Building the Government Life Insurance building

The Post Office tower is dwarfed in this view, taken from the top of the Government Life Insurance building in the Square  [March 1963]

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The answer to book hold purgatory

Recently, there was media interest in the amount of people putting The Hunger Games series of books on hold. Apparently in the Auckland Libraries, over 2500 are waiting for the first book in the trilogy and here at Christchurch City Libraries, to get your hands on a paper copy of the first book in the series, you will have to wait behind 285 other keen readers. A book chain even jumped in on the news and offered 30% off the titles for a week if you produced you library card. Clever.

So, I decided to think sideways as I often do without trying. I’m hoping to read Catching Fire, the second book in the series by Suzanne Collins, and I thought to myself… use the E-Reader Luke, oops, I mean purplerulz!

So I checked it out. For the paper copies, there are 180 people waiting for Catching Fire, but only 20 waiting for the E-Book version on Overdrive! Oh yay. Now, it maybe that there are more paper copies compared with E-Book copies and you only have 21 days to read an e book compared with 28 days for a ‘real book’, but I did get my hands on an e book copy within 3 weeks, so I thought that was pretty good going.

If you have an e reader or wish to download onto your computer or ipad and read it there, do remember this option when wanting to put holds on your favourites, especially if they are also everyone else’s favourite. You can find out more about e-books here .

Jeffrey Eugenides: the interview

On the day that I was down to chat to Jeffrey Eugenides, he had already been interviewed by Kim Hill early that morning, been a participant in the session The Future of the Novel, signed about a gazillion copies of his book and somehow lost his assistant.

Even though I bet all he wanted by that stage was a beer and a burger, he was easy to chat to – forthcoming and attentive, the perfect gentleman. But it does go some way toward explaining why (in the photograph that was taken when we’d finally worked out where he was next expected to be), the poor man looks quite curdled by it all!

In fact, he looked a lot like the Talking Heads quote in the front of his book The Marriage Plot:

And you may ask yourself, Well how did I get here?
And you may tell yourself,
This is not my beautiful house.
And you may tell yourself,
This is not my beautiful wife

On with the interview:

Christchurch Library users love your books! One of the questions I have been asked recently is: “If I loved Middlesex, will I like The Marriage Plot?” Do you think this new book will appeal to your existing fans or will it attract a whole new readership?

Well, my books tend to be not very like each other. So each time I write a book, sometimes I change my style – the way I write the book – so if someone is looking for Middlesex 2 they might be disappointed. But if they like my writing and my sensibility, the reading experience my books have provided them, I would think that they will also like this book. In some ways I think it is my best book, so I hope that they would like it, but sometimes people have a huge affection for Middlesex and it might be more difficult for them to love this book.

One of the differences between the two books is that Middlesex has a huge cast of characters and The Marriage Plot has a focus on only three main characters. Did that change your writing a lot?

This book is very much about character and it is the first time I have gone deeply, deeply into the psychology of people. The canvas in Middlesex is broader – it’s more populated but the characterisation is not as searching. Whereas in The Marriage Plot, I’ve dug quite deeply into what these characters think and feel, the verisimilitude of those characters in other words.

Perhaps that’s why I ended up being able to identify with all the main female characters in the book in one way or another. Madeleine when I was younger, her mother now and even her sister, Allie, who appears about three quarters of the way through the book.

Well, I hope that means that it will be a relatively easy book for people to find some points of connection with – certainly that was one of my intentions.

Are you a re-reader of books?

If I have a book that I love, I read it many times so I can find out more about how it is put together. When I first read a book I’m just figuring out what the story is, taking in the book but when I read it the third and fourth time I start to see the architecture of it. This is very helpful for me as a writer.

I’m not normally a re-reader of books, there is just so much other stuff out there that I want to get stuck into. But I did re-read parts of The Marriage Plot because I struggled to synthesize the literary aspects of the book (Madeleine’s research and readings) and the plot line at the same time. Have other people had a similar difficulty?

Well, I think there are two ways of reading the book. A certain kind of reader likes to read just for the story and another one can read it for the dual levels, the literary metatextual structure of the book, that the book is commenting in some ways on the traditional marriage plot. There is no right or wrong way to read a book, in my opinion.

Would my reading of The Marriage Plot been enhanced had I more knowledge of the writers that Madeleine was studying in her Semiotics course?

I don’t think so. I know that some readers become somewhat intimidated in so-called Books About Books. In the case of The Marriage Plot, the reference to the books Madeleine is studying is really there to help the reader enter into that world. They are like the props in that world. You don’t have to know how the props are made or where they come from, you just need to use the props to help position yourself, as the reader, in a certain time and place. So I would say, do not worry about any of that. The books are just the furniture of the novel.

It took nine years to write this book. Madeleine must feel like a part of your family. Do you ever wonder what would happen to her next?

No, she does not live outside of the book for me and when I finish a story about any character, it is because their story is finished. I am not a writer of sequels.

Madeleine is a very reactive character. Almost all her decisions are made for her by the men in her life. I worry about her, I really do.

Yes this is a woman who thinks she can save a troubled man by loving him, she is in a way ensnared by her feelings to be good and helpful. But I do think she gets some degree of clarity about herself by the end of the novel.

The Marriage Plot is a great read and, I think, it has the best ending ever. Tell us a little bit more about how you got to this perfect ending.

I certainly didn’t build up to it, it really came to me right at the end. And I must say I am very pleased with it as well.

What’s the main difference, in your opinion between The Pulitzer Prize and The Man Booker Prize?

That’s easy, the Booker Prize we care about in America but the Pulitzer Prize is not particularly cared about in Britain.

If you could go back to university now, and study anything that you liked, what would it be?

Can I be young?

Yes I’ll let you be young!

Science and history – I would broaden my education.

How important have libraries been in your life?

We had a bookish home in my childhood. We had lots of books on our shelves and this had a fairly profound effect on me. But we did use the public libraries as well.

What’s Princeton Public Library like?

My daughter’s there all the time. It’s a beautiful place but libraries are not as quiet as they used to be. I miss that, I remember when they were church quiet, there was a sense of sanctity about them. That said, in Princeton, the library is the anchor of the community – people of all ages are going there all the time. I believe you can borrow e-books from libraries now, I am worried about that, how e-book use in the future will affect writers’ incomes and hence their ability to write.

Then out of the blue Jeffrey Eugenides asked me a question. He said:

Have you ever fasted?

A girl can only take this one of two ways: you look as if you need to (fast that is) or: I’m getting really hungry now. Time to end the interview methinks!

The soup kitchen? Men Adrift

This session featuring Charlotte Wood , A.D. Miller and Roddy Doyle felt, to use a culinary simile, a little like a canny cook was boiling up the chicken bones from last night’s roast dinner to extract every last bit of flavour to make stock for the soup pot.

These three tasty authors have been kept pretty busy with their individual sessions and a variety of panel presentations but the festival programmers perhaps wanted even more bangs for their buck. The sometimes tenuous theme for discussion was on the “lost” men at the centre of each of these authors’ stories.

The session, while both interesting and entertaining was a flavoursome but thin consommé rather than the hearty broth maybe intended. Thematic cohesion proved a little elusive although some interesting audience questions on the definition of modern masculinity and fictional templates of manhood helped pull the session into more shape.

Notable moments included Roddy Doyle’s observation that five-aside football is the male equivalents of the female book club and the question posed in one of his short stories from Bullfighting “Is a bad relationship better than none?”

AD Miller captured the female vote when he said “women have a tougher time than men and I doesn’t have much time for men whinging about how terrible their lot in life is.”

Well said my man!

Three fantastic authors but a theme that seemed slightly adrift.

The great big New Zealand singalong

A few years ago at a music librarians conference I was introduced to a musical phenomenon that was entirely new to me. The community singing movement.

It originated in the USA and was established in New Zealand in the 1920s. It became really popular in the 1930s when whole theatres, town halls and cinemas could be standing room only for the sessions. Basically it was the singalong around the piano expanded to gargantuan proportions.

The sessions were drop ones at a lunch time and you could bring along your knitting and your lunch and have a good old singalong under the direction of a leader and accompanist. All the old favourites were trotted out and hits from the radio and everyone had a good time. I suppose it was the 1930s version of karaoke.

From today’s perspective it might seem the sort of thing Patsy would be horrified to have accidently enjoyed while sober, but it was considered community building and gave many people something positive in their day during the dark times of depression and war.

As time went by competitions and auctions were added and passing celebrities inveigled into attending. It petered out everywhere but Dunedin. They kept it going to the 1960s).

There is an interesting paper ‘And Everybody Sang’ – Community Singing in Wellington, New Zealand by
Michael Brown.

If you want to revive the tradition at your place you can find  Singalong  and Karaoke CDs  in our collection.