August 2023
It’s the first day of spring here in the Southern Hemisphere, although the weather has been Spring-like in Australia for a few weeks. Today heralds our publication of the second instalment of Michael Duffy’s interviews with great writers. This time it’s Gertrude Stein, an American writer who immigrated to Paris in 1903 with her brother and became an influential figure in the Parisian art scene, with connections to artists like Matisse and Picasso, as well as writers like Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Click on the image or click here to check out Gertrude Stein.
- bikerbuddy
Last week our local bookshop, The Turning Page, advertised a one day competition on Facebook called ‘Search History.’ It was to promote a newly released book, Search History by Australian writer Amy Taylor, published by Allen and Unwin. The publisher had sent Turning Page five copies for a giveaway.
To win a copy you had to describe the strangest thing that has been turned up in your internet search history.
I related a story from many years ago when our kids were young. We looked up ‘wiggles’, expecting to find information about the children’s band. The search returned the band’s website, but second in the search results was a link to a website that allowed men to upload pictures of their genitalia. The website might have even been called ‘Wiggles’. I don’t remember for sure. If you do the same search now you no longer see it.
My entry won a copy of Search History which I happily picked up during the local yearly Springwood festival on Saturday.
This is me receiving the book, pictured with a staff member from the Turning Page.
Thanks so much and obviously I will read and review it sometime soon.
- WaywardWoman
I’ve been trying to keep to a running schedule for a while now and my route often takes me through the shops at Springwood. At the far end of the shops is Vinnies, as we call it in Australia – St Vincent’s de Paul’s – which has second hand clothes and household items for sale at cheap prices. It also has a few shelves of books at the back of the store. Their range of books is pretty good. Everything from Booker prize winners to the most popular of popular fiction.
I found this out the other day when my eye was caught by a set of books in the front window of the store. I was interested more for their aesthetic appeal to begin with. I went back to check out the books when I had time. It was a set of nine hardback books in a series called The New Junior Classics and they include everything from sporting stories to legendary stories like the Trojan War, written for children. They’re illustrated throughout, but I also love the way they look on a shelf, because the spine of each book has an illustration, and their varied colours look great together.
Needless to say, when I found out that Vinnies were selling the entire set of nine books for only $30, I bought them. They look wonderful at the top of my bookshelf in the lounge room. So far, both my daughters have noticed them, but my son seems to be blind to their presence. The important thing is, I love them, and I love browsing through them.
- Toriaz
I could be accused of trying to compete but it really isn’t that simple. Toriaz bought a set of nine New Children’s Classics earlier this month which look rather nice (see the blog entry for the sixth of this month) and now I’m writing about my own set of nine ‘new’ second-hand books. Actually, I bought them last Friday but today is the first day I’ve had the luxury of time to write a post about them.
Some time ago we wrote about a trip to Berkelouw’s Book Barn in Berrima. We bought books then but naturally didn’t bring home everything we were interested in. While we were there we found a nine volume set of the diaries of Samuel Pepys. Pepys was a naval administrator who is now famous for his diary written between 1660 and 1669. The diary covers the Restoration of the English monarchy after the interregnum, a period of eleven years in which no English monarch ruled England after the beheading of Charles I at the end of the English Civil War. After Oliver Cromwell’s death there was a movement to bring back the monarchy. Charles II was instated as the new monarch and many of the Puritan social strictures, including the closure of theatres, were relaxed or reversed. The diary also covers famous events like the Great Fire of London in 1666 as well as the Second Anglo-Dutch War of 1665–7. It also contains details about Pepys’ private life, including an affair. He probably felt comfortable committing this to paper because the diary was written in a shorthand which has to be deciphered.
The edition we saw at the book barn was something like six or seven hundred dollars. A bit pricey, especially since this 1970 edition of the diary by William Latham and William Matthews was actually an eleven book set. The tenth volume was a companion volume with a lot of materials to help study the diary, and the eleventh was an index. Parts of the diary were first published in 1825, and there were other editions in 1875 and 1893. However, Latham and Matthews’ edition was the first that included the diary in its entirety, unbowdlerised.
My Edition of the Diary from Harry Hartog’s
I recently spotted the diary in Harry Hartog’s bookstore in Penrith in their antiquarian section. Again, it was only nine volumes, but it was selling for only $125. I did a check online. There seemed to be no copies of the same edition being sold online in Australia, but I did find sets in America, complete, for anything up to $850 and in some instances, charging as much as US$125 for shipping. Despite the two missing volumes, I decided to buy the set in Penrith. I’ve discovered that it is easy to buy cheap paperback volumes of the companion and index online, so if I should ever feel the need to consult them I’ll be able to do that.
I’m hoping that in the next few years my time frees up enough that I can concurrently read a little bit each day of works like Pepys’ diaries and other large works which I hope to turn into long term reading projects for this site.
- bikerbuddy
When I awoke this morning the first thing I did was check to see which books had made it to the Shortlist for this year’s Booker Prize. The Bee Sting was the only book I managed to read from the Longlist before this morning’s announcement. I reviewed it last week. I was really impressed with the book and my review can be found by clicking here. I usually try to make a guess at the winner each year, and despite the fact that I often don’t have time to read the shortlist, I’ve had a good success rate. And since The Bee Sting has been shortlisted, I’m going to make that my pretty uninformed guess for this year, although I reserve the right to change my mind if I read any other books on the list I think are better.
In fact, I should read at least one more shortlisted novel before the winner is announced on November 26 this year. I wrote in a previous blog post that I also bought Paul Harding’s This Other Eden when I bought The Bee Sting. I would have been finished it already, except I was distracted by Zadie Smith’s The Fraud which I felt compelled to purchase last Friday, along with my set of Pepys’ diaries which I wrote about yesterday.
For those interested in reading more about the Booker Prize you can visit the Booker site by clicking here. If you just want to read about the shortlisted books, you can read the descriptions below, which I have lifted from the Booker site.
We have a long-term goal to eventually read (or re-read) all the Booker Prize winners since 1969 and review them for this website. You can check out our Booker Project by clicking here.
- bikerbuddy
