The Librarian

Last summer's weather lacks many redeeming features. I don't think I was the only one who decided last April that a summer without sun just isn't . And I swear it has made this summer all the better. I keep on noticing all the simple summer things. Picking a basket of apricots, riding down a (small) rapid in an inner tube, having my cup of tea and christmas cake in a shady spot of the garden. My beach bag is brimming over with bookish goodness. Here's what you'd find if you tipped it out on the picnic blanket:       The latest Frankie and Extracurricular mags       A borrowed copy of series 3 of The Good Word       New albums Sad but True , Carry Me Back , and Wreck and Ruin and an amazing, 'unputdownable' book called Room . Wishing you a year of sunshine, good reading, and plenty of take-a-skip moments (and an outdoor bath too - I cannot recommend them highly enough).

I finished The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain, over a week ago, but every time I think of it my throat constricts, my eyes get smudgy, and I realise I'm still a little bit heartbroken. The story, written as fiction, and told in the voice of Hadley Richardson, Ernest Hemingway's first wife, is based on known facts about their relationship. It's a love story, but as far as love stories go, it's pretty devastating. Hadley and Ernest meet at a party in Chicago, when he is only 21, and she six years older. Each carrying sadnesses and baggage, they fall in love. They marry and move to Paris, where, spurred on by new friends such as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, Hemingway begins to make tentative steps towards fiction writing. They become parents, he becomes famous, and they come apart. I cried. x Library Girl PS I feel abit guilty. I got a recommendation for this book from a friend, and rushed out to get it from the library. Somehow, in doing so, I actually p...

I am unsettled.  I have a handful of authors who, in my opinion, can do no wrong. It's their names I rattle off when people ask who my favourites are. They are my top people. And being a bookish librarian, that says a lot. Anne Tyler has topped my list of favourite authors ever since I read Patchwork Planet a decade ago.  As John Updike describes, she "gives the mundane its beautiful due". Her work has been described as 'domestic realism' - she writes about people grappling the stuff of ordinary life, and she captures the nuances and quirks of that everyday life in such a way that we see it afresh. Her work always carries an edge of melancholy; yet her amused tone makes us smile as we read, detached and charmed, taking nothing to heart. So, when I finally had her new book, The Beginner's Goodbye , in my clutches last month, I quickly made up an excuse to spend the afternoon curled up reading. It's a slow-moving tale of a man grappling wi...

Some days I just can't wait for bed time, especially with a pile of books like this waiting for me. I was recommended The Paris Wife by a friend, it is about Hemingway's wife. I have followed Rachel Allen's cooking career a bit since I have been helping out a friend opening a cook school here in Hawke's Bay, so it was a treat to find this book Home Cooking at the library. Fairytale Food by Lucie Cash, looks cute but not very practical. And, finally, ah sweetness, the latest Country Living magazine.

I have been revisiting my favourite classics from my 'tweens'. I'm so glad that I had those books in my childhood. So comforting, and so....inspiring to read again. Oh, how I love the strong and plucky leading ladies, and how I love that the pace of life was so much more sedate, that the weeks all had a comforting rhythm to them, that the domestic arts were so cherished. How to get some more of all of that into my life, to resist the temptation to move faster, to do more, to be everything. Thank you, my dear favourite ever authors, you have reminded me once again what the essentials of life are. It's hard to narrow down my list of fav's, but here are five of them: This is the cover of my much-loved edition 1. Anne of Green Gables 2. Little Women (and Little Men and Jo's Boys!) 3. A Girl of the Limberlost 4. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm 5. Caddie Woodlawn

Every quite often it seems a New Zealand author writes a book that I love so much that I can't stop talking about it. In the last few years there was Let Me Sing You Gentle Songs, then Mr Pip , and this time it is..... The Conductor by Sarah Quigley. The Conductor by Sarah Quigley It's cold, it's spare and it's very stark, but Sarah Quigley has created something powerfully beautiful in this book that follows the story of the composition and first performance of Shostakovich's 7th symphony amidst the seige on Leningrad by the Nazi's in 1941. Based around the story of Shostakovich’s single-minded endeavour to write his 7 th Symphony, and see it performed, the book shows the lengths that an artist will go to to express himself. While most people are fleeing the city, and others starving and dying, Shostakovich determinedly writes his piece of music, and it falls upon conductor Karl Eliasberg to rise above his own starvation and grief to bring toget...

Oh, why am I being such a slow reader?! I still haven't finished my book chat book. It is still good though, and I soooo look forward to sharing it with you. In the meantime, for August's book chat here is one of my favourite books by one of my all-time favourite authors. Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver. Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver I'd like to read this one again this winter. It's so beautifully written, and the characters and relationships so real, that the book demands to be read more than once so you can check in again with the place (the Appalachian mountains) and th characters to whom you become so attached. This book came out around the same time as Kingsolver's highly acclaimed The Poisonwood Bible , and it strikes me as an antidote for the intensity and dark desperation of that amazing book, because there is a real lightness to Prodigal Summer that is both uplifting and very beautiful. And, before I go any further I must say a gre...

A comedy of classic proportions My friend and I have been at war. She laughs in the face of danger, she claims   to dislike Jane Austen without even opening one of her books or at least watching the BBC version of P&P. While of course part of me is just miffed that she doesn't like something that I so love, the other part of me finds it hard to understand the lack of curiosity...after so much general female adoration of Mr Darcy, doesn't she at least want to see Colin Firth and that wet shirt scene? I thought maybe we would have to part ways until she gently reminded me that we liked lots of the same other sorts of things, like vintage tea cups, cute little chickens, op shopping, pretty scarves,  you know general sort of nice things, so maybe we could just overlook our differences about Jane Austen. Nothing beats a rational argument like that. Yet, though I knew she had a point, it was still abit of a niggle, so when she said one day "I don't like Jane Austen...