August 2011

Words & Books & Things.

The Man Booker short-list is announced on the 6th of September, we have a competition for anyone who fancies taking a speculative stab at the shortlist, the prize is the book of their choice from the official short-list.

Like bookshelves? Have a look at our series collecting the neatest bookshelf pictures from around the magical interweb.

And, remember, buy any of these books online and they're sent freight free within NZ.

What's for Pudding?

by Alexa Johnston

PB, Penguin

RRP $50.00

What's for pudding tonight? In her third cook book, Alexa Johnston provides over 70 answers to that all-important question; the main course may be the main event, but pudding is what everyone is waiting for.

Continuing the themes of her best-selling baking books, Alexa has sought out the finest versions of favourite recipes from skilled home cooks of the past, and has personally tested them all. Her pudding selection includes everything from Lemon Delicious to Sticky Date Pudding; from Rhubarb Crumble to fragrant Feijoa Mousse. For a festive dinner why not try Peaches and Cream Pie, Chocolate Mousse, a Date and Chocolate Torte or flaming Baked Alaska? Or you could always stay with the classic Apple Pie of domestic happiness. Any of these puddings will bring joy and delight to family and guests alike.
What's for Pudding? is a wonderful book, written by an intelligent and exuberant woman with a passion for baked goods that leaps of the page, and into your oven, making your stomach growl and teeth nervous. Buy now

Go the F**k to Sleep

by Adam Mansbach

HB, Text

RRP 23.00

It started with a sardonic comment on a Facebook page and transformed into the Indie publishing sensation of the year. Go the F**k to Sleep is a bedtime book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don't always send a toddler sailing blissfully off to dreamland. Profane, affectionate, and radically honest, Adam Mansbach's verses perfectly capture the familiar (and unspoken) tribulations of putting your little angel down for the night. In the process, they open up a conversation about parenting, granting us permission to admit our frustrations, and laugh at their absurdity. With illustrations by Ricardo Cortes, Go the F**k to Sleep is beautiful, subversive and pants-wettingly funny - a book for parents new, old and expectant. You probably should not read it to your children. Buy now

For further fun, hear this little book of genius read by Samuel L. Jackson (pretty much the audio book he was born to narrate).

The Sisters Brothers

by Patrick deWitt

TP, Granta

RRP $36.99

Oregon, 1851. Eli and Charlie Sisters, notorious professional killers, are on their way to California to kill a man named Hermann Kermit Warm. On the way, the brothers have a series of unsettling and violent experiences in the Darwinian landscape of Gold Rush America. Charlie makes money and kills anyone who stands in his way; Eli doubts his vocation and falls in love. And they bicker a lot. Then they get to California, and discover that Warm is an inventor who has come up with a magical formula, which could make all of them very rich. What happens next is utterly gripping, strange and sad. Told in a darkly comic and arresting style, The Sisters Brothers is stark, unsettling and has a keen eye for the perversity of human motivation. A novel about the things you tell yourself in order to be able to continue to live the life you find yourself in, and what happens when those stories no longer work. It is an inventive, strange and beautifully controlled piece of fiction recognised by being long listed for this year's Man Booker Prize. Buy now

I Loved You the Moment I Saw You

by Peter Black

HB, VUP

RRP $60 vicbooks' price: $54.00

A photographic love song to Wellington, Peter Black has captured the faces, places and feeling of the city. There are startling moments of recognition and foreignness in these richly coloured photographs; the expressions, bricks and corners, the atmosphere and depth of a multihued city.
In eighty-two brilliant, disturbing, and compassionate photographs, extended as if across the time it takes for a baby to wake up and recognise the grandfather who is waiting with the child to cross a busy, dangerous street, Peter Black has composed one of the great photo-portraits of our time. A digital flaneur on high alert crisscrossing the complex urban landscape of Wellington, Black has seen and loved the tender, sad, and often humorous details of life lived moment by moment on the streets of his home city.
"Looking at the photographs in I Loved You the Moment I Saw you has alerted me to this: to the significant ways in which perception is situated, and to the laminated or layered times it takes to take that in- to be moved, to be in love, in ‘the moment'." Ian Wedde Buy now

Humiliation

by Wayne Koestenbaum

PB, Picador

RRP$30.00 vicbooks' price $26.00

Poet and scholar Wayne Koestenbaum whole heartedly, and at times deeply personally, explores the contours and meaning of humiliation. Drawing from the public sphere of the art and celebrity, the personal sphere of the body and mind, and the societal tropes of racism, politics and reality TV, he takes the reader through a diverse spectrum of mortifying circumstances.
Arranged by chapters, or fugues, filled with short observations and longer reflective essays, Koestenbaum delivers a diverse range of view points, examples and experiences on the nature, need and result of humiliation, describing an intricate and debilitating human emotion with care, beauty and rare honesty.

The visceral nature of humiliation is evident in his prose, creating a poetics of debasement, yet it is firmly rooted in humane philosophy. His fascination and sensitivity is always evident: "I am tired, as any human must be, after a life spent avoiding humiliation and yet standing near its flame, enjoying the sparks, the heat, the paradoxical illumination." Buy now
 

Open City

by Teju Cole

TP, Faber

RRP $36.99

Along the streets of Manhattan, a young Nigerian doctor doing his residency wanders aimlessly. The walks meet a need for Julius: they are a release from the tightly regulated mental environment of work, and they give him the opportunity to process his relationships, his present, his past. Though he is navigating the busy parts of town, the impression of countless faces does nothing to assuage his feelings of isolation. But it is not only a physical landscape he covers; Julius criss-crosses social territory as well, encountering people from differing cultures and classes, people who provide insight on his journey. A haunting novel about national identity, race, liberty, loss, dislocation, and surrender, Teju Cole's Open City seethes with intelligence. Written in a clear, rhythmic voice that lingers, this book is a mature, profound work by an important new author who has much to say about our world. "...beautiful, subtle, and, finally, original." - The New Yorker. Buy now

Freedom

by Jonathan Franzen

PB, 4th Estate

RRP $29.99

Critical voices have asked where the angry writers are; where are the writers who challenge our comforts and understanding? Where are the social novels? Where are the writers that roar? With his new novel Freedom, Jonathan Franzen gives an excellent answer.
With moral intelligence and surprisingly ribald wit Freedom's characters ask us what liberty is. The characters enact our limited and contradictory ideas of freedom, playing out the consequences of liberty, its realities and illusions. Richard, a sardonic rock-god, self-indulgently railing against societal norms. Walter Berglund, the very personification of meliorism, confounded by his high ideals, is crippled by his inability to express the love or anger that fills him. And Walter's wife, Patty, a self-loathing, ex-athlete who doubts the validity and merit of her life, able to see the harm she does yet incapable of stemming the love that drives her harm. If the other characters are the currents of the novel, Patty is the body of water they run through. Patty expresses the constraints and expressions of freedom; all its complexity, damnation and beauty. Patty, and the extended Berglund family, is testament to the moments of perfect horror and beauty that make a life; moments emblazoned on personalities so deeply they can be passed through generations and societies like DNA.

The novel is life bound in paper sheaths; an idea explored in a narrative of warmth and great intelligence, carried forward by characters of depth and profound flaw. It is an all-consuming narrative about how to live. Buy now

The Catastrophe

by Ian Wedde

TP, VUP

RRP $35.00 vicbooks' price $32.00

The Age of Excess has been good to Christopher Hare. One of the world's top food writers, he has travelled to the best restaurants in the most exotic locations, with the chic dining companion known to readers of his lavish books as The Glace. But, in the new mood of austerity ushered in by the credit crunch, will the world still be interested in what he thinks of Robuchon's caramelised quail? Certainly Christopher's editor isn't. Christopher's moment of truth catches up with him in the corrupt space between the violent Lebanese civil war of 1975-90 and the luxurious bolt-holes of the Riviera. One evening, almost at the bottom of his over-the-hill slope, he is investigating the budget options in a mediocre restaurant in off-season Nice. These days he is no longer accompanied by The Glace, aka Mary Pepper, who has found international fame and fortune as an art photographer of pornographically eroticised foodstuffs. In the restaurant, Christopher witnesses an assassination. Impulsively, he throws himself into the action, and becomes the almost-willing victim of a political kidnapping. What will be Christopher's fate? Will his ex-wife 'The Glace' come to his rescue? Will the harshly beautiful Palestinian paediatrician Hawwa Habash soften towards her accidental prisoner? Suffused with culinary delights and political menace, The Catastrophe is laced with dark humour, crimes against humanity and a range of calamities that cascade towards a gripping conclusion. Buy now

Q & Eh

Bauer; Holmes; Bardsley & Warren

TP, Random House

RRP $39.99

Riddled with contradictions and idiosyncrasies, language world-wide is a complex thing; however, taking a lighter look at it can also be enormously entertaining and the psychology behind it is endlessly fascinating.
Why is it not wrong to be doubly negative? Where does 'wowser', 'craw thumper' and the 'f-word' come from? Do New Zealanders mangle the English language? Why do we say ‘bald as a badger' when badgers are really hairy?
We use it every day, but what is this thing called language and are there rights and wrongs about its use? Four leading linguists, with specific interest in New Zealand English, tackle the common-place and quirky questions that arise from what we say, read and write. Funny, accessible, informative, this is a fascinating book. Language and the way we communicate may be taken for granted but pick it apart, turn it inside out, and it becomes a fascinating object of speculation or conversation topic. Buy now

Listen to Paul Warren interviewed on Radio NZ by following this link - a fascinating and funny discussion.

Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches

by Roberto Bolaňo

HB, New Directions

RRP $ 55.00 vicbooks' price $45.00

Between Parentheses collects newspaper columns, articles and speeches Bolaňo wrote during the last five years of his life. Bolaňo became famous overnight for his novel The Savage Detectives and was suddenly in demand for articles and speeches, he took to this new vocation like a vociferous duck to water. Cantankerous, irreverent, and insufferably opinionated, Bolaňo could also be tender (about his family and favourite places) as well as a fierce advocate for his heroes (Borges, Cortazar, Parra) and his favourite contemporaries, whose books he read assiduously and promoted generously. A demanding critic, he declares that in his ideal literary kitchen there lives a warrior: he argues for courage, and especially for bravery in the face of failure. Between Parentheses fully lives up to his own demands: "I ask for creativity from literary criticism, creativity at all levels."
Dipped into at random this collection reveals observations astute, funny and, always, deeply intelligent: "One is prepared for friendship, not for friends"; "I enjoy vegetarian food the way I enjoy a kick in the stomach"; "Maybe she'd only been Miss Santiago or Miss Burst Into Flames"; "Editors tend to be bad people"; "He had a mother who was less a mother than a gypsy curse." Buy now