The Bookshow Blog

Travel reading

Monday, July 26th, 2010

I haven’t even begun to do my packing as I escape the winter blues and head north for a brief  Asian adventure in two days, but already I am contemplating what books I should pack with me on my journey. Picking the perfect book is like choosing a meal- it needs to fit the occasion, your mood, your circumstances and of course be delicious.

So what is the perfect travel book? Beside the usual adventures involved in travelling, there are all those interminable waits at airports and langourous afternoons at hotels and beaches. In this case a good travel book must operate like a good friend.

It must provide absorbing company which enhances the pleasure and leisure of the moment but also provide relief from intolerable waits in  transit and in high altitude. If possible a good travel book has some link to the destination in question, is light, breezy, personal and engrossing, although sometimes the opportunity of a 7 to 14 hour block of flight time reading can be an irresistible opportunity to tackle that classic on your shelf you’ve been wanting to get around to.

I spent my last flight feeling elated as I finally read (and loved) my friend’s present of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.
(more…)

Tags: Asia, Pushkin, travel reading
Posted in Reading | 2 Comments »

Writing, procrastination and social media

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

I’ve commented before on the fabulousness of social media in saving the world etc and am a great fan (despite being on a protest sabbatical from spacebook) but I haven’t discussed the evil side, in particular its effect on (ahem ok I am using the word) ’serious’ reading and writing generally (at least for me).

We know social media has plenty of pros. There’s the ability to share your work and read other people’s work. There’s the feedback and interaction. There is the ability to find stories and contacts and check out trends. There is the  accessibilityand exposure to different ideas and people instantly and constantly. This should all be excellent for creativity and writing generally right?

Yes and no, for me anyway. This is where the evil side comes in. The side that cuts your attention span so that if you are not constantly bombarded with a cacaphonous stream of message relayed through various technologies you get impatient. The side that has this dumbing down effect where the more information you have, the less you know. The side where  you lazily let your opinion on a complex political or social issues  be summed up in a status update or140 character tweet (why bother writing that 1000 word feature or opinion piece I was planning when I could avail myself of such a witty and succint mode of self-expression?) Not to mention the massive waste of time spent procrastinating over the pointless and inane.
(more…)

Tags: creativity, internets, social media, writing
Posted in Online literary world | 7 Comments »

Life’s too short for boring books

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

Let’s pretend the book as a potential partner. 

The blurb might be the first conversation. If that’s got you hooked then you move on to the first chapter, kind of like the first date.

I have a reading list that grows every day and I’m beginning to lose patience with reading new books. If a book doesn’t grab me by the first chapter, I’m dumping it. Sometimes I stop on the second page. It’ll be like leaving a partner halfway through a first date. Am I being too harsh? If a book’s not doing it for you, when do you stop? Five chapters? Five pages? Five words?

Sometimes you just have to know when to stop reading a boring book. Unless you’re reading for educational purposes or a book club, is there a need to keep reading?  I must admit that I’m inclined to give bought books more of a chance because I want value for money. I’m also much more patient with books that have been recommended by friends.
(more…)

Tags: boring books, challenging books, Reading
Posted in Reading | 4 Comments »

In praise of second-hand booksellers

Monday, July 12th, 2010

A few years ago, I worked in Canberra, around the corner from two of the ACT’s best second-hand bookshops. This was rather dangerous. On my lunch breaks, I would scamper off to wander the aisles of pre-loved books, and more often than not, I’d return to work with an armful of new and distracting reading material. At least it wasn’t a particularly expensive addiction, and buying second-hand books left me with a beatific feeling, as if I’d done a service to the world comparable to recycling rubbish.

Living in Cambridge, I am lucky to be close to what must be the home of second-hand book shops: Cecil Court and Charing Cross Road, near Leicester Square Tube station in London. For the booksellers in this area, there is no interest too specialised or obscure, no hobby too strange to prevent it having a bookshop catering to it. The shops range from Travis and Emery Music Bookshop, which sells new and antiquarian sheet music, books on music and ephemera such as opera bills and posters, to Motor Books, which stocks resources on all things related to transport. For those more interested in children’s literature, there’s David Drummond, which stocks playbills and books relating to drama. For the true antiquarian book aficionado, there’s Goldsboro Books, which only stocks first-edition fiction.
(more…)

Tags: book shops, second-hand book shops
Posted in Reading | 3 Comments »

The sound of literary blogging

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

A post on our literary blog about literary blogging with literary bloggers Sophie Cunningham from Meanjin’s Spike and Max Magee from The Millions. Listen here.

Tags: blogging, book reviews, literature, Spike, The Millions
Posted in Online literary world | 2 Comments »

Beautiful covers for beautiful readers?

Monday, July 5th, 2010

Everytime I go to the Young Adult (YA) section of a bookstore, I swear I’m walking into the set of Australia’s Next Top Model. All I see are book covers with dark covers and moody girls. Perhaps it’s the vampire and angel books that are setting the cover trends:

           
(more…)

Tags: book cover design, book covers, justine larbalestier
Posted in Trends, YA fiction | 3 Comments »

Yo lo encontré. (I found it.)

Monday, July 5th, 2010

Yep. I found it. After much searching far and wide across Argentina. A poem, in Spanish, that is not about love, does not mention love, is not an allegory for love-related matters (I don’t think), and doesn’t contain any references to hearts, souls, or passion(s). What’s more, it’s a poem by Rubén Darío, who is one of the most smoochy flowery over-the-top Spanish-language poets of all. If you shot Rubén Darío in the chest then pastel-coloured kittens carrying flowers would come out singing Celine Dion songs. Then they would sell the flowers to raise money for sick kiddies, before setting up a Free Hugs stall. Yet somehow in this case the man managed to get through an entire eight stanzas – that’s 33 lines – without once giving in to temptation. Go Rubén. Instead, this poem is about a sailor sitting on a beach and smoking a pipe. Admittedly there are some vague references to failings and/or regrets which could in theory be romantically related. But they could just as well be related to a failure to adequately provision the ship with salted pork, so, let’s leave speculation aside.

I’ve included the original poem below, and I’ve done a translation for you. But to help make the original a little more accessible for those who don’t dabble in poetic Spanish, I’ve also included it in audio form. This is a rather lovely reading of the poem by musician Julián Gervasi that I recorded recently in Buenos Aires. If you click the poem title, the recording should play automatically or tell you how to make it play. If that doesn’t work, right-click and download it to your computer via ‘Save Target As’ or equivalent. Hopefully it helps you get a better sense of the Spanish version.

(more…)

Tags: Argentina, Geoff Lemon, love, poetry, Rubén Darío, translation
Posted in Argentina, poetry | 2 Comments »

Top 5 books for business leaders

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People is not in the top 5 book lists of The Book Show’s Reading on Vocation guests. Evan Thornley CEO Better Place Australia, Andrew Penn CEO AXA Asia Pacific and Simon McKeon, Executive Chairman of Macquarie Group’s Melbourne office shared their lists at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne with guest presenter Peter Mares .

Here’s Simon McKeon’s top 5 books:
Sea Of Dangers: Captain Cook And His Rivals by Geoffrey Blainey
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
Fromelles: The Story Of Australia’s Darkest Day – The Search For Our Fallen Heroes Of World War One by Patrick Lindsay
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Mao’s Last Dancer by Li Cunxin

Andrew Penn’s:
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Bonfire fo the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
1984 by George Orwell
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Doctor Fischer of Geneva by Graham Greene

Evan Thornley:
Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton
The Turning by Tim Winton
Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
Everyday Zen by Charlotte Joko Beck

Tags: ABC, Book Show, business, economics, finance, Reading on Vocation, Wheeler Centre
Posted in Reading, Reading on Vocation | No Comments »

Is fiction culturally irrelevant?

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

Fiction is not dead, despite Lee Siegel’s obituary for it. Carolyn Kellogg thinks Siegel’s argument for the demise of fiction is misplaced. She says that just because non-fiction is popular that this doesn’t mean fiction is irrelevant. Her final point is “I would argue that readers energized by one form will not abandon another; it would take a small heart not to love them both. Fiction lives! It lives!” 

Since the Harry Potter series finished and Twilight’s been on sabbatical, publishers have been looking for the next big thing. Will it be Justin Cronin’s ‘The Passage’? Or will the US right wing commentator Glenn Beck save the US publishing industry? 

But maybe what will really give publishing a boost is the rise of the gadget app. Literary Platform was launched in London in April this year. While fiction may not be the ascendant form of cultural expression as it was 100 years ago, they have noticed that the organisations experimenting with new ways to tell stories are not publishers but advertising agencies and the film industry. Gone are the embarrassing days in the 90s of the clumsy hyperlink story, today transmedia storytelling is almost cool. The Australian project Paper Radio made it onto the Literary Platform site. Well done to them.

Fiction isn’t dead, it’s just been re-arisen.

Sarah L’Estrange

Tags: Carolyn Kellogg, Glenn Beck, Justin Cronin, Lee Siegel, Literary Platform, transmedia
Posted in Blockbusters, Online literary world | 4 Comments »