It’s like I suddenly have a new medium to read in, which is awesome because all my life I’ve read books. And now I can do that same thing but just a bit differently.

You could say I was wrong but that would seem a little mean.

The lovely kind folks at The UBS Review of Books have awarded me the Liebster Award! Now, I want you all to know I worked hard for this award. Alternatively, there’s this explanation:

“The Liebster Award is bestowed to up and coming bloggers with less than 200 followers. There are no judges and each person nominated is a winner! It is an award that fellow bloggers nominate to each other to offer recognition and support. According to Google translate, Liebster means ‘dearest’ in German. This means that the Liebster blog award is acknowledging the dearest bloggers out there who may not have millions and trillions of followers, but still deserve recognition for all of their hard work.”

Here are the Liebster Award Rules:

List 11 random or interesting facts about yourself.
Answer 11 questions from the blogger who nominated you.
Nominate 11 bloggers who have less than 200 followers.
Ask 11 new questions to the bloggers you have nominated.
Notify the bloggers you have nominated that they have been awarded the Liebster Award.
Thank the blogger who nominated you

Good lord, what work. On with the answers then.

11 random or interesting facts about moi.

1. I love The Muppets.
2. I am the proud owner of a cat, a guinea pig and a rat.
3. My very first copies of Terry Pratchett books were “borrowed” from an ex-boyfriend.
4. I still feel a bit guilty about no. 3.
5. I really love shoes.
6. I am a fan of really, REALLY bad television.
7. When I was little I wanted to be an archaeologist.
8. When I was ten I read The Neverending Story over and over again continuously for about 2 months.
9. When I was young I liked Luke Skywalker, now that I’m older I’m definitely Team Han Solo.
10. I love mountains.
11. I can’t eat pavlova. No sir, I don’t like it.

My questions to answer

What do you like best/least about blogging?
Best – it’s all me! I don’t have to be answerable to anyone except myself. Least – I don’t have to be answerable to anyone except myself which means I don’t pay me and I have to tell myself what to do.

Which book do you remember as important in seducing you into reading & bookish things, and how old were you?
Oh tricky. It’s hard to remember a time I didn’t read. I really loved Nancy Drew books when I was little, and often felt like I could just read and read them. I also remember being really affected by A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle – it combined maths and books and weird spirituality.

What was the last thing you read, watched, and listened too?
In the Memorial Room by Janet Frame, Home and Away (see, bad television), The Bugle podcast.

What is something you would never do again?
Sadly, sell books on Trade Me. The market has changed and we couldn’t change with it.

Is there a book that everyone seems to love but it just didn’t work for you?
Where do I start? Harry Potter. Lord of the Rings. The Art of Racing in the Rain. Almost all Charles Dickens. Victorian literature.

Do you grow any of your own vegetables?
Yes, lots! Tomatoes, potatoes, spinach, cucumbers, pumpkin, peppers, beans, raspberries, mandarins, lemons, figs, blueberries. Not all in huge amounts though. I’d happily live that way if I could.

Are you a yellow person or a purple person?
Purple, absolutely.

What book(s) would you recommend be on a “Before You Die…” list?
All of the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. Under the Skin by Michel Faber. Ghostwritten by David Mitchell. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. The Remains of the Day by Kazui Ishiguro. Vanity Fair by Thackeray. For starters…

Do you prefer spring or winter?
Winter as long as it’s cold and not rainy.

Ebooks or hard copies?
Oh hard copies. But I have recently acquired a cheap secondhand tablet with Kindle app so I can read ebooks and I am really enjoying the new medium.

What is one thing your author blurb/bio would say (that it doesn’t already, for those who have them)?
She doesn’t know what she wants to be when she grows up.

Nominate 11 bloggers who have less than 200 followers.

Hmmm…. here’s a go. They may or may not be interested and I have no idea whether they have less than 200 followers – and let’s be real, this isn’t an actual award it’s just a way to connect a few bloggers, so please don’t take offense that I’ve listed you here!

The Well Read Kitty
KidsbooksNZ 
Tararua District Library Blog 
Kings High School Library Blog
Bridget’s Readings, Ramblings, Recipes and Randoms
Rosa Mira Books
The Intertidal Zone - Penelope Todd
Schroedinger’s Tabby
Bibliophilia
Let Me Be Frank

Ask 11 new questions to the bloggers you have nominated.

What’s your desert island book?
Favourite fruit?
Ebooks or hard copies?
What was the last thing you read, watched, and listened too?
What do you like best/least about blogging?
What is one thing your author blurb/bio would say (that it doesn’t already, for those who have them)?
What’s the most recent new thing you learned?
When and why did you stop believing in Santa Claus?
Han Solo or Luke Skywalker? Or Princess Leia?
Top five authors?
Do you have one well-known author you’ve never read?

Notify the bloggers you have nominated that they have been awarded the Liebster Award.

Check.

Thank the blogger who nominated you.

Thanks The UBS Review of Books!

In the Memorial Room by Janet Frame, Text Publishing, ISBN 9781922147134, RRP $35, Available now.

In the Memorial Room is the second posthumous Janet Frame novel to be published, after Towards Another Summer which I thoroughly enjoyed, both deemed too personal or too “close to home” to be published while she was alive. Fortunately both break the general mold of posthumous novels as being unfinished extracts.

In the Memorial Room follows Harry Gill, winner of the annual Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship, a “living memorial” to a dead, expatriate New Zealand poet – Margaret Rose Hurndell – which entitles him to spend six months in Menton, France, to work on his writing in a room of a villa once occupied by the dead poetess (the memorial room, natch). Sound familiar?

Frame drew on her own experiences as a Mansfield Fellow (spending six months in Menton, France, to work on her writing in a… well, you probably get the picture) to write In the Memorial Room, which apparently meant living in a social farce. Harry meets various characters in Menton, and Frame’s small details of each add a large amount of satire.

The book is imbued with a sense of hilarity, and the humour is laugh-out-loud material. Harry is constantly overlooked in Menton as the actual Fellowship winner in favour of Michael Watercress (who “looks like a real author”). Among the cast of characters he meets is George Lee, who speaks without moving his mouth and so Harry only hears one memorable phrase every time he speaks:

-Angela will be livid, he said.

I apologised and said I’d had an attack of motion sickness.

-Angela will be livid.

Eventually Harry starts to go blind, on visiting a doctor (Dr Rumor) he’s told it stems from his desire to go unnoticed. When he actually does go deaf he’s then told he’s got “auditory hibernation”. He’s like a fluttering moth, completely unsure of himself or his existence.

The writing is exactly what we expect from Frame – gorgeous, delirious and shining with delight. Her amazing ability to pile on sound and word texture is just as evident in this book.

Each day the patterns of the light in the room were different. If the sun did not shine there were no light-patterns. When the sun shone, window-shapes patterned themselves on the rust-red rug of which there were two, of equal size, square, on the polished wooden floor.

There’s also a fair dose of what I’m going to coin “Framesque WTF-ness”. As in:

Whatever the explanation I accepted my deafness with a passivity which, before the age of the raging clitoris, would have been looked on as feminine!

No, seriously, WTF?

For those who haven’t yet actually read any Janet Frame (and there are plenty, despite her many accolades),  In the Memorial Room will be a wonderful introduction, lighter than Faces in the Water, less obscure and dense than say Daughter Buffalo or Intensive Care.

In the Memorial Room adds yet another dimension and more acclaim (as if it was needed) to Frame’s amazing body of work.

At the Dying of the Year by Chris Nickson, Severn House, ISBN 9781780290423, UK edition available now, US edition 1 June 2013.

I have to say I do like a good historical crime. Separately, those two things are not necessarily my favourite but together they just make sense.

They do have to be well-written though and fortunately At the Dying of the Year is well-written. It’s extremely well paced and enthralling.

The year is 1733, Richard Nottingham is the Constable of Leeds and three children have just been found. Dead, stabbed and battered. This is not a one off. Nottingham and his team are on the tail of a serial child-killer.

I describe this as crime rather than mystery because, really, there’s not a lot of mystery here. Nickson’s skill isn’t in weaving a whodunnit, it’s in telling a tale and letting us into the lives of the protagonists of his story. We go inside the minds of Nottingham and his deputies, and see how they view their times and lives.

Nickson really brings the personal to the fore in his characters, particularly focusing on their fears and uncertainties and he’s not afraid to deal to his readers emotions to push the story forward. He keeps the story moving at just the right pace, fast enough to keep interest but without sacrificing the cerebral slower moments.

There’s a lot of historical detail here and Nickson does go to lengths to bring to life the grit and sights, sounds and smells of 18th century England. He’s not always entirely successful, with some of it feeling a little forced and not quite on the button but this is a minor quibble.

If you like a good crime story I highly recommend making the effort to seek this one out.

Shift

By Hugh Howey (Century, $29.99)

The sequel to last year’s best selling Wool, this is an intelligent and intriguing novel of a dystopian future. Howey has created a truly frightening story, one that asks big questions of our present selves. Shift approaches its subject matter from several different viewpoints: the politician who becomes embroiled in plans he has no control over; the worker who steps into a revolution he didn’t even know was coming; the young boy who grows up and lives utterly alone. A compelling read, as entertaining as it is thought-provoking.

A Winter’s Day in 1939

By Melinda Szymanik (Scholastic, $18.50)

Melinda Szymanik is one of New Zealand’s most thoughtful young adult authors, and her latest book is based on the experiences of her father during World War II. The story takes us to eastern Poland in 1939, where Adam and his family are faced with the invading Soviet Army. In time they are forced to leave their home to travel to a labour camp in Soviet Russia and from there they endure a senseless journey that will eventually take them into modern day Iran.

Ghosts of Parihaka

By David Hair (Harper Collins, $24.99)

Book 5 in David Hair’s popular Aotearoa series for young adults, Ghosts of Parihaka’s central character is Matiu Douglas, an acolyte who can slip between two worlds – modern day New Zealand and the parallel country of Aotearoa, a ghost world that combines elements of our history and myth. When his best friend goes missing on a school trip to Parihaka, Matiu has to race to find and protect those he loves. The author does a great job of exploring how two separate cultural identities can be combined into one national identity through shared history and knowledge.

Published May 12 2013. Reproduced courtesy of Herald on Sunday.

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson, Random House NZ, RRP $36.99, ISBN 9780385618687, Available now.

What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right?

11 February 1910, a baby girl is born dead with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, the doctor stuck in snow.

11 February 1910, a baby girl is born with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, the doctor has made it through the snow to ensure she breaths her first. And so we meet Ursula (“little bear”), whose life after life we will follow. Ursula is a soul afloat in life, beholden to the dangers of one small choice, one small change that can spell her end. She is born dead, she drowns, she falls out a window, she gets influenza – there are a myriad ways to die but each time she does it’s 11 February 1910 again and it’s snowing.

Oh, how I loved this book! At first thought the premise didn’t seem like one I would enjoy but Kate Atkinson handles it so incredibly deftly that I found myself completely drawn in to Ursula’s lives, shocked each time she died, waiting to see how she would get through the next life, the choice she would make that would see her navigate the danger.

Atkinson is also a master of characters, hers are so beautifully drawn. She makes sure her characters are human, likeable, dislikeable and capable of so many emotions.

“To war? You are going to war?” she had shouted at him when he enlisted and it struck her that she had never shouted at him before. Perhaps she should have.

If there was to be a war, Hugh explained to her, he didn’t want to look back and know that he had missed it, that others had stepped forward for their country’s honour and he had not. “It may be the only adventure I ever have,” he said.

“Adventure?” she echoed in disbelief. “What about your children, what about your wife?”

“But it’s for you that I am doing this,” he said, looking exquisitely pained, a misunderstood Theseus. Sylvie disliked him intensely in that moment.

There’s also a generous amount of humour throughout Life After Life. Ursula struggles through the Influenza epidemic following WW1, dying several times before she finally finds a way to avoid contagion, and it becomes almost slapstick.

Darkness, and so on.

Then Atkinson hits you between the eyes with a moment so touching, so human you just thinking about weeping.

“We cannot turn away,” Miss Woolf told her, “we must get on with our job and we must bear witness.” What did that mean, Ursula wondered. “It means,” Miss Woolf said, “that we must remember these people when we are safely in the future.”

“And if we are killed?”

“Then others must remember us.”

Such a tour de force.

HIGHLY recommended.

Listen to an interview with the author, from Kendall Forbes. (Thanks for the link Kendall!)

And you can read it right here! http://www.listener.co.nz/culture/books/life-after-life-panel-discussion/

We talked about Life After Life by Kate Atkinson – spoiler alert – it’s a damn good book. I’ll write more about it soon.

Ahau aroha Aotearoa.