in a delicate balancing act. And yet Ankh-Morpork is described so lovingly that you'd be forgiven for thinking it's heaven on earth.

This has got me thinking, and I wonder if Pratchett is onto something: perhaps people really are happier with the chaos and the imperfections of everyday life than they would be with peace, prosperity and equality. At any rate, Pratchett is right about one thing: even in dystopian surroundings, life goes on and life is a wonderful, adventurous thing.

Speaking of Ankh-Morpork, a board game based on the loveable fantasy city was released last month, and my copy arrived last week. If you're a Discworld fan, it's worth checking out. The game is unbelievably fun, and loyal to the characters represented. The first time I played it I enjoyed many shared giggles with my fellow players over the depictions of characters we know and love.

Oh, Mr. G!

2011-09-13T12:59:00.001+10:00

Not only is Neil Gaiman utterly fabulous, he also affiliates himself with so many fabulous people/shows/projects that I could happily spend weeks watching and listening to his various appearances and interviews in various wonderful settings and with various wonderful people. The latest of these is his appearance in Season 5, Episode 7 of The Guild.

He says in his blog: "Sometimes I wonder what would happen if the version of me I play in The Guild and the version of me I play in The Simpsons and the version of me I played in Arthur teamed up to fight crime and encourage people to read by hiding in their fast food."

When is a character essentially gendered?

2011-09-13T12:14:00.005+10:00

Yesterday I finished reading Mary Robinette Kowal's Shades of Milk and Honey. Having read good reviews of the book and hearing it described as "the fantasy novel you wish Jane Austen had written", I had expectations of a historical romantic satire, with an interesting fantasy twist. Unfortunately, the novel didn't quite deliver.

Simply put, the book was far too gendered for my taste. I want to be cautious here, because I think this is an area in which feminists sometimes do more harm than good. They obsess over the representation of women in literature and cinema, and in doing so sometimes turn characters into gendered objects. In my ideal feminist world, female characters aren't considered good representations of women because they aren't considered as representations of gender at all. They are just characters. Fictional people with interesting motivations and complex personalities. Sometimes women are reduced to their biological or social roles by the critical feminist, who insists that a character's worth should be evaluated in terms of how successfully she represents women.

Further, I think it's wrong to blame writers or publishers (or Hollywood) for producing male-centred plots for a male demographic. Publishers (and film studios) are, after all, in the business of selling things to people and it's a fact that male audiences are overwhelmingly only willing to pay for masculinised stories, while women will readily consume stories about men or women. This isn't primarily a problem of how women are represented in fiction; it's primarily a problem of masculine identity and insecurity. Fixing this is a large-scale social problem, not something for which we can assign responsibility to publishers and producers.

Having said all this, however, I was still disappointed to read Kowal's period romance (which, granted, had an interesting fantasy element) and find that it embodied many Austen tropes and none of Austen's feminism. Kowal has taken elements from each of Austen's novels, including a frustratingly self-centred mother with 'nervous complaints' from Pride and Prejudice; a sometimes-loving, sometimes-tense sister relationship from Sense and Sensibility; and a protagonist whose central motivations are propriety and moral conduct from Mansfield Park.

Jane Austen, in my opinion, ought to be viewed as one of the great feminist writers (some more thoughts on Jane here). Of course, people often complain that her plots revolve around heterosexual romance and reiterate the perceived value of making a 'good match', but Jane Austen did write in 1800. Her heroines move toward the gendered role of wife, true, but she satirises the role of women in society and writes strong characters who demand control of their own futures. These women sparkle; they have opinions and they speak them. In short, we are led to see them as people rather than as women.

Kowal, on the other hand, repeats elements of Austen's comedy (such as women who claim various ailments to garner male attention) without ever ascending to satire. Her main character, Jane, seems to have no motivations of her own other than concerns of morality and propriety, and is frustratingly lacking in personal confidence. The reader is supposed to accept that this inability to assert herself is unproblematically a result of Jane's lack of beauty. While Jane and her sister Melody are given lengthy physical descriptions, the appearance of the male characters is given very little attention. The women are defined by their husband-snaring virtues: Jane's talent and Melody's beauty. Having got to the end of the book, I still don't feel I care for either of them. They aren't characters I care about so much as representations of bland female stereotypes: the talented, plain woman and the beautiful airhead.

I had hoped that Kowal would use her post-feminist outlook to say something more than Austen about the wrongs of treating women as nothing more than candidates for marriage but alas, she manages to say even less.

The Sending

2011-09-08T12:36:00.015+10:00

For those who haven't already heard, The Sending, book 6 of Isobelle Carmody's Obernewtyn Chronicles, is due at the end of October. However, as with book 5 (The Stone Key), this will no longer be the final book of the Obernewtyn Chronicles, with one more to come. At the moment, the expected release date of the final book is early next year, but I'll believe it when I see it.

If you're not familiar with the Obernewtyn Chronicles, they are a teen fantasy series by Australian author Isobelle Carmody. The first book was published in 1987. I don't yet know whether I ought to recommend them - I'm sure I will write about it once I have read the final book.

A librarian can bring you back the right one

2011-08-28T14:02:00.004+10:00

This is the carpet in Canberra's Gunghalin Public Library. Awesome.

The Princess Bride - A Hot Fairy Tale

2011-08-20T00:38:00.002+10:00

I collect editions of The Princess Bride, and have decided to start providing descriptions and details of my editions on this blog. You can find an explanation about this and a list of editions here. I will most probably backdate posts which contain further editions, so that my blog doesn't become unreadable to passers-by, so if you're interested in the list, make sure you click on the link.

I'm going to start with an edition with the original, 1973 text. It's a reasonably ordinary edition, printed on cheap paper for a mass market audience. The most exciting thing about it is that it has a glossy, colour map insert in the middle of the book.

Title on cover: William Goldman's The Princess Bride
ISBN: 0345315324
Format: paperback
Measurements: 108 x 174mm

Front cover, spine, and back cover:

Typeset:

Typeset for editorial interruptions:

Map:

Adventures in Fabletown

2011-08-20T00:27:00.006+10:00

Recently I've been reading Bill Willingham's comic book series, Fables. The series started out as a set of cute stories with fairytale characters in them, I suspect in an attempt from Vertigo to retain their Sandman audience after Sandman ended. Over time, however, (I'm up to volume 7) this series has become a serious literary contender. Every time I start reading a volume, I can't put it down. There's all the things that fairytales should have - blood, sex, revenge, murder, magic - and there's also modern sarcasm and wit, beautiful art, and just the right amount of subversion (the picture top left depicts an impoverished Prince Charming seducing a hapless New Yorker).

The characters, over time, have become characters I care about, and I was astonished to discover how pleased I was to find rounded, interesting male fairytale characters. We're so used to worrying about how female characters are represented that I had never noticed before how rare it is to find well-represented male fairytale characters, characters with more than one motive and who blur the lines between protagonist and antagonist. But here we have Prince Charming, B.B. Wolf, Jack of the Tales, Beast, Bluebeard (to name a few) and they display charm, ruthlessness, internal struggles and depth of character. They stand alongside (or head to head with) Snow White, Rose Red, Beauty, Cinderella, characters we already knew were intelligent, resourceful, stronger than they look, forces to be reckoned with.

The series is about a group of Fables (fairytale characters) who live as refugees in our world after a powerful Adversary took the fairytale lands by military conquest. I highly recommend it. Currently I'm reading the prequel, 1001 Nights of Snowfall, which, to top everything off, has art by Charles Vess.

Round and round and round she goes

2011-08-04T20:46:00.000+10:00

Since I abandoned this blog last year, the Australian book market has undergone a dramatic change. At this moment, the entire market is in a state of flux and nobody really knows what's going to happen.

The collapse of REDgroup Retail led to the close of 139 Angus & Robertson and Borders stores, with many suburban areas left without a local bookshop. Crikey provides a rundown here. For people like me, who no longer live within reasonable distance from a bookstore, this means relying on online purchasing. But the online market has gone bizarro, too. Here's what's happened in online bookselling this year:

Austalia's largest online bookstore, fishpond, has started outsourcing many purchases to warehouses overseas. While this means that a larger range of books is available, it also means that the customer has to wait much longer while the item is first shipped from the USA or the UK, and then shipped from fishpond's Sydney warehouse. This means it's just as cheap and much faster to order from overseas.

Ferrier Hodgson, the administrator for REDgroup Retail, has sold the A&R and Borders online stores to Pearson Education. Pearson Education is a publisher, so this signals and unprecedented level of direct involvement in the book market by an Australian publisher.

The Book Despository, the best option for buying books from overseas, has been bought by Amazon. This concerns me, because I think Amazon just might be the devil.

So where is one to buy a book? And what is going to happen to the book market? I suspect something big and different is going to happen over the next few years, but what it is I can't guess. Bookselling is a centuries old industry and things just haven't changed that fast until now.

In the meantime, these are the things I want to know:

I want a local independent bookstore. Where's my local independent bookstore?
Am I still going to get free shipping and my choice of non-Kindle ebooks on The Book Depository?

For those interested, by the way, I think I might start posting here again, though somewhat less regularly than I used to.

A quick note regarding fishpond links

2011-06-27T18:36:00.001+10:00

While I'm not maintaining this blog anymore, I am aware that it may occasionally be visited and that I offer advice about purchasing books. For these reasons, I thought it might be worth noting that while I have previously linked several times to fishpond, an Australin online bookstore, I can no longer in good conscience provide a personal recommendation for their store. I have noticed a decline in their customer service standards of late, and I feel that product quality, reliability and delivery lead times have suffered.

It might well be that I have simply had a run of bad luck with my last few orders. Things do go wrong from time to time in the world of retail (I should know!) and often nobody is really to blame. If you still feel inclined to purchase from fishpond, by all means go ahead. In the meantime, I have removed the link on my "Where to buy books" page, but (because it would be much too time-consuming) I have not removed any links in previous posts.

The Princess Bride - 30th Anniversary Edition

2011-01-15T16:11:00.084+11:00

The 30th Anniversary Edition of The Princess Bride is little-known. It contains all of the original 1973 text (with the original Goldman introduction appearing after the title page which simply reads ' The Princess Bride'), as well as the 25th anniversary introduction and a further introduction (both of which precede the title page of the book). There is also a map which comes immediately after the title page.

Title on cover: The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure
ISBN: 9780151015443
Format: hardcover
Measurements: 156 x 233mm

Front cover, spine, and back cover:

Naked:

Typeset:

Map: (The map in the book is in black and white, but I couldn't get an adequate picture. This is the same map in colour.)

The Blog Post to End All Blog Posts Part 3: Wishes

2010-12-19T21:50:00.001+11:00

I can’t be certain that I won’t pick this blog up again one day, but for now I will echo the sentiments of the wonderful Mr. G (who, like me, gets nostalgic when the year changes):

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

The Blog Post to End All Blog Posts Part 2: Christmas ramblings

2010-12-19T21:49:00.000+11:00

This year as Christmas approaches, I’ve been thinking a lot about the shade side of the Season. There’s a lot that I’m leaving behind at the end of this year, and a lot that I’m looking forward to in the new year, and I guess this has made me reflective. All of the media messages regarding Christmas amount to the same thing: it’s the most wonderful time of the year/you’ll have a fantastic time with your family/it brings us all together. But what if it doesn’t?

Christmas, if you push aside the commercialism and frantic rush for presents, is a time of year that keeps us honest. It can be a time for sharing and love and warmth, but the shade side is this: if you’re lonely, you feel your loneliness at Christmas; if you have trouble getting on with your family, you have to face the tension at Christmas; if you’re scared or doubtful or apprehensive about the future, the time of ‘celebration’ draws out the fear and doubt and apprehension.

I’ve been exploring these thoughts through various media. Here’s what I’ve been tuned in to:

Music: Kate Miller-Heidke’s ‘The Day After Christmas’. (I saw her live last year and she said something to the effect of: “This is a song about a time of year when you’re supposed to be happy, but if you’re not then everything sucks so much more.”)

TV: West Wing’s Christmas episodes (one from each Season). The Christmas episodes of West Wing are always poignant, exploring familial difficulties and personal setbacks.

Movie: Love Actually. I don’t think that requires explanation.

So what does this have to do with books? Only this: I haven’t yet found a book to read which explores the shade side of Christmas. The only one which springs to mind is A Christmas Carol, but Dickens and I have tried getting on before and we have Artistic Differences. So I’m putting the question out there: can anybody think of a shade-side-of-Christmas book for me to read?

The Blog Post to End All Blog Posts Part 1: Wrapping up

2010-12-19T21:47:00.001+11:00

I learned last week that I’ve been awarded a scholarship do my Masters, beginning in January. This is wonderful news, primarily because it means philosophy will be my full-time occupation. It does mean, however, that books won’t play as large a role in my life anymore. I’ll still be an avid reader, but I won’t be a literature student and I won’t be working at the bookshop very much. I’ve decided that means it’s time to stop keeping this wonderful blog and to focus on other things.

Here’s a few parting bookish thoughts, in The Blog Post to End All Blog Posts, a Farewell in Three Parts.

Here’s some links and thoughts on some of my favourite subjects:

Neil – a wonderful interview of Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer can be found here to listen to free or download for a tiny tiny fee.

Jane – a friend recently convinced me to give Northanger Abbey another go. It’s the first Jane Austen I ever read and my least favourite. I’m beginning to realise that last time I read it (at fifteen), much of the wonderful metafiction was simply over my head.

Laura – adopt a critic. Read Laura Miller’s bookish thoughts over at Salon.

Re-re-reblog

2010-11-27T23:32:00.002+11:00

I shan't write a proper blog post because the universe might just implode, but Naja reblogged about my reblogging about her reblogging about my blog about graphic novels, and you can read it (that is, the first one in that list) here.

Sometimes when Naja talks about literature, I feel like she's plucked the thoughts right out of my brain and articulated them in ways I couldn't possibly. This is one of those times.

Reblogging

2010-11-27T17:27:00.004+11:00

This is how awesome thinking comes about. Collaboration.

The fascinating, wonderful Naja linked to my previous post about graphic novels via Tumblr. I met Naja in the course of my English degree. She kept cropping up in my classes, in those delicious English classes about children's lit and fairy tales which felt like cheating because it wasn't work to study these things, not really, it was fun.

Anyway, here's something Naja says in her blog about my blog which, by the way, you can read right here:

Novels are only just a majority in my favourites collection, and sometimes I feel like a bad lit student for it, because I have such a short attention span and I much prefer WHAM POW PICTURES! to some weird snooty elite.

It's certainly not the most interesting thing she has to say (you really should read the whole blog) but I'm quoting it here because I relate to it. I have very little patience for long books, for wordy books, for overly literary books or for classics. I almost quit literature at uni after having to read Wuthering Heights in first semester, first year, but lucky for me I took a class on fantasy the following semester and fell back in love with books.

All this made me think about another blog I recently read, incidentally by Doc-in-Boots, the academic who runs all those classes on children's lit and fairy tales which Naja and I attended.

I've been feeling guilty lately because I feel as if my attention span has shortened, as if exposing myself to graphic novels and short stories and children's novels has made me less capable of reading a literary book cover to cover. I've also been feeling guilty because my ereader is really really handy, and I've become less patient with heavy, thick paper books.

The Doc-in-Boots blog made me feel less guilty, because it made me realise that it's not that my attention span has shortened. It's just that I've found mediums which suit the way I read.

When I was seven years old I would get up at 7am on a Saturday morning to watch Saturday Disney, but I would have a novel in hand to read during the commercials or any boring parts of the show (the bits that weren't Disney). And before I had an ereader I didn't like heavy books any more than I do now. I simply abandoned them when my wrists started getting tired. At least now I have the option of buying them electronically in the first place (as I've done with Bill Bryson's The Short History of Nearly Everything). And I hated classics even more in my childhood than I do now (I distinctly remember being disgusted by Great Expectations). At least now, thank Heaven, I know that there are lots of wonderful books out there which don't count as 'literature' - graphic novels, children's books, genre fiction, fractured fairytales.

Anyway, that's my blog about Naja's blog about my blog. Which brings me back to my first point: thought works best when we share it. Reblogging is fantastic.

Graphic novels and 'the gang'

2010-11-26T18:24:00.009+11:00

If you watch Australian TV, you may have noticed that Jennifer Byrne is suddenly everywhere (just this week she was a guest on both The 7pm Project and Talkin' 'Bout Your Generation). Sometimes I watch her First Tuesday Book Club, sometimes I don't. When I do, I usually find myself annoyed by the invariably literary nature of the books deemed worthy of the First Tuesday treatment, but I suppose one must make concessions for the fact that the audience of the show probably consists mostly of 'literature' readers.

A couple of weeks ago the ABC ran a special on Graphic Novels, presented by Jennifer Byrne. Why, I ask you? Why Jennifer Byrne? The woman may read a lot for her job, but this scarcely qualifies her to make informed comments on graphic novels. Her lack of grounding in the medium showed (to me, anyway), and much of the show seemed devoted to determining whether graphic novels have (or deserve) literary legitimacy. Which is somewhat beside the point. The audience that enjoys graphic novels knows that something doesn't have to meet the narrow definition of 'literature' to be good, to be worth reading, to be insightful and enjoyable and thought-provoking.

There was one part of the show I enjoyed- the part where the fabulous Eddie Campbell told it like it is. This is from the transcript:

JENNIFER BYRNE: I mean, this is part of - Sophie isn't the only one - there is talk of, finally, a focus on graphic novels as a serious form. Is it true or is it just...

EDDIE CAMPBELL: That's just what I hear. I hear that we've finally been accepted by the culture at large but at the same time, we still get... If this was true, I would be invited here... I'd be invited on shows for being an interesting personality but we still get invited everywhere as a gang.

JENNIFER BYRNE: The gang of...?

EDDIE CAMPBELL: We'll do something different this week. Get me a gang of graphic novelists.

Of course, he was right. The smugness of the First Tuesday attitude shows in the fact that graphic novels aren't considered worthy texts for the book club, and need to be presented in a separate 'special'.

You can view the special or read the transcript here.

Home Love

2010-11-12T16:01:00.000+11:00

I have been living in my new place for four months now, and I still absolutely love it. Last week, I put Megan Morton's Home Love on my coffee table (I rotate my coffee table books about once a week) and, upon flicking through, realised how much of my inspiration for decoration came from this book.

It's a beautiful book, full of decoration and furnishing ideas which are practical enough to actually use. Here are a few snapshots of ways I used Megan Morton's ideas:

A feature wall of handbags in my bedroom, pictures hung with the edges touching, and on-display shelving for the kitchen. Another idea I'll be sure to use next month is hanging Christmas baubles from a chandeleir. I just happen to have a chandeleir in the centre of my house, and I think it will look quite festive and lovely!

Of course, my place isn't quite as polished as any of the beautiful homes photographed in Home Love, but that's the beauty of it. The ideas translate, they can be used in ordinary homes.

View on fishpond:

The fading art of readership

2010-11-07T21:17:00.001+11:00

Laura Miller writes here about why we should make less fuss about writers and more about readers. Readers, she says, are an endangered species. Here's a quote for good measure:

Yet while there's no shortage of good novels out there, there is a shortage of readers for these books. Even authors who achieve ... publication by a major house will, for the most part, soon learn this dispiriting truth: Hardly anyone will read their books and next to no one will buy them.

On a somewhat related point, the Honours thesis I wrote this year had quite a bit to say about reading practices. In the course of my everyday conversations ("Hey Christina, how's the thesis going?" "Great! I'm looking at readership practices at the moment and [some unbelievably boring and complex philosophical aspect] is fascinating!") I was astonished to discover that most people take readership for granted. Reading is considered the most passive activity in the writing-editing-producing-reading process. It's just something that happens to people that sit down with a book.

Over the course of the year, I became a passionate supporter of the sophisticated reader. I don't mean that some people get lots out of a book because they have the knack for mining literature for little bits of gold. I mean that reading, any instance of reading, is an incredibly complex, sophisticated exercise in using one's imagination, interpreting language use, searching for cultural cues and negotiating author/reader authority.

Neil Gaiman in a Tardis - Esoteric much?

2010-10-31T20:06:00.003+11:00

I couldn't resist sharing this, even though to properly get it you need to be a geek of four sorts: A Doctor Who geek, a Neil Gaiman geek, an internet geek and a philosophy geek.

Pretty clothes sigh

2010-10-31T19:19:00.002+11:00

I love beautiful clothes, and I love beautiful books. So, naturally, I love beautiful books about beautiful clothes. I don't think I will ever quite understand why I adore clothing so much, but that doesn't stop me from trying. I think one of the reasons I read about style is because I'm attempting to understand why it's so important to me.

Two books I absolutely must have are released this week.

Dreaming of Chanel is a follow-on from Dreaming of Dior, which I blogged about here. It contains gorgeous fashion illustrations of vintage pieces. I could spend hours gawking at them.

A Life in Frocks, by Sydney Author Kelly Doust, is the most beautifully produced new release I have seen in years. The cover image below doesn't do it justice. Really. Every page is printed in two colours (black chapter text and red headers), with colour fashion illustrations scattered throughout (printed onto the page, not on separate plates). The paper has a beautiful texture. My favourite touch is that when you peek at the naked book beneath the dust jacket, you find colour illustrations of cute lingerie.

Kelly Doust writes:

Over the years clothes have comforted me, given me confidence, lured love interests, made me invisible, secured jobs, aged me and given back my youth. ... It's a testament to their immense power that clothes can be so many things.

If you know someone who loves clothes as much as I do, think about getting them one of these books for Christmas.

View on fishpond: A Life in Frocks

All hallow's read

2010-10-30T17:42:00.001+11:00

Neil Gaiman had an idea on his blog. Lots of people liked it and reblogged it, and it became A Thing.

Now I'm joining the bandwagon and encouraging you: give someone a scary book this Halloween. Because Neil's right. There aren't enough book-giving traditions.

There's even a website: allhallowsread.com

I'm going to start by giving this one to my nephew:

Literature and technology

2010-10-27T22:08:00.000+11:00

The ill-fated matchmaking and meddling of Jane Austen's Emma Woodhouse, for example, was seamlessly updated to include cellphones in the 1995 movie "Clueless." Of course, an Emma transposed to 2010 would have a field day with Facebook, nudging acquaintances to friend each other and forming little groups like "People Who Have Heard Quite Enough in Praise of Jane Fairfax," to the dismay of Mr. Knightley.

Which classic literary characters would embrace modern technology? Read Laura Miller's musings on the topic here.

Collected thoughts

2010-10-21T15:56:00.004+11:00

I have exactly one week left of Honours...

In the meantime, here's a link to a recent interview of Neil Gaiman. One thing he said about comics caught my eye: "It is not a genre. It is simply a medium."

Meanwhile, I've been browsing through a book called Jane Austen: Antipodean Views when my brain can't handle any more study (and sometimes when it can) and was struck by the insight of Tim Flannery, which actually stands out amongst the writings of English Professors, teachers and celebrities:

One of the most significant evolutionary forces currently acting is sexual selection. Women are much more selective than men, and the sort of trade-offs and carefully calculated estimations of worth of men in various capacities elucidated by Austen is, in some ways, as fine an evolutionary study as Darwin's, though it is admittedly only a single-species perspective.

Austen also investigates that eternal battleground between the mind and the genes that is humanity's unique affliction. Because the choices women are forced to make in this area are so much more onerous than men's, Austen's insights are piquant indeed.

Unfortunately I can't link you to the book. I believe it's out of print.

Something else that's been in my procrastinatory thoughts is how my concept of having 'read a book' is changing as a result of my studies. I used to think that to have read a book I had to begin at page one and read it all the way through. While that still applies to fiction, I just don't think that way about non-fiction anymore. I can say, without a guilty conscience, that I have 'read' a non-fiction book as long as I feel I've read all the interesting and relevant bits.

Don't tell me I'm cheating. I am maximising my time.

Notes on a Bill Bryson

2010-10-13T15:35:00.001+11:00

Laura Miller wrote in her review of Bill Bryson's latest book, At Home, that the book is ultimately "a bit pointless, but damn if it isn't a lot of fun all the same."

I've only read two of Bryson's books--Shakespeare and Mother Tongue-- but the assessment sounds fair to me. Bryson has an obvious joy in learning, and he shares this with his readers by presenting facts and histories in ways which are a delight to read. Shakespeare is a biography of William Shakespeare, far more entertaining than any biography has the right to be.

I recall laughing all the way through Mother Tongue, which is surprising when you consider that the subject of the book is the history of the English language. Take this excerpt from the chapter on swearing:

English is unusual in including the impossible and the pleasurable in its litany of profanities. It is a strange and little-noted idiosyncrasy of our tongue that when we wish to express extreme fury we entreat the object of our rage to undertake an anatomical impossibility or, stranger still, to engage in the one activity that is bound to give him more pleasure than almost anything else.

Which reminds me: it's about time I read more of Bill Bryson's books.

View on fishpond:

Ignorance is no armour

2010-10-06T19:49:00.001+11:00

Last week was Banned Books Week. Read about it here. I was somewhat bemused (perhaps even proud) to discovere here that Sandman was the most contested graphic novel of the last year. Last year, Ellen Hopkins wrote a poem which made me shiver:

"Sticks and stones do break bones, and ignorance is no armour."

This is particularly pertinent when you consider that To Kill a Mockingbird was on the list of the 10 most challenged books this year. One of the reasons given was 'racism'. Excuse me?

Your friendly neighbourhood e-bookstore

2010-09-29T19:32:00.003+10:00

There's an article here about the impact of e-books on author royalties. It bothers me a little that the article focuses mainly on 'literary fiction', but let's set that aside for a moment. The following sentences caught my attention:

Unlike traditional bookstores, where a browsing customer might discover an unknown book set out on a table, e-bookstores generally aren't set up to allow readers to discover unknown authors, agents say. Brand-name authors with big marketing budgets behind them are having the greatest success thus far in the digital marketplace.

Actually, not all 'traditional' bookstores are 'set up to allow readers to discover unknown authors. The bookstores set up for this are usually small (local) independent bookstores. E-bookstores aren't local, and at this early stage most aren't independent. E-books are mostly sold via the websites of well-known, established bookstores. I'd like to see an online equivalent of a local independent bookstore; an e-bookstore which displays little-known titles and has a unique layout. Has anyone seen one? I'd like to hear about it if you have.

Call me optimistic, but I think that in time the book industry will grow into this new phase and we'll see the emergence of such stores online.

Sketches from an incredible imagination

2010-09-26T20:21:00.000+10:00

It's no secret that I think Shaun Tan is one of the finest illustrators alive today. Just this week I finally received my copy of his latest release- The Bird King and Other Sketches. It full of gorgeous urban fantasy sketches. It's not yet available for purchase online. Here's an idea- support your local independent bookstore and order it in!

Now I'm counting down the weeks until the end of November- that's when my copy of the AWESOMELY DELUXE BOX OF THE ARRIVAL GOODNESS arrives. It comes with a limited edition print and a 'making of' sketchbook. Check out the details here. Probably a good one to pre-order. Again, support your local independent!

Um... squee?

2010-09-22T19:55:00.002+10:00

Allow me to indulge my feminist and geek sensibilities all at once for a moment. Being proud of my geekdom, I am of course familiar with the term 'fanboy'. For those who aren't, here are a couple of definitions:

Wikipedia- Fanboy is a term used to describe a male who is highly devoted and biased in opinion towards a single subject or hobby within a given field. Fanboy-ism is often prevalent in a field of products, brands or universe of characters where very few competitors (or enemies in fiction, such as comics) exist.

The Urban Dictionary- Fanboy: A passionate fan of various elements of geek culture (e.g. sci-fi, comics, Star Wars, video games, anime, hobbits, Magic: the Gathering, etc.), but who lets his passion override social graces.

I was thinking about the term 'fanboy' the other day, and began to wonder if there was a 'girl' version of the term. Lo and behold, there is. I can't help noticing, however, that the definitions of 'fanboy' and 'fangirl' seem a little uneven. Note, from the very same sources:

Wikipedia- The term fangirl can be used to describe a female member of a fandom community (counterpart to the masculine "fanboy"). Fangirls may be more devoted to emotional and romantic aspects of their fandom, especially (relation-)shipping. However, it is commonly used in a derogatory sense to describe a girl's obsession with something, most commonly a male teen idol or an aspect of Japanese pop culture. Fangirl behavior can vary in intensity. On one end of the scale are those that, while harboring a crush on a particular actor or character, are perfectly capable of understanding that the fulfilment of the crush is never going to happen. On the other end are the girls who are said to be obsessive in their claims on a fictional character, even fighting with other fangirls over who 'owns' the character in question.

The Urban Dictionary- Fangirl: A rabid breed of human female who is obesessed with either a fictional character or an actor.

Uh... rabid? Excuse me, give me my term back! I'm a girl, and I'm a fan of lots of things.

I hereby declare myself a non-rabid, non-hormone-driven, passionate, geeky fangirl of the following:

Neil Gaiman (including, but not limited to, the Sandman comics)
The Princess Bride (yeah, that's me in the t-shirt)
The Obernewtyn Chronicles
The Lord of the Rings films
Robin Hobb's fantasy worlds
Narnia

Don't you dare diss my fangirldom.

Author/Fan

2010-09-20T19:31:00.000+10:00

I had an idea back here about the rebirth of the author: I think authors are taking a new place within their fan communities and no longer stand as authoritative figures over them. Thanks to the internet, of course. If you follow your favourite writer online, tell me you haven't noticed that the author/fan boundary seems to be getting blurred.

Author Lynn Flewelling has a book coming out soon inspired by fan artwork. This, I think, is collaboration at its best. There's a blog on the topic here.

I was discussing a related concept with my thesis supervisor last week: sometimes, it seems, the fanbase has more say in 'what goes' in a fictional world than the actual writer does (think Star Trek). This seems to happen most with extraordinarily geeky fanbases. (Actually, on a sidenote, cult TV shows are beginning to cash in on this, enlisting famous author-fans to write episodes, such as Neil Gaiman's upcoming Dr Who episode.) The fanbase's authority does depend, however, on whether the fans worship the story or the writer. Joss Whedon, I think, is an example of the latter. Incidentally, a transcript of his keynote session at the Melbourne Writer's Festival is available here.

Abandoned books

2010-09-20T18:14:00.004+10:00

Shelfari tells me I've read 32 books this year, and that I'm currently reading another 7. This is exactly the kind of thing I use Shelfari for. There are lots of book-related social networking sites. Too many, in fact, because there isn't yet a standard- the site that 'everyone' uses. (Monopolies aren't nice, but for social networking they're kind of necessary. Who wants to use a social networking site unless their friends are using it too?) I joined Shelfari for two reasons: it's an easy way to keep track of what I've read and am reading, and it allows me to put a lovely bookshelf on my blog.

The fact that I've read 32 books this year is good. I have a vague goal this year to read an average of a book a week, so 32 means I'm on track. (I'm slightly behind if you count the number of weeks exactly, but don't forget I have a thesis due at the end of October and will have lots of time for reading in November and December!)

The fact that I'm 'currently reading' 7 books is not so good. I've never been the kind of reader who worries about abandoning a book halfway through. If it's not interesting enough to keep me reading, then I'm quite happy to move on to something else and forget I ever started it. What's concerning is that these 7 books don't fit that description. They're all good books, and I intended to finish them.

Here they are:

Magician by Raymond Feist- I. will. read. this. I've been meaning to get round to it for years. I've only just started, so there's hope yet.
Would You Eat Your Cat by Jeremy Stangroom- a great intro to philosophy ethics. This one I'm reading section by section.
36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction by Rebecca Goldstein- an engaging novel involving the world of academia I hope to get myself into. It just doesn't have the "What happens next??" factor.
The Golem's Eye by Jonathan Stroud- I loved the first book in the series, The Amulet of Samarkand, but I should have taken the hint when it took me over a year to get onto the second book. I'm just not interested enough.
Politically Correct Bedtime Stories by James Finn Garner- I adore this book! Why on Earth haven't I finished it!?
Do Travel Writers Go To Hell? by Thomas B. Khonstamm- the premise of the book is engaging, but the prose is about as sparkling as you might expect from a travel writer (i.e. not at all), so I may give up on this one.
The History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell- This book is brilliant! I will get on to 20th Century philosophy one day, I swear!

So, the boiled-down analysis of what makes me stop reading a book? Either it's divided into sections, in which case I've read whole sections and simply failed to read others, or the plot simply hasn't captured enough interest. I just don't feel the need to discover what is on the next page.

On writing a thesis

2010-09-09T23:31:00.002+10:00

At the risk of sounding like an (albeit extremely intermittent) broken record, I still don’t have internet. It is on its way though, so for blogging purposes, I’M BACK.

I’ll be honest with you. I haven’t read much in the last few months. A copy of Raymond Feist’s Magician has moved about in my home (bedside table, coffee table, desk) for the past two months, trying desperately to get my attention, and so far I’ve only read ten pages or so. I have read enough to appreciate Feist’s language and to know I’ll enjoy the book once I finally find the time to read it.

The reason I haven’t been reading is that I’ve been busy writing a minor thesis. The topic is truth in fiction. Which is not as grandiose as it sounds. The question is this: how do we know what is true within the world of a story? I’ve been focusing on two wonderful texts- William Goldman’s The Princess Bride and Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber.

I wrote about The Princess Bride here. I once promised to tell you about The Bloody Chamber, so I suppose it’s time to make good on that promise. The Bloody Chamber is a collection of short stories, most of which are re-imaginings of fairytales. Reading it takes a bit of effort. The language is incredibly rich- you won’t find any light-hearted entertainment here. What you will find instead: gothic themes, breathtaking imagery, magic, strong women, violence, sex, otherworldliness. Every story has a different pace and tone. It’s a beautiful book, and Carter’s storytelling is masterful.

Writing the thesis has been a lot of work, but I can’t help feeling I’m incredibly lucky. I get to write about the nature of fiction and Inigo Montoya and fairytales full-time. I love it, I truly do. This is how it came about: roughly a year ago, I walked into the office of an academic at my university and ventured my ideas for an Honours thesis. She asked if I had any texts in mind and I cautiously- very cautiously- said: “Well, I’m thinking I’d like to use The Princess Bride.” She actually took me seriously, and here I am.

This week, the same academic wrote on her blog:

‘I love working with fairy tales. So even on days when I'm tired and grouchy because I've been ploughing through marking and paperwork, there is a little voice in the back of my head, saying over and over again: "You have a career where you spend your time thinking about cats in boots, glass slippers, magic blue boxes, prince charming and falling stars."’

Those outside academia rarely think of academics as people who live and breathe their passion, who do what they do because they love it. Yet these are the traits I observe in the academics I see every day. And these are exactly the reasons I’ve decided to continue with philosophy. I adore it so much I couldn’t possibly give it up.

So, in summary, I’m sorry I don’t have any book reviews for you, I’ve been too busy revelling in my full-time occupation.

There really is joy in pursuing what one loves.

NEEEEEEIL! (and also some links)

2010-08-17T15:27:00.000+10:00

Just over a week ago I attended 'Graphic', a convention run by the Sydney Opera House. Neil Gaiman was present.

For those of you who weren't lucky enough to attend, here's a video of the reading Neil did on the Saturday night. His reading voice is just divine, but don't take my word for it. Check out the video.

I attended a panel discussion with Neil, Shaun Tan and Eddie Campbell the following day, and got to ask Neil a question I've been pondering a while. It was a wonderful weekend. =D

Now I'm back to study, and have found myself quite motivated to write by this rather old TIME interview of Neil and Joss Whedon (by none other than Lev Grossman).

In some unrelated thoughts, I've been thinking about how having an ereader changes my reading experience. Just this morning, a friend mentioned that he'd found an underlined sentence in a book I've loaned him. I've always been very aware of books as physical objects. I don't just read them, I use them. I love the portability of ebooks, but I do occasionally miss the ability to mark a page with a ticket stub or write my thoughts in the margins. And voila, I logged onto one of my favourite blogs today and found this link, in which Sam Jordison discusses books-as-archives.

Happy birthday!

2010-08-17T15:12:00.000+10:00

I still have no internet at home. Grr. I promise I have not forgotten you. As I logged on to share a few particularly wonderful links, I realised that this is my 100th post on this blog.

In honour of this birthday, I decided to make a list of my favourite posts so far:

Fantasy and philosophy - An exploration of why I adore fantasy fiction and studying philosophy. I honestly think this is my best post to date. It says an awful lot about my passions.

Lost in Austen - A review of the BBC show of the same name, with some theorizing regarding Darcy-mania thrown in.

Princesses and pornstars - The world needs more awareness of contemporary feminists like Emily Maguire, and here I tell you why.

This is my favourite book in all the world - What are your favourite books? Here I discuss mine, though this list has had an addition since.

The one about cover art - Because beautiful things are lovely to look at. Indulge yourself in some book porn.

Would the real Sherlock Holmes please stand up? - Some thoughts on the famous detective and the weird things we do with classic characters.

Have a browse through, these posts are oldies but goodies! I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them. =)

I think I'm just a little bit evil...

2010-07-30T23:55:00.002+10:00

I still have no internet at home, but I couldn't resist sharing these recently discovered book gems:

A couple of years ago I purchased Great Lies to Tell Small Kids by Andy Riley, who is best known as the author of The Bunny Suicides. Each page of the book contains a hilariously mean lie, coupled with a funny cartoon. Highlights include 'Milk feels pain' and 'If you grab the edge of your chair and pull as hard as you can you'll lift yourself into the air'.

This evening a coworker of mine, JS, brought a book to the counter, chuckling. Imagine my delight when I discovered that it was a follow-up, Loads More Lies to Tell Small Kids. (My favourite lie: 'When you change channels on the TV the presenter you were just watching dies instantly.') The following conversation ensued:

Me: Oooh, I have the first one! I have to get this!
JS: That's really bad, you know.
Me: What's bad?
JS: Your need to purchase things you see.
Me: I have the first one. I love it!
JS: Maybe I should order a copy for myself then.

I can't help it. I find the idea of telling outrageous lies to small children hilariously funny.

In the meantime, I am concerned that my coworkers are going to start worrying about me, because I have the following two books on hold for myself: Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, and Would You Eat Your Cat? by Jeremy Stangroom. The answer, if you're wondering, is no. I wouldn't. While the titles may make me look like an obsessive carnivore, Eating Animals is actually about vegetarianism, and Would You Eat Your Cat? is a brilliant intro to ethical theory which uses interesting ethical dilemmas. A philosophically sound introduction to an area as complex as ethics is a rare find, so I recommend the book highly to anyone with an interest in ethics.

A wonderful thing

2010-07-14T20:50:00.001+10:00

I'm not quite back to blogging as normal, as I still don't have the internet at home. I have my fingers crossed for next week.

In the meantime, here comes another handful of stray bookish thoughts drifting across Christina's mind:

One of the most wonderful things about reading is that sometimes, sometimes, you are hanging out with a friend, and mention something you've read, and they know what you are talking about. Suddenly, you have just that much more common history, that many more esoteric references. This happened to me last week, and it was an absolute delight, but I'll get back to that.

Common interests in reading and film have always been important to me, but over the last few years I've become increasingly distrusting of other people's ability to judge my tastes. I have books recommended to me often. Friends, relatives and customers all think they know exactly what I want to read (usually, they think I want to read whatever they happen to enjoy reading). I don't very often come across people whose recommendations I trust. (V, I love you for your unfalteringly good suggestions!)

Last week I attended a philosophy conference in Sydney with a few friends. I've begun to think of the whole week as an exchange of ideas. The philosophical debates went back and forth, and I enjoyed that, but I equally enjoyed the conversations about the books, films and TV shows we loved. We exchanged must-sees and must-reads. For the first time in a long time, I'm actually looking forward to tackling some fiction that has been recommended to me.

That's what friendship is for.

I remember exchanging 'homework' with friends in high school- "I'll watch this if you read that..." I really must get back into the habit. Perhaps I'll even end up less niched.

An office!

2010-07-01T10:22:00.000+10:00

As you will recall, I moved house last weekend. I don't have internet in the new place yet, so please forgive me if this blog flies under the radar over the next couple of weeks.

In the meantime, I will be enjoying having my own library/office/study area! Finally! The place is still a work-in-progress (pictures to go on the walls; a couple of pieces of furniture still need to be moved in) but my office is pretty much done. =D

Before:

After:

A bit of news and some wonderful links

2010-06-25T17:14:00.002+10:00

For those of you who, a couple of posts ago, said "Huh? Who's Neil Gaiman?", I have this piece of news: Mr. G is now the only author to be awarded both the CILIP Carnegie Medal and the Newbery Medal for the same book. The medals are awarded in the UK and the US respectively, for the best children's book of the year. This year's winner for both was The Graveyard Book. You can read more here.

The picture shown here is one of my favourite illustrations from the book.

FYI, he has been the recipient of numerous awards in the past, including the World Fantasy Award (the first author to receive it for a comic) and the Hugo Award for Best Novel.

Also, I thought it about time that I shared a wonderful ebook link I've found: make sure you check out Inkmesh. It's a search engine for ebooks. It's invaluable for finding those ebooks which are difficult to track down- last night I finally found L.M. Montgomery's Emily trilogy in an electronic format. It also lists prices and available formats alongside each site which supplies the ebook, cutting down on time-consuming online searches.

It's so useful, in fact, that I've added it to my page of (Actually) Useful book links.

Mostly brainless

2010-06-22T17:55:00.003+10:00

I've just finished reading Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's trilogy in four parts. Perhaps one day I'll move on to the fifth book, Mostly Harmless, but it's about Arthur's daughter and I have a general aversion to books containing revisited characters, especially if they've gone on to have children. I don't care to imagine their lives post-adventure; I like to leave my characters free in the big wide world with endless possibilities before them. (I know I'm preaching to the converted here, but this was my biggest problem with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.)

Whilst I'm sure Adams will have treated this altogether differently, I'm not sure whether I want to read the book. So, in the meantime, I'm searching for something to read next.

As I was packing my photo albums the other day, I flicked through one and came across a quotation from one of my favourite books, Emily Climbs: "To love is easy, and therefore common -- but to UNDERSTAND -- how rare it is!"

I started thinking about it. If there's one piece of advice this media-saturated world gives us, it's BE YOURSELF! I am myself. I am myself everywhere I go, but how often do I come across someone who actually sees me? It's one thing to 'be' yourself, it's quite another to have friends who know and understand that self. I'm blessed to have a few such friendships.

All this gave me an itch to read L.M. Montgomery's Emily trilogy again, but the books are packed away. Right now, with thesis-writing and house-moving upon me, I need two things from a book:

1. Brainless. I do occasionally read chick lit, but it doesn't give me the sucked-in, switched-off feeling I need, because I tend to over-analyse it. What I need is lad lit.

2. An ebook. Because pretty much everything I own is in boxes, but my ereader is still out.

I think I'll go download me some Nick Hornby.

The one where I gush about Neil Gaiman and think about the rebirth of the author

2010-06-17T17:06:00.004+10:00

So if you don't already know that I'm a Neil Gaiman fan, welcome to my blog for the very first time. Those of you that have been here before will understand that when I bought tickets yesterday to seem him in Sydney in August I was BESIDE MYSELF. At work yesterday, I kept saying "I'm going to see Neil Gaiman!" to anyone who would listen (and quite a few people who wouldn't).

I'm not the sort to be star-struck. I think Neil is probably the only person on the planet who could send me into a fluster. I've already started stressing about what I will say if, for some reason, I have the opportunity to shake his hand at one of the events I'm attending. A man as talented as Mr. Gaiman hears strangers tell him how much they appreciate his work all the time.

If you haven't heard of him before, you'll have to take my word for it. His writing talent and his imagination are awe-inspiring, and he has a cult following of over a million fans worldwide. His creativity is matched only by a kind of intellectual rigour rarely found outside academia. When you read a work by Neil Gaiman, you know you are in the presence of a keen awareness of mythology and tales most of us have long forgotten. I think it's telling that a quote from his Sandman comics was recently misattributed to Shakespeare. I'd like to gush some more but I won't, because a.) I would probably bore you and b.) Charlie Orr has already said it anyway.

Instead, I'll just mention that I've been thinking a lot lately about the similarities between William Goldman's The Princess Bride and Neil Gaiman's Stardust.

Neil has said in interviews that Stardust was partly inspired by The Princess Bride- or by a lack of book similar to The Princess Bride. Both are fairy tales sold primarily to an adult audience, and they have a similar humour about them. Both were made into films with plotlines more romanticised than those in the original books.

There is, however, one significant difference: The Princess Bride is metafictional. Goldman continually interrupts the story to say what he thinks of it, and this is part of the story. He talks about his wife and son, their reactions to the text and the process of abridging the original text of The Princess Bride. This is all part of the fiction, though Goldman mixes in enough truth to confuse the reader a little.

I've been thinking about this because I'm writing my Honours thesis on a certain philosophical problem regarding fiction, and I'm using metafiction (specifically The Princess Bride) to illuminate the problem. It occurred to me the other day that while Stardust the text isn't metafictional, it was created in a postmodern world where we have access to authors' opinions of their work. Fans interact with Neil all the time, on Twitter or on his blog. They ask him questions about his work and his life and he answers them (though I've never seen him offer an authoritarian interpretation of one of his works).

It's a joy to read, mostly because it's well-written and he's such a nice guy. And it makes me wonder. There are lots of authors with blogs these days. How does this affect they way we see their work? Roland Barthes famously told us that the author is dead. Could it be that when authors enter our online communities and interact directly with the fans of their work, the author is reborn? Not as a authoritative figure, but as a member of the community discussing the work he happened to create.

Books that aren't overrated

2010-06-14T21:42:00.000+10:00

As someone who enjoys fiction of the cult variety more than mainstream novels, I'm always wary of books recommended to me as 'must reads'. More often than not, when I read a universally acclaimed book I find myself disappointed. Every so often, though, somebody does convince me to read something generally acclaimed and I'm pleasantly surprised.

I've read a few of these lately, so in honour of these books I present to you:

Christina's list of books that aren't overrated.

1. The children's book:
The Finn Family Moomintroll is a gorgeous children's book by Finnish author Tove Jansson. The Moomin books are huge in Europe, and utterly charming.

2. The crime novel:

As discussed elsewhere in this blog, I've started reading the Sherlock Holmes books and have found them much more enjoyable than I expected. Who'd have thunk the famous detective would be so delightfully eccentric?

3. The science fiction series:

I'm currently working my way through Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the trilogy in four parts- plus the other one). I was so sure these books would turn out to be overrated. They're not. They. Are. So. Funny. I keep attracting funny looks on public transport by (literally) laughing out loud whilst reading them on my ereader.

4. The romance:
How can you go past Pride and Prejudice? Yet so many people do- they assume this book is a sappy romance and pass it over. The men I know who have been brave enough to read it have loved its glittering satire. Go on, read it. I dare you.

When my desk goes, I go

2010-06-11T08:54:00.002+10:00

You may remember from this post that I am awfully attached to my desk. Until this week, I didn't realise quite how much. It's a nice big desk, about two metres wide, with a return (a bit that juts out) on the left hand side which houses my laptop, dictionary and notebooks. (As pictured. I insisted on these paint colours when we moved in seven or eight years ago- now I can't wait to see the back of them!) Even though the desk is mostly used for study now, I still think of it as my 'writing desk'.

I mentioned earlier that I am soon to move. This is good: I am leaving behind my shoebox of a bedroom for significantly more space, including my own office area. I'm essentially going to be a boarder, so I have taken advantage of the fact that the space is already available and have started moving boxes over, bit by bit. My thought was that I would move in gradually, and eventually change home addresses once most of my things were in the new place. A casual, relaxed move.

It's not to be.

This week, I realised that my desk is too large to easily transport, so I'm going to need a few helping hands and will actually have to set a date for moving it. Then I realised that I can't bear to stay in my old place once my desk has moved. I simply cannot be without my beautiful desk, with all its space for thinking, writing and imagining.

So. The move date is set for the 27th. In the meantime, I promise I will blog about actual books soon.

22 boxes

2010-06-07T17:01:00.000+10:00

I'm moving house in about a month, so naturally I've started packing. I started with my books, mainly because once I've cleared the books out of my room there will be much more space to move around and pack everything else! So far I've packed 22 boxes of books. There are another four or five boxes' worth that I can't afford to pack just now...

Yes, they are labelled by category. This is because I hope to have help unpacking and organizing them at the other end (HA, that means you!). I need it, because otherwise I will waste an entire week pouring over books I'd forgotten I had.

I already got distracted by my picture books whilst packing. (I collect picture books. I also collect perfume bottles and handbags. Contrary to popular belief, I do not collect shoes. I just happen to have quite a few of them.)

Language and the self

2010-06-02T07:39:00.003+10:00

I’m a bit of an anglophile, much to the bewilderment of my parents, who brought me up to be keenly aware of my Finnish heritage. My interest in all things English, however, stems from a deeply-rooted conviction that culturally, I am a product of England as much as I am of Australia or Finland.

I ardently believe that language, far from being a simple tool for communication, is one of the strongest forces in shaping our consciousness. Even though Finnish was my first language, my whole education has been conducted in English. I first encountered the alphabet, that magical cluster of characters with the capacity to create worlds, in English. My obsession with the English language began then.

The folk tales I heard as a child came to me via England (did those adult storytellers ever really understand the power of Red Riding Hood’s cape or Cinderella’s shoe?). My dragons are dragons of flight and fire, they are not the Scandinavian crawling wyrms. The legends I read in primary school were English (are there any stories as wonderful as the Arthurian legends?). The fantasy I grew up on was written by Oxfordians. My sense of humour, even, is quite English (think Gaiman, Pratchett, Adams). In high school, I studied Shakespeare in three separate disciplines. The turns of phrase employed by the English, with their delightfully extensive vocabularies, have always made me proud to speak their language.

How can I begin to unravel this bundle of influences? How can I explain how King Arthur’s court shaped my impressions of the world more strongly than anything I ever saw on TV? How can I account for the fact that my imagination soared in response to black letters marching across the pages?

I’m not sure I can unravel it, and I don’t really want to. If you took away the influence of English, what was left wouldn’t be me anymore. I couldn’t tell you why it’s so important to me, it just seemed apparent from the start that the English language is one of the parameters of my universe. I am defined by this language and this literary heritage, by my responses to it and my passion for it, and I like it that way.

Briefly

2010-05-27T23:02:00.001+10:00

You know by now that I admire the work of book critic Laura Miller.

This month, she wrote on why men don't read books, and on bad writing and what it's good for. Check it.

Sony Reader Touch - my new toy

2010-05-24T09:32:00.002+10:00

My Sony Reader (Model PRS 600) arrived in the mail a couple of weeks ago. I was terribly excited about receiving it, but completely unprepared for the resulting love affair. I know, I know! I am a book lover! This blog is, after all, entitled 'Paper and Ink and Glue'. But I want to be honest with you, and the truth is that I adore my ereader.

I still think e-books shouldn't be called 'e-books' because they are not 'electronic books' any more than they are 'electronic scrolls'. The word 'book' denotes a physical format (sheets of paper bound between covers), not an abstract collection of text.

I'm also aware of the fact that a change in format radically changes the reader's experience. The move from paper to ereader is no trivial one. Let me assure you that I will continue to buy the paper versions of those books which I love best.

I was, however, caught unawares by several of the positive apsects of having an ereader:

I always have it with me, because it's lighter than most books I read
Countless classics, and lots of other books, are available for free online
The E Ink screen is even easier to read than I imagined
It's easy to hold
The ability to highlight and make notes (let alone to carry lots of textbooks around at once) has already made study loads easier. With just a couple of clicks, I can scroll through all of my highlighted notes and find the parts of the text which caught my attention!
The size of the screen (7 inches, slightly smaller than an average paperback) isn't the least bit annoying. I hardly notice as I flick through the pages.
I am reading much, much faster than usual. This is partly due to the adjustable text size (bigger fonts make for faster reading) and partly due to the fact that I always have reading material on me. In the past two weeks I've read four novels on the reader, none of which I would have read otherwise.

There are a couple of down sides, though:

Transferring selected files from the library on my computer to the ereader is easy enough (just like an MP3 player), but if I try to sync some of my texts get doubled up
The device charges through USB, but the computer has to be active (i.e. not in sleep mode) for this to work- I accidentally drained my entire battery by leaving the reader connected to the computer overnight

Neither of these is any great obstacle if you're aware of it (especially since I already have a USB to AC adaptor), but it can get a little annoying.

If you're toying with the idea of getting an ereader but aren't yet convinced, I suggest visiting your local Borders store, where the Kobo reader has just been launched. There should be a model on display for you to play with. Angus & Robertson will soon be selling the same model. At $199, the Kobo is the first affordable ereader widely available in Australia.

I paid a good $100 more for mine, but I think it was worth it for the touch screen, which enables the highlighting and notes functions. It always pays to do your research.

If you already own an ereader, or if you are comfortable with reading on a laptop screen, I suggest you visit feedbooks, a fantastic site which with loads of books (including, much to my delight, books of philosophy) available for free in both PDF and EPUB formats.

IF YOU READ THIS BOOK THE WORLD WILL END

2010-05-21T19:41:00.002+10:00

The Hypothetical Library is a blog by cover artist Charlie Orr. The project is fascinating: he asks authors to give a title and a description of a book they could write, but never will write, and then designs the covers and posts them.

When I first came across The Hypothetical Library, I thought 'That reminds me of the libary in the Dreaming, from the Sandman comics.' This library contains not just every book ever written, but also every book ever intended. It's one of my favourite things about the Sandman series. (Click on the image to see what I mean.)

As it turns out, I was right: The Hypothetical Library was actually partly inspired by the library in the Dreaming.

Now, Orr has actually designed a book for Neil Gaiman (with audio and e-book versions to come). The book is entitled If You Read this Book the World Will End. It looks as if the world actually would end, too. You can view the post here.

Would the real Sherlock Holmes please stand up?

2010-05-19T19:21:00.006+10:00

I posted here about how the book is not always better than the film, and how I enjoyed the recent Sherlock Holmes film. I've since had several friends mention to me that they were disappointed with the film, in virtue of the characters being so different from those written by Conan Doyle. 'That's fair enough,' I thought, 'You have to draw the line somewhere. You don't get to go around claiming a film is based on a book if it doesn't even use the same story or characters.'

After all, everyone knows that Sherlock Holmes was a reserved private detective who spent his time smoking a pipe whilst sitting in a wingbacked chair, the picture of civility. It's all incredibly sedate and English. Right?

Robert Downey Jr., on the other hand, plays him as:

a detective consulted by police
eccentric
energetic
alcoholic (when without work)
brash
a prizefighter

Imagine my surprise when I started reading the Sherlock Holmes books and found that Holmes actually is all of these things! With one exception- in the books, Holmes has a cocaine habit when out of work. We can safely assume that the cocaine was substituted with alcohol in the film for the purposes of winning the sympathy of modern audiences (at the time, cocaine use was considered a vice, but not a terrible one).

Shouldn't the Sherlock Holmes fans be praising Guy Ritchie for presenting the rich, endearing true nature of Holmes to the world? (Not to mention for turning an English cliche into a fresh adventure story?)

I even spotted some of those delightful homages film directors sometimes put in, retaining bits and pieces of the original story for fans to spot:

In The Sign of Four, Holmes notices scratch marks on a pocket watch and deduces that the owner must have been a drunkard. In the film, Watson makes the same observation.
In A Study in Scarlet, Holmes comments that the police have been careless at the scene of the crime by walking on the same path as the murderer, thus disguising his footprints. Watson makes a similar observation in the film.
In A Study in Scarlet, Watson doubts Holmes's ability to deduce a man's occupation and character from his appearance, and Holmes proves him wrong. In the film, Watson's fiance poses the same question.

These are just a few examples- there are more to be found, including bits of dialogue lifted straight from the books.

I can only suppose, then, that the Sherlock Holmes purists object to the portrayal of Watson in the recent film. It is true that the relationship between the two men is depicted quite differently, that both a closeness and a tension between them is introduced. But in the books, at least as far as I have read (and I have read to where Watson is engaged, which is where the film leaves us), Watson isn't much of a character. He just tags along, and seems to exist chiefly for the purpose of providing a narratorial voice.

Why should I mind if Ritchie has given Watson a personality? If you ask me, the dynamic between Holmes and Watson is more interesting in the film.

I can only conclude again that films based on books are not made for book purists. If your very favourite book is made into a film, do yourself a favour don't go and see it. In the meantime, enjoy all the films based on those books you'll never have time to read.

By the way, I'm more than happy to be disagreed with on this one. Did you object to the recent film? If so, let me know your thoughts.

Something of a filler

2010-05-17T17:48:00.004+10:00

It occurred to me that I should alert you to the fact that posts this month are (and will be) few and mostly likely not very substantial. This is because the final two weeks of the semester are upon me. I know my priorities. =)

In the meantime, I was sneaking in some Black Books last night and noticed something of a resemblance between two of my favourite book-related people:

If you haven't seen any of Black Books and you are in possession of a sense of humour, I suggest you do yourself a favour and watch some. And by possessing a sense of humour, I mean that you have laughed at one of the following:

a.) The Princess Bride

b.) Monty Python and the Holy Grail

c.) Something by Terry Pratchett and/or Douglas Adams

Edit: A friend has pointed out that I failed to note that the dashing gentleman on the left is Dylan Moran of Black Books, and the charming one on the right is Mr. Neil Gaiman.

A book for mum

2010-05-04T19:55:00.001+10:00

Belinda Alexandra's White Gardenia is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read. It has everything: history, romance, drama. It follows Anya, the daughter of a Russian aristocrat, displaced from birth. She flees her home on the Chinese-Russian border and grows into womanhood amidst the glitzy world of Shanghai nightclubs, only to again be be chased away by the circumstances of history. Once again a refugee, she must find a new homeland.

Alexandra is an Australian author and her historical detail is both accurate and fascinating. From the publisher's website:

"White Gardenia sweeps across cultures and continents, from the glamorous nightclubs of Shanghai to the harshness of Cold War Soviet Russia in the 1960s, from a desolate island in the Pacific Ocean to a new life in post-war Australia."

I highly recommend it, for yourself as well as mum.

View on fishpond: White Gardenia Books Alive Edition

Austenbook

2010-04-27T14:40:00.002+10:00

Elizabeth Bennet became a fan of Pemberly.

Fitzwilliam Darcy is suprised and hopeful.

...You get the idea, but it doesn't really work with the formatting of my blog. Which is all the more reason to check out the Austenbook page for yourself. What a delightful way to spend ten minutes!

Links links links

2010-04-26T15:55:00.001+10:00

Books are a passion of mine. If you've read this blog before, you know that. My passion, however, isn't just for my own reading. It extends to other people. My favourite thing about my job (I work in a bookstore) is helping customers find books they will enjoy. I love matching a person to a book, I love it when other people enjoy what they're reading, I love other people's passion for books.

To that end, I've posted a couple of pages of links on this blog. You'll see the tabs above- Where to buy books and (Actually) Useful book links. These aren't links to other book blogs or to pages that I happen to enjoy reading, they are links to websites which I find indispensible to my own literary life. I've posted them because they're useful, fantastic for anyone with an interest in books. I'd love it if you had a look.

Sex tips?

2010-04-26T14:28:00.002+10:00

It always puzzles me somewhat when people laugh feminism off as the pointless preoccupation of bra-burners and hairy women. Sure, bras turned out to be kind of useful and some of us like our legs hairless, but that doesn't mean the ideals of feminism are beside the point. (I blogged about the continuing need for feminism here.)

Then, every so often, something comes along which reminds me of the depth of ignorance behind such callousness. This time it was a book entitled Sex Tips for Husbands and Wives from 1894. This book is part of a recent trend for republishing books which predate the 1960s (i.e. second wave feminism) and contain advice on relationships and families. The idea is that the books, with their outdated values and prudish suggestions, are supposed to be funny.

It's kind of nice, in a way, that the old-fashioned, often sexist, advice seems absurd enough to be funny. It shows we've come a long way. But this book crossed the line. It's publisher, Summersdale, advertises the book with the following excerpt:

"While sex is at best revolting and at worse rather painful, it has to be endured... One cardinal rule of marriage should never be forgotten: give little, give seldom and, above all, give grudgingly… Most men are by nature rather perverted, and if given half a chance, would engage in quite a variety of the most revolting practices."

Which might seem funny, until you remember that second wave feminism wasn't all hype. This book, when first published in 1894, was for real. Sex actually was "at best revolting and at worse rather painful" for many women, and this was considered natural.

Am I really supposed to find that funny?

Weird books

2010-04-24T17:01:00.002+10:00

Oedipus in Disneyland? Really? I found these gems at Abe Books's Weird Book Room. Checkit.

Found

2010-04-23T22:36:00.000+10:00

There is a book which my dad and I have Arguments over. (This isn't too surprising, since my dad and I have arguments over a lot of things. Arguing with each other is one of our Favourite Pastimes. This particular arument, however, is a Recurring Argument.) The Argument is entirely my fault, but don't tell my dad I said that.

Here's the thing: my dad owns a book entitled The Complete Evaporated History of the World Since the Dawn of Time. It was published in 1984, and I adore it. I use it for reference, you see, because unlike every other book of history I have ever read, I have Excellent Recall of Everything in This Book. I can quote it verbatim. It helps me keep history in order inside my head.

My dad rarely looks at said book, and so a couple of years ago the Natural Order of Things caused the book to become appropriated to my own collection. It has lived on my bookshelf ever since.

My dad doesn't like this, since the book is His and he suspects that I intend to take it with me when I move out (he's not wrong there). This is how the Arguments came about.

BUT NOW! Praise be, I have discovered the wonder of online shopping. In particular, YOU CAN BUY OUT OF PRINT BOOKS ONLINE! I've ordered myself a copy of The Book for the Princely Sum of $12. So now, all that's left is for me to share some quotes with you, my dear readers, so you too can agonise over the fact that you do not own this gem:

"We know all about the Egyptians because they wrote their history on the wall in a secret language. Unforunately, they then forgot the language, so it was all a bit of a waste."

"Julius Ceasar invented a new sort of calendar, which was exatly the same length as a year. This may not sound very clever, by there has to be a first time for everything."

"A small problem arose over a loosely-worded commandment which said THOU SHALT NOT KILL."

"The Inquisition came down heavily against materialism. ... Thus proper civilisation came to America, while crass materialism was shipped back to Spain."

"When the French heard about the American revolution, they said 'Ah-ha' in French, and decided that they would like to revolve too."

P.S. Please disregard the Inappropriate Capital Letters in this post. I'm just in That Sort of Mood.

Some random thoughts

2010-04-16T15:09:00.001+10:00

Why do most fiction authors fall into the first half of the alphabet? Or, to be precise, in A-M?

I've worked in books for eight years and as long as I can remember, three quarters of the fiction shelves in each workplace have been taken up by A-M, with N-Z squashed into the final quarter and dominated by Jodi Picoult and Wilbur Smith.

Is there some natural law which makes people with surnames beginning with A-M more talented? Do authors choose pseudonyms in the first half of the alphabet so that they will appear earlier in catalogues? Are there simply more surnames overall which begin with A-M? Or do book buyers scroll through lists of possible purchases starting at A and run out of money at N?

The biography section is evenly divided between A-L and M-Z. Every fiction section (general fiction, classics, speculative fiction) is skewed. I'd like to know why.

In other thoughts, now that I've decided to get myself a e-reader for study purposes I'm a bit frustrated to find that many of the text books I need are more expensive in e-book form than they are in paperback. It would be handy to carry all my text books around with me, but am I really willing to shell out an extra $20 per book?

I understand that the cost of producting e-books is nowhere near as low as most consumers estimate. Scott Westerfeld in his blog about Macmillan vs. Amazon explains:

"All discussions of this event will draw commenters who think they magically know how books should be priced, and who say there is no reason for electronic editions to be more than $9.99. A quick note to them: You don’t know what you’re talking about. Seriously, your back-of-the-envelope calculations are crap. The printing costs of a book are generally between 3% and 10% of list price. So in most cases, 10% should be your “first-printing” e-book discount, not 50%. That may seem weird to you, but that’s because all the cheap stuff on the internet is backlist (like Baen Books), subsidized/coerced (like Amazon), self-published (no editing or marketing costs), or promotional (like when I gave Uglies away for free). Yes, the “long tail” of backlist books may become very cheap, or free, but not the new stuff, which is what this discussion is all about."

But still. I don't want to pay more for an e-book. I'm a reluctant convert. I'm still getting used to the idea of having e-books.

Here's a bright idea: why don't publishers of text books offer hard-copy/e-book bundles? At, say, $10 more than the paperback price? Now that I'd be willing to pay for. I could highlight to my heart's content and carry around a light, easy reference tool.

Instructions Book Trailer

2010-04-09T21:35:00.000+10:00

Have you heard of book trailers?

I hadn't, either, until I stumbled across a reference to them on another blog recently. Which makes you wonder: what's the point?

Anhyhow, here's the trailer from HarperKids for the latest Gaiman / Vess collaboration, a picture book entitled Instructions. (The Australian release is next month. I can't wait. Have I mentioned that I collect picture books?)

View on fishpond: Instructions

Best. Gift. Ever.

2010-04-06T12:48:00.000+10:00

I've been looking back at some old Disney favourites. Beauty and the Beast has always held my heart, perhaps because Belle receives this as a gift:

Swoon.

One star reviews

2010-04-04T20:58:00.002+10:00

I decided to try out a little experiment suggested by Jeanette Demain in this Salon article. The method: search your favourite books on Amazon, read the 'one star' reviews. See if you can't avoid coming away "profoundly disheartened and pessimistic about the continued existence of humankind."

Here's what I found:

The Princess Bride by William Goldman
"I went to amazon to find a unabriged copy of the princess bride. The copy I recieved is not unabriged. I found out that amazon dose not have aunabriged fore sale,but if you request it it comes up that they do.So now I am stuck with a book that I do not want and still nedd the book that I do not have." [sic]
(If you haven't read The Princess Bride, it might help to understand that the book is not actually abridged. There are several authorial interruptions throughout the book, but these are part of the fiction.)

Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb (Book 1 of the Liveship Traders)
" This is 809 pages of adolescent drivel. The conflicts established provided ample opportunity for a satisfying resolution that never occurred. Far too much elaboration on the shallow reflections of flat characters. As a reader, I felt cheated."
(I want to scream: Flat? FLAT!? Hobb's characters come in so many shades of grey they put E Ink to shame. They're more complex than... than... ['What's something complex?' I ask, and my dad and brothers suggest several possibilities: integrals; rocket science; the female mind? Any of those works. Insert your own.] FLAT!!??)

Emily Climbs by L.M. Montgomery (Book 2 of the Emily series)
"Emily Climbs is a book for people of no imagination or life. Ittook me forever to read because of the lack of action and adventure.I don't reccomend this book to anyone with an imagination. END" [sic]

Stardust by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess
" 'Stardust' was just about the worst book i have ever read. It's extremely boring, and some parts are very inappropriate for little kids.The first chapter was pointless and too long (30-something pages) and had bits of fluff that were not important. Every chapter is 20 pages or more. I stopped reading it by chapter 4." [sic]
(Perhaps this would be a suitable criticism of a children's book, but I fail to see how it applies here.)

Eric

2010-04-04T19:37:00.000+10:00

If I haven’t convinced you to read Shaun Tan yet, try dipping your toes in the water with this cute new edition of Eric, one of the stories published in Tales From Outer Suburbia. It’s cheap and it’s beautiful.

Usually, I'd link you to fishpond, but this time it's actually cheaper at Angus & Robertson.

Book porn

2010-04-03T19:41:00.001+11:00

I don't really have spare dollars lying around in the thousands, but if I did I'd be ordering myself a Ptolomeo bookcase:

...or a Kartell Bookworm, the flexible bookcase:

In the meantime, I have to content myself with browsing blogs, such as this one, for beautiful book images.

Hair and influence

2010-03-30T18:28:00.000+11:00

You've got to love these t-shirt designs from Hirsute History. I'm considering getting the Neil Gaiman one...

Literary crushes

2010-03-29T12:02:00.003+11:00

The first crush I ever had was on a fictional character. Nuuskamuikkunen. Or, in the English translation of the Moomins, Snuffkin. The reason was simple. He was a thinker, and I liked that. I wanted to marry him. I must have been four or five years old.

Since then, I think the fictional characters I’ve ‘had a thing’ for have outnumbered the ‘real people’. I don’t think I’m alone in this, and I think the reason is simple. We get to know fictional characters, really know them, in a way we rarely know people we come across in day to day life. Isn’t that what happens when you fall in love? You get to know someone so well that their faults and their mistakes make sense to you, because you know their motivations and their history. Sometimes you know them better than they know themselves. That’s what love is. Is it any wonder that we sometimes feel a shadow of it for the characters we know intimately?

Here are a few of my literary loves:

Peter Pevensie, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
Teddy Kent, the Emily series by L. M. Montgomery
Matthew, the Obernewtyn Chronicles by Isobelle Carmody
Fitzwilliam Darcy, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Wintrow Vestrit, The Liveship Traders trilogy by Robin Hobb

I actually began typing out a brief description of each of the characters, and then realized I was saying the same things about each of them: unflinchingly loyal, considerate, immovable on matters of integrity and conscience, confident in his own judgment. (Mind you, a lot of these characters are quite different. They just happen to share all of these qualities.)

I guess the fact that Peter Pevensie makes it onto the list shows that even at age seven I knew that standing for something is hot.

Argh! Or, The difficulties of purchasing an e-reader.

2010-03-28T19:15:00.002+11:00

Despite my love for books of the paper and ink variety, I have decided to buy myself an ebook reader. I don't actually think I'll buy significantly less books. That is, I'll keep buying graphic novels, photographic books, picture books and books which are unavailable electronically or are cheaper as hard copies (there are more of those than you'd suspect).

What I will buy electronically are the books I would have previously bought as paperback fiction. And some of those, I suspect, I will go on to buy as hard copies (if I like them enough), because I am a compulsive collector.

Why buy an ebook reader, then?

Portability
The ability to carry study materials and notes
The ability to make notes or highlight as I read even though I've left my pens and highlighters at home again
The ability to search study materials and the notes I've made on them

It's about convenience, really. But now that I've decided to buy one, I'm having trouble finding one that meets my needs. And I don't think I'm being extravangant with my 'needs'. I want:

Something easy on the eyes (i.e. with a decent sized screen and E-ink technology, which rules out the iPad and anything smaller than 6 inches)
Something which allows me to highlight and make notes as I read (Which rules out the beautiful green Cool-er)
Something which isn't going to cost me more than $600 (which rules out the Irex models sold by Dymocks)
Something which allows me to buy ebooks from any store I like without jumping through hoops (which rules out the Kindle)
Something which doesn't punish me for living in Australia by making it almost impossible to register the product or purchase compatible ebooks (which rules out pretty much everything else)

Which leaves me with a grand total of two options:
The Sony Reader Touch Edition, which apparently is a bit difficult to procure books for. OR, the BeBook Neo, which hasn't been reviewed yet due to its April release date and has the misfortune of being $200 more expensive and looking a lot like an iPod.

Sigh.

Stardust: Child vs. Adult

2010-03-23T13:50:00.006+11:00

I've just been listening to a podcast found here about Neil Gaiman's Stardust. Most of the discussion in the podcast revolves around what makes the book a 'fairytale for adults'.

Stardust, as you know, is one of my favourite books. Gaiman describes the premise of the book:

"I wanted a young man who would set out on a quest - in this case a romantic quest, for the heart of Victoria Forester, the loveliest girl in his village. The village was somewhere in England, and was called Wall, after the wall that runs beside it, a dull-looking wall in a normal-looking meadow. And on the other side of the wall was Faerie - Faerie as a place or as a quality, rather than as a posh way of spelling fairy. Our hero would promise to bring back a fallen star, one that had fallen on the far side of the wall.

"And the star, I knew, would not, when he found it, be a lump of metallic rock. It would be a young woman with a broken leg, in a poor temper, with no desire to be dragged halfway across the world and presented to anyone's girlfriend."

In the same article, Gaiman mentions that he loved The Princess Bride when he was young, and wrote Stardust with the wish of creating another story that was "unapologetically a fairytale, and just as unapologetically for adults."

Much of the podcast discussion revolves around the single sex scene and the single swear word found in Stardust. Are these what make the novel one for adults? Or are they just the elements which make adults able to claim a fairytale as their own without embarrassment?

Certainly there is an extent to which adults are too afraid to be 'caught' reading children's books. C. S. Lewis was right when he said that if a book is worth reading as a child it is also worth reading as an adult. Anyway, Tolkien famously noted in his essay 'On Fairy Stories' that fairy stories were told to children not because they were especially suited to child audiences, but because they had become unfashionable with adults.

I believe, however, that it is not the inlcusion of a sex scene or a swear word that makes Stardust (or any other story) a story for adults. Stardust is a story for adults anyway, which is what makes it natural for Gaiman to include the swearing and the sex. The reason that Stardust is a story for adults it that it's complex.

There are lots of narrative threads, lots of intertextual references, lots of big words. Laura Miller floats the idea in this fascinating podcast that the difference between the way children read and the way adults read is marked by the complexity of our approach to the text rather than by the text itself. Reading the Chronicles of Narnia now is a very different experience to reading them when I was seven, simply because now I bring all sorts of background knowledge (about literature, about fantasy, about religion, about the world) to the text which I simply didn't have when I was seven.

Stardust demands a sophisticated readership. And that is why it's a fairytale for adults.

View on fishpond: Stardust

A new favourite

2010-03-22T09:32:00.002+11:00

I blogged about my favourite books here, but alas, the list is now out of date. I've added Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, to my list of favourite-ever books.

I wrote about Good Omens here. I really can't praise the book highly enough.

And I am rather excited to have found some wonderful fan art, here on deviantART. Do yourself a favour and check it out. It's beautiful art, and it's an excellent recommendation for the book.

View on fishpond: Good Omens

Never buy...

2010-03-20T21:19:00.012+11:00

There are just some books I would simply never buy. Here's a few examples:

The book that tells you where to shop for clothes. Seriously. The only person who knows your shopping needs is you. Do a bit of research.
Instead, for inspiration: Grace Kelly Style: Fashion for Hollywood's Princess , The Sartorialist

The book with the film poster as cover art, so that film-going shoppers won't have to tax themselves too much trying to identify the book-the-film-was-based-on in the bookstore. You're smarter than that, right?

Instead: The Field Guide: The Spiderwick Chronicles: Book 1, The Lord of the Rings, Inkheart

Aren't they so much prettier?

The book you think you 'have to read' because everybody else has.
Here's a brilliant little-known: Girl in Hyacinth Blue

The cookbook without pictures. (Shudder!)
Here's some cookbooks I've had success with: Frost Bite: Everyday Food Fresh from the Freezer, Real Food: Healthy, Delicious, Easy to Prepare

The book that tells you how to be happy. I've never seen one that worked.
Try instead: Emotional Intelligence: Why it Can Matter More Than IQ, Happiness, Enough: Breaking Free from the World of More

New popular penguins

2010-03-20T20:31:00.000+11:00

Penguin is bringing out 75 new titles in its 'Popular Penguins' range. You know, the $9.95 ones with the orange covers. This time there's some Oscar Wilde, another Jane Austen, Verne, Coetzee, Dickens, Winton... even (I'm pleased to say) an Isobelle Carmody. The books will be available for purchase in July.

You can view the list here.

A reader's advice

2010-03-14T13:53:00.001+11:00

Laura Miller points out that while authors keep seeking advice about writing from other authors, readers might have something to contribute as well.

On artistic prose lacking story: "it's daft to write something with the deliberate intention of denying readers what they love and want and then to be heartbroken when they aren't interested."

You can read the whole article here.

The one about cover art

2010-03-10T21:22:00.002+11:00

I was linked by a fellow blogger to this video of the design process for the cover of a Victorian/Steampunk novel. The cover is quite striking, and so is the creativity that goes into it!

It got me thinking about recent cover art. I am a sucker for a good cover. I have been known to buy books simply because the art was beautiful. Here's some covers that have caught my eye in the last year or so.

Of course, there are things I can't show with 2D pictures. You can't see that the cover of Dreaming of Dior is textured, and you can't see that Enchanted Hunters (besides wearing an incredibly detailed dust jacket) looks good naked.

View on fishpond: Fire, Friendship, Family, Love and Laughter (M.I.L.K), Dreaming of Dior, The Lady and the Chocolate, The Arrival, Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood

Reaching distance

2010-03-06T20:59:00.002+11:00

Some books are simply indispensable. For study and writing, I think it's absolutely essential to have certain books in reaching distance. My wonderful desk (my favourite possession) has quite a few books on it.

Here's where I keep my computer:

Note the stack of notebooks and the massive dictionary. I have to keep it close because if I had to walk across the room to use it, I probably wouldn't. And my writing would suffer for it.

Then there are the books I keep at arm's length- close enough to reach over and grab as need fits. I changed these over last night. My grammar texts and style manuals were replaced with texts about truth and fiction...

My Honours study can now commence!

Before:

After:

Characters to hate

2010-02-26T15:30:00.005+11:00

I've dealt with my favourite characters, but what about the least favourite?

I often find that the characters I truly despise aren't the villains and the supervillains- there is pleasure in disliking these, they are literary devices and they are there to be disliked. But what about the characters towards whom I'm supposed to feel sympathetic, and simply don't? Those, I really cannot forgive.

1. Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë – there seems to be nothing to Heathcliff’s personality but abuse and manipulation. He was bent on destroying the lives of all he knew, including the woman he was supposed to love. Where is the heroism in that?

2. David Meredith, My Brother Jack, by George Johnston – David’s self-serving morality never won any points with me. Even worse, he recognized his own failures and refused to do anything about them.

3. Queen Jadis, The Magician’s Nephew, by C.S. Lewis – In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the White Witch is something of a literary device, a villain, not truly despicable. But before she became the White Witch, Jadis was a Queen who, even in the prime of her very human youth and beauty, thought more of her own power than she did of her people.

4. Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, by Shakespeare – Enough said.

5. Captain Kennit, The Liveship Traders Trilogy, by Robin Hobb – Kennit is pretty much a pirate version of Heathcliff. I will concede to Robin Hobb, however, that Kennit is a masterfully complex character, the most difficult on this list to hate.

As you might gather, I have no truck with the Byronic Hero. Life throws terrible things at all of us. Being ‘damaged’ is never an excuse for abuse, manipulation or compulsive lying. The Byronic Hero is a large part of the reason I avoid many classics, and the reason I refuse to read Twilight.

I do, however, have quite a soft spot for the antihero, who is different.

Aesthetic value?

2010-02-26T14:36:00.000+11:00

One of the primary arguments extended against e-books is that books, in their hard copies, have an aesthetic value that simply cannot be replicated electronically. The texture of the paper, the smell of the ink, the lush covers. I myself have extended this argument.

I was struck, however, by an odd thought when I visited my local village library on Monday. Going to this library is like stepping back in time. No computers, just cards which slip in and out of yellow pockets, and stamps. The second floor of this library is lined with old hardcovers, some exquisitely bound, some so faded along the cloth spines that it is impossible to read the titles.

Haven't we already lost much of the aesthetic value of books? What, truly, is the aesthetic value of a mass-market glued paperback when compared with a leatherbound hardcover with thick pages and hand-stitched binding?

On a trip to Europe last year, I was lucky enough to visit some amazing libraries. The Long Room of Trinity College, Dublin, was among them. It was stunning. It was full of beautiful books. I hope we'll always have beautiful books, that publishers will keep commissioning them and printers will keep printing them. But what have we really lost if mass-market paperbacks turn electronic?

Ten Rules for Writing Fiction

2010-02-21T21:25:00.000+11:00

"Remember that all description is an opinion about the world," says Anne Enright.

The Guardian provides writing advice from several authors here.

Buying a better way

2010-02-15T13:00:00.000+11:00

Something that matters a lot to me is finding a better way to buy. It's important to me to find fair trade or single origin (easily traced and therefore usually ethically sourced) coffee and chocolate. It's important for to me to buy clothes and jewelry that weren't made using sweat shops or other forms of exploitation.

The publishing industry is one in which large corporations make a lot of money and small, independent publishers struggle to make ends meet. It is a very old industry, currently in flux due to the rise of e-books and online giants such as Amazon. It is my belief Amazon has consistently put its own needs above those of readers and publishers, and furthermore has used its clout to bully publishers into submitting to this. For a brief list of controversies surrounding Amazon, see this.

Monopoly of an industry by a single online giant is good for nobody.

There is, however, a little-known Australian online retailer of books, fishpond. If future, if you want to buy books I've mentioned, I'll link you there.

Most of my readers are Australian, and so will benefit from free shipping for orders over $49, book prices listed in Australian dollars, and a guarantee that ordering from fishpond will cost Australian customers less than ordering from Amazon.

Furthermore, my conscience will be clear because I'll know that I've linked you to a site that respects the needs of publishers, authors and readers.

Three wonderful things

2010-02-13T23:45:00.004+11:00

Robin Hobb's next book, Dragon Haven, is due out on March 1st. Bless her for being so prompt with her releases, in a genre so notorious for postponed release dates.

I just discovered a site called 'The Cultural Gutter', dedicated to forms of art "generally considered to be beneath consideration." The sci-fi page is so wonderful that I will even forgive it for including fantasy under the banner of 'sci-fi'.

I am eating M&M Minis with a spoon. Not book-related, but nonetheless very exciting.

Buy on fishpond: Dragon Haven (The Rain Wild Chronicles)

Miller on Austen

2010-02-10T10:17:00.000+11:00

Laura Miller remains insightful as ever:

"Marvin Mudrick published 'Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery' in 1952. Irony (the real kind, not the Alanis Morissette variety) was Austen's predominant mode, as Mudrick pointed out, and this not only made her 'almost inhumanly cold and penetrating' but also positioned her against 'all the delusions intrinsic to conventional art and conventional society.' That was the manly '50s speaking; by the 2000s, Austen became, in the popular mind, a wistful reminder of all the chivalrous pleasures of a long-lost social order -- a society that would have driven the average contemporary Janeite to insurrection if she actually had to live in it.

"Like Dumbledore's mirror, Austen's fiction seems to have the ability to reflect whatever its readers most wish to see. Austen is the grandmother of chick lit, much as that fact may irk her highbrow admirers. But that's not all she is, and to persuade yourself that her novels are only about being courted by rich, handsome men well-versed in ballroom etiquette is to be as dangerously silly and frivolous as Elizabeth Bennet's youngest sister, Lydia. The chick-lit take on Austen is forever trying to subtract the brutal social and economic realities from her fiction (as well as ignoring the mortifications her heroines undergo)".

Thank you, Laura Miller. The rest of the story is here.

I’m all for resistant reading, but I think it’s just annoying when tragedies, satires and comedies get turned into ‘romance’ in the public consciousness. Think Romeo and Juliet, Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights. Yes, romance is an aspect of these stories (and one which I enjoy, with the exception of Wuthering Heights) but if you read them purely as romance you’re missing so much.

For the record, I’m a Darcy fan because I like intellectual, argumentative, challenging men with integrity, not because I have any illusions about how ‘nice it would be’ to have doors opened for me by a 'gentleman' for the rest of my life.

The magic of words

2010-02-08T07:59:00.002+11:00

Maybe my heritage has something to do with my obsession with words:

“The [Finnish] magic is not like anything else known by that name in European literature. The magic is entirely the magic of words. These ancient people believed in the existence of words, by the utterance of which anything might be accomplished. Instead of buying wood and hiring carpenters, you might build a house by uttering certain magical words. If you had no horse, and wanted to travel rapidly, you would make a horse for yourself out of bits of bark and old sticks by uttering over them certain magical words. But this was not all. Beings of intellect, men and women, whole armies of men, in fact, might be created in a moment by the utterance of these magical words.”

Lafcadio Hearn, quoted in Tales from a Finnish Tupa. (I can't get onto the publisher website and the authors seem to have none, but this is a helpful review.)

I've ordered this book for myself, and can't wait for it to arrive! I've grown up with Finnish food, Finnish family and the Finnish language, but sadly I wasn't brought up on Finnish folk tales. The ones I have heard I love, because they are the earthy, pagan, magic-y sort.

Buy on fishpond: Tales from a Finnish Tupa

E-textbooks

2010-02-07T14:55:00.000+11:00

As much as I love paper and ink books, I must say I would have welcomed e-textbooks with open arms. Too bad they're coming too late for my undergrad years. I'd especially love access to such a resource this year, as my Honours thesis promises to have me carrying around mountains of books only relevant for a chapter here, a page there...

Well, perhaps an incentive to study postgrad.

Available at booksellers everywhere except Amazon

2010-02-06T18:49:00.003+11:00

For those of you who haven't already heard about this:

Publisher Macmillan and global online bookstore Amazon were engaged in battle this week. The long-short of it is that Macmillan demanded higher profit margins and higher prices for the e-books sold through Amazon and Amazon responded by ceasing all sales of Macmillans' books (both e-books and hard copies).

The story can be found here. The end of the story had Amazon acceding defeat, but not without resentment: "we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles." (Fancy that, a publisher having 'monopoly' over its own titles!)

Anwyay, the most amusing thing in the whole debacle was this advertisement in the New York Times, which read: "available at booksellers everywhere except Amazon":

I note that at the time of writing, the book in question is still not available through Amazon.

Edit: For the interested, Salon's Laura Miller provides an in-depth discussion here.

A Further Edit: Author Scott Westerfield posted his opinion on the topic at his blog here, with such eloquence and humour that I now think I absolutely must get hold of one of his books.

The Sartorialist

2010-02-05T16:59:00.003+11:00

If you're into clothing, this is a book you must check out:

Scott Schuman's philosophy is inspiring- he's a fashion photographer who takes photos of ordinary people wearing their everyday clothes.

I like to wear things that look interesting, but still function as everyday clothes. I like colour. I like beautiful fabrics. I like things that are not the norm. I like clothes that make a statement about who I am.

This book is full of inspiration for out-of-the-ordinary outfits, like the "shirt as skirt" I just had to have. (Yes, I got myself one. It's so easy to make- no sewing required. Tip: only use a shirt with a pleat in the centre of the back. And pinstripes work!)

Look over The Sartorialist for ideas, or just because it's beautiful to look at.

(P.S. Thanks ML for putting me onto this book!)

Buy on fishpond: The Sartorialist

Sometimes a cover says a lot

2010-02-02T18:55:00.002+11:00

Like this one:

The back cover is even more confusing. It caught my eye at work today, and I turned it this way and that several times before my poor brain registered that the text was oriented more than one way.

I haven't read it, but now I want to.

It's called The Collapse of Chaos, and it's by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart.

Apparently it's a science book, about the origins of complexity and simplicity. Science isn't my forte, but a cover like this says 'I have a sense of humour and I'm accessible'. The Terry Pratchett endorsement doesn't hurt either.

Buy on fishpond: The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World

Princesses and Pornstars

2010-01-31T16:46:00.005+11:00

In my eyes, my mother will always be the ultimate feminist. She never campaigned for her right to work or vote, she never wrote essays or participated in protests. But she is a passionate advocate for women's rights to their own bodies. She has worked alongside many women who have had those rights violated. She is a homemaker, but she is a homemaker because that's what she wants to be. She is not a homemaker because she feels societal pressure to be so. If anything, she has had pressure in the opposite direction. Her greatest life ambition was to raise children and to devote her time to her family, and she did this despite the disapproval of her pro-career generation.

My mum would never call herself a feminist, though. To her, feminism is embodied by single career-women with little respect for family. To her, feminism means man-hating.

Emily Maguire, in Princesses & Pornstars aims to debunk exactly these kinds of myths. She discusses why feminism is about equality, and why equality is still something we need to strive for. In recounting her own experiences and those of many friends and acquaintances, she shows that feminism is not a dirty word and it is not a fight that is behind us.

I was especially drawn to the chapters about marriage and child-rearing. Compared to women in generations gone by, I am exceptionally lucky. I have political rights. I have intellectual rights. I have rights in the workplace.

But.

I am a young woman with no desire for a white 'meringue' wedding. Or domestic 'bliss' of the suburban white-picket-fence sort. Or children.

People seem to find this extremely threatening.

If it comes up in conversation, I am either deemed an abnormal woman (it's just natural to have the desire to create a family), a naive youth (my biological clock will surely kick in soon and I won't want anything but a husband and a family), or a selfish individual (people who don't have kids only ever look out for themselves). I sometimes wonder what people think they're achieving by saying these things to me. Really, they succeed only in strengthening my resolution to prove that childless women are capable of being valuable, moral, wise members of society.

I've been lectured and I've been scoffed at. Very rarely have people treated my goals as legitimate life-choices.

Apparently, I'm supposed to spend my life trying to snag a husband and then (subsequently) trying to convince him to have children. A lot of guys my age have no particular desire for marriage or children, and nobody scoffs at them. It's OK for men to be resistant to these things (that's the natural way), but not women. Which is strange, if you think about it, because in our society it is usually the female partner's life which is radically changed by the decision to have children. Men become fathers, but they continue on pretty much as before.

I am aware that I'm still young and it is entirely possible that I will change my mind later. But even if I do end up with a couple of children, I fiercely believe that it is not at all strange or immoral for a woman to choose not to reproduce. My personal reasons are simple: I don't particularly want a domestic family life, and there are other (mutually exclusive) things I do want. For example, I want to work full-time in a job which allows me to use my mind. Nobody would look down on a man for wanting the same thing.

If I lived in Emily Maguire's utopia, where fathers are just as open to becoming primary caregivers as mothers, where I might be able to simply carry on with life after procreating (the way most fathers do now), perhaps I'd feel less negative (simply abivalent) towards reproducing. But I don't live in that kind of world.

For that reason alone (and there are plenty more), feminism is still required.

Maguire makes it clear that it's not rights so much that are at issue here, as conceptions. Despite forty years of feminism, society still perceives us (men and women both) in strong gender roles. I suspect that the Problem of Parenting lies not so much in how we view women, but in how we view men. Society thinks less of men who earn less than their partners, let alone those who forgo their salary altogether to look after the family.

Why?

I fail to understand why, in a society where we go on and on about personal choice, we scoff so much at examples which fall outside the norm. I fail to understand why being the primary caregiver (as opposed to the primary breadwinner) should be any less rewarding for a man than it is supposed to be for a woman. I fail to understand why I am abnormal for not wishing to take part in a ceremony in which the responsiblity for my 'care' is 'given away' by my father.

And I fail to understand why the lack of desire for these things should be considered so strange in me, when it is considered quite natural in most men my age.

Buy on fishpond: Princesses and Pornstars: Sex, Power, Identity

Drawing Down the Moon

2010-01-30T12:56:00.002+11:00

Have I mentioned before that I absolutely adore fantasy art?

Two imports arrived for me this week at work (I work in a bookshop), and I literally jumped up and down in my excitement.

The first was a collection of Arthur Rackham's illustrations, which I'm sure I'll mention again once I've had a chance to look at it. The second was Drawing Down the Moon: The Art of Charles Vess. The book is full of gorgeous fantasy illustrations and contains commentary from Charles Vess himself.

I was very interested to read: "After college, when I returned to the 'real world,' I had to struggle for many years to regain that lost, individual sense of whimsical fantasy that those school years tried to squelch." I hope the same doesn't happen to my writing.

This is my favourite book in all the world

2010-01-26T17:51:00.004+11:00

I'm currently rereading The Princess Bride, and I'd forgotten how much I loved it. Actually I'm going to spend my whole year loving it (I hope), because I get to write my Honours thesis on it. I'm a little excited about the project.

Anyway, rereading one of my favourite books made me realize that I've never shared my favourites on here. So, here they are:

The Princess Bride by William Goldman
I love this book because of its playfulness and its truth. I love so many of the characters- Inigo, the vengeful Spaniard, is my favourite. How can you not love the dialogue? (Much of which is in the film. Don't tell me you haven't seen the film. You'll break my heart.) And how can you not love Goldman for continually taking the piss out of his own work?
This book is pure satire, in all its sarcastic, entertaining glory.
First line: "This is my favourite book in all the world, though I have never read it."

The Emily series by L.M. Montgomery
I first read these when I was seven years old. If there are any books which define me, these are it. I quote these books continually, I've internalised them. They're by the author of Anne of Green Gables, but where Anne is flamboyant and loud, Emily is dreamy and intense. She lives in a world where fairies are always seconds away and words shape our existence.
Quote: "there is something BEYOND words--any words--all words--something that always escapes you when you try to grasp it--and yet leaves something in your hand which you wouldn't have had if you hadn't reached for it."

The Liveship Traders trilogy by Robin Hobb
I have never met characters who seemed more real. They step off the page. They learn, they grow, they ache. Robin Hobb allows her characters to go through things most authors would cringe at, and she allows them to be truly flawed (no 'token flaws' here).
And whaddayaknow? Their confused and flawed actions shape history in ways that you couldn't have guessed, yet seem just as real and inevitable as any human history.
Epic fantasy which is entitled to take itself seriously.

Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland
This book is a collection of short stories about a single painting. A beautiful exploration of the ways in which art touches us, changes us and commemorates our passions. Girl in Hyacinth Blue gives us the history of a painting (possibly a Vermeer) through the lives of the people who admired its beauty, from the man who destroyed it to the girl who posed for it.

Stardust by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess
Sparkling and funny. Fantastical and unsettling. Brilliant.

Merch, merch, merch

2010-01-26T17:03:00.003+11:00

Alas, summer brings with it summer reading habits. For me, this usually means a general inability to commit to a book from beginning to end unless it is a.) incredibly engaging, or b.) a piece of fluff. The result is that I have nothing interesting to report in terms of my personal reading.

I did, however, discover a fabulous website where you can order t-shirts with all kinds of esoteric and hilarious slogans. There are a lot of wonderful Jane Austen Ts. I'm going to order these:

If you don't get them, brush up on your grammar and read Pride and Prejudice. Both will enrich your life.

Widening Horizons

2010-01-12T09:00:00.001+11:00

Salon's Laura Miller invites you to read a book you think you'll hate in 2010:

"Champions of the book like to think that reading broadens the mind and expands the sensibility. It can't do that, though, if the reading lists we choose from are too narrow."

Read more here.

The film of the book

2010-01-10T16:43:00.006+11:00

One of the things I most often hear over the counter at work is that “the book is always better than the film.” Well, the customer is not always right. I beg to differ. While in the public consciousness books and films enjoy a long history of antagonism, their actual relationship is one of mutual support.

Angela Meyer, in her awesome booky blog last month, pointed out that our “generation learns everything backwards –
from reference or homage to the original”. This is true. While I’m unlikely to pick up a book by Arthur Conan Doyle, the image of Sherlock Holmes has become a familiar one via Disney’s Basil the Great Mouse Detective. And this week I went to see the film, partly because (despite never reading the books) I know that Sherlock Holmes is an awesome character. The rest of my reasoning may or may not have had something to do with Jude Law’s aesthetic appeal.

If you read the arts section of your local newspaper, you may have noticed comments recently about Hollywood’s increasing reliance on books for plots. The concept of a ‘bankable star’ is a familiar one (people will go and see a film if George Clooney is in it), but the ‘bankable character’ (that book hero everyone loves and will go to see) is also becoming a factor.

Jane Austen alone has been 'banked on' for a rash of series and movies in recent years: Pride and Prejudice, Lost in Austen, Miss Austen Regrets, The Jane Austen Book Club, Becoming Jane. Don’t even get me started on the child/teen fantasy/paranormal market for films-based-on-books. A quick glance at my inbox says that films currently showing locally which are based on books (or the writers of them) include: Bright Star, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Lovely Bones, Sherlock Holmes, New Moon, and Where the Wild Things Are.

But the benefit of the film-book relationship goes two ways. Jodi Picoult’s bestselling My Sister’s Keeper enjoyed a resurgence in sales with the release of the film (which one might imagine was inspired by the book despite an incredibly different storyline), the Twilight saga went from a popular series to an international phenomenon with the release of the first film, Mastering the Art of French Cooking was brought back into print after it featured in Julie & Julia, and Keats’s poems are back in bookshops with the release of Bright Star.

So even if films do tend to remove some of the ‘good bits’ from our favourite books, they bring wonderful stories to wider audiences. I read The Lord of the Rings, About a Boy and The Princess Bride because I’d seen the films. (All of these films, by the way, are excellent and not at all 'worse than' their corresponding books.) And I’m familiar with other stories I’ve never read- North and South, Treasure Island, The Jungle Book, A Christmas Carol, Spiderman (to name a few)- because I’ve seen films or series based on them.

So who am I to complain that Paramount butchered the ending of Stardust? I owe a lot of my literary experience to films.

And now for a complete contradiction...

2010-01-09T07:48:00.004+11:00

Above is the cover of a book I am currently reading. It's a book about economics, not a strength of mine, so I'm struggling a little to keep up. But so far, the gist is this: while we view the world as if value and price were roughly equivalent, they actually aren't. 'Price' is a highly artificial construct, and to move forward responsibly, we need to recognise it as such. So far, so good.

You can read more about the book here, and a review written by someone who does understand economics can be found here.

Meanwhile, I'm also reading the book shown below, a chronicle of just some of the 3000 vintage fashion pieces inherited by author Charlotte Smith. Each double page depicts a gorgeous illustration of the dress (or other item of clothing) in question, alongside a charming story about the adventures of a woman who once wore it.

You can find out more about the book here and read the author’s blog here.

My dad would laugh and call me a ‘good little consumer’ (style is my guilty passion), but I truly identify with the attitude Dreaming of Dior takes to clothes. There is something about wearing clothes you love which transcends the desire to cover yourself and/or look attractive.

Clothes become part of your identity. They say things about you that you would never dare to say aloud. They remind you of the wonderful times you’ve had in them. They add beauty and colour to an ordinary day. Getting dressed in the morning is an opportunity to centre myself, to begin the day as the person I want to be.

In spite of that, the better part of me knows that Patel is right. I have too many clothes.

Buy on fishpond: The Value of Nothing, Dreaming of Dior

Neil Gaiman's Sandman

2010-01-04T17:50:00.000+11:00

I've mentioned the Sandman comics a few times in passing. Now it's time to give them a proper treatment.

I've been a fan of Neil Gaiman for a couple of years now, so when I made the decision a few months ago to start reading more comics it seemed natural to start with the Sandman. I really didn't expect to enjoy them so much.

The series's main protagonist is Dream (aka Morpheus/the Sandman), lord of the realm of dreams (and stories). It begins with Dream being captured by humans, and the hideous consequences which occur when mortals meddle in such things.

I've enjoyed later installments even more than the first one. The character that's really captured my attention is Dream's older sister, Death. She's just so... well, for starters, she's hot. But she's also cute, and rather lovable. When she turns up to chat with the recently deceased, why wouldn't they want to go with her?

The treatment of death as something to embrace (not before one's time, but as a natural part of life) is common theme in Gaiman's work, and one I like.

For now, I'm ordering the fourth volume of the Sandman from Minotaur, a brilliant store in Melbourne which sells all kinds of wonderful things related to pop culture and cult followings.

Unblocking the writer

2009-12-28T15:04:00.001+11:00

Writer's block.

Sometimes we get it because we have no ideas. But lately I've been encountering it for a different reason altogether. Could it be that sometimes we are afraid of what we need to say? When we write fiction we must acknowledge the ugliest parts of ourselves... and we must acknowledge that they are ugly. The struggles of our characters are played out in miniature within ourselves.

Here, then, is the challenge:

Dare to set pen to paper. Dare to face what we are and always have been. Dare to express what flows out of yourself. Dare to devastate, to destroy. Dare to create the deeply flawed. Dare to give a face, a name- a beating heart- to cruelty. Dare to dream of danger. Dare to imagine that somewhere is an ordianry person with the passion and the fierceness to stand and say: this is wrong.

In the beginning...

2009-12-28T14:47:00.000+11:00

I was lucky enough to receive The Doll's House, volume 2 of Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics, for Christmas. Yippee!

Mr. G begins the volume with the following paragraphs:

"In the beginning...

"But of course we never see the beginning. We come in the middle, after the lights have gone down, and try to make sense of the story so far. Whisper to our neighbours 'Who's he? Who's she? Have they met each other before?'

"We get by."

What an insightful reflection on stories, fictitious and non-fictitious alike.

Book Images

2009-12-15T20:12:00.000+11:00

This image, and other incredible book-related images, can be found here.

Fresh M.I.L.K.

2009-12-13T12:29:00.001+11:00

The original M.I.L.K. collection was the result of a global photography comptetition to capture humanity's "Moments of Intimacy, Laughter and Kinship". If you've never seen it before, it's beautiful. I can't find a proper website, but there is some useful information here.

Now a fresh competition, Fresh M.I.L.K., has resulted in a new collection of beautiful photos. The collection can be bought in book form (of course!). The book is entitled Friendship Family Love & Laughter. The image above is my favourite of the new lot- it looks just like a daydream!

Highlights '09

2009-12-10T13:25:00.003+11:00

I'm subscribed to quite a few book blogs and book news feeds. At this time of year, a lot of 'best of ' and 'highlights' lists start coming through, pointing readers to the best books of the year. But the problem with book news is that it's all about new realeases. I started reading books towards the end of the 20th Century- I have the whole history of print to catch up on!

So these are (some of) the highlights of my '09 reading:

January - four weeks off in Toowoomba and Brisbane
   -The History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell (1946)
     A fascinating look at a fascinating topic
  -The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, Terry Pratchett (2001)
     A magically intelligent cat and clan of rats figure there's always money to be made in faking rat plagues.

March-April - Semester 1
   -Beginning Logic, E. J. Lemmon (1965)
     An excellent guide to formal logic. I read it for uni, and it rocked my socks!

March 31- I meet Shaun Tan and a friend leaves the country
   -The Arrival, Shaun Tan (2006)
     A gorgeous graphic novel about the strangeness and beauty of immigration. I cried.

June - cruising on the Nile in Egypt
   -I was reading, but I don't quite remember what. The view was distracting me. =P

June/July - London & Oxford, England; and Wicklow, Ireland
   -The Inkworld trilogy, Cornelia Funke (2003, 2005, 2007)
     Because you have to read fantasy in Oxford.

July - a very long flight home
   -The Ghost, Robert Harris (2007)
     A surprisingly engaging modern thriller from a historical novelist.

August-October - Semester 2
   -The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman (2008)
     Brilliant. =)
   -The Magicians, Lev Grossman (2009)
     Equally brilliant. =)

mid-September - an awful sickness strikes
   -Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen (1811)
     Thus completing my aim to read all of Austen's novels.

November-December - mixing up my reading habits
   -Preludes and Nocturnes, Neil Gaiman (1988/1989)
     The first installment of the classic Sandman comics. An excellent read.
   -Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (1990)
     Read it.

(As always, I've posted links to authors' sites where possible. It's not my fault if their sites aren't helpful. Where these weren't available, I've posted links to the best information I can find about the book. Sometimes this means Amazon.)

In Praise of Libraries

2009-12-06T14:52:00.001+11:00

It's a stressful day at work. Customers are being difficult and there are SO MANY of them! I need a safe place. Lucky for me, my workplace is located very close to my local public library. There is nothing I find more relaxing than sinking into a comfy red chair tucked in a corner behind rows and rows of shelves standing at attention, listening to the intermittent beeping of scanners. That sound- the beeping- is more relaxing to me than waves on the seashore.

I thought I'd take a moment to praise your local library. Having worked (in the past) for my local public library corporation for a good five years, I know a thing or two about the place.

People have a tendency to think of libraries as places that house books. This is true, but it's not the primary function of a library. Libraries are there to serve the public. They are there to provide both entertainment and information. They are there to foster a love of reading in children, and to provide the tools of research to adults.

If you haven't been to your local library for a while, here's a few ideas on how to rediscover the amazing world of public information. The library does more than loan fiction!

Put in a request for an inter-library loan on that out-of-print book you've been having trouble getting hold of (I recently did this with an esoteric book about philosophy of language, and was pleasantly surprised at how quickly it came through!)
Make use of your library's subscription to the world's newspapers and journals. Whatever your interest is, chances are there's a regular publication on it!
Check out foreign language collections for easy texts in a language you're trying to learn (kids' picture books are great for this!)
Borrow audio books (let's face it, they're too expensive to buy) and listen to them in your car, or on MP3 on the train

Good Omens & The Finn Family Moomintroll

2009-12-02T20:52:00.003+11:00

I have recently being trying to mix up my reading habits to include different mediums. A few weeks ago I thoroughly enjoyed the visual challenge of reading some comics- but that's another post. Another medium I've been trying is audio. It's been years since I have listened to an audio book (I did listen to them quite frequently as a child), and I'd forgotten what a heady experience it is.

Recently, I've been listening to two audio books.

The first is The Finn Family Moomintroll, written by Tove Jansson and read by the incredibly talented Hugh Laurie. The Moomin stories were favourites of mine as a child, and it has been a rather magical experience (albeit strange, with childhood memories popping up all over the place) to hear Hugh Laurie perfectly represent each character with a different 'voice'.

Find out more about the Moomins here.

The second audio book in question is Good Omens, written by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (oh why, oh why have they never worked together since!?), and read by Stephen Briggs. If you never read any other comic fantasy, read Good Omens. Or better yet, allow Stephen Briggs to read it to you.

The story is both hilarious and thought-provoking. It follows Aziraphale, an angel, and Crowley, a demon (or an angel "who did not so much Fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards"), unlikely partners in crime who face impending Armageddon and realize that they've come to like Earth the way it is, really. There are many other characters you won't soon forget, many of them endearing. (Read more about the book at Gaiman's webiste, here.)

Stephen Briggs lends to all this an actor's talent, giving different characters distinct voices and often making me chuckle out loud as I sit and listen through my earphones.

I can't recommend it highly enough. Buy it for someone this Christmas. Or buy it for yourself. You deserve it, right?

Personalized Stationery?

2009-12-02T19:54:00.000+11:00

Apologies for the short break in posting. The past week has been rather involved, so I hope you will forgive me!

I very much can't afford (and very much don't need) personalized engraved stationery, but I still had fun designing it at the Smythson website.

Who doesn't want their envelopes lined with tissue paper?