Books for Christmas

Need this book

My friend/acquaintance/friend-of-a-friend Raquel makes an awesomely entertaining blog called Need This Book. Enjoy these samples or click here for more hilarity.

 

The reader: Mai Campbell

My friend Mai is a lawyer. She's also the most vibrant, vivacious and outrageous person I know. If you have any preconceptions about what lawyers are like Mai will instantaneously break them all. For a woman of many words please enjoy these super brief recommendations of her three favourite books.

Lolita by Vladamir Nabakov

Taboo suffused in beautiful language

.\

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriele Garcia Marquez 

Magical Realism in Columbia

Midnight's Children by Salman Rusdhie  

I know you were not a fan Sarah but but for me it was the post-modernist's, post-colonialist's hailing of 'history as a pickling process'.

Literary underground: almost too adorable!

Over at the New York Times Amy Goldwasser and Peter Arkle have published a sketch of what people are reading (both analog and digital) on a No. 6 train between Astor Place and 125th street. I love how it even notes what page each of the readers is up too. 
Click here for a bigger view 

Sticky fingers

There are many things Kieth Richards loves. Drugs, for instance. He's also very passionate about collecting books. He's even confessed to a secret longing to be a librarian. I'm sure he could just role play that in one of the many rooms he has dedicated to his collection of thousands of books spread across several homes. Here's some pics of Keef kicking it in his home library.

Geek gifts

Buy it at Etsy

Shaun Micallef tribute post

Tonight while shopping for Christmas gifts I treated myself to a painfully expensive Zimmerman maxi skirt and a copy of Shuan Micallef's new book, Preincarnate.  All the reviews I've read so far have described it as "confusing" at least once. That hasn't struck me as a major selling point, nor did Shuan's description of the story,  "it's about a guy who is murdered and wakes up 300 years earlier in someone else’s body. He puts himself in suspended animation and is re-awoken in time to prevent himself being murdered in the first place." Wow, I'm not sure I'm even following that sentence but  I'm willing to give it a go because I believe Shuan is a genius and, besides, my friend Emily would disown me if I ever said anything bad about him. 

Remember this? Hilar.

Paper giants

When I first started at CLEO my friend Julia Zaetta organised for me to have lunch with Ita Buttrose. I told everyone I was really excited but mostly I was just terrified to meet the woman who had created CLEO. I planned my outfit carefully and bought a big bunch of flowers. When I arrived the lift was broken and I climbed 10 levels of stairs before meeting her face-to-face.  I felt light headed and short of breath. Ita, who had arrived minutes before me, looked perfect. 

Ita told me lots of great stories about the early days of CLEO.  Like, pre-launch, after creating a mock for the magazine, Sir Frank Packer thought it was too risque and asked his son Kerry to take it to focus groups and get feedback. Kerry arrived in Ita's office with the results of the study, "Well it's unanimous" he said, "...they absolutely... hated it". Ita began to cry, "What will we do?' she said.  Kerry responded, "we hide these results, pretend they never happened and just launch it anyway." That's what they did of course and, lucky for them, the first issue sold out in 48 hours. It was a sensation. In fact for the first few months they didn't have the capacity to print enough copies for it not to sell out in the first week. Ita has never trusted focus group results or research since, she believes in "gut instinct".

The day after our meeting Ita sent me a copy of her biography, A Passionate Life, with a lovely inscription. In a sentimental sense it's one of my favourite books however it has always been criticised for leaving out one of the most fascinating parts of her life and career; her intimate relationship with Kerry Packer. 

But now that Kerry has passed away apparently we will finally find out what happened between them in the new ABC series "Paper Giants: The Birth of CLEO" (working title) out in 2011. Ita will be played by Asher Keddie (the first pic from the show is below). If you love magazines her bio (despite it's omissions) is still a great read. Oh the heady days when magazine circulations still grew from month to month...

Patti Smith is awesome on The Colbert Report!

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Patti Smith
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog March to Keep Fear Alive

Good tippers make good lovers

Over the weekend David Sedaris told Canada’s National Post  that a couple of book tours ago, he put a tip jar on his signing table and made an easy $4,000 from his generous fans. Sedaris said, “The problem was then I started hating people who didn’t tip me. I didn’t say anything to them, but I would just sit there thinking, ‘You cheap son of a bitch. I just signed four books and you can’t even give me a dollar?’ And why should they? But I just got so involved in it. I had to stop doing it.” 

Julian Assange's favourite book?

Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

A dark novel loosely based on the Stalinist purges and Moscow show trials of the late 1930's.

Hot men reading books. A visual essay.

There are many hot men in the world but not all of them read books*. 

Bob Dylan

Jason Schwatrzman

James Franco

Vampire Weekend

Jon Hamm (Don Draper)

Rahm Emmanuel

Sean Connery

Stephen Colbert

Elvis Presely

*and magazines.

What my mum is reading. The travel book edition.

"Jane Austen never yearned to venture from her beloved Highbury and I too have been enjoying weeks of weary free travel in China, France, Spain and Hungary with these books"  

  

"James Jeffrey’s Paprika Paradise takes an unpredictable journey through his mother’s homeland of Hungary, described in the book as an exotic parallel universe, where grandparents live in towns called Uranium Town, and people say ‘hello’ when they mean ‘goodbye’.  The language is so alien it is almost impossible to master and the roads totally unreliable. This is a funny book; although it left me feeling in real doubt to whether I would actually pay the airfare to visit!"

Jan Wong by Beijing Confidential

"Jan Wong is a Canadian student arrives in China during the height of the cultural revolution in the 1970’s on a study program. A true believer in Maoism and socialist principles she reports on a fellow chinese student Yin who requests her help to try and get to America. Three decades later she returns to Bejing with her family to try and find Yin who she betrayed and make peace with her.  With 400 million cell phone users all unlisted and forty percent of the population sharing 10 surnames this is not an easy task. A great insight into the changing values, new rich and the booming Chinese economy."

Jason Webster’s Duende

"This book takes running away with the gypsies to new levels. ‘Duende’ is an intense emotional state; part ecstasy, part desperation and an integral part of flamenco. The main character learns guitar with the gypsies and immerses himself deep within their counter culture. If you want to take a rough ride through the real Spain of gypsies, drugs, flamenco, passion and guitar, you will love this book."

Ellie Nielsen Buying a Piece of Paris 

Imagine being able to buy a chic apartment in Paris, oh mon dieu, il n’est pas possible!  Ellie Neilsen is an Australian girl who sets out to do just that with all the usual cultural barriers you will encounter in a foreign country.  If you love Paris, champagne and apartment hunting you will love this book.  J’adore Paris and this book!

Read more from Julie at her blog Totally Second Hand

Pretty book shelf wall paper

(Via Daily Imprint)

How to be a fiction hero

This latest video from David Kazzie is about getting your work published and it's hilar!

Binge reading

I've spent the weekend switching between Jay Z's Decoded and Steve Martin's Object of Beauty. They don't have a terrible lot on common in terms of tone and subject matter but they're both easy reads are beautifully designed; Jay Z's is a full colour scrapbook and Steve's includes reproductions of art works connected to the story.

I'm not a huge Jay Z fan and this book sums up the reason why quiet nicely, he just takes himself so damn seriously. If there is any humour in it at all it's lost on me. In short staccato sentences he takes credit for a whole lot of things, (including getting Bono to go back in to the studio to perfect U2's last album) and then there's just an awful lot of name dropping and pages and pages of lyrics and personal photos. I know it's been a hard knock life and all but the ego in this just KILLS me. It's one for the die hard fans only (I preferred Robbie William's picture book at least it was self deprecating and fun, but then I guess that's the difference between pop and rap). I'm reading it for work so I'll persevere and hope that it grows on me. Steve's book seems good so far. I'll write  a proper review when it's over.

Top Words of 2010

Yep, it's officially list season and The Global Language Monitor (whatever that is) has announced that 'spillcam' is the Top Word of 2010 in its annual global survey of the English language.  The words are culled from throughout the English-speaking world, so that'sapprox 1.58 billion speakers.

 

THE OFFICIAL TOP 10

10.  Simplexity – The paradox of simplifying complex ideas in order to make them easier to understand, the process of which only adds to their complexity. This just sounds like something Stepehn Colbert made up.

9.  Shellacking - President Obama’s description of the ‘old-fashioned thumpin’ in George W. Bush’s words, that Democrats received in the 2010 US Mid-term elections.

8.  3-D – Three-dimensional (as in movies) but also as a way of generally describing ‘robustness’ in products ie toothpaste can now apparently be a 3D experience.

7.  Snowmagedden (and ‘Snowpocalypse’) words used to describe the record snowfalls in the US East Coast and Northern Europe last winter.

6.   Deficit – A growing and possibly intractable problem for the economies of most of the developed world.

5.   Guido and Guidette — another repercussion of the Jersey Shore "situation.

4.  Refudiate — Conflation of “refute” and “repudiate” (un)officially coined by Sarah Palin.

3.  The Narrative – Though used at least since The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was written in 1845,  ‘The Narrative’ has recently been gaining traction in the political arena, replacing the need for a party’s platform. 

2.  Vuvuzela — Brightly colored plastic horns that came to prominence at the South African World Cup.

1.  Spillcam — The BP Spillcam instantly beamed the immensity of the Gulf Spill around the world to the dismay of environmentalists, BP’s PR staff and the President.

Grand designs

Penguin recently published a new set of beautiful, Art Deco-inspired, foil-decorated hardback F. Scott Fitzgeralds designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith.Please enjoy this extremely pretty little video about them.

 So sorry, the competition has already closed!

Best of the best

The New York Times has released it's list of the 100 Most Notable Books of 2010. You can get a sample here but I assume the full list won't go online until the print edition is on sale on December 5. The roll call includes Room by Emma Donoghue, Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman and a number of books written by or about Barrack Obama. (As a side bar here Brad Pitt's production company Plan B recently bought the big screen rights to The Imperfectionists.) 


If you love a list Oprah has also posted her top 10 of 2010.