Novel ideas : Manly Library

The Selected Works of T.S.Spivet: A novel

2009-10-26T15:29:00.000+11:00

by Reif Larsen. 2009

Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com).

T.S.Spivet is a twelve-year-old genius maker of maps, plans and illustrations. "I think". he tells a CNN interviewer, "we are born with a map of the entire world in our heads...the patterns are already there and I see the map in my head and then just draw it". This is a simplified version of what he tells the scientists at the Smithsonian, but they are cleverer than a CNN man trying to entertain an audience. T.S., however, is still just a child and his Selected Works are a wonderful grab-bag collection of his notes, drawings, maps and stories, as well as a vivid, funny and sometimes terrifying tale of how he came to be at the Smithsonian that night and the adventures he had getting there.T.S. (the initials stand for 'Tecumseh Sparrow', and how he came by them is a story in itself) lives with his family on a ranch in Montana. He can recite the latitude and longitude of his address to the nearest second, but he is not so certain about the thoughts and feelings of his family. His sister, Gracie, is sixteen and T.S. regards her as "the most together member of the family". She is smart, sassy, and, when the family exasperates her, is inclined to a behaviour which T.S. has labelled 'Dork Retreat': i.e. she will plug in her earphones and/or retreat to her room with her music. If T.S. is the cause, he knows he can mollify her with 500 grams of chewy tape. T.S's mother, Dr Clare, is, so he says, "a misguided coleopterist" who has spent her entire adult life studying and classifying beetles. She can't cook, is a champion blower-up of toasters, and she is "the kind of mother who would teach you the periodic table while feeding your porridge as an infant". T.S. feels close to his mother and shares some of her interests but doesn't understand her continuing obsession with finding a particular species of moth. He is much less close to his father, who is a taciturn farmer: "the sort of man who will walk into a room and say something like 'you can't bullshit a cricket', and then just leave". No longer part of the family, but still very much a part of T.S's notebooks, is Layton, his younger brother who has only recently died in a shooting accident which none of the family will talk about and which T.S. fears may have been his fault.T.S. makes sense of his life by charting it in diagrams, maps and plans which he keeps in the colour-coded notebooks lining the walls of his room The extent of his curiosity and the huge variety of his work is apparent in the Selected Works, where panels alongside the text show (in a random selection) detailed botanical drawings; plans for corn-shucking; stages of male pattern baldness; "My first Inertia Experiment...a disaster"; his brother's rocking horse; a map of the locations of the 26 McDonalds restaurants in North Dakota and much, much more. Some of this work has been sent by a family friend to the Smithsonian, Scientific American, Science, Discovery and Sport Illustrated for Kids, and some (in particular, his meticulous illustration of how the Bombardier Beetle mixes and expels boiling secretions from its abdomen) has been published.

T.S's Smithsonian adventure begins with a phone call from an official who tells him that he has won the prestigious Baird Award for the popular advancement of science. Unaware of T.S's age, he invites him to attend the Smithsonian's hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary celebration dinner in Washington in order to accept the award and to give a keynote address. T.S. initially declines the invitation, but after a really scary day failing to help his father free 'Old Stinky', the bad-tempered goat, from some barbed wire on the farm and almost being bitten by a rattlesnake into the bargain, he changes his mind. To get to Washington, however, without talking to the Smithsonian official again and disclosing his age, is a problem. T.S. decides to make it a true adventure and, like Hanky the Hobo of a story he once heard, he decides to jump a freight train.

A large part of the Selected Works tells of T.S's adventures, some of which are terrifying. Interspersed with these, however, are extracts from a notebook which he stole from his mother's study as he was leaving. These tell the story of Emma Osterville, who married Tecumseh Tearho Spivet, T.S's great, great, grandfather. Emma's life and her struggles to be accepted as a geologist in the conservative, male-dominated scientific world of America in the 1800s, make fascinating reading. Nevertheless, I was so taken up with T.S's adventures that I began to skip over them to find out what happened to T.S. and then came back to them later.

Whichever way you read this book, it is a wonderfully imaginative work of art and literature. Reif Larson captures the spirit of a twelve-year-old boy, but also manages to tell a story, or stories, which will appeal to a many age-groups. Many of T.S's observations are very acute and very funny, although only an adult might see the humour of some of them. Larson's publishers, too, have done him proud. The book itself is innovative and inventive and a delight. Even T.S's thanks page and Reif Larson's own acknowledgements are worth reading, and I particularly liked T.S's additions to the publisher's information page at the front of the book - a page which only publishers, booksellers, librarians and reviewers would normally read. Added to the CIP Catalogue information is a note: "This book is about"- and a list of 27 entries, which includes "7. WHISKEY DRINKING - FICTION", " 12. HOBO SIGNS - FICTION", "16. HONEY NUT CHEERIOS - FICTION", and even an entry for "MIDWESTERN WORMHOLES", which is also Fiction. That should make shelving the book in any particular section of a bookshop difficult! This is a truly inspired, inspiring, imaginative and novel novel, and you can see more about it at http://www.tsspivet.com/.

How to paint a dead man

2009-10-22T15:01:00.003+11:00

by Sarah Hall, 2009

Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com)

The curious title of this book gives no clues to its contents other than to suggest that art is the link which binds this book together. Even the quotation from Cennino d'Andrea Cennini, from which the title is taken and which is included at the end of this book, only confirms that subtlety, colour, light and shadow are a necessary part of the way in which Sarah Hall paints her characters.Signor Giorgio is an Italian artist famous for his obsessive depictions of a small group of bottles. Dying of cancer in a small town in Umbria, he looks back on his life and work, meditates on the meaning of art, remembers a past troubled by war and loss, and has daily battles with Theresa, his housekeeper, to maintain his smoking habit. One of his fond memories is of a young English artist, Peter, who once wrote him stimulating letters about art but who never included his address, so could not be answered. Thirty years later, Peter Caldicutt, successful, middle-aged and described by his daughter as "one of his generation's formidable eccentrics", still struggles with the demands of art, both philosophically and literally. Trudging the rugged Cumbrian landscape which is his inspiration, he slips and becomes trapped. So begins his own musing on life, death and art, as he also contemplates the irony of being so unpredictable and unreliable that no-one will immediately miss him or know where he is and he may well die of exposure.

A little later again, Sue, Peter's daughter, is also an artist. Her own field is photography but she is currently curator of an exhibition of objects which have had close personal significance for famous artists. A bottle given to her for the exhibition by her father forms a link with Signor Giorgio. Sue is reeling from the sudden, accidental death of her twin brother. Her sense of self has been fragile since childhood, but now, again, she is distanced from everything around her. She talks of herself as 'you', struggles to feel present, and discovers that only in the dangerous and illicit affair with her close friend's husband can she feel alive and human. Sex, described in graphic detail by Sue, is voyeuristic and coldly un-erotic in spite of shared lust and passion, but only through this sex can she find relief from the numbing separation from reality which she feels.The fourth person whose life we enter in this book is a young Italian girl, Annette Tambroni, whose growing, congenital blindness has given her a special quality of imaginative vision which Signor Giorgio, who briefly met her whilst teaching art to local schoolchildren, describes as a gift for discovering invisible things. As readers, we experience Annette's world through that vision, and Sarah Hall's exceptional ability to convey the experiences and personality of each of her characters is at its best in Annette's story.

Annette is innocent and vulnerable. She vaguely remembers a painting in her church which depicts 'the Bestia' but cannot describe it exactly and in her imagination it comes to represent all the unspeakable things which her obsessively religious mother fears for her but will not discuss. The atmosphere of suppressed sexual tension, especially associated with the men in Annette's family, is palpable, but Sarah Hall also manages to create incredible beauty, even in the final horror that enters Annette's life.

Four different characters, four different stories, four different ways of telling the stories and a shifting pattern of time-frames throughout the book, all make this an ambitious novel which poses challenges for both the author and the reader. But Sarah Hall writes beautifully, intelligently and, at times, with simple poetic flair. The chapter titles, 'The Mirror Crisis', 'Translated from the Bottle Journals', 'The Fool on the Hill', and 'The Divine Vision of Annette Tambroni', repeat in that order throughout the book as each character's story develops; and inevitably, perhaps, some stories are more gripping than others. I must admit that Peter's dilemma caused me to skip chapters in order to discover whether he escaped and survived. But I did go back and finish the other chapters, and Signor Giorgio, Sue and Annette each held my attention in different ways.Structurally, and in some of its content, this is not an easy book to read but it is absorbing, interesting, innovative and a thought-provoking way of considering some of the many aspects of art.

American rust

2009-09-11T13:46:00.002+10:00

Philipp Meyer. A&U, 2009.

What to read after Cormac McCarthy’s The Road? American Rust might be a good choice. Less bleak than the McCarthy – everything is – but with the same concern for the decay of American life, it’s a fine piece of writing. Two young men living in a town in Pennsylvania where all the steel-mills have closed, or are closing, find that they are already running out of options. Meyer is very good at conveying the inner voices of his characters, in particular the two young men, Isaac and Poe. The main narrative, involving a sudden killing, is compelling reading, but it is Meyer’s portrayal of the underlying corrosion of contemporary American society which stays with you when the book is done.

"You could not have a country, not this big, that didn’t make things for
itself. There would be ramifications eventually".

- John

The city and the city

2009-08-21T10:11:00.002+10:00

by China Miéville. Macmillan, 2009.

It’s difficult to pigeonhole Miéville. He writes cutting-edge genre-bending fiction, not quite crime, not quite science-fiction or fantasy. The City and The City could as easily be short-listed for a Gold Dagger for best crime novel, or a Hugo award for best science-fiction, as for a Booker prize for best novel. It explores the idea of the divided city, like Berlin or Jerusalem, and in heightening the idea, he says something worthwhile and interesting about sectarianism and ethnic cleansing.

A body is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere in eastern Europe, and it becomes a case for Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Extreme Crime Squad. To unravel the mystery, Borlu must journey to Ul Qoma, a city which shares the same boundaries as Beszel, but which it is forbidden to see. Residents of either city routinely ‘unsee’ the other, (perhaps in the way that we often fail to notice some residents of our own city?) and a shadowy third force ensures that no breaches of this etiquette occur. Borlu’s investigations unearth a powerful conspiracy.

- John

Man Booker longlist 2009

2009-08-02T11:26:00.000+10:00

The longlist for the Man Booker prize 2009 has been announced.

Britain's best book borrower?

2009-07-31T08:40:00.002+10:00

The Guardian reports that a 91-year-old library member in Scotland is probably Britain's most prolific book borrower. Staff noticed that she was up to her 25 000th loan! She now reads about 12 books per week, mostly romance, and first borrowed in 1946.

The Pearls of reading

2009-07-20T12:06:00.000+10:00

Nancy (BookLust) Pearl’s approach to helping people find books they like, is to elucidate from readers the characteristics they find especially appealing about books they already know. She delineates these “appeal characteristics” as:

· Character Example: A Prayer for Owen Meany
· Setting Example: The Shipping News
· Story Example: The Pelican Brief
· Language Example: Possession
Embracing all four (the blockbusters) Example: Lonesome Dove

http://www.nancypearl.com/

By looking at these examples and other books you have read, people can delve within themselves to determine what characteristics they find most appealing. Of course, different people respond in distinct ways, loving certain books for totally unique reasons. Many are surprised when they analyze their reading pleasures in this manner.

A little exercise to try –
Write down your all time five favourite books.
Look at what is common to all of them – is it the story line, characterization, the setting or the way it is written?
Is one different? If so consider what type of mood you were in when you read this. Sometimes your mood may change what most appeals to you at that time.

Happy Reading!!

- Fran

The book is dead, long live the book

2009-07-17T12:01:00.003+10:00

by Sherman Young. USW Press, 2008.

Sydney academic Sherman Young believes that, as an influence in society the importance of the book has declined almost to the point where it is dead as an object. He chooses to convey this message in a book, so I suppose there’s life in the old format yet, but he makes a strong case all the same. In many ways books have been overtaken by newer formats. Older texts can be found on sites such as Project Gutenberg, and newer books are increasingly available in e-book format. In due course, a sufficiently attractive e-book reader will be on the market, and then we can expect the book to go the way of the vinyl record, becoming little more than a niche market. Young points out that this is not altogether a bad thing. For instance, there is much more likelihood of specialist texts being found by their target audience in an electronic format – no more haphazard ordering from book-shops which can only carry a fraction of the material being published. Young’s argument is persuasive, and spells a worrying message for booksellers, which will have to reinvent themselves, perhaps carrying a smaller range of stock and selling more coffee. But what does it imply for public libraries? Can we carry on buying and shelving books as we have done for the last hundred and fifty years, or do we move into e-books in a bigger way before it’s too late? Should we blog a bit more? Young has an entertaining style, and his book can be digested fairly rapidly. I recommend it to anybody who likes reading; we’re still just about in the majority.

- John

(Update: Sherman Young also has a companion blog for his book)

Revolutionary road

2009-07-15T11:51:00.001+10:00

By Richard Yates. Vintage, 2008.

Richard Yates Revolutionary Road is now a movie, but the book, published in 1961, is a work of serious moral intent - about the shortcomings of its characters. Frank and April Wheeler are a living as a dysfunctional couple so she devises an escape plan, one that will enable Frank to realise his potential while she works, at least until her husband finds an occupation more suited to a literate war veteran. As Richard Yates's novel unfolds, however, it becomes apparent that though Frank might rail against the suburbs, he lacks the imagination or boldness for change and so his marriage rapidly unravels.

- Wendy

The book of Emmett

2009-07-14T11:45:00.003+10:00

by Deborah Forster. Random House, 2009.

Deborah Forster’s novel, The book of Emmett is a powerful and emotional work that begins with the funeral of Emmett, the father in the story. Forster has written an emotional tale of domestic violence with simple yet engaging language. Set in the western suburbs of Melbourne, where Forster grew up, the novel traces the complex relationships between brothers and sisters and the love and pain that evolves between them in this house of violence. It brings together some strong images of growing up in this period and how children forgive but are still damaged by a violent upbringing

- Wendy

Another time past created

2009-06-19T09:51:00.004+10:00

by Brett Hilder. Pier 9, 2008.

A layered design recreates the intricate, collage nature of a journal, where words, quotes from philosophers, poets and authors, ponderings, experiences, travel observations and astonishing photographs of landscapes and people are interwoven.
This is a book of a journey showing the lands of Spanish culture in the Mediterranean and Latin America, made with notations of memory
Absolutely beautiful.

- Wendy

Update - From Pier 9's website: 'The winners of the 2009 Australian Publishers' Association Book Design Awards were announced as part of the Sydney Writers' Festival on Thursday 21st May. Another Time Past Created, designed by Toyoko Sugiwaka, won Best Designed General Illustrated Book and this beautiful, captivating book was also awarded Best Designed Book of the Year overall!'

Manly Library Author Talk: Bob Ellis

2009-06-04T15:14:00.005+10:00

Bob Ellis is the author of more than eighteen books.

His most recent work is And So It Went: Night Thoughts in a Year of Change and other recent titles include the bestselling Goodbye Jerusalem,

Goodbye Babylon and First Abolish the Customer.

Bob Ellis will be speaking at Manly Library:

Wednesday 24th June 7pm
Manly Library Meeting Room

Market Place, Manly NSW
$5 entry light refreshments provided
Bookings essential call 9976 1722

Deaf sentence

2009-05-28T12:13:00.002+10:00

by David Lodge. Harvill Secker, 2008.

David Lodge’s books include comic gems such as the campus comedy Changing Places, as well as more serious works such as Author, Author. Deaf Sentence is a bit of a mixture. It has comic elements, but the overall tone is darker, even alarming. Retired Professor, Desmond Bates, finds that life has become tiresome and embarrassing due to the onset of hearing loss. While blindness is commonly regarded as tragic, he observes, deafness is often the source of amusement, though not for the deaf person himself. Desmond’s ageing father is a source of further disquiet for him, as the start of some sort of dementia makes itself known. Set against these two strands of plot is a third, less successful element, involving a young, erratic student who is supposedly researching the language used in suicide notes. This plot element is not fully worked out, and is somehow reminiscent of the movie Fatal Attraction, (though no bunnies are harmed). Altogether, though, the novel is written with Lodge’s customary elegance, and successfully draws attention to the under-appreciated struggle many people have with deafness.

- John

Alice Munro wins 2009 Man Booker International

2009-05-27T13:09:00.005+10:00

Alice Munro, known for her short stories, has won the 2009 Man Booker International prize (different from the Man Booker Prize). Her new collection is due to be released at the end of 2009, entitled Too much happiness. Her most recent titles include Away from her (which was made into a movie of the same name) and a collection called The view from Castle Rock.

The women

2009-05-01T11:32:00.002+10:00

by T C Boyle. Viking, 2009.

T C Boyle’s mastery of the short story is at odds with his ability as a novelist. Having raised expectations with his marvellous early novel, Water Music, about the explorer Mungo Park, he has disappointed on several occasions since. The Women is an ambitious portrayal of the women who loved Frank Lloyd Wright, and it’s another frustrating read. Boyle is capable of enviable sentences and description, but there are many paragraphs here which could be struck out without loss. The novel is supposedly told through the recollections of one of Wright’s students, Tadashi, via an Irish American translator, but the various ironical effects achieved by this method are submerged by the suspicion that the author is being a clever-clogs. The characters of the three wives/mistresses of Wright are comprehensively detailed, but are of minor historical interest compared to the architect himself. With the exception of Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, novelists have seldom been up to the challenge of putting themselves in the mind of an architect, and Boyle does little to show how Wright’s genius operated. And call me picky, but would people have fed coins into a jukebox in the early 1930s? Did the term ‘jukebox’ exist then? If you haven’t read Boyle before, I’d suggest looking for a collection of his stories first.

- John.

Burnt shadows

2009-04-28T11:27:00.002+10:00

by Kamila Shamsie. Bloomsbury, 2009.

"Later, the one who survives will remember that day as grey, but on the morning of 9 August itself both the man from Berlin, Konrad Weiss, and the schoolteacher, Hiroko Tanaka, step out of their houses and notice the perfect
blueness of the sky..."

The day is 9 August 1945, and the place Nagasaki. It is the morning on which the second Atomic Bomb was dropped, and the one that survives, in this story, is Hiroko Tanaka.

Right from the Prologue of Burnt Shadows, Kamila Shamsie makes it clear that this book will have no happy endings. Yet it is a book full of love and life, humour and strength.

Hiroko is a likeable heroine and as we follow her though the event-filled fifty-seven years which this book covers she matures into a strong, independent, resilient and loving woman. Yet, even before the bomb dropped and burned the embroidered birds of her kimono into her back, her life was shadowed. The earliest shadow is reflected from her father, who was branded a traitor by the local community for an act of protest against the glorification of a young man's death in war. On the day of the bomb, Hiroko feels the suspicion of the people around her in an air-raid shelter, even of those she has know as friends for many years, and so she leaves. Konrad Weiss's death on that day, too, throws a deep shadow over her life. Not just because of her grief for the man she loved and was going to marry, but because it sets in motion a train of events which take her from Japan, to India, then to Pakistan and, eventually, to America. Each move brings her new joys and new sorrows.Kamila Shamsie is a superb story-teller. The people in her book are human and believable, and she draws the reader into their lives in such a way that you warm to them and care about them. In some ways the lives of these fictitious characters become more real than the horrors of the non-fictional history that they live through. It is hard to believe, for example, that sane human beings can perpetrate the acts which have led to the family divisions, bloodshed and trauma of Partition in India; the growing power and the influence on young Afghan boys of the mujahideen in Pakistan; the war in Afghanistan; the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York; the growing power of the CIA and private militia; Guantanamo Bay; and the resulting spread of xenophobia, religious fanaticism, and everyday suspicion of strangers who are not "like us". The lives of Hiroko and her family and close friends are influenced by all of these. And, as Hiroko's story moves into the present-day, Kamila Shamsie makes us aware of the way in which these things have changed all our lives, prompting, especially, the suspicion of strangers, the resulting spread of surveillance and the erosion of individual rights.

Yet in spite of its thought-provoking portrayal of recent history and the frightening, unresolved, seemingly unresolvable situation with which the book ends, there is nothing polemic about it. There are good times as well as bad. For long periods, as one section heading suggests, the shadows are veiled and the book celebrates comfortable, loving, family relationships. Hiroko faces the worst that can happen and, as she did at Nagasaki, she survives - because she has to, and because, as she says at the end of the book "the world goes on". And the shadows, for all of us, are always there.

Burnt Shadows, like the two fragments of poetry which Shamsie chose to set at the front of her book, is an elegy for all that the earth has lost and is still losing. But it is also a powerful and moving story.

********************************
Copyright Ann Skea 2009

The house of wisdom

2009-04-14T09:58:00.003+10:00

by Jonathan Lyons. Bloomsbury, 2009.

Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com).

Baghdad: 'The Round City', 'The City of Peace'. This doesn't sound much like the city we hear of today. Nor do we think of Baghdad as one of the most important centres of learning in the world. So it is timely for Jonathan Lyons to remind us that all this was once true of Baghdad and to demonstrate how much the ancient Arabic-speaking world influenced the development of Western, non-Arabic-speaking, knowledge and culture.

In 762, the Abbasid Caliph, Abu Jafar al-Mansur, influenced by the geometrical teachings of the Ancient Greek, Euclid, set about designing the new capital city of his empire as a perfect circle. Learned astrologers (one a Zoroastrian, the other a Jewish convert to the Muslim religion) were consulted; a mathematically gifted overseer was appointed; various rites were performed, and The Round City grew up on the site of the old Persian city of Baghdad. Al-Mansur and his scholars then began to collect knowledge from wherever in the world they could find it. Persian, Greek and Indian knowledge was searched out, translated, studied copied and disseminated, and the city grew into a rich and important place which, according to one traveller, had "no equal on earth" for prosperity, luxury and learning. The great library of Baghdad, which housed the accumulated knowledge of the Empire also housed an academy of scholars and translators, and it was the resort of experts in astrology and scientific experiment. It became known as 'The House of Wisdom', and large sums of money were devoted to expanding its endeavors, accumulating valuable texts, and undertaking related cultural and intellectual projects.

Al-Mansur was not the first to so value knowledge and learning. The Umayyad dynasty, whose armies al-Mansur's brother had defeated in 750, were equally interested in 'scientific' enquiry. Astrology, logic, law, philosophy and medicine, all were studied, and when the most important surviving Umayyad Prince, Abd al-Rhaman, fled to Southern Spain, he took this love of scholarship with him. So Muslim Spain, too, became a important centre of learning.

Meanwhile, the Western non-Arabic-speaking world had lost the language skills which would have allowed them to learn from the Ancient Greeks. Latin had become the language of scholars in the few centres of learning. And Christianity suppressed Greek philosophy and independent thinking to such an extent, that only Aristotle's influence survived in the formal teaching and practice of logic and rhetoric. The Crusades soon made the free exchange of knowledge between Muslims and Christians almost impossible. However, contact with the Arab world, however bloody, did expose some Western men to Arab culture and a few, like Adelard of Bath, set out to learn more. Adelard is one of the heroes of Lyons's book. Born in about 1080, he had influential church patrons, a thirst for knowledge, a flair for languages and, apparently, a penchant for flowing green capes, green being a new dye colour discovered by the Alchemists. In about 1100, Adelard left his native England for a cathedral school in France. From there, he headed East, possibly by way of Spain and Sicily, spending at least seven years studying in and around crusader lands before returning home. He learned Arabic well enough to communicate with other scholars, and he read and translated (from the Arabic) the works of Classical Greek philosophers and mathematicians. When he finally returned to England, he brought back with him knowledge of geography, astronomy and astrology, as well as his own translations of a work on the use of the astrolabe and, most importantly, Euclid's Elements. Euclid's work was of seminal importance in the West. It covered geometry, number theory and such sophisticated mathematical concepts as irrational numbers, plus the logical method of stating a problem, hypothesizing a solution, demonstrating proof, and presenting a final conclusion. This 'scientific' method was, and still is, applied to every aspect of the search for knowledge. Adelard's work, Lyons notes, became the benchmark for Twelfth-century learning.Other scholars similarly sought out Arab knowledge and brought it back to the West. In 1230, the Scotsman, Michael Scot, brought back the medical work of Avicenna, and the philosophical work of Averroes. In twelfth-century Italy, Leonardo of Pisa, better know as Fibonacci, produced his Book of Calculations, which provided a detailed account of the use of the Arabic numbering system (which had, in turn, been learned from India) and so the nine figures 9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 and the sign 0 (which we still call by the Arab name 'zero') came to the western world. In the thirteenth century, English scientist and philosopher, Roger Bacon, brought from the East the knowledge of alchemy, which was the precursor of chemistry. Lyons's charting of these changes gives us an important insight into the major sources of our knowledge today, and the strong influence of Arab learning is still clear in every aspect of our lives. Music, manners, gardening, geography, religious debate, magic, all were strongly influenced by Arab learning. They gave us not only our number system but also many of the words which are in everyday use: 'alcohol', 'tariff', 'monsoon', 'algebra', and many more. The House of Wisdom is a timely reminder of the debt we owe to these early lovers of learning: the Arabs who searched for it, treasured it and transmitted it so freely, and the adventurous Western scholars who were fascinated by it, saw its value, and brought it back with them from their travels. Lyons writes well and his knowledge of the Muslim world is extensive. My only quibble, is that he tends to jump around in time in his book and, since history and dates were never my strong point, I often lost track of which century I was in.

However, this was a small price to pay for the knowledge I gained.

Manly Library Author Talk: Love in the Age of Drought by Fiona Higgins

2009-04-09T11:25:00.004+10:00

Fiona Higgins will speak at Manly Library on Wednesday 6th May on her first book Love in the Age of Drought her true story of rural romance.
Author Fiona Higgins met her husband-to-be at a conference in Melbourne, she wasn’t looking for a relationship, let alone the upheaval of falling for an eco-aware cotton farmer from South East Queensland.
But then life never goes quite according to plan...

Check out her interview with Grazia magazine.

6.30pm Wednesday 6th May

RSVP 9976 1722

Light refreshments provided

Land of marvels

2009-03-27T09:58:00.002+11:00

by Barry Unsworth. Hutchinson, 2009

Not too many novelists in their 70s produce great work. It’s as if there is a slackening off of power. But Unsworth, pushing 80, has just produced a novel twice as good as anything recent by authors half his age. It should be a contender for novel of the year. Set in 1914 in Mesopotamia, the story concerns events surrounding an archaeological dig. As the scholars excavate through layers of the past, revealing the fate of doomed empires of long ago, events in the outside world foreshadow the end of another Empire. Others, with different agendas, gather at the dig – an American geologist, German and British spies, religious zealots. The action and tension are gripping to the end. Unsworth has explored imperial ambitions in the past, notably in Pascali’s Island, and the Booker-prize-winning Sacred Hunger, and Land of Marvels is well up to their standard. Here he is marvelously subtle, not only harking backwards to the age of the Assyrians, but making ironic reference to the most recent oil-fuelled imperial folly in the land now known as Iraq.

- John.

Library-a-go-go!

2009-03-24T15:32:00.000+11:00

The Contra Costa County Library in California has launched a 'library-a-go-go' service. It is like a vending machine, but it lends library books.

Ghostlines

2009-03-12T11:20:00.003+11:00

by Nick Gadd. Scribe, 2008.

As an unpublished manuscript, Ghostlines won a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, and it’s a strong debut. Philip Trudeau, an investigative journalist fallen on hard times, finds himself drawn into a mystery involving corruption in the art world. The dialogue is convincing, the Melbourne settings are well-done, and Gadd pulls together the strands of the mystery neatly at the end. There’s no shortage of novels featuring investigative journalists. English author Joe Kelly, whose mystery novels are set in and around East Anglia, is possibly the best of the bunch at the moment, but Gadd could rival him once he’s got a couple more books under his belt. Not everyone will swallow the supernatural side of the story, which was an unnecessary element of the plot in my view, but I would certainly read more from this author.

- John.

The casebook of Victor Frankenstein

2009-02-12T13:30:00.004+11:00

by Peter Ackroyd. Random House, 2008.

So, Victor Frankenstein had now given us another account of his life and it is rather different to the version he gave to Robert Walton in Mary Shelley's book. Which are we to believe?

That may seem a strange question to ask, since up to now it has always been believed that Mary Shelley, at the age of nineteen, invented Victor Frankenstein as a character in the horror story she concocted one dark and stormy night in a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva. The poet, Percy Bysse Shelley (Mary's husband to be) was there, so too were Alfred, Lord Byron, his physician Dr Polidori, and Mary's step-sister, Claire Claremont. Two of the stories told that night eventually became books: Mary's Frankenstein and Polidori's The Vampire.

Peter Ackroyd, however, seems to have come across an autobiography written by Victor Frankenstein in which he tells us how he met and befriended Percy Bysse Shelley and, so, came to meet Mary, Byron and Polidori. So, who are we to believe?

Maybe reading Victor Frankenstein's "casebook", as Ackroyd calls it, will solve the mystery. Or maybe not, since Ackroyd is well known for re-inventing the lives of famous people - Dickens and Defoe, to name just two. Ackroyd's Victor Frankenstein, like Mary's, was born in Switzerland. He speaks (or writes) with almost the same voice and he, too, creates a monster. Some of the things he tells us about himself are the same as in Mary's book: his obsession with the source of life, his experiments with electricity, his horror when his creature comes to life, the murders, the false accusations, the confrontation with his creature and its demands - all these are re-told but there are startling differences.Victor Frankenstein's visit to Oxford on his tour of England becomes, in Ackroyd's book, a much longer stay which is of major importance in his life. Enrolled as an undergraduate at Oxford University, he meets 'Mad Shelley' and is able to provide us with a vivid account of the poet and his 'libertarian' friends and activities. Fact and fiction become ever more entangled in 'The Casebook' as Frankenstein follows Shelley to London, meets the poet's first wife, Harriet (a poor factory worker whom Shelley rescues from a life of drudgery in this account), and becomes familiar with various aspects of nineteenth century London life. He sees the low life of poverty, squalor and inequality, and the high life of theatres, intellectual debate and the power of money. He is taken to meetings of the radical libertarian Popular Reform League, attends a lecture by Humphrey Davey on electricity, and searches out 'sack-'em-up men' (resurrectionists) who supply him with cadavers for his experiments. He buys an old Thames-side warehouse in Limehouse Reach (an area of London docks for which Ackroyd seems to have a particular fancy in his books), and here he does his gruesome experimenting and, eventually, brings his monster to life.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is sparing in his descriptions of what he actually does in his experiments and he passes swiftly over the moment when his creature comes horrifyingly to life. Ackroyd's man, however, tells us all in gory and terrible detail. All this is inventive, imaginative and entertaining, and Ackroyd is expert at re-creating the atmosphere of nineteenth century London. There are times, however, when he seems to be more intent on doing this, and on having fun playing games with fact and fiction, than in getting on with the story. And the story, in broad outline, is Mary Shelley's. Ackroyd has tinkered around with the chronology of events and with some of the characters, and he has inserted and invented biographical details of some real historical figures. Some might say this is plagiarism: others might call it post-modern trickiness. Whatever it is, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein is an ingenious, light-hearted horror story, with a touch of Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde about it for good measure. It has little of the thought-provoking psychological and social depths of Mary Shelley’s' masterpiece and it is unlikely ever to become as famous. But it does have a much more startling ending!

- Copyright Ann Skea

The chimney sweeper's boy

2009-02-10T15:54:00.002+11:00

By Barbara Vine. Penguin Classics, 2008.

Why bestselling novelist Gerald Candless assumed a new identity years before his marriage and the birth of his two daughters isn't revealed until the last chapters of the book, but the effect of his deception on his family drives this story. The search for the origins of a child is themed throughout. In Gerald's wife, Ursula, and his daughters, Hope and Sarah, Vine [Ruth Rendell] has created three complex women and in Gerald, an equally complicated and compelling man. Each chapter is headed by an extract from one of Gerald Candless' fictional novels and Gerald's mystery is wrapped around a forgotten murder.

I loved this book – every word. It deserves to be a penguin classic!!

- Wendy

Definitive list of novels everyone must read

2009-02-10T12:01:00.003+11:00

The Guardian reports that they have compiled a 'definitive' list of the top 1000 novels that everyone should read. I'm sure there are people who might find something missing from the list, but 1000 is a lot of books. They're handily split into genre types. Although 'War and travel' seems strange combination. In any case, I'm sure you'll get some good suggestions from the list.

The northern clemency

2009-02-06T14:59:00.003+11:00

by Philip Hensher. Knopf, 2008.

A big thick tome, which was short-listed for the 2008 Booker Prize, which might be enough to put people off reading it, but aha, local readers are in for a surprise. The bulk of this novel is set in Sheffield, England in the 1970s and 80s, but 620 pages later, the action shifts to the Manly we know and love. Is this the first time Manly has appeared in a Booker-shortlisted novel? Sydney is affectionately described, with a gee-whiz air that suggests that Hensher must have been over here for only a few days. Without wanting to give it away, the novel’s ending seems to have confused some English reviewers, who mistook the action of a tidal rip for the attack of a shark. Where were the life-savers??

Other reviews thought that the novel was too long, but shorter books can sometimes take longer to read, and this one flows pretty smoothly. It treads similar ground to Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club, or Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-pool Library, and is not inferior to either of those, only slightly soapier somehow. There would have to be a lot of the author’s childhood on display here, in among the melodrama.

- John.