Christchurch City Libraries Blog

When will there be good news? I wonder when Kate Atkinson wrote this book that she had any idea that this phrase would be on everyones lips? Thankfully I didn’t read this book last year after hearing her at the Christchurch Readers and Writers festival, but saved it for a good weekend read when I needed a little bit of escapism from all the doom and gloom. What I love about fiction is that fact that I can go from the brutal reality of the The Wasted Vigil (see previous post) to a gritty but somewhat more cheerful story from Kate Atkinson, who specialises in great eccentric characters and gripping drama with a good dash of humour.

Reggie, a plucky sixteen year old steals the show, managing to overshadow the familiar and somewhat complex Jackson Brodie who we have met in previous outings. Reggie is an orphan with a precocious wit and a predisposition to solving crime, who I hope we will meet again, alongside Louise Marlow, a world weary detective with ongoing feelings for Jackson Brodie, and the man himself, who manages to spend part of the book in a coma, after a train crash, but still has a brooding effect on everyone he encounters. (But not while he’s in the coma of course!)

You could say the general theme of the book is loss, and how to keep going, and the initial chapters relay the story of a young girl who is the only remaining survivor after her mother, brother and sister are brutally murdered. Escapism you say? Thankfully, we discover that the young girl is now a doctor who, with her husband and baby boy, generally manages to get on with life, (with the support of the ever helpful Reggie who is her nanny), until the murderer is released after 30 years in jail, and her sudden and strange disappearance gets everyone on the hop.

There is a certain predictability in how the story unfolds, which personally I find somewhat comforting, but enough of a twist to keep you on your toes. I’m looking forward to Atkinson’s next outing, that according to TimesOnline will feature two female characters, Gloria and Louise, at a murder mystery weekend. I’m sure they will be the usual quirky and interesting characters that Kate Atkinson (and I) love.

I am still reeling from having finished Nadeem Aslam Aslams book The Wasted Vigil, author of the previously well revieiwed Maps for lost lovers. This is a story that is hard to categorise. For those who want to read about the degradation of women under the Taliban, then there’s something for you. If you want to read about misguided Americans meddling in Afghanistan’s culture then you won’t be disappointed. If you want to get inside the mind of a young member of the Taliban or experience Russia’s brutal invasion of Afghanistan then it is all here; a poetic and personal lesson in Afghanistan’s history. It’s compelling brutal reading, at times hard to read, but is an incredibly powerful way for a writer to convey the complexities of this country to those of us in the west, who find it all so hard to comprehend.

There are four main characters; Marcus, an Englishman who has adopted Afghanistan as his home, Lara, a Russian woman who has come to find what happened to her brother who was a Russian soldier, David an American ex spy, and Casa, a young man in the thrall of the Taliban. All end up at Marcus’s house, a home that he once shared with his Afghani wife, and a place where books are nailed to the ceiling, in the hope that they won’t be found by the Taliban.

The story moves about from present to past, dreams to reality, brutality to tenderness. There are no answers and no happy endings, how can there be? The story is political without having an obvious agenda, and for those of you, like me, who want history that is based on people rather than events then this is a hard, but engrossing read.

The finalists have been announced for the 2009 New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards! They are :

Picture Book

• Duck’s Stuck! – Kyle Mewburn, Ali Teo, John O’Reilly
• Every Second Friday – Kiri Lightfoot, Ben Galbraith
• Piggity-Wiggity Jiggity Jig – Diana Neild, Philip Webb
• Roadworks – Sally Sutton, Brian Lovelock
• The Were-Nana – Melinda Szymanik, Sarah Nelisiwe Anderson

Junior Fiction

• Chicken Feathers – Joy Cowley, David Elliot
• Enemy at the Gate - Philippa Werry
• Five (and a bit) Days in the Life of Ozzie Kingsford – Val Bird, Rebecca Cundy
•  Old Drumble - Jack Lasenby
• Payback - Michelle Kelly

Non-Fiction

• Back & Beyond: New Zealand Painting for the Young & Curious Gregory O’Brien
• The Crafting of Narnia: the art, creatures and weapons from Weta Workshop – Paul Tobin, Daniel Falconer
• High-Tech Legs on Everest - Mark Inglis, Sarah Ell
• Juicy Writing - Brigid Lowry
• Piano Rock: A 1950s Childhood - Gavin Bishop

Young Adult Fiction

• The 10pm Question – Kate De Goldi
• Chronicles of Stone #1: Scorched Bone  – Vincent Ford
• Gool – Maurice Gee
• Juno of Taris – Fleur Beale
• The Tomorrow Code – Brian Falkner

Helen Yong is glad she spent a couple of minutes visiting the Christchurch City Libraries 150th anniversary website earlier this year – out of more than 3700 entries, hers was the lucky entry drawn as the winner.

Christchurch City Libraries manager, Carolyn Robertson presented Helen with her red Dell Inspiron laptop at her local library, Redwood, on Monday, 2 March.

“I’m over the moon,” Helen said. “It’s amazing. I nearly wasn’t going to enter, then I thought well, someone has to win it – I’ll give it a shot.”

Helen, a writer, says she couldn’t have dreamed of a better prize.

“It’s the best thing I could have got. It’s very cool because I’ve only got an older computer at home and it’ll be wonderful. I regularly go on writers retreats and I’ll be able to take my laptop along.”

Helen writes poetry, including the Japanese forms haiku and tenka, and has been published in the United Kingdom and the United States as well as at home in poetry anthologies and The Press.

A “quite regular” visitor to Redwood and Central libraries, Helen says her writing friends were thrilled to hear of her win – and a little envious.

Christchurch City Libraries manager Carolyn Robertson said to have a published author win the competition was “the icing on the cake”.

The number of entries in the competition was “amazing” she said.
“We know that our website is really well used, but to have that number taking the time to actually enter the competition is fantastic stuff.”

There are plenty more activities planned for the 150th celebrations, including more competitions, so keep your eye on http://library150.com/ for details. Photos celebrating 150 years of public library service in Christchurch can be found on flickr.

Hmm, with a title like that you know for sure that this isn’t a “what to do in case of bird-flu” kind of book, but you might not necessarily think it’s actually a book about love songs.  Creepy love songs.  Fifty-two of them in fact.

Tom Reynolds has a background in television production and has performed in several bands.  He’s also created his own sub-genre of “unpacking and unpicking popular songs in the services of sarcasm”.  Touch me, I’m sick: the 52 creepiest love songs you’ve ever heard is his follow up to I hate myself and want to die: the 52 most depressing songs you’ve ever heard.

My own musical knowledge tends towards the populist and the eighties so some of the songs that he mentions (and by “mentions” I mean “eviscerates”) were not on my radar (if only “Afternoon delight” by the Starlight Vocal Band could have been one of them).  Anyway, thank God for YouTube and its provision of music videos, I say.  It means that I can just have quick watch and listen so I can have a better appreciation of Reynolds’ acerbic vilification of Clay Aiken (whose songs with which I am blessedly unfamiliar).

With chapter titles such as “I’m not bitter, I just wish you’d die, you miserable pig” and “Love’s just another word for I want to eat your liver” you pretty much have a sense of what’s on offer.

And I’m totally with him on “Thank heaven for little girls”.  Euwh.

Any creepy song suggestions of your own?

Sometimes living in New Zealand has disadvantages; we don’t always get books from the US in a timely manner, as evidenced by this entry in our “New Books” update email -

A bound man : why we are excited about Obama and why he can’t win  Shelby Steele

That’s a shame – I thought he was in with a chance…