BookieMonster

Book blog, books for sale, book reviews and more!

Posts Tagged Book Reviews

A week’s worth of reading

Mar 9

Posted by BookieMonster in Book Reviews, Book Spotlight, BookieMonster News, Books for Sale, TradeMe | No Comments

Selections this week from our stock of new books:

If you fancy some well-written and gripping historical fiction then I highly recommend New Zealand writer Barbara Ewing’s Rosetta – we have a new copy for $20.95.

If you have young kids you know that the pre-school years are a great time for encouraging their natural curiosity and desire to learn (not to mention answering a million questions a day). How to Be Your Child’s First Teacher is a great title chock-full of suggestions and guidance on how to encourage your child and covers the full spectrum of learning. Just $22.95 from BookieMonster!

Dare to Repair Your CarIf you follow me on Twitter (@bookiemonsternz) you’ll know I’m rather upset because my beloved Nana-car is broken (apparently a transmission is a wonderful, but expensive, thing). So I’m thinking I need to read Dare to Repair Your Car and start paying a leeetle bit more attention to my car maintenance. A great guide for anyone who’s is a bit flummoxed by the basic mechanics of cars and just $24.95!

If, like me, you’re a fan of the BBC Friday Night Comedy podcasts, and more particularly The News Quiz, you’ll have heard the dulcet tones of Francis Wheen. Wheen is also a great writer, and we have a copy of his history of Das Kapital by Karl Marx from the Books That Changed the World series, called (unsurprisingly) Marx’s Das Kapital. A biography of a book, $26.95 from BookieMonster.

The Graveyard Book

Neil Gaiman is here soon for the NZ Post Writers and Readers Week in Wellington (wuhwuhwuh) – start preparing now with your own copy of The Graveyard Book for just $19.95! I loved this book when I read it – you can read my review here.

That’s a lot of ifs! :)

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Maskerade by Terry Pratchett

Feb 27

Posted by BookieMonster in Book Reviews, BookieMonster News | No Comments

I’m currently reading Maskerade by Terry Pratchett, I don’t think I’ll do a full review but just had to say – is this possibly the funniest Discworld book of them all? It’s truly hilarious. From the very first page:

An eldritch voice shrieked: “When shall we… two… meet again?”

Thunder rolled.

A rather more ordinary voice said: “What’d you go and shout that for? You made me drop my toast in the fire.”

Nanny Ogg sat down again.

“Sorry, Esme. I was just doing it for…you know…old time’s sake…Doesn’t roll off the tongue though.”

“I’d just got it nice and brown, too.”

“Sorry.”

“Anyway, you didn’t have to shout.”

“Sorry.”

“I mean, I ain’t deaf. You could’ve just asked me in a normal voice. And I’d have said, ‘Next Wednesday.’”

The story is so entertaining and along the way he skewers opera, popular musicals, publishing, ballet… and some of the best characters are here – Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, Agnes/Perdita Nitt, Death, the Death of Rats – it’s an embarrassment of riches. If you haven’t read any Pratchett this would be a great title to start with.

Tags: , , ,

What’s BookieMonster Reading? Becoming Madame Mao by Anchee Min

Feb 19

Posted by BookieMonster in Book Trade News, BookieMonster News, What's BookieMonster Reading? | No Comments

This is going to be such a short review, for the most part because there’s just not a heck of a lot to say. In fact this is really more of a “just letting you know where I’m at” post rather than a book review, so apologies for that.

You know how some books just give you happy reading, nothing special, nothing to really jump out and grab you, a few irritants, but then you’re finished and there you go?

Yeah, that was this book. A fictional account of the life of the woman who would eventually become Madame Mao, it’s a relatively enjoyable read with only minor quibbles regarding the constant jumping between first and third person. That I could have done without. And to be honest the actual non-fictional accounts of many of the people and the history of China in the 20th century is so, well, mad, that it almost seems a bit superfluous to fictionalise any of it.

All in all, an okay read.

And to make up for this brevity, please to find this damn fine review of Wolf Hall, by Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic. I love the internets that it allows me to read stuff like this.

Tags: , , ,

What’s BookieMonster reading? When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

Feb 15

Posted by BookieMonster in Book Reviews, What's BookieMonster Reading? | 2 Comments

Ah, the spectacular run had to end some time. I picked up WYAEIF due to some good recommendations (waaah! Other people liked it, why can’t I?) and previous reading experiences – I’ve enjoyed Me Talk Pretty One Day and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (one thing you can guarantee with a Sedaris book: great titles) as both funny and with that little tinge of sadness that can elevate proceedings and with an all important subtlety.

One of the promo blurbs attached to WYAEIF goes like this: “David Sedaris’s ability to transform the mortification of everyday life into wildly entertaining art,” – to which I have to ask – whose everyday life?? My everyday life does not consist of taking a month out from my life in Paris and the countryside of Normandy to spend in Tokyo so I can give up smoking. And herein lay the problem for me with WYAEIF – while I could laugh at some of it, not one piece engaged me and really provided that “small detail provides larger general life revelation” that I kind of usually like with this sort of playing-the-personal-life-for-laffs collection. And so much of it seemed oblivious to the fact that it was all coming across as terribly self-indulgent.

And not enough of it was as funny as this:

As a young man, I saved up my dishwashing money and bought a seventy-five-dollar copy of Medicolegal Investigations of Death, a sort of bible for forensic pathologists. It shows what you might look like if you bit an extension cord while standing in a shallow pool of water, if you were crushed by a tractor, struck by lightning, strangled with a spiral or nonspiral telephone cord, hit with a claw hammer, burned, shot, drowned, stabbed, or feasted upon by wild or domestic animals. The captions read like really great poem titles, my favorite being “Extensive Mildew on the Face of a Recluse.” I stared at that picture for hours on end, hoping it might inspire me, but I know nothing about poetry, and the best I came up with was pretty lame:

Behold the recluse looking pensive!
Mildew, though, is quite extensive
On his head, both aft and fore.
He maybe shoulda got out more.

In the end this was a bit like being stuck next to someone on a plane who insists on telling you every detail about their life that you don’t find that interesting but still feel vaguely envious of, and only occasionally are amused by. They’re not rude or aggressive or off-putting, but you do feel like the time is dragging and wonder when they’ll shut up.

P.S. If anyone knows where I can get a cheap copy of Medicolegal Investigations of Death you can be my new best friend! :)

Tags: , , ,

What’s BookieMonster reading? Sydney Bridge Upside Down by David Ballantyne

Feb 10

Posted by BookieMonster in Book Reviews, What's BookieMonster Reading? | 8 Comments

Sydney Bridge Upside DownI started my review of The Graveyard Book by saying what an embarrassment of riches of reading I’ve had recently and as I’d just finished this book before I wrote that review you’ll probably get a good idea of why I was feeling that way.

Sydney Bridge Upside Down was first published in 1968 and has just been reprinted and reissued by Text Publishing (literally just – last week!). And how very, very, VERY lucky we are. The book is set in a small New Zealand out of the way bay – Calliope Bay (apparently modelled on Hicks Bay, where the author spent some time as a child – more on that below) and is narrated to us by Harry. Harry’s mum has gone to the city for the summer and his cousin Caroline has come to stay with him, his younger brother and his dad.

Caroline is beautiful – and seemingly entrancing for every man and boy in the bay, including Harry who isn’t overly happy about the attention Caroline attracts from everyone (and I mean everyone), and struggles with his own ambivalent and sometimes powerful feelings towards her. Meanwhile it’s summer holidays and so they’re all at play – in their house, in caves, at waterfalls, on the wharf, at the neighbours (there’s like 6 houses of people), in gossip, and shadowing everything there’s “the works” – an abandoned meatworks, crumbling, the scene of several deaths – excluding the more than several animal deaths obviously.

In the brand new introduction Kate de Goldi quotes Patrick Evans as saying that: “Sydney Bridge Upside Down… is the great, and unread, New Zealand novel.” And… oh… is it ever. Gothic, thrilling, creepy, drowsy with summer sunniness – this is that laid back, mad, bad New Zealandness we all know exists but don’t really know how to talk about.

The book starts as a relatively straight-forward seeming narrative but gradually it becomes clear that these are not straight-forward lives – there are questions here, lingering and being ignored, and you just know they can’t be ignored forever. Eventually they will be faced and they will be answered and most likely something terrible, or at least terribly creepy, will happen.

And it does.

The writing is intense, veering between narrative and dreamlike stream of consciousness, but never losing any focus or my attention. I could easily have read this in one sitting, if not distracted by the rest of life.

Sydney Bridge Upside Down drew me in, thrilled me, wrong-footed me and, ultimately, shocked me. It is a wonderful piece of work to have back, and I hope that this time around it is read.

A lot.

Starting with you *points*.

 

P.S. I’ve been to Hicks Bay once about 9 (?) years ago. It’s beautiful in that lazy New Zealand way. You drive in and drive along the beachside road and there’s a few houses and suddenly there are several concrete boxes and you think that’s incredibly strange, it’s like a factory in the middle of nowhere. And of course that’s pretty much what it was for a long time. It’s one of those disparate and ever so odd places that you stumble across in New Zealand.

Oh, and there was a kunekune pig with lots of little hairy piglets running around. I desperately wanted to pick one up and take it home with me. But I didn’t, because I’m responsible. *sigh*

Tags: , , , ,

© 2009-2010 BookieMonster All Rights Reserved