December 2009
Monthly Archive
8 December 2009
One of the great free things to do in Christchurch is to head along to the Christchurch Art Gallery on Wednesdays at 6 pm, when curators, artists, academics and others examine the ideas behind the exhibitions, enhancing and expanding the experience of viewing them.
When Ken Hall, the exhibition curator for The Vault: Neil Pardington, looked at this exhibition in relation to earlier bodies of work I was swept away with enthusiasm for finding out more about the artists he mentioned. Christchurch City Libraries has some information on most of them; some is held at the Christchurch Art Gallery library, which can be contacted if you would like to make an appointment to see these items.
So for those who love a list here’s one to work through, of some very interesting artists who have concerned themselves with similar “conceptual or thematic terrain” as Pardington in The Vault.
And can I add a heartfelt recommendation to get along to one of the Wednesday night events.
8 December 2009
What’s the most popular book for Christmas? My bet is on a New Zealand cookbook.
What’s hot at the moment? You only have to switch on telly or open a magazine – it’s food, glorious food.
It seems every New Zealand foodie has published a cookbook in 2009 including:
From ‘grow it, cook it’ to ‘culinary journeys’ there is a NZ cookbook for every budget, taste and time.
Surely a record year for the cookbook industry.
For cooking your own Christmas kai, find more about festive fare from our web site – Christmas pudding? Christmas cake? Pavlova and strawberries? Roast lamb and new potatoes with mint sauce? Salmon on the barbeque? Whatever you’re planning for your home-cooked Christmas dinner, our libraries have plenty of resources to give you ideas.
Cornelia, Selection and Access Librarian
7 December 2009
It’s always interesting to see who releases a Christmas album at the end of each year. This year, those who are prepared to ‘Pa rum pa pum pum’ with the little drummer boy or ‘Fa la la la la’ while decking the halls are a mixture of the expected and the surprising. One of the most surprising is Bob Dylan with his Christmas in the heart. He’s singing old favourites such as ‘Here comes Santa Claus’ and ‘Silver Bells’. It was been receiving good reviews. Proceeds are going to charity.
New Zealand Christmas albums
Another album for Charity is Merry Christmas baby, a New Zealand compilation with proceeds going to Plunket. It includes the Jordan Luck band doing ‘Barbie dolls for Baghdad’ as well as other Kiwi favourites such as Opshop, Jackie Clarke, Whirimako Black, Hollie Smith and Annie Crummer.
The other New Zealand Christmas albums for 2009 are from Hayley Westenra and her Christmas Magic album with familiar seasonal carols and popular Christmas songs. It includes a duet with Ronan Keating. Howard Morrison has also posthumously released the Christmas collection which has 14 classic carols.
Classics and crooners
Neil Diamond’s A cherry cherry Christmas includes brand-new yuletide performances penned by Neil plus re-mastered seasonal classics.
Sting doesn’t quite commit to a Christmas album settling with a winter themed album conjuring the season of spirits featuring Christmas carols and lullabies spanning the centuries on If on a winter’s night.
This year’s crooner release is another Frank Sinatra one. Christmas with friends the friends being Rosemary Clooney, Mel Torme, Tony Bennett & Bill Evans and Ray Charles & Betty Carla.
Other albums coming soon to a library near you are Timeless Christmas with the greats, Country Christmas collection, Christmas crooners collection and R&B Christmas Hits.
For more Christmas music, see:
Terrisa, Selection and Access Librarian
7 December 2009
I notice that Harbour kitchens : celebrating Lyttelton, its food and people is on order, and should hopefully arrive in our libraries soon. This is a wonderful cookbook, produced by parents from Lyttelton main and Lyttelton West Schools as a fundraising project. Gone are the days of photocopied sheets of recipes hurriedly put together by the local PTA. Harbour kitchens could well stand beside costlier and well-known cookery books and feel proud!
I like a cookbook to be crammed full of colourful photos, and Harbour kitchens has plenty of luscious looking food as well as photos of local personalities and school children, all taken by Lyttleton photographers. The recipes are supplied by local restaurants as well as parents and people associated with the school, so there is a lovely variety of flavours to choose from. I was lucky enough to be given a copy of this book and have already enjoyed cooking a number of the recipes. They have turned out beautifully and almost look like the photos! (A sign of a good cook book I think).
What a wonderful fundraising project, as well as a peek into what makes Lyttelton such an interesting place to live. The local Library is rather good as well I hear!
4 December 2009
An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah has won the Guardian First Book Award.
Worth £10,000 to the winner, the Guardian First Book Award, as the name suggests, is open to new writers of both fiction and non-fiction. Several popular authors have had their first taste of literary fame through being short-listed or scooping the big prize: Zadie Smith won in 2000 with White Teeth and Jonathan Safran Foer with Everything is Illuminated in 2002.
This year’s long-list was released in August and rather excitingly included a first time novelist who hails from New Zealand, Eleanor Catton. Her novel The Rehearsal has been garnering glorious reviews, The Guardian reviewer Justine Jordan has described it as “smart, playful and self-possessed, it has the glitter and mystery of the true literary original.” The Rehearsal centres around a scandal, the illicit relationship between a young music teacher and an underage schoolgirl. Their tale is re-written and dramatised by a local theatre group for an end of year performance and the original and re-worked tales run both side-by-side and interwoven for much of the novel. Reviewers have been particularly taken by Eleanor’s ear for both the everyday and heightened theatrical dialogue used in the novel and her deft handling of the interchange between the play and the original scandal. The four other short-listed titles were:
A swamp full of dollars: pipelines and paramilitaries at Nigeria’s oil frontier by Michael Peel.
A former West Africa correspondent for the Financial Times, Peel examines the petroleum industry in the Niger delta and its impact on the people of Nigeria. The only shortlisted non-fiction title this year.
The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey.
Already shortlisted for the Orange prize, longlisted for the Man Booker and winner of the Betty Trask Prize, Harvey’s novel centers around Jake Jameson a retired architect succumbing to Alzheimer’s.
The Selected Works of TS Spivet: A novel by Reif Larsen.
Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet is twelve years old and a compulsive cartographer. This novel includes charts, diagrams and ephemera to trace TS’s tale as he journeys from rural Montana to Washington.
An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah. This short story collection looks with both humour and sadness at the challenges of living in modern Zimbabwe.
4 December 2009
Nothwithstanding by Louis Bernieres
For anyone that read my blog on short stories you will know that I am not a big fan of short stories in general. In fact I almost returned the latest Louis de Bernieres without reading it when I discovered it was short stories. A friend pointed out the stories were set around a central village called Nothwithstanding so I thought I might as well give it a go. Thank goodness I did otherwise I would have missed out on a truly delightful read.
Some stories were amazing character studies that you felt like you knew the “person” within the confines of a short story, others had twists, both surprising and funny. The afterword is interesting too, with Louis talking about his own upbringing in a small English village. Notwithstanding has a little bit of everything…I laughed, I cried and I enjoyed immensely. It made me wonder though, how many great reads by favourite authors have I recklessly disregarded due to their short story status? Is it time to rethink my reading ways?
Have you got any reading habits or aversions that it might be time to let go of?
3 December 2009
Necrology – a list of notable people who have died recently. Now a regular feature on our blog.
Nien Cheng, 1915-2009
Chinese American author who recounted her harrowing experiences of the cultural revolution n her memoir Life and death in Shanghai
Lionel Davidson, 1922-2009
Thriller writer whose novels, which mixed excitement with moral intensity, impressed the giants of the genre
Jeanne-Claude, 1935-2009
Artist whose monumental installations included wrapping up the Reichstag and the Pont Neuf in Paris
H.C. Robbins Landon, 1926-2009
Scholar and critic who unearthed Haydn’s forgotten works but fell victim to a musical hoax
Arda Mandikian, 1924-2009
Operatic soprano who inspired Benjamin Britten but fell foul of the ruling military junta in her native Greece
Geoffrey Moorhouse, 1931-2009
Journalist and writer of brilliant diversity who only just survived an epic voyage across the Sahara
Ian Norrie, 1927-2009
Journalist, author and bookseller whose pungent views earned him the title ‘Sage of Hampstead’
Elisabeth Soderstrom, 1927-2009
Operatic soprano whose mesmerising performances enthralled audiences at Glyndebourne for 40 years
Edward Woodward, 1930-2009
Actor who could turn his hand to any part but found particular fame with his bleak performances in Callan and The Equalizer
3 December 2009
One of the coolest and most popular picture books of all time, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are makes it’s big screen debut today. You probably couldn’t miss the huge cutouts promoting the movie in cinemas and some of us have had their photos taken pretending to be Max. I’m really excited about seeing the movie tonight, even though there have been mixed reviews of it. It’s one of those movies where you just have to leave the original story behind and enjoy the movie in its own right. Everything I’ve read about it and all the trailers I’ve seen make it look and sound fantastic.
If you’d prefer to read the original picture book or just want to revisit the story before you see the movie we have plenty of copies in the library. You can also watch the trailer for the movie here.
After seeing the movie…
It lived up to all my expectations and I came out of the cinema with a huge grin on my face, wanting to see it again right away. The Wild Things look very much like the original ones from the book and I wanted to be Max, hanging out with the Wild Things and sleeping in a big pile with them. Each of the Wild Things is quite different in personality and their clashes in personality make it difficult for them all to live together. As Spike Jonze (the director) explained, it is not a children’s movie but a movie about childhood and you see childhood emotions coming out in the Wild Things, such as worry, fear, anger, and the feeling that nobody ever listens to you. It wasn’t a scary movie so younger children would cope, unless they’re scared of monsters. I thoroughly recommend it!
3 December 2009
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In August 2009 an exhibition was held at SOFA gallery featuring 15 artists with Canterbury connections. All are well known in the wider scope of contemporary New Zealand art and include Neil Dawson ( whose newest public art work, called Sky Lens, has just been erected in the City Mall), Seraphine Pick and Ronnie van Hout (exhibiting at Christchurch Art Gallery this year). The book associated with the exhibition is called Inner Landscapes: 15 New Zealand Artists with Canterbury Connections.
The book showcases the work and ideas of a range of artists who are connected or associated with the Canterbury region. Unlike past books of its type, it does not focus on the geography of the region but instead on the ‘Inner Landscapes’ of the artists: their ideas and inspirations. The range of artists is very varied, creating a mix of styles, ideologies, and career stages – from senior artists such as Philip Trusttum through to younger artists such as Hannah and Aaron Beehre. The artists were interviewed by Sally Blundell. She presents their words directly, allowing them to speak in their own voices in a plain-english style devoid of art-world jargon, thus leaving the reader with a sense of having a friendly conversation with the artist. This makes the book suitable to a wide audience – not just art experts. The excellent introduction by Justin Paton is written in a similar style – being open, accessible and easy to understand.
Like the writing, the excellent studio and portrait photographs by Diederik van Heyningen are realistic and intimate – sometimes uncannily so, with close-ups of the artists’ faces showing every wrinkle. This certainly fits with the de-glamourising tone of the book. I thought it was great to show our famous artists in this manner – as real people and not inaccessible icons. My only complaint is that the book could be enhanced by more practical examples about how the artists go about actually making their work – not just how they come across the ideas that inform their practices.
Marie
2 December 2009
Drum roll, bated breath, nervous giggles. The 2009 Bad Sex In Fiction winner is Jonathan Littell!
400 connoisseurs of crummy sex writing gathered at London’s In & Out Club (I didn’t make that name up) to toast Littell’s sucess. The man of the moment didn’t attend but the award, presented by the lovely Charles Dance, was accepted by his editor at Chatto and Windus. The judges praised The Kindly Ones as an “ambitious and impressive novel” and hoped Littell took the prize in “good humour”.
So bad luck Philip Roth, John Banville, Nick Cave etc but don’t be too despondent there is always next year. For a peep at the prizewinning passage see The Literary Review, be prepared to blush.
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