Posts Tagged non-fiction

A week’s worth of reading

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! :)

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Books to Buy!: Stepfamily Life by Margaret Newman

Why it is different – and how to make it work

Stepfamily LifeDescription:

In this book, Margaret Newman, an experienced couple and family counsellor and a member of a stepfamily herself, describes challenges that members of a stepfamily usually encounter. In her experience, stepfamily life is different, and therefore different solutions are needed to get it on track – and, more importantly, to help it survive. In this reassuring and straightforward book, Margaret Newman considers a wide range of stepfamily scenarios, and gives practical suggestions as to what to do in each case to overcome any difficulties.

Stepfamily Life helps the reader to understand the dynamics of life in a stepfamily – what lies beneath the surface – and how to rationally approach each family issue concerning adults and children. Margaret Newman highlights the fact that while skills such as communication are very important, so too is self-awareness and a basic knowledge of family life.

Using case studies and the experience of working with a broad range of stepfamily situations, Margaret Newman examines problem areas and explains what is happening and what to do about it. She shows how, despite the obstacles, a happy stepfamily life can be achieved.

Buy Stepfamily Life from BookieMonster for just $18.95!

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Books to Buy!: Build Your Own Contemporary Furniture

22 great projects for every room in your home from Popular Woodworking magazine

Build Your Own Contemporary FurnitureDescription:

Contemporary furniture’s great appeal comes from its simple, understated elegance and subtle details – from sleek black drawer pulls to gracefully beveled shelf edges. It’s no secret that woodworkers love building these pieces!

They’re suited to just about any room, no matter what the decorating style.

This book presents 20 original contemporary furniture projects, hand-picked from the pages of Popular Woodworking.

Each one comes with step-by-step instructions, high-quality diagrams, cutting lists, color photos and detailed, easy-to-follow assembly techniques.

Buy Build Your Own Contemporary Furniture from BookieMonster for just $29.95!

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Books for sale – do we have them? Yes, we do!

Now, here at BookieMonster we don’t promise to sell you 4 billion, squillion, million book titles – who has the money or time for that carry-on anyhoo?

What WE do is sell you interesting, individual and hand-selected (by moi, yes, moi) books. Books that will have you accosting strangers at parties and giving them a full run-down on the history of hardware and hardware stores (for example, and yes we do have that book).

Here’s my selection of some of our more unusual titles that we’re currently selling:

Did Monkeys Invent the Monkey Wrench?Did Monkeys Invent the Monkey Wrench by Vince Staten – a history of hardware and hardware stores. Hardware turns out to be surprisingly fascinating! Seriously!

Where God Was Born by Bruce Feiler - part travelogue, part religious study, part history lesson. Bruce Feiler travels through biblical sites around the Middle East.

The Sexual Life of Catherine M. by Catherine Millet - very French, Millet became something of a sensation after the publication of this graphic sexual memoir. Millet recounts her many experiences and interposes them with a dollop of philosophical thought regarding relationships and personal sexuality – reminiscent of both Jean Genet and Henry Miller.

Dog PartiesDog Parties: Entertaining Your Party Animals – People LOVE their dogs. I can understand this. And yes throwing them a party might seem like frou-frou – but these look like fun on a stick. Go with that anthropomorphization.

The Complete Guide to Uninvited Advice on Raising Children - you know the sort of thing: “Oh, we were teaching Bryannahxyz the basics of Swahili using flash cards the minute we got home from the hospital – you have to keep their brains busy at that age.” As the subtitle says: Everything you never wanted to know about raising children that people will tell you anyway.

Classic Literary Trivia - Never be stuck for an answer at that (admittedly very highbrow) pub quiz.

These are all titles from our selection of brand new books for sale!

We also have plenty of secondhand titles for you – I like to combine secondhand and new books because it caters for not only all budgets, but also for those booklovers who are looking for more classic books, or books no longer in print.

In that vein, here’s a selection of secondhand classic and older books for sale (and some New Zealand ones too!):

Lauris Edmond : Bonfires in the Rain – a memoir from one of New Zealand’s best writers and a sharp insight into New Zealand women’s lives in the mid-20th century. We also have…

Lauris Edmond : The Quick Word - the third volume in her trilogy of memoirs.

Memoirs of a Peon by Frank Sargeson – another New Zealand writer, one of Sargeson’s earliest novels.

The Penguin Dorothy Parker - Dorothy Parker is funny, crazy and an amazing short-story writer. She was also very very cruel to A.A. Milne, and therefore I like her a lot (sorry Piglet).

And then there’s just the unexplainable:

Stuff on My catStuff On My Cat : The Book - so there’s these cats, and they put stuff on them and then they took photos. Like lolcats. With extra stuff.

Jonathan Routh’s Good Loo Guide (to London) 1968 - Exactly what it says – a guide to London toilets. Seriously, toilets. A guide. To toilets. In London. Essential reading, if you ask me.

As always this is just a very small selection of the books we have for sale. Have a browse through all our listings, and don’t forget my Recommended Reads!

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

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! :)

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