Wednesday 25 June 2014

Mockingjay - The First Trailer

If you haven't seen it yet, here it is!! The first trailer for the third Hunger Games movie "Mockingjay Part 1" is out there, and it's fricken EPIC! I can't add much to what has already been written up on wonderful Nerdist Chris Hardwick's (who this bookseller always fancied a wee bit when he hosted MTV's Singled Out waaaay back in the days, but one digresses) website, but I can only confirm. It's not just the trailer for another teen movie. It is subtle. It is suave. It is CREEPY.


Talk about teaser. We'll still have to wait 'til 21 November. Gaaargh!

Ah well. Might as well go and read the book first. 
We haz it. Just saying. :)


May your local bookshop be forever in your favour.

Toodle pip,

Patty :)




Tuesday 24 June 2014

Andrew Solomon's Far From The Tree - Review

Andrew Solomon blew me away a few years ago with his Noonday Demon, a book which was a finalist for but, dammit, should have won the Pulitzer Price. It was unlike any other book I had ever read: a mix of science, psychological and sociological study, autobiography, philosophy, and inadvertently perhaps even a self-help book. It helped me tremendously, and has others. Hard to top, you’d think.

But Solomon’s done it. It is a very personal book to him, having known from an early age that he’s gay and subsequently having struggled in a society that still perceives this as a ‘sickness’. This book took him a long time to write, but every minute he spent, researching, interviewing, exploring the subject was worth it. The result is astounding. Far from the Tree is a well-rounded, all-encompassing study of parents’ relationship with their children, born into or marked by what most would perceive as tragedy at worst, or a challenge at least: children with disability, mental illness, criminal activity, born out of rape, and so forth – and how these relationships, despite hardship, flourished and gained a meaning they might not have under different circumstances. How the people involved even managed to embrace some of those challenges as identity, which turns the idea of disability and illness on its head, suggesting that trying to fix or make certain perceived problems like deafness and homosexuality “go away” causes more damage than it improves.

           This book bears Solomon’s trademark holistic approach, it covers all angles and perspectives and neglects nothing. He looks at the very individual story of each person involved but also places it in its wider societal context, micro- and macro-analysing and this way managing to still any appetite and need for reading this book: be it scientific curiosity, a need to relate and be understood, inspiration on a personal and wider philosophical level, even finding answers, explanations and solutions if one finds oneself involved in a similar subject matter. It is a lesson in tolerance, love, acceptance for the self and others and embracing differences.
When I say this is not an easy read, please do not misunderstand. Solomon’s style reads beautifully and accessibly, but I had to put the book down time and again, just to digest the richness of it, to catch up with my thoughts and how I related to it, to fully grasp what he was talking about. It is not a book made for passive consumption, it is one that, “for best results”, should be chewed and allowed to seep into one’s soul. It is challenging not on a “too hard to understand” level, as the man talks nothing but sense, it is merely the complexity of it that blows you away.

       Solomon has confirmed himself as my hero: he’s an intellectual, but one that is humble, openly flawed but nonetheless enlightened, outrageously warm and humane, a man with a vision as wide and encompassing as the sky. Sorry to gush, but there are very very few people who have managed to do what he has done.

So I beg you, please please read this book. I myself shall be shipping it to friends far and wide, like soul-expanding, mindboggling, brain-blowing and enlightening lollipops. Far from the Tree is a masterpiece that will probably never find its match. Until Solomon writes another one.

Patty :)



Thursday 12 June 2014

Karyn Langhorne Folan's Doomsday Kids and the pros and perils of popular dystopia

Having grown up in the Cold War, I have always had a morbid fascination with anything related to doomsday, but in particular with nuclear holocaust. I’m aware that my reading dystopia now is an obsession born of that fear. It’s been the equivalent of continually prodding a hole in your tooth with your tongue or picking a scab.  Despite it terrifying the living daylights out of me, I couldn't help but returning to the scene of trauma, observing, gathering information, considering possibilities. Maybe in an attempt to rationalise absolute horror or the possibility of not just my own extinction but that of our entire planet. 

         It was a possibility in the 80s, one we got very very close to around ’84, and to this day I can’t decide whether it makes suitable Young Adult fiction. It is too unimaginably awful to be child’s play. Of course, there is the current trend of post-apocalyptic teen fiction, but it’s all set in a fairly far-off dystopia which is safe enough for a young mind to contemplate and play with. Enough interspersed with young romance and heroism that makes those scenarios abstractly symbolic enough to not become gratuitous. But something as real and close to home as nuclear holocaust?

       I have always been in two minds about it. I think kids need to know about certain issues, and shouldn't be left in the dark about them. And we definitely shouldn't talk down to them. But then again, it’s our job to protect them from fear too big to be processed healthily in a young mind, and I think if kids read these kind of books, they need to be talked about with adults and contextualised. It’s not something juvenile cognition can cope with on its own.

       I first read a children’s book about Hiroshima, The Day of the Bomb by Karl Bruckner, the true story of Sadako Sasaki, the girl with the thousand cranes  – ironically a present for International Children’s Day, when I was about 9. Then there was the equally harrowing Raymond Briggs film When the Wind Blows, which some fool had broadcast on a Saturday afternoon, during a children’s matinee. All this in a time where talk of nuclear threat was on the news on a daily basis. Altogether, for me it was a bit much – it gave me nightmares.

      Then, when I was 11, there was a terrifying book called The Last Children by renowned German author Gudrun Pausewang, dealing with an atomic attack on central Germany and the effect on and pitiful demise of a family. It was syllabus material then, and no doubt valuable in a time when every ounce of peace movement was needed. But it’s still one of the most horrific books I have read on the subject. It had everything. Graphic descriptions of a scorched earth. Horrible mutilations. Radiation sickness. The disintegration of civilised society. Deformed newborns. And one particularly powerful scene of a teenage boy whose legs had been torn off by the blast and who only got around by means of a rickety, soiled pram, hanging himself off a tree by a wall on which he had written “Damned parents”: The parents who had stood by and done nothing to stop the nuclear arms race. It was meant to be a cautionary tale, and, justified, Pausewang didn’t hold back.

       The more astounded I was recently when I saw that Louise Lawrence’s Children of the Dust is classed as 9-12. While it is by far not as bleak as Pausewang, and actually has an ending of hope,the first half is still pretty full-on. I have recommended it to parents, but with a word of warning - I don't think it should nor is meant to be read "alone".

       Still, as a grown-up, I can’t help myself but read everything on the subject I can get my hands on. Thus it was inevitable that I picked up Doomsday Kids. And here’s the verdict:

It is doubtlessly well-written. I love the characters, who are mildly cliched (there’s a jock and a princess and a weird girl and the loner type, but then, teenagers tend to fit themselves into one category or another for a sense of belonging, so I think those “classifications” work), but the variety of them makes for some tense, conflict-ridden reading. Imagine those different types locked into a small shelter, having to get along, because the only alternative is a bombed out, radioactive world outside. I like that different ethnic groups and disability were represented (the little sister has Down’s Syndrome): you ended up getting a good cross-section of the population. And none of these characters were static: each one of them grows and develops and becomes deeper and more rounded with every page. None of them end up being fully good or fully evil, no one having a moral high ground. They’re kids suddenly confronted with the end of the world, having to survive without their parents, where they suddenly can no longer trust even those they thought to know well, and adults become a threat more than a source of protection and help. They are kids who have to deal with sickness, injury, hunger, emotional distress. They make good and bad decisions. They are fallible and vulnerable. They’re kids.

The story is carried and paced well, suspense is kept up throughout. It ends on a cliffhanger that made me scream “What? You can’t stop now, man! WHAT’S GONNA HAPPEN?” – so in that respect it has done a great job of storytelling. And yes, I am excited that there will be sequels.

      It’s a fairly harrowing tale – again not as extreme as Pausewang, but still pretty gruesome. I can’t decide whether I liked or disliked how amazingly those kids had it together, all circumstances considered. But would a young mind be calmer because it couldn't grasp the true horror...or would it collapse for the same reason? Again, that would probably vary from person to person, but that mental struggle didn't come across as strongly as it could have. Also, I couldn't help but think that the threat of radiation sickness was somewhat underplayed. The actual scope of what nuclear war means is missing, reducing it to the playful horror of a computer game. Maybe it’s intentionally played down in order to protect the young reader, and maybe it's still coming in one of the sequels, but inevitably I worry that it creates a “meh” attitude towards the subject matter. What bothers me is that it seems to treat nuclear war more as a form of entertainment in the wake of the current YA Dystopia trend. 

        The question raised for me again is: Is softening young adult post-apocalyptic literature (especially using scenarios that pose or have posed a real threat) irresponsible? Or should young adults be protected from these subjects by giving them a “light” version? I’m in two minds about it, always aware of the fears I lived with as a child, but now, at the same time, glad I wasn’t patronised by a sugar-coated apocalypse.

I have grown up with these type of books being treated as a warning, being politicised, being catalysts of public debate. I think if we’re dealing with true threats, they shouldn't be used as a mere source of entertainment.



Because, maybe  - MAYBE   -  we’re meant to be scared to death of some things.


Traumatisedly yours,

Patty 

Friday 6 June 2014


The Book Thief - Heart Thief, more like! - A Review

One of the first things my Dad told me about reading is that no matter how often you read a book, it will be like new to you. You will always discover something different, always find a different kind of meaning in it for you in that exact point in your life. I hear so many people say they would never read a book twice, but really, it isn’t about just knowing the plot. You can appreciate a book for all its different forms of beauty, depending on where you are in life.

You know that eternal #firstworldproblem of running out of space for books, and having to decide which ones are gonna go to the charity shop? Some people find it easy – read it once, and it goes. But for me, and possibly for some others, it’s truly the test of a book’s true heart – is it gonna be a one-night-stand, or a life-long romance? Those books never leave me. Literally. And those books are the truly great ones. And sometimes you don’t even know. Sometimes it’s in the hands of a book-fate fairy, if you will, to reintroduce you to an old, forgotten love.

What I’m trying to say, this isn’t the first time that I have read The Book Thief. And it’s the second time around I think I could get a fuller, rounder, deeper appreciation of it. What a wonderful, wonderful book.

The story: intense, powerful, human, flaying your heart open, for want of a better comparison, like a china town duck.

The characters: quirky, idiosyncratic, bordering on weird, flawed, real, but truly lovable because of it.

The writing: simply beautiful, with turns of phrases that made me underline them.

The perspective: as told by Death: creating an “intimate distance”, a paradoxical but close observational point of view that evoke satire as much as rich humanity.

The Book Thief is universally amazing: one of those books you can recommend to everyone and not fail.

Please read it.

I’m not kidding.


Do!


Yours, bookishly,

Patty 

Tuesday 3 June 2014

Oh YES it's a Gruffalo!

It's been a few days now... too many days since our Gruffalo Tea Party without an update! Nina really put her heart into the preparation (though she enjoyed every minute of it). And we really got a sample of the lovely Witney spirit: our darling Susan, former Children's Bookseller and loved by many of our customers, who now runs the Cook shop around the corner from Hackett's, volunteered to do what she does best: story time with all the eager children that showed up.

On the same day, in the morning, a lady called Anna, who had just come in to buy a few books, volunteered to return for the event to do free face painting, just because "she loves the shop". What an utterly wonderful thing to say and do, and what great community spirit this displays - I have lived in a few places, and grown up anonymously in a big city, but have never experienced this kind of thing.
Lordy we LOVE Witney!

So here is a big THANK YOU to all of you who turned up - so MANY of you - and made this event truly wonderful with your enthusiasm. So many children showed up dressed up, bright-faced, with toy Gruffalos, and one baby even wearing a Gruffalo outfit that was unbearably cute.
There were cupcakes, and balloons, and children joining in, shouting the good lines in unison, and booksellers nearly fainting from all the balloon-blowing (but one cannot say no to a darling
child eagerly holding out a pudgy hand in balloon-envy) - good times were had by all. Hope to see you all again soon!