Tell me about it. I am terrified somebody will come to my house and strip me of my degree in, whatchamacallit, English Literature. Then they'll give it to somebody else who actually?

as on the net-

but the writers havent actually?

I had to look that word up. Thank you, Islander!

Other than that, I mainly read non-fiction. I like true stories better than?

I made a thing of only reading fiction that had had glowing recommendations from people I knew in person, or whose judgement?

Good, because Access Road inspired stabbing disappointment that I never want to feel again about a writer I revere.

I?m finding it hard to engage with novels and each one takes ages for me to plough through?

Since September I've found it hard to hold a plot or complex cast of characters in my brain and consequently I'm finding it hard to engage with novels

There was a point a couple of weeks after the Feb earthquake where I suddenly thought, "Wait a minute, this book I'm?

Nah. I make a policy of only purchasing books I know I'm going?

Oh well. Still enjoyed them though. Seems the great Australian Novel could fall foul of the same sentiments as expressed here about New Zealand. Or is the general consensus that they write better? (ducks)

Sorry for the off-topic, but this is a pet peeve of mine. Are you utterly perplexed or the opposite (whatever that is) by NZ fiction?

/pedant.

I'd continue avoiding it if I were you.

Fair enough. If you can get Obama to use it properly, I will too.

Oops. Something amiss here. I wrote a few lines, previewed, but my stuff didn?t appear. And still doesn?t.
ETA: But now has. As one of those anal retentive who rarely posts without reviewing, correcting, rewriting, etc, not?

Yes, I do have an accent (everyone does!), although I?m told it?s not easy to identify. I don?t believe I have the ABBA-style Swenglish any more. People who guess often think I?m from South Africa, but?

See, this may be where I differ from some. I'm not waiting for a successor to Janet Frame, Katherine Mansfield or for Maurice Gee to write more or, according to recent reports, more worthily. They did write wonderful novels with?

Wait. There's a William Morris museum?? Fantastic! Where?

I'm currently reading Bill Pearson's Coal Flat, which took a while to get into but is proving to be quite rewarding. Particularly given the historical context of the novel and knowing the passage?

It does (she said modestly). And so does the Listener, if you can bear to pick it up again — it's won "Best Books Pages" several?

Craig Y

Craig, you may have just inadvertently kicked off Public Address Books? new fiction line-up? I am already making notes for Zombie Alone.

And they in the Anglo-Saxon world books are not properly bound anymore, it's?

on other matters, I think the title ?the were people? belongs to me!

+1

Yes, Royce, Royce, etc.... – that was another one I read, and laughed at.?

Fishing does involve a torturous death – especially in big, quite long-lived animals like bluefins – which is why I?

+2. Loved her (last? it was ages ago!) book of short stories, the name of which escapes me. Terrific.
Don't think she's writing these days.

"Cherries On a Plate" is a really?

I do love that libraries have all the books I can't afford to purchase, but my legacy to my unfortunate descendants is?

(My kitchen equipment, with my brain attached, is second to none. My library apertaining to food/cooking/seafood is ? I understand- way better than CHCH Library. It is certainly better than anything here on the West?

I dream of high ceilings and ladders on runners.

Everyone has fantasies about ladders on runners, right?

I know I do.

After reading Neil Gaiman's blog about Diana Wynne Jones i am rereading Deep Secret which is familiar and silly enough to creep into the dusty corners of my brain and remind it that reading is fun and not?

We buy quite?

Oh, never apologise for books like those! They're are part of the imaginative landscape, no matter where you grew up.

I missed S & A as a child but got to enjoy discovering them?

Fleur Adcock, probably? In any case I must look that book up. I have a vague memory of reading it, but not for ages.

"...As for the women, they are wonderful. How can a man know their ways?" said the Maori philosophically.

And I love that you've preserved even the clippings that people tucked into?

Yeah, I was pretty keen to include as much "paratext" as I could when digitizing these novels. So that included publishers' catalogues, if those were in the same binding as the main?

Connections and leads that would have been completely invisible before the internet are now, as you say, just magically there. For a book historian, it?s like manna from heaven.

It is magical, isn't it? And yet methinks A.S. Byatt's Possession would be a different (and perhaps poorer) book if it?

NB I haven't read Garber's book, but as a recovering academic (and one who still harbours some sympathy for what goes on in literary anatomy classes, all of us scrubbed-up?

I'm pretty sure it does — and it's on my TBR list — but I've got to admit that I've got two problems with raiding a writer's desk drawers after they die.?

Why do we all love the 10 PM Question so much? Is it because of its warmth? Its gradually revealed psychological truth? The way we can definitely relate to the main character?

I reckon the reviewer for the Herald (John McCrystal? Cannot find the link, alas) was right to observe?

You know, that's what I sort of hoped one of our leading novelists would do with his retirement from the?

Maybe more so, but I would put a strong vote in for parents of pre-teen girls, and specify fathers, or at least this?

A very sane approach! But the patriotic force is strong. And there is such good stuff out there, it's worth panning for gold...

Plus if the gold is not found you can just pan. It's win-win for the reviewer! (Except, not you because you're too nice.)

The Okarito Project" which he accomplished in during the year 2007 – a photo?

And there you are, surrounded by books! (Is it silly that I feel like waving?)

And Jolisa!So that's what was fluttering at me from inside the Mac's screen!

Chortle.

(Except, not you because you?re too nice.)

Except sometimes, when I'm not.

Wonderful!

But always so readable. I enjoyed those, and realize that by not getting the Listener any more, I'm missing something rather splendid.

Love your work!

I didn't mean that you don't pan, rather that you don't strike me as the person who would count it as win. For instance I seem to recall you were positively pained by having to remark how clunky The Trowenna Seas was – which goes?

I'm finding this thread somewhat disheartening. I thought being disappointed sometimes was just what happened if you weren't completely safe in your reading choices? We've had a very open publishing environment for the last 20 or so years:?

That said, I don't read much?

Also, a secret library door, and the ultimate bibliophile's staircase.

ETA: place protective drool-resistant cover over keyboard before clicking above links.

Yes, we're under-represented in the YA field. I try to keep this constantly in mind in all discussions, because YA are (in my case)?

Okarito is my favourite place in the whole wide world – it's completely magical – I love it when you tell us snippets about life there, Islander.

+ 1 million, I suspect!

I'm all but certain of it. Some people work very hard to keep their tastes contemporary, but it's hard work the first time you hit?

Yeah, Twitter is the new hip hop to me. I'll drift backwards in time, chewing over the precious conversations of yesteryear, whilst the next generation finds nothing to recommend in my total inability to find anything worth saying in under?

Just incidentally, the start of the newly-constructed entrance to the Trig Track is a sinuous boardwalk across one of?

+1 plus Ben's.

@Islander: Your house looks wonderful. (Remembering that you built it yourself.) I was a bit nervous of asking?

A secret bookshelf door which leads to more books! I think I just exploded from squee-ness!

I think he has a similar humility & waitingness with people – although he doesnt usually 'do' people.

There is?

Yep, ?language arts (whatever they are ? all literary performance pehea?) and literature.?

Let no-one say that ANZ officialdom doest take?

Thank you for introducing his work. I?ll add him to my favourites in the ANZ photography category. TBH, I couldn?t tell the odd one out. Loved them all.

If it wasn't for the afore-twitter-mentioned burnout (well, Jolisa will know what I mean!) I would even try and make an intelligent comment too...

As it is, I'll just leave it up to y'all at the moment. :)

It's better to burn out than to fade away.

Umm, doh! On my part. Thanks again. Have heard of David Alexander. Nice photos on his site too.

Now, about those books...

Am patiently waiting to get my hands on The Shallows. In the meantime, as it has been framed thus far (in Is Google Making Us Stupid and Proust and the Squid) it's an argument that annoys the beejesus out of me?

*We prefer not to scare the shit out of littler kids-

!!!Jo-king...

It seems to me ?we? are reading more than ever. At least on my part there?s always a book or three on the go; these blogs; other blogs; 140 character haiku exchanges;?

Which means Alan Duff must even now be plotting "the were warriors".

I guess technically not a museum – they call it the William Morris Gallery, it hosts exhibitions as well as being a repository of things related to Morris himself, and it also has a research library. I'm guessing there is a considerable?

For?

... at any given moment, our most complicated machine will be?

Putting it in my diary for late 2012 :-) Did you make it in before it closed?

It's entirely dubious. I can think of many short stories which require more thinking and pack a greater emotional and mental punch than entire?

Ahem. ?What volume is that damn TV on, I?m trying to read!? ?Go to your rooms separately and stop yelling!? ?Dad, we share a room?. ?Don?t come at me with your adolescent logic, go to your room!?
shaggy readers emerge?

As for visiting, it's been a while now since I visited – I knew they had lottery money, but hadn't quite arrived at the realisation that it was actually going to close for such?

more like a low murmur of disgruntlement

You're messing with my vulpine metaphor, but OK :-)

I was going to airdrop Borges into the conversation, thank you for sparing me the trouble.

Useful — if not compulsory — reading at this point in the thread:?

Not enough, apparently. Comrade.

I?m off to the emblazoner to get this bit on some sort of pennant:

?When the electric toaster was invented, there were, no doubt, books that said that the toaster would open up horizons for breakfast undreamed of in?

Also, Airdrop Borges would be a great name for a band. (I imagine them opening for Jefferson Starship).

If you could check my browser history (which I sincerely hope you can't) you would see The Aleph & Other Stories. Why not some Casares to boot?

"The body is imaginary, and we bow to?

I am, but I have learned to fear and control that hunger. If I had dick-all to do in a day, I'd be into all kinds of immersion, although I suspect long-form novels would?

What was I saying? Drat, now you've distracted me with the Internet.

True... but I think the spell that a really good novel casts is built up via a slow accumulation of attention over a long period, culminating (in my case at least) in?

Surely Socrates meant that ironically? I can't recall the passage but I?

Is it this one?

"The children now love luxury; they have bad?

ETA Yes, that's the quote.

LOL, and I expect the same sentiment was expressed many times in the epoch between humans learning to speak, and learning to write.

Peter the Hermit in 1,200 AD may be the oldest recorded instance. It's also almost the earliest recorded instance of written speech.

Airdrop Borges will want to co-opt Proust?

Interesting you say that. My mother says that in her early days of motherhood – in the 1960s – it was seen as wildly self-indulgent and feckless and lazy to be seen reading novels. I expect reading Cordon Bleu cookbooks?

Let's do this thing. I call dibs on Really Big Shark At The Bay.

Well, Jane Austen seemed to think having your nose constantly in a book was not always?

Or even Baudolino. Who needs zombies when you can have a blemmyae?

It is a very useful summation, thank you for that. I have strong reservations about Wolf's book, but none that can be?

linger – possibly. I understand he now thinks writing is a mug's game, and ANZ are hateful disloyal readers for not supporting him in?

"If I write all this in defence of Flaubert, whom I do not much like, if I feel myself so deprived at not writing about many others whom I prefer, it is because I have the impression that we no longer know how to read."?

Hmm. You might think that authors would be all for noses affixed firmly to books, particularly their own (books, I mean).

Yes. I last read Borges' "Labrynths" at least 20 years ago (reminds self to do it again asap), and have vivid mental pictures of several stories. The ones I didn't connect with at the time are probably the ones I should?

When I heard that one, it was offered as if it were a serious comment, not an irony. Used to highlight complaints in the 60s that kids were no good,?

In any case, I would like to buy them all?

I have The Last Werewolf on my "to be reviewed" pile and it looks really good – anything that comes with a Nick Cave recommendation has to?

What I was struggling to say ...

In any case, I would like to buy them all?

Bitter for obvious reasons; sweet because they?re at least not being forced into receivership, or driven out by one rent hike too far as so many independent?

The independent bookstore down the street from me is currently being transformed into a community-owned cooperative with $250 shares. You could always do that. Or some for-profit variant.

Seems the Welly branch of Parsons is still going strong.

I sincerely hope they're at a keyboard, fingers flying, minds?

I was re-reading Diana Wynne Jones the other day – a short story called "The Plague of Peacocks," about a pair of do-gooders, the Platts, who move into a village and set about correcting its many "faults" — and this bit?

Well, I don't think you can get more "self-conscious" than Muriel Spark's 1957?

Of course not. You have to choose the dimensions along which you are prepared to experiment. Plot can be one of them, but it doesn't have to be.

Ah, yes — fans with entitlement issues. It is a wonderful if creepy article, and should be followed up with Neil Gaiman's legendary "George RR Martin is not your bitch" blog?

Moon is a particular coup because this is the first reprint since its original hardcover publication (copies of which are?

Edit I remember Tolkien complaining that his American fans took things way too far. But they were the main reason he made such a lot of money from LOTR too. When?

Sure they're not at the "quality" end of the prose scale, but Kirkpatrick has quite obviously been learning as he goes, and elements of his books are startlingly good.

Teehee!

It should be repeated loudly and often though that it's not as if Martin were writing the sequel?

His cartoon on his blog about the online exchanges kind of sums it up.

What seemed to happen is a first time?

Took him seventeen years to deliver that sequel to The Hobbit, what's it called? :).