Three books about surfing

The imagery of surfing is everywhere. In Las Vegas casinos, posters of bronzed surfers tucking into turquoise tubes are as prevalent as those of diamond-bedecked women and fast cars. The message - that surfing offers a slice of paradise - is unambiguous. It has been enthusiastically co-opted by any number of mainstream brands, including Pepsi, which produced an advert in which David Beckham was cast as a surf dude, and American Express, which produced a series of commercials in which the Hawaiian big-wave surfing legend Laird Hamilton was as much a star as were the likes of Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese.

- Alex Wade, Times Online

Read the rest of the article here.

The Girls of Summer

While we're freezing in our South African winter, The New York Times discusses their Summer reads for the fairer sex.

The “Commencement” characters are savvy about, among other things, feminism and publishing. “When a woman writes a book that has anything to do with feelings or relationships, it’s either called chick lit or women’s fiction, right?” one of them asks. “But look at Updike, or Irving. Imagine if they’d been women. Just imagine. Someone would have slapped a pink cover onto ‘Rabbit at Rest,’ and poof, there goes the ... Pulitzer.”

They’re right of course. But this is the season when prettily designed books flood the market and compete for female readers. It’s a time when literary and lightweight books aimed at women become hard to tell apart. Their covers use standard imagery: sand, flowers, cake, feet, houses, pastel colors, the occasional Adirondack chair. Their titles (“Summer House,” “Dune Road,” “The Wedding Girl,” “Trouble”) skew generic. And they tend to be blurbed exclusively by women.

- Janet Maslin, New York Times.

Read the rest of the reviews here.

The new children's laureate Anthony Browne

Take a stroll through the surreal world of children's illustrator Anthony Browne and his award-winning drawings here.

Where the wildest literary rascals are

Spike Jonze and his Where the Wild Things Are team have made some lame picks in their list of top 10 literary rascals.

Literature is full of rascals. Mischievous, naughty, covered in mud and poking sticks at snails, staying out past their bedtimes and getting into scrapes and mishaps. Rascals, rapscallions, rogues, the lot of 'em.

But is the list of top 10 rascals in literature provided by the We Love You So blog accurate? Fans of arch-rascal Max in Maurice Sendak's sublime and enduring children's picture book Where the Wild Things Are will recognise the name of the blog from the growled plea by the assorted Wild Things at the close of the adventure, when they implore Max to remain on their island with the rather dubious promise "We'll eat you up, we love you so!" The journal is part production diary, part list of influences and general good stuff put together by the film director Spike Jonze and his team, who are behind the much-anticipated big-screen version of Sendak's book, due to hit cinemas this October.

The blog's recent list of rascals does, naturally, put Max at the top, and perhaps there's no argument with that - he does, after all, get sent to bed without his supper after chasing the dog with a fork and telling his mum he'll eat her up. It also points out that this is a provisional list, and that detailed analysis explaining why the names have been included is to follow. But do their following choices really hit the mark when it comes to great rascals?

- David Barnett, Guardian.co.uk

Read the rest of the post here.

No Place Like Home

The Orange Prize for Fiction was announced last night and the winner is:

Home
Marilynne Robinson
Hardcover, 325 pages
2.92 cms H x 21.64 cms L x 16.41 cms W
EAN 9780374299101
September 2008
Farrar Straus Giroux
Available to order – 2 weeks
R249

Jack is one of the great characters in recent literature. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold a job, he is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton's most beloved child. Brilliant, lovable, and wayward, Jack forges an intense bond with Glory and engages painfully with Ames, his godfather and namesake. "Home" is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, and the passing of the generations, about love and death and faith. It is Robinson's greatest work, an unforgettable embodiment of the deepest and most universal emotions.

'Robinson makes us understand home isn’t just a place—it’s something we carry with us.'



The Shortlist:

The Invention Of Everything Else
Samantha Hunt
Paperback, 257 pages
1.65 cms H x 20.32 cms L x 13.56 cms W
EAN 9780547085777
March 2009
Mariner Books
Available to order – 2 weeks
R138

Hunt's novel is a wondrous imagining of an unlikely friendship between the eccentric inventor Nikola Tesla and a young chambermaid in the Hotel New Yorker, where Tesla lived out his last days.


Scottsboro
Ellen Feldman
Paperback, 363 pages
2.79 cms H x 20.57 cms L x 13.72 cms W
EAN 9780393333527
May 2009
W. W. Norton & Company
Available to order – 2 weeks
R159

Alabama, 1931. A posse stops a freight train and arrests nine black youths. Their crime: fighting with white boys. When two white girls emerge from another freight car, the cry of rape goes up. One of the girls sticks to her story. The other changes her tune, again and again. Told through the eyes of a young journalist who fights to save the nine youths from the electric chair, Scottsboro is a novel of a shocking injustice that convulsed the nation and reverberated around the world.


Burnt Shadows
Kamila Shamsie
Paperback, 370 pages
3.05 cms H x 20.57 cms L x 13.46 cms W
EAN 9780312551872
April 2009
Picador USA
Available to order – 2 weeks
R138

Sweeping in scope and mesmerizing in its evocation of time and place, "Burnt Shadows" is an epic narrative of disasters eluded and confronted, loyalties offered and repaid, and loves rewarded and betrayed.


The Wilderness
Samantha Harvey
Hardcover, 371 pages
3.23 cms H x 21.59 cms L x 15.60 cms W
EAN 9780385527637
February 2009
Nan A. Talese
Available to order – 2 weeks
R236

It's Jake's birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life - his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now he is in his mid-sixties, and he isn't quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison, and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer's.
As the disease takes hold of him, Jake struggles to hold on to his personal story, to his memories and identity, but they become increasingly elusive and unreliable. What happened to his daughter? Is she alive, or long dead? And why exactly is his son in prison? What went so wrong in his life? There was a cherry tree once, and a yellow dress, but what exactly do they mean? As Jake fights the inevitable dying of the light, the key events of his life keep changing as he tries to grasp them, and what until recently seemed solid fact is melting into surreal dreams or nightmarish imaginings. Is there anything he'll be able to salvage from the wreckage? Beauty, perhaps, the memory of love, or nothing at all?


Molly Fox's Birthday
Deirdre Madden
Paperback, 240 pages
EAN 9780571239665
July 2009
Faber and Faber
Available to order – 3 weeks
R139

Dublin. Midsummer. While absent in New York, the celebrated actor Molly Fox has loaned her house to a playwright friend, who is struggling to write a new work. Over the course of this, the longest day of the year, the playwright reflects upon her own life, Molly's, and that of their mutual friend Andrew, whom she has known since university. Why does Molly never celebrate her own birthday, which falls upon this day? What does it mean to be a playwright or an actor? How have their relationships evolved over the course of many years? "Molly Fox's Birthday" calls into question the ideas that we hold about who we are; and shows how the past informs the present in ways we might never have imagined.


For more info go to http://www.orangeprize.co.uk/home

Pop-up Princes

Meet Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart, the two artists who have single-handedly (well, with four hands) revived the pop-up book for a new millennium. Chances are your child owns one of their awe-inspiring creations, be it The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with its spinning paper cyclone, or Encyclopedia Prehistorica: Dinosaurs with its jaw-gnashing T-Rex. Maybe you've received one as a gift yourself, from a friend who appreciates your inner child.

- Gwynne Watkins & Paul Barman

Read the rest of the article here.

How To Keep Awake While Reading

The rules for reading yourself to sleep are much easier to follow than are the rules for keeping awake while reading. Just get into bed in a comfortable position, see that the light is inadequate enough to cause a slight eyestrain, choose something you don't care whether or not you read, and unless you have insomnia, you will be nodding soon enough. Those who are expert in relaxing with a book don't have to wait for nightfall or for bed. A comfortable chair in the library will do at anytime.

- An essay by the late philosopher Mortimer Adler. Read the rest here.