Christchurch City Libraries Blog

It may not be common knowledge amongst the general populace but librarians love a nice morning tea and what could be more fitting in preparation for celebrating our national day, than indulging in a little food nostalgia?

• Home made : stories and recipes from New Zealand stove tops – A collection of New Zealanders’ family recipes and stories behind them as passed  down through the generations.  Includes historic photos and images of the recipes. They have thought of everything, including a pocket at the back for you to add your own favourite family specialties.
• Ladies a plate : traditional home baking – Johnston is a dedicated home baker herself, and has searched through hundreds of manuscripts and community cookbooks from the early to mid twentieth century. She tested the recipes herself to find the best version of some of our well known favourites.   This is a pretty good looking book, with lots of recipes and historical material.
• The Edmonds cookery book – Keep it “old school” with this 1914 edition of the beloved cookbook which is now available online.  The cinnamon scones sound nice but I might pass on the tongue omelet, just quietly.
• First catch your weka :  A story of New Zealand cooking – In which author David Veart investigates just how our Kiwi “style” of cuisine came into existence (no wekas were harmed in the production of the book).

And if all that isn’t enough to have you dreaming of lamingtons over the long weekend then check out our page on iconic Kiwi foods.  Dig in!

Junot Diaz, as those of you who caught our coverage of last year’s Auckland Writers and Readers Festival will know, scored a literary hole in one with his debut novel The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao.  Expansive, multi-generational and totally enthralling, the book recently won the Morning News Tournament of Books.  The book follows the trials and tribulations of a Dominican family, especially the hapless son, the eponymous “hero” of the title.

Though this was Diaz’s first novel, it’s not his first book and hungry for more of his work I asked nicely of them-that-buy-the-stuff and so now we have copies of Diaz’s 1997 short story collection, Drown in the library collection.  So is it any good?  Does it have the “Wao-factor”? 

Does a Dominican male have swagger?

If you liked Oscar Wao then you’ll enjoy Drown too.  It has a lot of the same elements; depictions of poverty and family life in the Dominican Republic, not-as-innocent-as-you-would-hope childhoods, gritty urban characters with dependencies and turbulent love lives and so on.  It also features a handy glossary at the back for most of the Spanish terms that liberally pepper the stories.

The only problem is that at 166 pages it’s a mere slip of a thing compared to the robust Oscar Wao and the stories are short enough to be digested rather quickly.  This makes it more of a snack than a banquet which means I’ll be hungry again in no time at all.

Not a book and yet available from a library!

The award for most obvious headline of the week goes to…The Washington Post who tells us “Libraries are not just for books” 

Really? I’m going to get myself down to that library and see if they have LPs for my gramophone yet.

If you are interested in the mysterious non-book holdings of the library, check out this info about our latest tech offering.

Christchurch City Libraries’ cataloguing team has many responsibilities, but one of the most unusual is updating author entries in the catalogue with the date of that person’s death. They monitor news sources and websites daily, and pride themselves in getting the changes made as soon as possible after the death becomes public news.

Why bother, you might ask? A date of death helps better identify the writer, performer or subject of the book, album and so on and makes it easier for people to find exactly what they are looking for at the library. There may only be one John Updike in our catalogue for example, but there are several entries for John Martyn.

This necrology – a list of notable people who have died recently – will become a regular feature on our blog. It will make fascinating reading.

January 25 to February 1 2009

• Tessa Bonner, 1951-2008 Early music soprano renowned for the purity of her tone who championed neglected female composers.
• Tony Hart, 1925-2009 Artist and television presenter
• Mick Imlah, 1956-2009 Oxford don and author of clever but approachable poems which showed a startlingly original ear for rhyme.
• Vincente Major, 1918-2009 One of New Zealand’s leading dramatic sopranos. Born in Oamaru, her versatility included numerous operatic roles, musicals and radio shows such as The prickly thistle club and Stars on Sunday. She developed, trained and sang with The Majorettes, a vocal group who won the Mobil Song Quest in 1972. She was awarded an MBE in 1979.
• John Martyn, 1948-2009 Singer-songwriter known for his virtuoso guitar playing and innovative recordings.
• John Updike, 1932-2009 Prolific author who captured the spirit of middle America and is best known for his Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom series.
• Christopher Wood, 1941-2009 Dealer and author who helped make Victorian art fashionable again and appeared on The Antiques Roadshow.

Those who regularly browse the new fiction shelves may have noticed the recent quiet infiltration of small, dove-grey paperbacks. These are some of the offerings of Persephone Books, a publisher whose field of endeavour is to reprint “forgotten” novels of the twentieth century.

Mainly by women authors, Persephone’s catalogue includes novels, short stories, diaries and cookery books. Persephone reprinted and repopularized Winifred Watson’s Miss Pettigrew lives for a day, now made into the movie starring Frances McDormand. Persephone has a website and a real shop that you can visit next time you’re in London, at the wonderfully named Lamb’s Conduit Street in Bloomsbury.

They now offer 81 books in print, some “minor” works by big names, some by unfamiliar authors. At the moment, I am reading Flush by Virginia Woolf , a novella about Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s dog. If you never usually read a preface (guilty), make an effort with Persephone’s; they are readable rather than scholarly, written by authors of our own time.

Persephone books offer something new, albeit old, filling the gap left by the Virago imprint. For those of us old enough to be tired of the “modern novel” (“how they all seem to be the same, my dear”) these little books may offer timely refreshment.