Love – in all shapes and sizes

Every so often a list of  new library titles or library recommended reads pops into my email box courtesy of the Libraries Email Newsletters.  This is a fantastic feature which results in me placing a flurry of holds on what usually turn out to be great reads.  Currently I’m reading this one:

T.S. Spivet’s fans at the Smithsonian Institution consider him a cartography genius–in fact, they’ve awarded him a prestigious prize they’d like him to accept in person, complete with a keynote speech for the celebration. What they don’t know is that he’s only 12 years old. But he’s nevertheless determined to get from his parents’ Montana ranch to D.C., and so he hops a train to begin his crossing of America. Along the way this precocious boy muses on everything from his impending fame to the garbage found on city streets and comes across some equally wide-ranging travellers. Cleverly illustrated, annotated, and printed, this debut is one of a kind.

The Selected works of T.S, Spivet is a book with everything; a humorous coming-of-age novel featuring a child prodigy with definite leanings towards Aspergers, a mysterious family, trains, science, insects, adventure and within its margins delightful little maps, diagrams, anecdotes and explanations.  It also has a rather bizarre and enchanting website.

It’s a book I currently adore (and I haven’t finished it yet – the ending could be dreadful – don’t tell me!).  Yet, for 3 weeks the book languished on my bookshelf – un-opened and unappreciated. Why?  Well, because, it’s not the cover exactly… it’s the shape – it’s the wrong shape!  It has the shape and feel of a text-book – it has the squarish weight of a history text-book whose tedium has not yet  enabled passage beyond the Tudors and you remain trapped in a dreary struggle to remember the exact order of luckless royal wives.

Why should the shape of my reading material matter so much? But it does (and it’s a pain to lug around on the bus).  This – and the title  - conjuring images of dull, 18th century poetry by someone you are probably supposed to have heard of but haven’t – must make it a booksellers nightmare.  Indeed, I saw a huge pile of them for sale in the remainders book shop.  Which is why Libraries Email Newsletters offer a brilliant way to discover the joys of the uglies you’d never choose to pick up in the library but could become your own true (book) loves.

P.S. What books have you reluctantly read – only to find a true gem?

 

Not a shy African woman

An hour with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 

Chaired by Paula Morris this session provided another full-house and an insightful look at the issues of interest to this relatively new and exciting author. The thing around your neck, Chimamanda’s first collection of short stories, explores cultural clash and the migrant experience, building on the success of her earlier prize-winning novels Half of a yellow sun and Purple hibiscus

Paula Morris opened her questions by asking Chimamanda whether she was conscious of an African and Nigerian identity while growing up in a middle-class home in Nsukka. Chimamanda answered that she had no real sense of being anything other than Ebu, a Nigerian tribe, and that it was only when she left Nigeria to attend John Hopkins University in the US that she was viewed as African and suddenly expected by her teachers and fellow student to be an authority on all things African. She added that while to some extent she had to accept the label of Nigerian and African writer, she felt uncomfortable representing a whole continent. She also talked of having the authenticity of her first novel Purple hibiscus questioned by a white, male American university professor because her African characters drove cars and weren’t starving!

Spending half her time in the US, Chimamanda believes allows her to look at Nigeria from the outside, making her clearer eyed. This sentiment was also echoed in a later session by Tash Aw who also finds his voluntary exile in London affords him more clarity in analysing his home country of Malaysia. But Nigeria was she said “where her heart is” and while her country often infuriates her she belongs there and “loves it very deeply”.

Chimamanda was outed as an Enid Blyton fan, she joked she was reading the Famous Five back in her hotel room, and that her teenage years were spent in the quest for lashings of ginger beer. The fact she had never actually managed to taste ginger beer was remedied by one of the ARWF crew who brought her a Bundaberg, how topping! When questions were opened to the floor one gentleman complimented her on her modest demeanour while waiting to come on stage and called her a traditional “shy African woman”, a compliment Chimamanda was not having a bar of. Talented, beautiful, intelligent and not shy, an hour with Chimamanda was a real delight.

 

Journeys in the Past

I’ve recently read or re-read three books that deal with new aspects of familar subjects: Ancient Egypt, the Discovery of America and Pompeii.

Mary Beard’s Pompeii : the life of a Roman town,  follows a book that I thought was the definitive work on the subject released only in 2005. That book was readable and informative. However, true to form Beard’s managed to make one reassess preconceptions of an overworked topic. She  critically reassesses the casualty rate (many of the bodies were those of people returning after the eruption), the location of bodies (cynically noting how the discovery of corpses seemed to coincide with the arrival of prominent visitors in the eighteenth century), makes one think twice about the alleged bawdiness of the city (not every other house was a brothel) and points out that the life of the place was not fixed: the buildings were a confused melange of several centuries rather than a town whose buildings all date from the same decade.  Her main success is in bringing the place and its people alive and making one think twice before accepting the conclusions drawn by archaeologists.

A similar achievement is performed by my other two authors:

 

America in music

It’s a big old Stars and Stripes, star spangled banner day today as Barack Obama became the 44th President of the United States. There was a lot of talk about the founding fathers, the spirit of America … and Aretha Franklin rocking the joint in a hat with a big bow on it. And spookily enough a mashup utilising David Bowie’s This is not America is playing on my headphones.

Which has got me thinking about American music. Who are the bands and the artists that spring to mind?

• Bruce Springsteen, troubadours and poets like Bob Dylan
•  Motown  (the sound of the Motor City record label still sounds righteous at the age of 50. A recent Guardian poll tried to find the top Motown tune … what a task. I plumped for “Just my imagination” by The Temptations)
• Madonna, Michael Jackson,  Hip hop and rap, Run DMC,  The Mamas and the Papas, Janis Joplin, Country,  Dolly Parton, Robert Johnson, Kanye West, Diana Ross, Elvis, Gershwin, Cole Porter … ok now I have made my head spin.

What song says America to you??

 

A small book with big ideas.

Andrew Sean Greer’s novel, The Story of a Marriage has created quite a stir in the reviewing world.  Some have loved it, some have labelled it trite and predictable.  I seem to fit somewhere in the middle, veering towards the former.

This is a small book that is big on themes and ideas.  It is certainly a story of a marriage, be it a rather unconventional one, but is is also a story of the effects of war, of 1950s America, prejudice, parenting and what it means to love. 

Seeing is believing: How Hollywood taught us to stop worrying and love the fifties.

Perhaps the book tries to cover too many themes, and that certainly has been some of the criticism, but the 1950s were a time when issues such as racism and sexuality were beginning to fester, when the world was full of suspicion and fear, as well as recovering from two wars. 

Greer  manages to inject all of these issues into his book via the main character Pearlie.  As the book progresses we realise that although she is naive, she unwittingly represents major upheaval, and is symbolic of everything that 1950s America was fearful of. 

 It is hard to write about this book without giving away the plot and some of the surprises, however I can say that it grew on me, and that I was intrigued to find out what would ultimately happen to this rather tenuous, but strangely compelling marriage.

 

How to Read Like a President

Jon Meachem has written a fascinating article in the New York Times How to Read Like a President. He surveys the reading of a number of presidents and talks to the current presidential contenders, asking them what books were most important to them.

John McCain mentioned Hemingway (in particular the character of Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls), the stories of W. Somerset Maugham, The Great Gatsby, All Quiet on the Western Front and James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, especially The Last of the Mohicans. He likes William Faulkner  especially  The Bear and  Turnabout.  McCain speaks of nonfiction less often but he has read — twice — Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Barack Obama’s list includes The Federalist, Jefferson, Emerson, Lincoln, Twain, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, King’s Letter From Birmingham Jail, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Non American writers include Graham Greene  The Power and the Glory and The Quiet American, Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward and Gandhi’s auto­biography. In theology and philosophy Obama mentioned Nietzsche, Niebuhr and Tillich. Obama cites John Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle, about a labor dispute; Robert Caro’s Power Broker, about Robert Moses; and Studs Terkel’s Working. But he also includes Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments on his list.

Both candidates are fond of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, a classic of American political writing about a corrupt Southern governor and based on the real life Huey Long of Louisiana.

Of course, in these days of spin, you might suspect that the reading list was carefully chosen by someone else to create the right impression but read the whole article and judge for yourself.

It doesn’t mention anything about George W Bush’s reading….

 

The wonderful world of Louis Theroux

I am an unabashed fan of unflappable roving reporter Louis Theroux.  For those of you unfamiliar with his genius, Theroux (son of author Paul) specialises in documenting the wacky, weird, and extreme in modern American society.  As a Brit he takes a calm and generally non-judgemental approach with his “subjects” whether they be neo-Nazis, Madams, or motivational speakers. 

The beauty of Theroux is in his willingness to throw himself in at the deep end and explore different lifestyles while never flinching from asking the hard questions of the people he encounters there.

I am delighted to find that from next week TVNZ are screening Inside story : Louis Theroux.  This four part series has Louis earnestly investigating America’s most hated family, gambling in Las Vegas, plastic surgery, and life behind bars.  The call of the weird : travels in American subcultures is his book in which he chronicles some of the more memorable oddballs that he has come across over the years and it’s a very entertaining and enlightening exploration of the quirky and unusual characters he’s come to know.  A great read for new Theroux fans or old.