Christchurch City Libraries Blog

Passengers in one of the spacious lounges at the Christchurch Airport. Circa 1960

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My favourite book of 2009

Next Wednesday (18 November) the annual Best and Worst Books of the Year event is being held at Upper Riccarton library from 7:30-9pm.  Everybody is invited to come along and hear from librarians, booksellers, publishers and authors about what their favourite books were this year.  It’s always a fun night with drinks and nibbles available and if you want to get your hands on a Jenny Cooper original illustration there is one being auctioned on the night. 

Our Holiday Reading List is also being launched on the night so if you want to find some great children’s and young adults books to read over the summer break, come along and get a copy.

Oh yes. Logicomix by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H Papadimitriou is an utter gem of a graphic novel – anyone who disses comics as lacking in intellectual rigour needs this thrust into their hands at once.

I’ve learned about arcane works like Russell’s Principia Mathematica (co-written with Alfred North Whitehead), logicians, philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Georg Cantor, set theory, David Hilbert, and the Incompleteness Theoreom. These are not people or ideas I’ve encountered before, and I thought this would be all too high falutingly intellectual and frightening.

But this graphic novel cleverly draws you into this world of unbounded thought. It tells the story of Bertrand Russell’s life as a thirsty quest for knowledge and truth, and it also explores the link between logic and madness. The writers Doxiadis and Papadimitriou and the husband and wife team of artists Alecos Papadatos and Annie di Donna inhabit the world of Logicomix too as a kind of chorus (in cartoon form).

It’s a profound book and shows the life of the mind as far more dangerous and challenging than any physical adventure. Read it, weep.

• Logicomix website
• Mathematics has never been so exciting – review in The Guardian by Alex Bellos

Graves of officers of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps on the Gallipoli Peninsula

Sometimes you come across someone who has the most amazing passion for something they are doing and it can be quite an inspiring experience. I recently met one such – Dolores Ho – who is an archivist at the National Army Museum at Waiouru.

In her spare time Dolores makes small flax crosses with an ANZAC poppy attached and her aim is to have these placed on the graves of all New Zealand service personnel overseas (read more about her project). If you have ever visited a Commonwealth War Graves cemetery they are often beautiful and sad places, superbly maintained by local gardeners, but not exactly bustling with visitors.

I visited Suda Bay on Crete some years ago and it would have been nice to place a little memento and take a photograph of the headstone which is what Dolores asks volunteers to do. She sees the name “Dolores Cross” as not being about her but about the meaning of her name which is “sorrows”.

The project seems to be focusing on World War 1 graves so far. Our New Zealand at War resource provides a vast amount of information for people interested in New Zealand’s participation in overseas conflicts.

Dolores hopes to eventually establish a website where all the headstone photographs can be displayed.

• Today is Armistice Day – Find out more the significance of November 11 on our website.

I started The Year of the flood by Margaret Atwood with a certain amount of reserve.  I hadn’t particularly enjoyed Oryx and Crake, having found it full of interesting science,  but lacking when it came to characterisation (interestingly, having now read her new book I think I will go back to Oryx and Crake and try again).

I was also a bit worried that I would find the book depressing or over the top in regards to climate change and our future.  However fiction is a powerful medium, and even though I read and hear about the state of our planet, there is something to be said about a novel that is so well written that you feel you know and like the characters, and that you want  to live with them through the experiences of a society so badly affected by climate change and greed.

The Gardeners are a group of future hippies I suppose, perhaps even part of a cult, led by Adam One and his group of Eves and lesser Adams.  There is a strong sense of belief in God, but a God that can get combined with science and evolution.  They have their own hymn book and many chapters end with their quirky numbers.  (These have been put to music and if you wish you can by the CD).The Gardeners are striving to be self-sufficient amongst the ruins of a city controlled by the ruthless CorpsSeCorps, and dominated by the Pleeblands, skunkweed gro-groups and HealthWyzer, a dodgy pharmaceutical group. 

The two main characters are Toby, who with help from the Gardeners manages to escape from a company called “secretburgers”, (yummy meaty burgers containing your worst nightmare), and Ren, a young girl who has been brought up within the Gardeners community.   Toby and Ren are also the two characters that we follow after “The Waterless flood”, a disaster predicted by the Gardeners, that creates the plague eradicated world we experienced in Oryx and Crake.  

There has of course been a number of books and films about this type of scenario, and you may well wonder what would make this book any different from a well-worn path of devastation and horror.  There is also a risk with this type of apocalyptic genre  to feel too outrageous to be taken seriously. This is where The Year of the flood is different.  There is enough that is familiar in the book to make you stop and think.  Many of the scenarios Atwood paints could be the end result of genetic engineering, carbon emissions, and tampering with gene pool and new breeds of animals.  Is it that far out of the realms of possibility that a sheep could be bred with coloured hair, crossed with a lion, or that we would live in such a disposable society that people could be dispensed with in the same way we trade in a new car? It is also just a good read, plenty of intrigue, good (and bad) characters and a fascinating story.

In an effort to lower her carbon footprint, Margaret Atwood is only travelling by train and boat on her promotional tour to promote The Year of the flood in Europe and North America.  You can follow her blog here.

The latest New Zealand Listener has a cover photograph of Witi Ihimaera and the lead story is his apology for his errors in using the writing of other people in his latest work The Trowenna Sea. It tells the story of Hohepa Te Umuroa, who was convicted of insurrection and transported as a convict to Tasmania with four other Maori in the 1840s. The similarities in passages of his work to the words of other writers was uncovered by reviewer Jolisa Gracewood.

Jolisa has a PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell Universityand has taught non-fiction writing at Yale University.  She was named Reviewer of the Year at the 2006 New Zealand Book Awards and publishes regularly in the New Zealand Listener, the New Haven Advocate, and Landfall.  She  is an occasional contributor to the Public Address blog and has alluded to the controversy in her most recent post.

The Listener also has a back up article about famous examples of plagiarism and what it calls “a fine and ever-changing line between what’s allowable and what’s not.”

On the international stage Britain’s poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion is fighting his corner over vitriolic attacks on using other people’s work in an official Armistice Day poem he wrote.

Did anyone else watch Inside NZ last week? It was about the ladies who won the old Spagalimis Restaurant at Northlands Mall on Trademe. They ended up opening a gourmet burger restaurant there. The burgers were HUGE and delicious, but sadly their business only lasted 6 weeks as they were unable to secure financing from a bank.

According to the start of the episode, 56000 businesses are started in NZ every year! So if you are part of the 1.4 percent of Kiwis starting their own business in 2010, give it the best chance of success by checking out our extensive collection of business books and resources. We’ve got stuff on small business management, books focussed on the NZ small business scene, a book that gives you 75 green business ideas to consider and even a book promising to help you write your business plan in one day!

The Library has lots of other services to help businesses, like research assistance, document delivery and free corporate membership. So maybe the lesson to be learnt is that buying something for $181 can cause you to go bankrupt, but using free Library resources could make you a millionaire?

I discovered on a visit to Rachael King’s luscious looking new website that she is speaking in Christchurch tomorrow (Tuesday November 10). This will be well worth a visit, she’s a warm and approachable speaker as well a fine writer.

An evening with Rachael King talking about her new novel, Magpie Hall, at Our City O-Tautahi, Oxford Terrace, Christchurch. Tuesday, November 10 at 7.30pm. Tickets $12 on the door or in advance from Morrin on 03 329 9789. Bubbles will be served on arrival and books will be available for purchase and signing.

She flouts the image of New Zealand writers being dour and restrained in their subject matter and tone – her first novel was about a  young lepidopterist named Thomas Edgar and a collecting expedition in the Amazon, and her new book is about Rosemary Summers, an amateur taxidermist and a passionate collector of tattoos. Nothing grey, urban/suburban there.

Rachael’s blog The Sound of Butterflies, named after her first novel (a Montana New Zealand Book Awards winner of the Hubert Church best first book award for fiction in 2007). is essential reading for anyone interested in books and writing, she blogs wisely about the writing process and all sorts of NZ book related matters.

I’ve noticed that there has been a bit of a run on picture books about bedtime lately and they’re all really cute.  Here’s just a couple of my favourites:

Bedtime without Arthur by Jessica Meserve is about a girl called Bella who has a very special bear named Arthur who protects her from monsters when she is asleep.  “He is as brave as a knight.  He is as strong as ten elephants.  And he does karate.”  While Arthur is fighting the monsters in the shadows, Bella is dreaming of rainbows and rainforests, but one night Arthur goes missing and Bella has a horrible sleep because she can’t stop thinking about the dragons, slugs and grizzly bears that she is scared of.  She searches everywhere for him and finds that he has made another friend.  This little bear has lots of character and the illustrations are adorable and so bright.

One of my favourite illustrators, Chris Riddell has also written and illustrated a picture book about the monsters that hide in your room.  Mr Underbed is about a boy called Jim who is dozing off one night when a friendly monster pops out from under his bed.  His name is Mr Underbed and he’s a bright blue, fluffy thing with a bulbous pink nose and a friendly face, and he tells Jim that it is very uncomfortable sleeping under the bed and asks if he can sleep in his bed.  Jim invites him in but this is only the start of the long string of monsters who want to share his bed, including Pinkie the bedside table rabbit and Grimble, Grumble and Groan the toy trunk triplets.  Will Jim ever be able to get to sleep?

Stormy Weather by Debi Gliori doesn’t have the humour of the previous two books and is more of a lullaby for parents to read to their children before bed.  The different animals tell their children how they will watch over them and protect them while they sleep.  The text flows nicely and is a pleasure to read with perfect ryhthm to lull children to sleep.

Last week I went of one of the great Technology Tasters that we are running at Christchurch City Libraries.  The Taster that I chose was about Online Bookclubs, which I knew a little bit about but had never actually joined up with one of them so I thought I’d give it a try.  We were introduced to the range of book and reading related websites that are available through the Christchurch City Libraries Internet Gateway.  There are some fabulous resources available here and if you’re ever stuck with what to read next, you should definitely have a look at some of these websites.

The main focus of this Taster was to introduce us to an amazing website called Shelfari.   Shelfari is a social networking site, very similar to Facebook but focused on books and reading.  You have a virtual bookshelf that holds your virtual library, you catalogue your books with whatever information you like, and can join user groups to discuss books with like-minded people and recommend books for others to read.  It takes only a few minutes to sign up and modify the settings to suit your needs and then you can start adding your books and joining groups.  Like Facebook you can also invite people to be your friends and others can invite you to be their friends.

The only downside to joining Shelfari is that I’ve spent more time adding books and joining groups in the last few days than I have reading actual books.