Neil Gaiman in a Tardis - Esoteric much?

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*

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

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

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

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

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

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?