Readings.com.au: News

Kitty, Daisy and Lewis

2008-09-06T00:00:00Z

The Durham family three-piece is enjoying lots of attention with their upbeat vibe and youthful enthusiasm. With a passion for music from the forties and fifties, they've become a word-of-mouth wonder in England and their reputation is quickly spreading.

Australian Citizenship Test

2008-09-05T00:00:00Z

I will admit there are a few books that make me groan, even despair, but when the Australian Citizenship Test Practice Questions arrived in store, it made my blood boil. It also made me ashamed. The book contains a series of practice tests designed to help you 'pass the test and go on to become proud Australian citizens'.

Even if there was any validity in it at all, the questions are outrageous. Take for example: What percentage of land in Australia is considered suitable for agriculture? Duh? Or When is Wattle Day? Do you know what Wattle Day is?

My personal favourite though is this: What occurred in 1973 that resulted in the arrival in Australia of migrants from Vietnam, China and India? I didn't know so I checked: In 1967 the dismantling of the White Australia Policy began and in 1973 migration was placed on a totally non-discriminatory basis...

Oh, how far we have fallen...

The Department of Immigration and Citizenship website describes the test as 'an important part of ensuring that migrants have the capacity to fully participate in the Australian community as citizens and maximise the opportunities available to them in Australia. It promotes social cohesion and successful integration into the community.'

What a load of crap. This 'community' has evolved through the lives and labours of millions of people who came here for a better future for themselves and their families and who have made this country what is is today. Not to mention the people who were already here and are still struggling to overcome some of the 'integration' processes enforced upon them.

The test began on the 1 October 2007. It will be a serious source of shame in this country if it makes its first anniversary!

For Whom the Belle Tolls

2008-09-04T00:00:00Z

Resident WonderWoman, Fashionista and steady back flanker Belle, is here in St Kilda on an exchange from Wonderland, the town where the beer is colder, the tans are tannier and the desert stretches from the doorsteps of every house for days on end. In Wonderland, there's only one book, because who wants to read poetry when you could be tanning it up with celebrity footballers. Fashion Wonderland is that book, an assortment of cool looking things drawn in cool ways by people who are way cooler than you. In a moment of sudden introspection, Belle turns to page 53, finds that there is no second paragraph, but reads instead the image of a very beautiful bird who may or may not be a pyromaniac about to burn the cold heart of this melencholy city.

Calder: The Paris Years

2008-09-04T00:00:00Z

This fascinating new book from Yale University Press explores the time Calder spent in Paris and how it informed his future work. The essays examine the social and cultural context as well as Calder's friendships with artists from Man Rey to Mondrian.

Premier's Literary Awards

2008-09-04T00:00:00Z

On Monday night John Brumby announced the Premier's Literary Awards with Helen Garner taking out the fiction prize for The Spare Room.

The other winners are:

Non-fiction: The Ferocious Summer: Palmer's Penguins and the warming of Antarctica by Meredith Hooper
Poetry: Press Release by Lisa Gorton
Drama: When the Rain Stops Falling by Andrew Bovell
Young Adult: Tomorrow all Will Be Beautiful by Brigid Lowry
First Book of History: The Lamb Enters the Dreaming by Robert Kenny
Essay: Trapped in the Aboriginal Reality Show by Marcia Langton
Indigenous Writing: Anonymous Premonitions by Yvette Holt
Music Theatre Script: The Wild Blue by Anthony Crowley
Unpublished manuscript: Going Finish by Mandy Maroney
Writing about Italians in Australia: Head over Heel by Chris Harrison
Journalism: Out of Control by Richard Flanagan

Random Oracles and the Black Market

2008-09-01T00:00:00Z

The psychic astrology guy Jonathon Cainer makes about 3 million bucks a week selling random sentences to strangers. We need that stuff, that little dose of the future, like coffee, to get us through the day. So in the name of free enterprise and good will I offer here; The Black Market Guide to the Future, Happiness and Wisdom. And you need never buy the Hearld Sun again.

Step 1. Choose a book at random

Step 2. Turn to page 53

Step 3. Find the second paragraph

Step 4. Read the first 2 sentences

As an example, I turn to the copy of The Great Wall of China by Franz Kafka I have here:

"You would oblige me if you would be a little more manly, more self assured. What am I to do with a mere shadow of a guest?

hhhmmm...

Bestselling books of the 2008 MWF

2008-09-01T00:00:00Z

The festival is over for another year and here is the complete list of bestselling books from the Readings Festival Bookshop that has been in the Atrium of Fed Square for the past ten days:

The Boat by Nam Le
American Journeys by Don Watson
On Rage by Germaine Greer
When You Are Engulfed In Flames by David Sedaris
Stray Dog Winter by David Francis
The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser
When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson
On Experience by David Malouf
The Whisperers by Orlando Figes
The General: CHERUB Book 10 by Robert Muchamore

Authors of the 2nd Weekend

2008-09-01T00:00:00Z

The Atrium at Federation Square was regularly packed with queues of people waiting to get book signed by various authors outside the Readings bookshop.

Blanche d'Alpuget was signing copies of her little book with a big theme On Longing.

Michelle de Kretser and David Malouf attracted the longest signing queue all weekend.

Kate Atkinson signs her latest book.

Andy Griffiths was playing with the kids at Wordplay @ Artplay over the weekend.

On Reading

2008-09-01T00:00:00Z

There is something beautiful about watching people read. In this lovely collection André Kertész captures photographs of people reading everywhere—on rooftops, in public parks, on crowded streets. Taken between the 1920s and 70s, the photos are also a wonderful form of social history.

Father's DVD Day at Port Melbourne

2008-09-01T00:00:00Z

This year Father's Day brings a couple of DVD bargains (although you don't have to tell dad they were cheap!). For the man who has everything, the boxed DVD set of the television series' Rome or the Band of Brothers will win many gold stars. Both are high on Mike, our DVD specialist's, list of 'must see, must own' and Mike, being a dad as well, might just have the right idea.

Other DVD thoughts for that Sunday morning 'breakfast -in-bed-present' moment include:

The Godfather DVD, as singles or as a set. The movies have all been re-released after a frame by frame restoration and with the complete set Dad will also be able to watch the never previously released documentary The Masterpiece That Almost Wasn't.
In the Shadow of the Moon was released on DVD in February. This brilliant piece of filmmaking covers the years between 1968 and 1972, when nine American spacecraft voyaged to the Moon, and 12 men walked upon its surface. They remain the only human beings to have stood on another world. This doco brings together for the first, and very possibly the last, time surviving crew members from every single Apollo mission which flew to the Moon, and allows them to tell their story in their own words. Do you remember when the world looked up?
Control is the perfect present for any Gen-X dad. It is rock star photographer Anton Corbijn's first feature film and tells the story of the tortured love triangle between Joy Division's frontman Ian Curtis, his young wife and his Belgian lover, and the rise of this seminal British band in the late 1970s.
The Wire is growingly popular. Even though it hasn't screened on Australian free-to-air television as yet, the word of mouth is phenomenal. This highly realistic HBO series follows a single sprawling drug and murder investigation in Baltimore. Told from the point of view of both the police and their targets, the series captures a universe of subterfuge and surveillance, where easy distinctions between good and evil, and crime and punishment, are challenged at every turn.

The Best Book in the Shop! (1)

2008-09-01T00:00:00Z

The impetus for all this strangess was an afternoon I spent a while ago in a vast library, engaged in a competition to find the strangest and most interesting book. If I had of stumbled unknowingly upon W.G.Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, I would have won in a landslide, so deliberately does it seem to have been conceived for just such an occaison. It's also my answer to the much asked question, "what's the best book in the shop?"

The Rings of Saturn is the most remarkable of books for the way it is able to move so brazenly between events, times and topics. If you drift away for a second you’re more than likely to find yourself on your return far from where your concentration left off, in an obscure annul of history, on another continent, contemplating some now long defunct scientific theory.

Sebald’s gift is to transform the job of life, by offering an example of the way memory, history, accumulated knowledge and imagination combine continuously with the present to create a poetic, unreliable and infinitely complex field of experience. For Sebald, the present is radioactive with association. The past is forever invading the present, and the present is always threatening to give way entirely, to become as it inevitably must, the past. The present in Sebald’s work is like the merest of threads which holds his erudite, factually dubious and obsessive digressions together. Yet what actually happens in the present of his books is almost nothing: he takes a walk, catches a train, buys some food, enters an undisclosed delirium in a hospital, wakes, falls back to sleep and goes out for another walk.

Yet what he is able to summon in between these most ordinary (and thus intensely relieving moments) combines to amount to one of the most profoundly moving meditations on the human species and its entropy:

There is no antidote against the opium of time. The winter sun shows how soon the light fades from the ash, how soon night enfolds us. Hour upon hour is added to the sum. Time itself grows old. Pyramids, arches and obelisks are melting pillars of snow. Not even those who have found a place amidst the heavenly constellations have perpetuated their names: Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osiris in the Dog Star. Indeed, old families last not three oaks. To set ones name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer’s day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.

For an excellent discussion of Sebald's work, have a look at Vertigo, or the many interesting plot twist at Self Divider.

Lonely Planet SALE ends this weekend

2008-08-30T00:00:00Z

This weekend is your last chance to get 20% discount on all Lonely Planet guides in store. So if you planning or just dreaming a journey large or small, come in and get inspired.

BBQ for Father's Day

2008-08-30T00:00:00Z

On Saturday 6 September parents and teachers from Albert Park Primary School will be cooking a BBQ outside the Port Melbourne Readings bookshop. All funds raised will go towards the school so come along from 11am, have a sausage and support your local school.

And while you are here, have a look at our Father's Day recommendations for your dad (or any other influential man in your life!).

Two bargain books in the shop this week are Rockwiz, the Q&A book from the fabulous television show (filmed every week at the Espy hotel in St Kilda) and the new James Bond story by Sebastian Faulks Devil May Care. Faulks' addition to the Bond bookshelf returns the glamour to one of our most recognized literary heroes.

Julius Winsome is a stellar piece of fiction by Gerard Donovan, an American writer. Julius lives in a cabin in the hunting heartland of the Maine woods, with only his books and his dog for company. Donovan works through the male psyche in a similar vein to Cormac McCarthy - why are male American writers so good at twining landscape and emotion? A perfect gift for a dad who loves a rich story.

For the perfect crime fiction present, Richard Price's Lush Life is a good cracking read, full of police procedural and the undertow of crime in the 'new' New York.

It is a wise father, the adage tells us, that knows his own child but equally, as John Clanchy's stories in Her Father's Daughter reveal, with great power and insight, it is a wise child that knows her own father. Clanchy, an Australian writer who focuses on short story, has crafted five beautiful tales for fathers and daughters (and mothers) everywhere.

And the last recommendation, but by no means the least, even though he is everywhere (including the Melbourne Writers' Festival) at the moment, is David Sedaris, the reigning king of the poignantly absurd. His most recent book, When You Are Engulfed In Flames, triumphs with essays on his family, his travels and of his ruminations.

Happy Father's Day!

Robert Muchamore @ MWF

2008-08-29T00:00:00Z

UK author Robert Muchamore has been in Australia for the Melbourne Writers Festival and is now embarking on a nation-wide tour to promote The General - book number ten in the CHERUB series, massively popular with teenagers across the globe. I spoke to him just after his final session in the Schools Program at the MWF about the special CHERUB novella Dark Sun which was published in the UK as part of World Book Day earlier this year.

Have you seen many copies of Dark Sun brought in to be signed during the festival?

I’ve signed a fair few but there is a level of frustration with the kids because its not just on general sale and not every kid can get it. So what we’ll do – we have to wait a year after the book day thing has happened because that’s the deal we signed with them in Britain – but what I think we’ll do is have it as a PDF download on the website so every CHERUB fan will eventually just be able to download it and read it.

Is this your first trip to Australia?

I’ve been to Australia before. I’ve not done author events. I’ve got a sister who lives up in Queensland so I’ve been to visit her four or fives times over the years. But this is the first time I’ve done an author visit with a festival and signings.

How have you found the Melbourne fans?

They seem to be incredible. I’ve just done a signing down there [at Fed Square] and kid after kid was pulling out battered old [CHERUB] copies that they’ve all read 20 times and stuff like that which I think is fantastic.

Any thoughts on the writers’ festival itself?

It’s interesting because I did a radio interview yesterday and Rosemary was in the studio before I was and she was comparing it to the Edinburgh festival in Britain which they say is the biggest in the world. But I was at the Edinburgh festival two or three weeks ago and to be honest the size of the festival doesn’t matter. What matters is that you bring a good audience to the authors that you’ve got…With Melbourne you’ve just got a fantastic setting, everything is organised well, all the events seem to be sold out – or at the least very popular. It just seems incredible. And even if it’s not the biggest in the world, it’s certainly one of the best.

What the question from readers that you’ve come across the most here?

I think every single session we’ve had the ‘Will there be a CHERUB film released?’ and we’re hoping for 2010.

What kind of involvement will you have in the CHERUB film?

They did offer me a chance to write the script but at the time we actually sold the film rights the books hadn’t been out for as long and I still had another job and there was just no way that on top of writing the book and having the job I could do it. Probably if they offered me now I’d have a stab at writing the script. But the way it worked out and the timing of it, I just wouldn’t have been available to do it. So basically my involvement is I’ll just be a consultant if they want me to be a consultant.

Part of the inspiration for the CHERUB series was your previous job as a Private Investigator. Have you had other jobs that could have also inspired a collection of novels?

No, I’ve only really ever actually had two jobs in my life. The first one I worked in a camera shop when I was a teenager – as a Saturday job – and when I first left school that became a full-time job. And then I just got this very unusual job as a Private Investigator usually reserved for police officers. Basically they took me on as a teenager because they wanted a dog’s body: someone to take the post, answer the telephone, make their cups of coffee – and that was how I got into as a kind of office junior.

Do you think kids are drawn to the power that the kids in CHERUB have as spies?

With any children’s story the children have to be empowered in someway. I mean, if you actually wrote a book about a completely realistic teenager’s life – unless there’s some kind of heinous social drama like a mother being murdered or something like that – there’s actually not much going on: they get up, they go to school, they come home, they hang out with their mates, sometimes maybe they have a girlfriend or a fight at school, but I mean it isn’t that compelling. Most ordinary adult lives are not that compelling either. And with kids the only way you can really make the story interesting is if they’re much more empowered than kids in the real world.

Do you have a favourite CHERUB character?

Favourite CHERUB character is defintely Lauren – James’s sister – and the simple reason for that is that it’s good fun writing the scenes because they’ve got a sort of brother-sister chemistry between them where they tease each other or wind each other up and that’s just really good fun to write.

And finally do you have a favourite font to write in?

The font I use is, Adobe Garamond. But it has be Adobe Garamond not a fan one that comes from ebay.

Outside Kevin '08

2008-08-29T00:00:00Z

Keep your eyes out for our darling Kev the courier - keeping the wheels turning and books transferring between our Carlton and Federation Square stores for the extent of the Festival. With a specially designed Readings Crumpler bag and bright orange flag, he is hard to miss!

Hamlet, Enid Blyton and Me - John Marsden with Mike Shuttleworth: Session Review

2008-08-29T00:00:00Z

Looking at John Marsden, I imagine that if I were close enough, I would see remnants of chalk dust on his clothes. (Or maybe, in these modern times, smudges of whiteboard marker.) He looks exactly like the school teacher that he is: maroon cable-knit jumper worn loosely over a checked shirt; wispy grey hair; a shuffling, bear-like amble across the stage. His easy manner with the schoolchildren massed before him is borne of long habit. You can see their teacher custodians relax as he briefly takes over.

First, though, session chair Mike Shuttleworth (from the State Library of Victoria’s Centre for Youth Literature) introduces John and provides some background on his reinvented version of Hamlet. He tells us that Marsden has just spent seven years writing it, and reminds us that the original version of the story predated Shakespeare by 400 years – and just ten years before the Bard’s version, a playwright named Thomas Kidd wrote his own.

Marsden begins by telling us that stories always remind us of other stories, and we are all storytellers in our way. “What we call conversations are exchanges of stories.” He riffs into a strong of invented conversation stories, kid-style, including things like skateboards. “There are the big stories but there are also the thousands of little stories we carry within that are so easily forgotten.”

“Our memories shape us, define us. Our stories tell us who we are. And our stories are unique. Many cultures, like the Aboriginals, didn’t write down stories, but retold them.”

He reflects that the original story of Hamlet is lost, and perhaps oral story telling is in some ways better than the Western tradition of writing things down, because it’s not so easily lost as manuscripts or books (like those in the lost library of Persepolis).

“Writing is my preferred method of creative expression. Some people dance. Not me. If I did that, I’d fall off the stage.” The sea of school uniforms ripples with laughter in response.

He moves on to tell us about how he used to make up ghost stories when teaching at a bush school, approximately 20 years ago. “There’s something quite delightful about terrifying people, I find.” Years later, he revisited the school and found that his stories still existed – albeit in a different form. They survived as truth, as living legends. He marvelled as he listened to tales that he had invented, but didn’t let on about their origin.

“Stories are about interruptions to routine.” If you get up for breakfast and everyone is there, eating, that’s not a story, he explains. But if you get up and your family has disappeared, that’s an interruption to routine – and a story!

Hamlet is a series of interruptions to routine. First, his father dies. Second, his mother remarries. And third, his father reappears, urging him to avenge his death. “MAJOR interruption to routine.”

Stories are also about changes of status, Marsden continues. Sometimes it works out well, sometimes badly. “One of the great lessons in life is learning how changes of status work.” He points out that, as the author and someone older than his audience, he has a higher status. “And because I’m a male and it’s 2008. To some extent, that’s still the way things work.”

“We love it when people lose status.” This, he says, can easily happen. “In writing a book, understanding status is everything.”

Hamlet is a young man with high status who is threatened by the actions of his stepfather and trying to deal with a very high status father figure. Hamlet has three father figures (his father, Polonius, and his stepfather/uncle). He kills two of them. “Maybe Shakespeare had problems with his own father,” Marsden jokes.

We’re all engaged with status battles with our parents, teachers and siblings, he says. Boys are engaged with status battles with their fathers that “they must win”. That battle comes for every young man. It may be a game of chess or tennis, or a fight. “If the day comes and the boy loses, he’ll forever live in the shadow of his father.”

He sums up with a few choice words on the book: “Hamlet is about identity, love, sex and becoming who you want to be. It’s about dealing with memories that your parents have passed on to you. It’s about fathers and sons.”

It’s question time. I have to say that high school students seem (judging from the few Schools Program sessions I sat in on) to ask much smarter questions than the grown-ups do.

“What was your status battle with your father?”

A curious hush descends. Marsden pauses for just a fraction of a second before answering.

“It was over the fact that my father used to beat me quite often and I said ‘you’re not going to do that anymore’. I was about 14. It was one of the defining moments of my life.” Pause. “I hope nobody here has to go through anything like that.”

September Book Clubs at Port Melbourne

2008-08-29T00:00:00Z

September is shaping up for some heated discussions in all five of our book clubs.

Sally's Wednesday 3 September book club will discuss Alfred and Emily by Doris Lessing while her other three clubs (2pm and 5.30pm Thursday 4 September and 6pm Thursday 11 September) are discussing The Boat by Nam Le.

Justine's book club, on the third Monday (15 September this month) at 6.30pm, will discuss David Sedaris' new bestseller, When You Are Engulfed by Flames.

Stay tuned for updates on what the book club members thought about these great reads.

Buttons with Miranda July

2008-08-28T00:00:00Z

Miranda July: you either love her or hate her. I'm definitely of the loving variety. And I found this weird but cute video done by July called How To Make A Button. As I said, weird but cute.

Love TV @ the Festival Club

2008-08-28T00:00:00Z

Augusten Burroughs was the star of Love TV last weekend and this weekend Love TV does it's thing again at the MWF Festival Club. Located in the Function Space at ACMI, the Festival Club is housing the post-daylight drinks and entertainment at this year's festival and Love TV is worth dropping by to see.

Love TV host Aphrodite interviews authors and festival guests from within the tiny Love TV tent and the footage is projected live onto the big screen in the Festival Club. It's a contradiction in style - an intimate, shoulder-rubbing interview, shared with the whole Festival Club - that should not be missed.

Tonight (Thursday) Matthew Condon and Anya Ulinich drop into the Love TV and on Friday night it's Mark Sarvas and Hannah Tinti, and Saturday night Elly Varrenti does the honours. Check out all the Festival Club details here.

Characters with Spine - Melina Marchetta & Rachel Cohn: Session Review

2008-08-28T00:00:00Z

Melina Marchetta and I had to contain our girlish fandom at sharing the stage with hip YA author, Rachel Cohn, all the way from the US of A, or more precisely the very cool NYC.

We’d already gushed over having to order her latest book in from the States because we couldn’t possibly wait for an Australian edition and ‘OMG wasn’t it amazing?’ (note to all publishers – publish it here please!) and I’d gotten slightly obsessed looking up her blog posts. Luckily she blogs, updates her site and partakes in an awful lot of ‘myspacing’ as writerly procrastination.

Delightfully, the love was being reciprocated: Rachel features the brand spanking new US edition of Melina’s On the Jellicoe Road on her webpage and I’ve even been offered the sofa bed in her undoubtedly cool rent-controlled Manhattan apartment.

A session on characters couldn’t have been more suited to these two. Most Aussie readers know Melina’s beautiful Francesca from Saving Francesca or Looking for Alibrandi’s Josie, and Rachel’s characters share the same raw honesty combined with sassiness.

Melina said her ‘characters come calling’ and Rachel noted that for the protagonist of her Gingerbread series Cyd Charisse, ‘it was just a question of when she would come and kidnap my attention again’. So it seems that being ambushed by strong characters is a common way of getting started.

We talked a lot about taking characters into dark territory. Not that either of these gals has shied away from big topics before (suicide in Looking for Alibrandi; splintered families in Rachel’s Gingerbread and The Steps series; displacement for many of their characters) but their latest books, Rachel’s You Know Where to Find Me (the aforementioned had-to-be-ordered-from-the-US novel) and Melina’s 2007 On the Jellicoe Road really move into darksville. I had to take to bed to finish You Know Where to Find Me and Rachel admitted that writing it was her hardest task yet.

For Melina, her just-gone-to-the printer Finnikin of the Rock provided other challenges: a move into the realm of fantasy and a book classified as ‘crossover’ – those YA novels that cross over to adult audiences. We all agree that many YA books deserve an adult audience, as well as the critical acclaim and attention afforded ‘serious grown up authors’.

We didn’t get to the suggested theme of the session ‘Learn how to create characters that spring from the pages’ (the clock beat us), but I’m sure the audience left with many valuable tips for writing. There were questions on where you write (in a writers’ room with no internet connection for Rachel), the editing process (‘hard work but ultimately satisfying’ for Melina) and whether swearing in books is ok (‘Fuck yeah’ according to Rachel).

What we did get was a sense of the startlingly talented, strong and feisty women behind some of the best YA fiction around. And that’s my absolutely unbiased opinion.

The Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist movie, co-authored by Rachel with David Levithen, is out in Australia January 2009.

Nikki Anderson is a member of the festival’s Schools Programming Committee.