Christchurch City Libraries Blog

Hot off the press – you can read the ten finalists in the Sunday Star-Times Short Story Awards online and cast a vote for your favourite. What a cool initiative. I’m keen to have a read – the opening lines featured definitely draw you in – check out these two examples (and then read them and the rest):

“A good turnout isn’t it?”

K B Fleet wasn’t much to look at. He was overweight and sported an unbecoming military buzz-cut but his voice, with its gentle Scottish lilt, had talked many a woman into bed and, from what Simone had heard, few had regretted it. (from The Competition)

Hearing the commotion I rushed to answer the door. Nobody was there. Costumed as a seven-foot ghost with flickering red eyes, I had an elaborately wired headdress – a polystyrene mannequin’s head and shoulders painted black - the base of which sat on the top of my head and was lashed to my shoulders. Embedded into the mannequin’s face were a pair of red light bulbs that could be operated by a switch in my pocket. (from Samson and Delilah)

Information from the site states that The People’s Choice Award is a new addition to the Short Story Awards, with the winner being decided entirely by public vote.  The writer of the story which receives the most votes will receive $750 in cash, $250 worth of books from Random House, and their story will be published in the Sunday Star-Times alongside the judge’s choices. Voting opens Sunday, October 11, and closes on Friday, October 23.

Recently I had the choice between using some credit card points to get a magazine subscription or a weed eater.  I chose the weed eater.  Being an avid reader I even surprised myself with this decision, but I have a problem with magazines.  I like to browse, but can never really commit to the full experience.

Next magazine is a case in point.  I pick it up, skim through, and immediately feel that a) I lack any form of self-discipline,   b) I am stuck on a rut and need to change jobs/husbands/or start jogging and c) I need a skin care regime. 

Every now and then I spot Time, or The Economist, and then quickly walk away.  I have tried Variety, but don’t  know the movies they are writing about, and never get the jokes in Private Eye.  New Idea is ideal for the supermarket queue, and If I choose to I can always read New Zealand Snowboarder and New Zealand Fishing World at home, courtesy of family members.

It is about this point that I feel so pleased that I have a local library (and one with a cafe) where I can browse, flick and discard at my leisure.  Every now and then I take a magazine home, and having read one, or at the most two articles, I feel very pleased that I didn’t take out that subscription, or spend $10.00 at the supermarket.

I am constantly amazed at the variety and depth of the magazine collections at Christchurch City Libraries though, and it would be great to hear about  some of your favourites, perhaps I will find something that is worth subscribing to?

This year, so far,  we’ve had two of the promised four Doctor Who special episodes and while they’ve been sufficiently Who-ish; Planet of the Dead featured a BBC budget Lara Croft-esque character called Lady Christina and The Next Doctor with an anatomically ambivalent CyberKing, the knowledge that this is  the delicious David Tennant’s protracted swan-song has made it a miserable experience so far.

Oh yes, Mr Tennant I’d climb into your TARDIS any day of the week  but I’m not so sure about this new chap Matt Smith, there is something vaguely unnerving about an actor born in 1982-the Peter Davidson era- playing a 900 year old time-lord. There is also a new assistant in the pipeline and with almost unimaginable self-restraint the new ginger –haired, Scottish lassie has been named Amy rather than the infinitely more obvious Heather or Agnes, this may yet prove a mistake as no-one likes a stereotype better than your average telly viewer and Scottish stereotypes are just so much fun, usually corrupt coppers or whiney, malnourished druggie/ crims.

We won’t be able to enjoy the next series for some considerable time here in far-flung NZ so in the meantime the library has oodles of Dr Who DVDs, audio-books, novels and magazines featuring the Doctor in his many guises. Yes, the vintage TV series sets do wobble and every second story-line was filmed in a quarry in the Cotswolds but for sheer nostalgia and a chance to hide in terror behind the couch again, they are well worth another watch. And although I must confess to having become a little fatigued by story editor Russell T Davies’s plots, the latest Doctor Who series have lots of famous acting faces, racey plots and fantastic CGI.  The empty child and The doctor dances with Chrstopher Eccleston are two of my favourite episodes and won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic presentation.

Beeb drama at its very best!

Necrology – a list of notable people who have died recently. Now a regular feature on our blog.

• Jim Carroll, 1951-2009
  Poet, heroin addict and author of The Basketball Diaries, which electrified New York in the late 1970s

• Frank Gurr, 1924-2009
  Clarinettist and longtime member of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

• J.B. Kelly, 1925-2009
  Influential scholar of the Middle East who deplored Britain’s withdrawal from the Gulf for making the world a more dangerous place

• Leon Kirchner, 1913-2009
  Composer and pianist who won the Pulitzer and mentored Yo-Yo Ma

• Alicia de Larrocha, 1923-2009
  Piano prodigy who became a passionate champion of composers from her homeland of Spain

• Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 1922-2009
  Exceptional scholar who waged a personal war to protect the soul of Classics from the modern age

• Irving Penn, 1917-2009
  Photographer whose immaculate images infused fashion with a new and luminous glamour

It turns out that my prediction for the winner of the Guardian Children’s Book Prize was wrong.  The winner was actually Mal Peet for his book, Exposure. Alison Flood from The Guardian describes Exposure as “a modern retelling of Othello, in which the Moor of Venice and his wife Desdemona are transformed into the South American equivalent of Posh and Becks.”  The book follows the fictional football legend Otello and sports journalist Paul Faustino, who have also featured in several of Mal Peet’s other books including The Penalty and Keeper.  Peet turned to writing these football themed novels for young adults as he felt that all football books for children were a load of rubbish.

We have all of his books in the library and you can read an interview with him in The Guardian here.

This week Christchurch is being inundated with librarians.  We are having our annual conference and the theme is He Tangata, Our People.  This morning one of the speakers was Claudia Lux from IFLA, the International Federation of Library Associations and she spoke about how as librarians we need to get out there and advocate for our profession.  In order to do that we need people to know what we stand for.  She posed the question “What do librarians do all day?”  So I was wondering, what do you, our library users, think we get up to all day?

What did you do in the war Daddy? – well that is an unanswered question for me in many ways as my Dad (in common with many Kiwi soldiers) didn’t talk a lot about his war experiences. He told some entertaining yarns about his time in training in New Zealand and England and as a  POW in Germany and a little bit of serious stuff about his time on Crete but that was it. Since his death I’ve found myself reading all sorts of stuff about New Zealanders’ World War II experiences in Greece and Crete and the POW experience and I’ve gained a deeper understanding of the trials my Dad endured.

Now I’m reading a fascinating account of the POW experience called  Dear Alison: a New Zealand soldier’s story from Stalag 383 by Christchurch man Dudley Muff. It is the facsimile of a notebook he kept as prisoner, written for his young niece in New Zealand. Illustrated with his own stick peopled drawings, there is an underlying tone to the adult ear that captures the boredom, frustration and sometimes anger, of the men who were imprisoned for four years.

You can see the original of his book  in a special display at Our City during Heritage Week (October 16 to 26). The theme of Heritage week is Doves and Defences: Discover Christchurch in peace and conflict and the exhibition is called Never Be Afraid which is  the postscript that Dudley added to the book on his return home to Christchurch: “Now I shall tell you in three little words what all my travels have taught me, NEVER BE AFRAID. With all the love in the world from Uncle Dudley”.

Christchurch City Libraries have an excellent service to Christchurch and yes, the world. You can check what you have out and when it’s due back while you are holidaying on the Cote D’Azur or even deepest darkest Antarctica.

Amazing huh? Do you need to research the latest medical information from the WWW? Well, you can do it while sipping on a cool drink while crusing the Adriatic on your Super Yacht. All you need is your library card. If you don’t have one, find out how.

Where’s the weirdest place YOU have checked your library details from?? Timbuktu, New Delhi or China – or in bed on your trusty laptop?

Labour Weekend marks the 75th birthday of the Waitaki hydro dam, which is one of the cornerstones of this nation’s power grid. Built in the 1920s and 30s using old-fashioned hard work – picks, shovels, concrete, steel and blood, sweat and tears, it first generated power in 1935 and was the first of  several dams on the Waitaki River.

A remarkable collection of 185 photos donated by Linton Simmons Payne, a hydro-electrical engineer, has been digitised and made available online in time to mark this occasion. The photos cover all aspects of the the construction of the dam and provide a fascinating glimpse into this massive project and what life must have been like for the workers who toiled in the harsh valley climate.

There are a few books on The Waitaki River and its hydro electric history, and another is set to be launched for this year’s milestone. I wonder what a power project on that scale would look like today? Would we even have the audacity to give it a shot? Reading the book commissioned for the fortieth anniversary of the Benmore Dam, with text by Lloyd Jones, I wonder if we would.

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Do your teachers speak in a really weird language when they think you’re not looking? Do they wear a brass wrist band that they use to communicate with someone in another galaxy? Do their eyes flash blue when you annoy them?  If you answered yes to all of these questions it is very likely that your teachers are aliens from another planet and you should get as far away from them as possible.

In Mark Haddon’s new book, Boom!, Jim and Charlie do exactly the opposite when they discover something weird is going on.  When Jim overhears a conversation between his teachers, he believes that they are trying to get him sent to a new school and so with the help of his best friend Charlie, they bug the staff room.  However, what they actually hear is two of their teachers speaking in a strange language and so they set out to find some answers to these strange goings-on.  This story has everything – action, adventure, aliens, mysterious men in gray suits, cool alien technology, a strange language and lots of laughs. 

You may know of Mark Haddon as the author of the hugely popular Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.  Boom! is a completely different sort of story for a different age group but it’s an out-of-this-world read.