Christchurch City Libraries Blog

Have you tried reading your toddler a textured book? They’re great fun for both parent and baby – you do the reading, and Baby can follow along, touching the characters in the stories with their little fingers. 

Usborne touchy-feely books are shorties, and some have a wintry theme:  reindeer, polar bears … My little girl and I are enjoying the Snowman, and his lovely red furry scarf and bouncy orange nose. Anything animal related usually goes down a treat.

• Textured books
• Lift-the-flap books

If you’re looking for tips on what to read your baby or toddler, try our It’s never too soon list for reading suggestions for under fives.
And if want to add to your picture book collection at home (without breaking your budget), check out our monthly book sales.

Intrepica : A high-quality play-based literacy resource with more than 10,000 activities online for children of all ages and ability. Children and parents can select from activities focusing on pre-reading skills, phonics, reading, spelling, vocabulary, grammar and comprehension in a fun, exciting and safe online environment. Users progress through progressively harder tests and earning trophies and  coins for completing games which they can then “spend” dressing their avatar up in outfits and costumes!

What makes Intrepica special?

• Incentive-based learning.
• Credits awarded for every exercise.
• A safe online world of visually rich activities.
• Children learn and have fun at the same time.

You can access  Intrepica and many other useful electronic resources from home with your library card number and PIN, or at our community libraries.

Don’t forget our other new kids electronic resource, TumblebookLibrary is an online collection of Tumblebooks – animated, talking picture books which teach kids the joy of reading in a format they’ll love. TumbleBooks are created by adding animation, sound, music and narration to existing picture books in order to produce an electronic picture book which you can read, or have read to you.

Get amongst these free resources for library members.

Winter garden are beautiful with the stark contrast of twig and berry. I am enjoying the bellbirds, fantails and wax eyes visiting my garden seeking out winter flowering shrubs. 

As the cloud level comes down and the weather cools, native birds arrive to take their luck in domestic gardens. If you’re lucky enough to have a neighbour with large trees or you have nectar rich flowering shrubs in your garden you may have had a visit. The liquid sound of bellbirds singing in Christchurch gardens is on the increase. Have you had any visit your garden? 

Investigate these books on: 

Attracting birds to your garden.

Winter gardening

Plants in winter

If you haven’t had any bellbirds visit you could take advantage of the wet ground and plant a tree or shrub with the family. Take a visit to your nearest garden centre and get the children to select their own to plant, break out the gumboots and spades and spend the weekend planting. It’s a great way to get everyone outside enjoying the garden and connecting with nature. The kids will remember the time they planted their tree or shrub and you can compare how much they’ve both grown in years to come. 

Explore our Library Website: 

Sustainable living

Loving winter

Gardening

Autumn Gardening

Winter Gardening from Richard Poole 

Got a pocket sized garden? Then take advantage of Council planting programmes and connect with your local community. It is surprising how many hands make light work big planting schemes, you’ll see the rewards of your labors quicker than you think. A few years is all it has taken to make a change from paddock to park at the Halswell Quarry. 

Christchurch has a proud tradition of public planting days we first celebrated Arbor Day on 4 August 1892. Augustus Florance waxed lyrical and advised on how Arbor Day might be even more successfully observed in the future. 

Christchurch City Council Links: 

Arbor Day

Year of Biodiversity

Volunteer events including clean-ups and tree plantings.

Popular Parks

I remember my children as they got their hands dirty and planted shrubs having enormous fun and enjoying a sausage to celebrate their achievement afterward. Have you ever attended a planting day?

Ken Catran is a national treasure.  He’s written close to fifty books from a range of genres including history, war fiction, thrillers, science fiction, both for children and young adults, and has brought some classic moments to New Zealand television through his work as a writer for Shortland Street and the TV adaptation of Under the Mountain.  I’ve been a fan of his for years and it’s always interesting to see what he will write next as he seems to like trying something different.  His new book, Smiling Jack, is a return to the thriller genre that he is particularly good at.

Set in a rural South Canterbury town, Smiling Jack is the story of Robert whose father and uncle get caught up in some dodgy dealings.  The local police sergeant turns up on Robert’s door-step one night to tell him that the car his father and uncle were in has crashed into the river, killing his uncle and washing his father’s body away.  Robert goes to the crash site to investigate and finds a Jack playing card with a huge grin drawn on it.  This is only the first of the ‘Smiling Jack’ cards that will turn up in this small town as others are killed, connecting the murders back to Robert.  As the body count rises so do the number of suspects that Robert adds to his list as he tries to prove his innocence, including the mysterious head of the Aten cult that seems runs the town.

Ken Catran keeps you guessing right until the end when the Smiling Jack is revealed.  It’s not just for young adults as I’m sure plenty of adults would enjoy it for the thriller that it is.  HarperCollins also have teachers notes available on their website.

As a companion to our Dead Dames series, I thought I’d sneak in a quick blog to celebrate dead dude J.G. Farrell, who last month posthumously won The Lost Man-Booker prize. A change to the Booker prize rules resulted in titles published in 1970 being ineligible for consideration, but forty years later Farrell beat out literary luminaries Muriel Spark, Nina Bawden, Shirley Hazzard, Patrick White and Mary Renault to collect the big prize with his novel The troubles.

Sadly, James Gordon Farrell died in 1979 after a comparatively brief career which saw him win both the Booker Prize in 1973 with The siege of Krishnapur, and The Faber Memorial Prize in 1971, also for The troubles.  Best known for his historical fiction, The Singapore Grip was prescribed reading in my Colonial History course at Edinburgh University, Farrell’s early novels tackled a variety of topics; Martin Sands, the central character in The Lung (1965) had like Farrell contracted polio and been forced to spend long, gloomy periods recuperating in hospital, while A girl in the head (1967) featured a Nabokovian character called Boris, and was set in a fictional English seaside town.

Farrell drowned while fishing near his home at Bantry Bay in Cork.  An editor acquaintance James Hale said “the memorial service was full of the best looking women in publishing”, a charming but perhaps meaningless observation on a creative life cut cruelly short.

For more on J.G Farrell’s life, Lavinia Greacen’s biography is worth a peek, so too is Farrell’s unfinished novel The hill station; while only 19 chapters and fifty-thousand words, it gives an indication of what would have been the next step in his literary story.

A list of notable people who have died recently:

Shusaki Arakawa, 1936-2010
Japanese-born artist who believed he could achieve immortality through a radical new concept in design
Avigdor Arikha, 1929-2010
Artist who recorded the horrors of the Holocaust and enjoyed a productive friendship with Samuel Beckett
Beaver, 1950-2010
New Zealand musician and actress
Miguel Delibes, 1920-2010
Journalist whose novels reflected the upheavals of the Spanish Civil War
Pat Evison, 1924-2010
New Zealand actress
Martin Gardner, 1914-2010
Writer who found fun in figures and fractals and decrypted the codes in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’ fantasies
Richard Gregory, 1923-2010
Experimental psychologist whose fascination with optical illusion informed his work on visual perception
Fred Halliday, 1946-2010
Scholar of international relations whose views on Islam were shaped by his Irish heritage
Dennis Hopper, 1936-2010
Hollywood actor and director
Lena Horne, 1917-2010
Singer and actress who used her talent, tenacity and charm to fight racial prejudice in America
Keith Jessop, 1933-2010
Treasure hunter and deep sea diver who raised ‘Stalin’s gold’ from the wreck of a British warship
Yvonne Loriod, 1924-2010
Musical prodigy who was taught by Messiaen and waited 20 chaste years to become his wife
Merata Mita, 1942-2010
New Zealand film director
Peter O’Donnell, 1920-2010
Creator of Modesty Blaise, the adventuress whose exploits came to rival those of James Bond
Mervyn Probine, 1924-2010
Former State Services Commission Chairman
Lynn Redgrave, 1943-2010
Least favoured member of the acting dynasty who strove to emulate her more famous siblings
Paul Reynolds, 1949-2010
Internet developer, commentator and catalyst
Anneliese Rothenberger, 1926-2010
German operatic lyric soprano
Giulietta Simionato, 1910-2010
Mezzo-soprano who overcame parental indifference to take the stage with Callas and Tebaldi
John Warham, 1919-2010
New Zealand ornithologist

Isn’t it great to see the sun again, my visions of flood, fire and pestilence are retreating with the clouds parting and the rain abating. The news is no longer full of flooding, the river Avon is once more within its banks and the family have had their flu pandemic shots. Equilibrium restored, no longer do I need to resist the temptation to race to the supermarket and stock up the larder with tins of soup and baked beans.

In our modern cities and towns we still have the primal urge to stock pile wood and food for the winter. Our basic urge to survive helps to explain why television programmes and wilderness survival books like those featuring Bear Grylls have a huge following. Survivalist scenarios change from decade to decade; the threat of world war, the nuclear bomb, pollution and today the threat of  peak oil production and global warming. I turn on the news or pick up a magazine to threat of volcanic ash disrupting air travel, speculation over why the Mayan calendar finishes in 2012,  Flash Forward’s latest episode points to the end of the world 2015 and our most popular film Avatar is about big business exploiting a planet. Then of course The Road paints a bleak picture of humanity’s future If you haven’t seen the film, read the book.

Perversely I find there is nothing better for making you feel safe and secure in your own “log cabin” than curling up on the couch this winter with a tale exploring  futuristic views of post-apocalyptic earth. Your favourite hero struggles to deal with environmental disaster and a regressed civilization, as I pretend those few bottles of sauce and jars of bottled fruit I made mark me a true survivor able to fend for myself.  If post-apocalyptic visions aren’t your thing try tales based on prehistoric civilizations where tales of food collecting, trapping and other survival tales abound or try a true tale of human endurance and outdoor life.

• Cormac McCarthy’s The Road The novel paints a bleak vision of a post-apocalyptic America; a land where no hope remains. A man and his son walk alone towards the coast, and this is the moving story of their journey. The Road is an unflinching exploration of human behaviour from ultimate destructiveness to extreme tenderness.
• Jim Crace’s The Pest house America, as we know it, has fragmented. Its machines have stopped, its communities have splintered, its history is forgotten, and the migration has started. This novel presents the story of an America adapting to a ‘medieval future’ without technology, science and social cohesion, and how two people find strength in one another against all odds.

Looking for more? Try:

• Climatic changes Fiction
• Regression (Civilization) Fiction
• Survival skills Fiction
• Apocalyptic fantasies

Search our premium databases for your perfect read

What do you like to read in the wee hours as the winter storm swirls and you are safe in bed???

Loving winter think library

Onward Christian Soldiers was the theme song this weekend as I got on with the five book Christian Fiction challenge under the generalship of Miss Francine Rivers.

Unveiled is the first in her Lineage of Grace series of five novellas (yes I know, a novella but I am truly on a mission here so I’m counting it as one of the five) about biblical women  in the genealogy of Jesus. The others in the series are Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba and Mary.

At the age of 14 Tamar is given in marriage to Er, son of  Judah. Those who were not paying attention at Sunday School or during productions of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat may not remember that Judah was one of bad boy brothers of Joseph,  who sold him into slavery.

Er is an abusive bad-tempered mama’s boy who is struck dead mid-rant. According to custom  Tamar is then given to second son Onan in order to beget a son in Er’s memory. That is not going to happen married to unsavoury old Onan, and clearly the Lord has bigger plans for Tamar than being married to either of these losers, as Onan also dies. Shelah is the third brother but Judah is none too keen on custom by this stage of proceedings so he keeps the two apart. Tamar is sent back to her father’s house where she is treated as little more than a slave before she eventually triumphs.

Unveiled is an engrossing read, short but satisfying.  Tamar didn’t appear in my Child’s Big Book of Bible Stories so I wasn’t familiar with her but she’s a compelling character and Francine Rivers isn’t one of the biggest names in Christian Fiction for nothing. I would read more of her but I am now about to embark on a ‘bonnet read’ – that is what Faith Fiction (this term is preferred to Christian Fiction apparently) publishers call romances set in closed communities like the Amish.

Having finished The night book by New Zealand writer Charlotte Grimshaw, (Winner of the 2008 Montana Book award for her short stories Opportunity),  I can’t decide whether I really liked it or not.  I certainly found that I wanted to finish it, and being a non finisher this is a good sign, but I’m just not one hundred percent sure that it is a great book.  The original story comes directly from her book Singularity, and maybe it works better as a short story? I would certainly be interested to hear what others think.

There is no doubt that the content is topical.  Roza is married to David, who looks as if he will become the next New Zealand Prime Minister.  I spent quite a lot of time trying to work out if there is a resemblance to our Mr Key, and certainly David has come from a tough background and is a self-made man.  You would hope that Roza and Bronagh Key don’t have too much in common though, as Roza turns out to have a bit of a drink and drug problem!

Grimshaw’s  descriptions of National party members in Auckland portrayed them as a fairly self-congratulatory lot.   Perhaps they are typecast –  I don’t really know, having not moved in those circles much myself, but from my lefty point of view I did enjoy the descriptions of party faithful in their ruffled skirts, (Trelise Cooper being a ‘must have’)  middle-aged men with red noses, boring fund-raising events and outright snobbery.

What kept me reading this book though?  The plot is somewhat pedestrian, bordering on the soapy, but there is something about the characters that made me want to find out what happens to them.  I almost found myself cheering on David and Roza as they moved among the rosette festooned party faithful, bathing in the glory of an outright National victory.

Monday 7 June is a holiday on which New Zealand celebrates the birthday of Queen Elizabeth II. 21 April was her actual birthday and she turned 84 (she was born in 1926).

Here’s some things regal:

• Books on Queen Elizabeth II
• The Queen’s page on the official website of the British Monarchy
• Queens of England (The Tudors are perennially popular subjects of both fiction and non fiction - think Mary, Elizabeth I, Anne Boleyn and the rest of Henry VIII’s wives)

Queen’s Birthday honours are traditionally bestowed over the long weekend.

And other queenly things:

• Freddy Mercury & Co
• Queenie in Blackadder the Second – Miranda Richardson squeaks it up as Elizabeth I
• God Save the Queen – The Sex Pistols