Volcanic Ash and other blurring of sightlines

Well when I am feeling ill, and frankly who does’t this cold, cold winter , I love to lay in bed eat soup drink hot lemon drinks and read something incredible. Well last week I was doing that very thing when I opened an advance copy of The Rules of Civility by Amor Towles it was fantastic perhaps one of my fave US titles this year. I can’t wait till August when it is in the shop and some of you can share in the thrill of Katey Kontent’s life and times. I did read this in a real live book form and not as an electronic book,which is just as well as lentil soup and screens do not mix. I must be a bit old fashioned but reading a whole book from a screen just feels like work to me. Speaking of the rules of civility, I do not think that Nick Sherry was very civil when proclaiming the demise of the bookstore. I for one love bookshops, of course I am in one nearly everyday, speaking with customers and learning all the time from face to face interactions. We will have to celebrate if we are still in the hood in 5 years time and I do hope that Village Idiom is still there and Maritas of Yarraville and Plump and and and...

May Argghh!

Well it is May, nearly, and we at the Sun Bookshop have been preparing for the Williamstown Literary Festival this weekend so many great events all squished into 2 days check the website.. We are also pretty excited at the Sun to be hosting one of the Miles Franklin short, shortlisters Chris Wormesley at our bookclub Wednesday night, one of my best books from last year have you read it yet? . You also need to know there are so many great books coming out this month, I can’t recommend enough S.J Watsons’ Before I go to Sleep a great book of a woman suffering short term memory loss, scary and incredibly readable. It must be the month of memory loss book because we also have for young adults (anyone really) Forgotten by Cat Patrick a great page turner with a weirdly similar memory loss as Before I go to sleep. It’s a bit like the covers of books some months they all seem to be green or have only half a girls head, go figure! Also loved Ottoman Motel by Chris Currie and A visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and rocks, really. New Restaurant Alert. I have now eaten at Tin Pan Alley in Victoria Street Seddon and it was yummy whenever I walk past I see the wood fired Pizza Oven and want to run in instantly but must keep walking cannot give in… Pizzaaaa. Eat, read be merry.

Chic-lit at its finest!

The Secret Life of Dresses, Erin McKean (H&S Fiction)

A wonderful novel about vintage dresses, small towns, romance and being a little lost in life. Author Erin Mckean created the famous US website Dress-A-Day; and her knowledge, respect and love of stitching, hemlines, and floral patterns poetically transcends into her first novel. You’ll be absorbed by the 20-something year old Dora as she faces the challenges of losing a loved one, dealing with family secrets and the heartache of making tough decisions. A great read for lovers of vintage fashion, shift dresses and Jackie Kennedy gloves: “chic-lit” at its finest.

--Felicity--

A Bookseller never forgets?

I just had a terrible bookseller moment trying to recall the books I have read this week and coming up completely blank, however working backwards it has all returned. Finished Fall this month’s bookclub book. Loved it. Still going with Terror of Living (Urban Waite) incredible writing very Cormac MCarthy. I love that Canadian award The Giller Prize the books are always just my type, beautiful writing and an exploration of human nature, also there is usually a picture of water on the cover. Anyway I completely loved the latest Winner The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud. Onto the new Sleepers book This too Shall Pass by S.J Finn we are so lucky in Australia to have these small and exciting publishers, so let’s support them. Finally started that incredibly well written and compact story of illness and snails The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey. So very excitingly the Miles Franklin Prize Longlist has been announced. The Short list will be announced next month. I am jumping up and down because my favourite book of last year is on the longlist. Bereft by Chris Wormesley. On the 27^th of April Chris will be attending the Sun Bookclub so get reading and come on down.

Here is the Miles Franklin Longlist list in case you missed it.

Jon Bauer - Rocks in the Belly / Honey Brown - The Good Daughter / Patrick Holland - The Mary Smokes Boys / Melina Marchetta - The Piper's Son / Roger McDonald - When Colts Ran/ Stephen Orr - Time's Long Ruin / Kim Scott - That Deadman Dance / Kirsten Tranter - The Legacy / Chris Womersley – Bereft

So many good Australian Writers, so little time.

Scary Times

Well in these times of floods, earthquakes, tsunamis nuclear meltdowns and so on, I feel the need to escape and escape I did, yesterday, into the excellent psychological thriller by Julia Crouch called Cuckoo. Cuckoo is a page turner of a first novel. When Rose, who is seemingly, contented with her life, invites her recently widowed best friend, Polly, to stay she opens a very nasty can of worms. Glamorous, fragile, Polly arrives at the graceful English home with her wild young boys and the unravelling of everything Rose has strived to perfect, begins. I had a couple of quibbles but all in all so enjoyable.

Last time I blogged (so exciting) I mentioned an Indian restaurant in Victoria st, Seddon. The restaurant is Indian Palette and has perfect small dishes of delicious traditional Indian food with real spices to put to one side, like cardamom pods and cloves. Indian Palette puts me in mind of another book I recently read, Snake by Australian author Kate Jennings which is just about to be reissued. Snake was fabulous; a novel told in small portions, the story of a marriage, it is rich and beautifully executed. Snake was first published in 1996 and is well worth revisiting. Also loving the bookclub book, Fall by Colin Mc Adam and The Terror of Living by Urban Waite (an apt title).

From this day forward The Sun Bookshop really will post blogs

We at The Sun Bookshop, have been very slack, unlike our co-workers at the Younger Sun, from this day forward we promise to be conscientious bloggers giving you our thoughts on what we are reading, exciting, newsy, booky stuff and very interesting information about very interesting things.

So to begin I must sing the praises of Jasper Ffordes’ great new Thursday Next tale ‘One of our Thursdays is Missing’. If you have not read any Jasper Fforde you should beg, borrow or even purchase ‘The Eyre Affair’ and work your way through the series to this new one, which is, as always, hilarious, inventive and chock full of literary references.

In the latest instalment there is trouble in book world, the real Thursday Next has disappeared but is urgently needed for peace talks to head off a Genre War between The Racy Novel and Women’s Fiction. Fictional Thursday is called to stand in for real Thursday, but fictional Thursday has her own troubles with a growing backlist readership and an understudy who can’t handle crowds. Too funny, found myself laughing in public when eating Indian food in Seddon, which is great if you want Daal shooting out of your nose.

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER : THE FINKLER QUESTION

Howard Jacobson has won the prestigeous Man Booker Prize* for his novel The Finkler Question.

from the publisher's website:

Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular and disappointed BBC worker, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they've never quite lost touch with each other - or with their former teacher, Libor Sevick, a Czechoslovakian always more concerned with the wider world than with exam results.
Now, both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and with Treslove, his chequered and unsuccessful record with women rendering him an honorary third widower, they dine at Libor's grand, central London apartment. It's a sweetly painful evening of reminiscence in which all three remove themselves to a time before they had loved and lost; a time before they had fathered children, before the devastation of separations, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. Better, perhaps, to go through life without knowing happiness at all because that way you had less to mourn?
Treslove finds he has tears enough for the unbearable sadness of both his friends' losses. And it's that very evening, at exactly 11:30pm, as Treslove hesitates a moment outside the window of the oldest violin dealer in the country as he walks home, that he is attacked. After this, his whole sense of who and what he is will slowly and ineluctably change.
The Finkler Question is a scorching story of exclusion and belonging, justice and love, ageing, wisdom and humanity. Funny, furious, unflinching, this extraordinary novel shows one of our finest writers at his brilliant best.

Keep your eyes peeled for a Sun Bookshop staff review of this remarkable book.

*He gets 50,000 pounds for winning this prize. That's around $80,000...

Freedom: A Novel, Jonathan Franzen

I cannot rave enough about Freedom, it is absolutely brilliant. Franzen has produced another insightful family drama with characters and relationships that continue to resonate long after I turned the last page. Walter Berglund is a bike riding environmental lawyer, and Patty rebels against her high profile Democrat family and chooses to devote herself to her children rather than pursue a career. Both try to create a perfect world for their children but of course mistakes are made. Richard the enigmatic musician and Walter’s best friend is a constant presence (and source of friction) in their lives. At times funny, at times tragic but always totally engaging. Freedom is a testament to Franzen’s literary genius and is destined to become a modern classic.
Michelle

Our Tragic Universe, Scarlett Thomas

From the author of the brilliant, physics-inspired sci-fi-ish novel The End of Mr Y comes Our Tragic Universe. Looking at it one way, not a lot happens in this book. But if you look at it at a certain angle a whole mess of ideas (some unfinished and others half-realised) come spilling out. The protagonist, Meg, is struggling to write her ‘proper’ novel – instead distracted by the formulaic genre novels she churns out to pay for her rather meagre existence, which amounts to a damp flat in Devon with her unemployed (and quite frankly rather whingy) boyfriend Christopher and her dog B (who is very intelligent) and a cast of brilliantly curious characters (including a mysterious Beast). Lit up in lights, screaming at her for attention is the uncomfortable (but pleasurable) truth about the kiss Meg shared with the handsome, older, curator of the local museum (and how she mostly wishes it would happen again). Thomas leads us down one-way streets, to dead ends, leaves one three-page, involved philosophical musing to head off down another. She explores the mechanics and methods of writing – the ‘storyless story’, the death of the author, metafiction – as well as philosophy, Zen Buddhism, poltergeists, magic, ships in bottles, fame and whether or not we’re actually all living in some kind of fictional Second World without ever knowing it.

What happens in Our Tragic Universe is what happens after Meg reads a book she thinks she’s supposed to review and it turns out hadn’t ever sent it to her to review in the first place.

Kate