Murakami unleashed: Auckland Writers Festival programme is out

Last night the programme for the 2015 Auckland Writers Festival was released and people gave a collective squee. Haruki Murakami is the headliner. This is doubly exciting – he is one of the best writers of our time and he doesn’t appear much on the literary festival circuit. We are not worthy, but we are excited.

And there are more names, names, names:

• David Walliams
• Alan Cumming
• Atul Gawande
• Helen Macdonald
• Tiny Ruins
• David Mitchell
• Captain Underpants (aka Dav Pilkey)
• Nalini Singh

Explore the full Auckland Writers Festival programme.

Here’s how Twitter is responding – with the hashtag #AWF15 as your gateway to the good stuff.

Squeaky clean reading?

Holy Sh*t: A brief history of swearing

Today I stumbled upon an app that I can quite safely say I will never use. Clean Reader can instantly sanitize any of the books in its store to make them squeaky clean and free of profanity.

Occasionally we get a customer who does feel that a book contains too much bad language.

I have read this book from cover to cover and it is disgusting!”

Libraries have, and always will be about choice. I choose not to read nasty psychokiller thrillers but I don’t mind a bit of cussing. I don’t have a problem with someone else wanting to read these books – actually that isn’t quite true as I really do think they are mysoginistic and nasty, but I will always defend the right for the library to purchase these books and for our customers to read them.

So don’t expect to see a clean reader attached to our eBooks, but it is out there if you need it. I wonder if there is an app that can remove nasty sadistic psychos, probably not. Maybe I could make one?