Books That Show Us Other Lives

One of the highlights of a recent trip to Auckland was the launch of Aorewa McLeod's new novel Who Was That Woman Anyway? Snapshots of a lesbian life. The crowd in The Women’s Bookshop spilled out into the street as Stella Duffy did the honours and Aorewa talked about the writing of the book and read two extracts. 

Reviewer Elizabeth Heritage writes in the Booksellers NZ blog: "Who Was That Woman, Anyway? is an engaging and determined attempt to look at the ways in which we structure our own identity in terms of gender and sexuality. Why do we act the way we do? Why do we feel sexual desire the way we do? What determines who we are attracted to? To what extent is gender a cultural performance, and to what extent is it biologically determined? Ngaio doesn’t definitively answer any of these questions; her life in this book becomes a process of examining and querying and arguing." Read the whole review at: http://booksellersnz.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/book-review-who-was-that-woman-anyway-by-aorewa-mcleod/

I read Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother partly because it’s sci-fi-ish, slightly-in-the-future setting makes it background for the novel I have embarked on. It’s a novel about what happens when “homeland security” goes, well, mad. Marcus, a 17-year-old who cares about justice, gets his friends into trouble. Marcus — a fictional character — has been compared to Aaron Swartz, the internet activist charged with using a university computer network to, without authority, download millions of academic journal articles with the idea of making them freely available. Aaron Swartz committed suicide. Little Brother is good, and chilling, and I plan to read the sequel, Homeland.

When I started reading Rose Tremaine’s Merivel, I thought it might be a variation on Hilary Mantel’s magnificent Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. It isn’t. Merivel the character is not a political figure, he’s much more Montaigne—to whom he refers often—than Thomas Cromwell. He wants to believe in himself as worthwhile but struggles with his own past and present dissipations and can’t decide whether he is slave or friend to Charles II. As a physician of his time, he pays plenty of attention to bodily functions, smells and (lack of) sanitation. In many ways a foolish character given to weeping, he survives many changes of fortune.

"Such are the days and times of every man and, no matter how hard we work and strive, we can never know when something shall be given to us and when it will be taken away." (page 286)

I recommend this beautifully written book.

I don’t very often give up on a book, but I did on America. And it’s Franz Kafka! I found it a great disappointment compared to Metamorphosis, The Trial and The Castle. The protagonist of America endlessly introspects on minor matters, makes and breaks “friendships” oddly and doesn’t seem to learn anything. The book has a Kafkaesque sense of doom but about halfway through I couldn’t be bothered finding out any more.

“Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity,” it says on the cover of Behind The Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo. I didn’t see a lot of hope as I read of people living grim, stinking, insecure, violent, self-punishing lives recycling the waste of the rich on a rubbish dump. One woman’s plan for getting on in the world involved becoming a slumlord. However,

"Among powerful Indians, the distribution of opportunity was typically an insider trade." (Page 138)

 

Katherine Boo says in an excellent note at the end of the book that it’s all true, including people’s names. She used interviews, recordings and public records to get the stories. It’s hard to read about such unrelenting poverty and awful living conditions, but somehow, once you have started this book, necessary.

"Sunil thought that he, too, had a life, a bad life, certainly—the kind that could be ended as Kalu’s had been and then forgotten, because it made no difference to the people who lived in the overcity. But something he’d come to realise on the roof, leaning out, thinking about what would happen if he leaned too far, was that a boy’s life could still matter to himself." (page 199)

There's More to ebooks than Kindle

I've been an advocate for independent bookstores for years. (My two favourites in New Zealand are Unity Books in Wellington and The Women's Bookshop in Auckland.) For Unity you need the "unitybooksonline" page and the "ebooks" button and on The Women's Bookshop page the Kobo link is at the very top on the left of the home page. 

I have read a lot about "the death of the book as we know it" and "the death of print" and so on, to which I say "Tosh!" It’s both/and, people, not either/or.

The Ebook market is presently dominated by kindle, an ereader that takes books from the Amazon Kindle store in a format called .mobi that is particular to Kindles. Which means you can only read it on a Kindle device or app, so Amazon creates a circular process whereby you spend your book money with them. 

I want to say out loud: “THERE ARE ALTERNATIVES.” There's another Ebook format, called ePub, which is used for nearly every other Ebook reader than Kindle. New Zealand booksellers have decided to go with a reader called  Kobo, and sell this device. You can also download a free Kobo app to your iPad or smartphone. iBooks is another app for ipads and smartphones that reads ePub.

So you have a Kobo and you want to put some books on it. If you go direct to the kobo.com website you can buy and download from there. BUT, if you go to the website of your favourite independent bookstore and tap or click on their 'ebooks' button you can go from there to the kobo website and its 3 million books and—this is the important bit—the bookstore gets a cut from the sale. This is a tiny amount, a few cents, but it a) adds up if lots of people do it and b) keeps the independent bookstores in the game; they remain a player in the business of getting the books we want to read to us.

This all seems ponderous written down, but once you've done it a couple of times it's simple enough and, whatever happens in the book retailing world, I want independent bookstores, who are the ones who care about books and readers, to be a big part of it. Independent bookstores are also important to independent publishers, who are also important to us readers. Whether you take your books with or without batteries, support the independents.

PS. My own preference is still for reading books printed on paper. There's something about the physical object I really enjoy. The irony is I didn't appreciate this until I read a couple of books on my ipad.