Holiday Reading

 

I went on a holiday!
It was indeed fabulous and many, many books where consumed. I always attempt to only read for entertainment on a holiday and the following are a some of those books (super entertaining).  Vanishing Point is a great stand alone page turner from Val McDermid. I had not read her for a while and oh how comforting it is in her hands. A child disappears from his adopted mother at the airport.

Whilst in the midst of my reading frenzy I  read Broken Harbour, I love Tana French always a good story teller and this one about the perfect family, the husband and children found murdered the wife clinging to life is no exception.

 

The Twelve follows on where The Passage left off. Just as entertaining and unputdownable, if you have a few days to indulge yourself in this great tale of Virals and the fight to defeat them just do it. It will be in The Sun on the 16th of October only a few more sleeps. Amazing airplane read.

Too Many Books Too Little space

Well November is here for Booksellers as books run in the door and there are giant piles all over the shop. In fact we are finding it a little scary just where do these books fit? Shop little, books many. Trying to fit in the reading requirement of a bookshop life between receiving books has been hard too but I have managed a few. Blood by Tony Birch a moving road story of a young boy, the sister he will protect at any cost and their neglectful mother, I shed a tear. The much hyped The Night Circus -Erin Morgensten which really is a magical love story written with great imagination. Death and the

Spanish Lady- Carolyn Morwood a great mystery set in Victoria during the Spanish influenza epidemic in 1919, the first in a 3 book series it was a treat to read. The Marriage Plot -Jeffrey Eugenides what a fabulous tale of a love triangle, growing up and semiotics. Squeezed in The Sisters Brothers -Patrick DeWitt This Booker short listed book really is such a great, violent, western. The story of 2 hitman travelling across America to do a job is a complete page turner.Ate a great meal at the Corner Shop'snewest venture Brain in Williamstown Smoked eel to die for.

Characters and Risotto

Well this gorgeous book landed in the shop last week and is selling like hotcakes. Why? Because it is very gorgeous and fabulously interesting. Characters (why is it so hard for me to spell that word?) is a fabulous look at signage and typography in and around Melbourne, including the gorgeous Sun Theatre sign pre restoration. Don't trust the index on this one it is actually on page 190. We have an added interest here at the Sun because one of Yarraville's own characters and our long time customer, sometimes handy man and pal Warren Kirk has photographs featured in the book, very exciting.

Don't miss Warren's Photograph of the man with his Jesus trolleys just past the index, the lucky last one in the book. Saturday saw The Help which was great and just like when I read the book, I cried and ate chocolate, also made an asparagus risotto from Jamie Oliver it was a really excellent recipe and tasted like Spring.

More events than you can poke a stick at!

Well it is certainly event time here at the Sun Bookshop get out your diary and start putting aside some time for the following. Saturday 24th of September we have ex Doggies player Barry Hall signing his memoir Pulling no Punches. Put your scarf on and head down at 10.00am. Then the very exciting launch of William McInnes and Sarah Watt's beautiful, funny and moving book, the story of their lives together and with their children Worse Things happen at Sea on Tuesday 27th at 6pm you are all welcome but book for this as it is an event exclusive to the Sun . Our bookclub meets September 28th at 8pm this time we are reading the powerful Kinglake 350 and we are so lucky to have author Adrian Hyland coming along. Saturday October 1st at 11.00am sees Kerry Greenwood's fantastic new Corrina title Cooking the Books being launched, book as Kerry's launches are always popular. Then on Wednesday October 5 we are selling books for Sydney comedian Mandy Nolan at Aqua y Vino call them to purchase tix 9687 9006. Finally at 1.30pm, Saturday the 8th Claire Saxby's beautiful childrens picture book The Carrum Sailing Club will be launched. Whew after that I will be having a fab Latin american meal at Los latinos in Maidstone where I went to for the first time last week and had incredible Fajitas yum, I can not wait to go back.

National Bookshop Day Text Prize Winner

Yes finally got it together to put this photo of our happy winner of these great Text titles on the website. Personally can vouch for 3 of these great reads

Indigenous Literacy Day

Today is Indigenous Literacy Day started by that amazing woman Suzy Wilson at The Riverbend Bookshop in Brisbane. Proof if you ever needed it that one woman and a community can make a huge difference. We will be giving 5 % of our sales to the ILF today along with loads of other bookshops that are also supporting this great event in different ways. So get on down to an ILF friendly bookshop and spread the love. On another tack( is that the sort of tack I mean) I have been reading up a storm. I totally adored Alice Pung's beautiful and moving memoir Her Fathers Daughter, really really liked Amy Waldman's The Submission the story of a 9/11 Memorial Competition a very interesting look at the power of prejudice and the media. Also, do not get too jealous, reading the newest Kerry Greenwood, Corinna Cooking The Books which as always is Kerry Greenwood enjoyable. Has anyone been to the Victorian Pyrenees? I went this weekend and it was pretty countryside with really good wine, practically no other wine visitors highly recommended. Another high recommend is The Naked boy and the Crocodile edited by Andy Griffiths, a fund raising book for the ILF.

Well, what a great start to the week I had an excellent lunch at Cumulus yesterday thanks to the lovely Hachette folk. An incredible meal with US crime writer John Hart, who has a new book Iron House just in stores at a great price. Our lunch was a bit like a John Hart crime novel a range of surprises arriving to keep us interested, and just when you thought it was all over wham here comes the main course. Of course we were all left feeling very satisfied. Quite excited about National Bookshop day I am thinking a Greek Theme for our snacks at the Kerry Greenwood launch of Medea. We now officially have a lot of events coming up. Andy Griffiths Launch,William McInnes and Sarah Watt Launch, Sam DeBrito visit,Barry Hall with Karaoke? Another Kerry Greenwood Launch and Kaz Cooke. Well keep checking the website for dates times etc.

Win a book to Review

Well goodness me what about England very scary and not to make light of it maybe less TV and more reading could help. I have been reading up a storm and have no inclination to riot. Finally read One Day ,some of it is set in Hackney, (enjoyed it a lot) and I was reading it in the flipback edition which was a very fine experience didn’t feel any different except for the lack of weight in my bag this has to be a good way to go. Okay so we have been going a little mad at the shop this week organising National Bookshop day events it is suddenly only 1 week away but just confirmed is the Wests own William McInnis reading a few stories for little ones at 10.00am yeh! Another Westie Kerry Greenwood is relaunching her Delphic Women Series starting with Medea at 1pm double Yeh! We have prizes from Text and Hachette Childrens and other fun stuff too.
I don’t want to make you all too jealous but I am reading Jeffrey Euginedes newest book (out soon) The Marriage Plot. I love it. Calling Yarraville readers of this blog if you are out there and would like to review a book for us I have 1 copy of The Ridge by Michael Koryta and 1 of Megan Delahunt’s new book To the Island so the first 2 people into the shop on Friday 12th of August ,that’s tomorrow, can WIN!

Not Actual Bedside Table

Well tonight is bookclub night and we will be at the Sun Theatre upstairs room 8pm. Unusually we are reading optional books this month either The Hare with Amber Eyes that prize winner, or Townie the book that Michael loves. I unfortunately due to holidays and conferences and time flying and 50 books in a pile beside my bed have read neither bookclub book! Sorry. I have, in the non- fiction vein, started the incredible Kinglake-350 by Adrian Hyland it is a book about the 2009 bushfires, Adrian lives in St Andrews and has written the story in a moving page turner way. Stay tuned for dates on Adrian attending the bookclub (we hope).‘So you have been on holidays’ I hear you say, the answer is a big yes to warm, warm Bali where I read trashy holiday reads only, it was fab. I loved Poison tree by Erin Kelly and Beauty Queens Libba Bray and I can’t remember what else weird as it was only a week ago. What I do remember was an unforgettable meal at Mozaic in Ubud and I came back to find the book of the restaurant is out in September, yummy. So much is going on I had better get into more blogging, and up with the times as I am do you follow us on facebook?

Warm events for cold nights

Cold and Foggy! Why that is perfect reading weather if ever I lived it. Just in at the Sun which I read on the weekend and is quickly doing the rounds is Kylie Ladd’s new book Last Summer great entertaining chick book for the 30+ it is a bit like watching Tangle it sucks you in and you can’t stop till the very end. Tonight at 8pm at the Sun we have Favel Parrett at bookclub we are so lucky to have her come along to talk to us about Past the Shallows an incredible debut novel, I haven’t stopped crying since I reread it on Sunday. I hope to see you there can you bring some tissues? We are also counting down to an exciting event July 18 at The Corner Shop to celebrate the release of The Butcher, The Baker, The Best Coffee Maker, with authors Kylie Smorgan and Gaye Weedon This event is right up my alley, learn the secret locations of amazing food and coffee places around Melbourne. Starting with the Corner shop 11 Ballarat st Yarraville

July so many books, so little time.

Well what an exciting week there are loads of great books coming out for July but 3 of my very favourites are, in no particular order, To Be Sung Underwater -Tom McNeal, There Should be More Dancing by Melbourne Author Rosalie Ham and State of Wonder- Ann Patchett. There are so many others and yesterday I just finished Alan Hollinghurst’s latest great novel The Stranger’s Child . I have never read this Booker prize writer before and I totally loved this big history of the aristocratic, minor poet Cecil Valance, his family and all of the secrets that lay below the veneer of respectability. Smashing. Alan Hollinghurst’s other books are now on my ‘definitely to be read once I retire and have time book shelf’. Really this is just a tiny sample July is a jolly good month old girl.

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...

June New Releases

The Life: A Novel, Malcolm Knox : Allen & Unwin
He looked into the Pacific and the Pacific looked back into him. The Life tells the story of former-world-champion Australian surfer, Dennis Keith, from inside the very heart of the fame and madness that is 'The Life'. Now bloated and paranoid, former Australian surfing legend Dennis Keith is holed up in his mother's retirement village, shuffling to the shop for a Pine-Lime Splice every day, barely existing behind his aviator sunnies and crazy OCD rules, and trying not to think about the waves he'd made his own and the breaks he once ruled like a god. Years before he'd been robbed of the world title that had his name on it - and then drugs, his brother, and the disappearance and murder of his girlfriend and had done the rest. Out of the blue, a young would-be biographer comes knocking and stirs up memories Dennis thought he'd buried. It takes Dennis a while to realise that she's not there to write his story at all. Daring, ambitious, dazzling, The Life is also as real as it gets - a searing, beautiful novel about fame and ambition and the price that must sometimes be paid for reaching too high.

The Amateur Science of Love, Craig Sherborne : Text Publishing
They say we fall in love. But really we fall in sickness. I lost appetite for food in those two nights with Tilda. My stomach was sunken in its wishbone cavity. Me, I was never sick, but I was sick now, the strangest sickness that made my eyes gleam green with excellent health. They had shiny white edges. My cheeks were glossed in a fresh oil of pink. Colin dreams of escaping his parents’ New Zealand farm for a grand stage career. He makes it to London and a disastrous audition before meeting Tilda—beautiful Tilda, older, an artist—who brings his future with her. A heady romance leads to a new home in a decaying former bank in a small town hours from Melbourne. They are building a life together—but there are cracks in the foundation. This is a love story, told from passionate beginning to spectacular end. It is intimate and honest, blackly funny and emotionally devastating.

Parisians, Graham Robb : Picador

New Format
The Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller from the award-winning author of The Discovery of France. No-one knows a city like the people who live there – so who better to relate the history of Paris than its inhabitants through the ages? Taking us from 1750 to the new millennium, Graham Robb's Parisians is at once a book to read from cover to cover, to lose yourself in, to dip in and out of at leisure, and a book to return to again and again – rather like the city itself, in fact.

See more new releases on our website.

The Ottoman Motel

The Ottoman Motel, Christopher Currie (Text Publishing)

Christopher Curries’ debut novel is a fabulous page turner. I read it in one sitting and was totally engrossed. Simon, a young boy, stops with his parents in Reception the town where his grandmother lives. Whilst Simon stays at the hotel, his parents go for a drive and never return. A distressed Simon is taken in by the townsfolk but feels that nobody is searching for his parents in any meaningful way and that’s when he and another parentless boy take matters into their own hands. This book is a great way to while away a rainy weekend (and there seems to be plenty of those).

---Deb---

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.

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.

Libbi Gorr Event

Yum, ate gorgeous french food at PM 24 last night, Lemon Curd to die for, and as you may already know chef Phillipe Mouchel along with Rita Erlich has a new book called More Than French recipes and stories, divine! Let me feed you two morsels of information.Wednesday April 6 at 12pm we are hosting an event at the Sun Theatre with Rebecca Barnard chatting to Libbi Gorr about her book The A-Z of Mummy Manners, an hilarious look at etiquette for the modern mother. Run away from home or work and join us for Dips, biccies and a glass of wine it is not PM24 but its free, book on info@sunbookshop.com.My second morsel is that I was lucky enough to see the Williamstown Festival Programme so far and I feel very excited loads of excellent people and events I would love to attend.

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.

Michael Hyde : All along the watchtower

All along the watchtower, Michael Hyde (Vulgar Press)

Local author Michael Hyde has written a memoir of his years as an activist during the 1960s and his opposition to Australia's involvement in the Vietnam war, his trips to China and Cambodia - and he has also given us a wonderful insight into the life of young, political and wild youths of that time.

Michael is fortunate enough to have recently recovered his ASIO file and he found that writing All along the watchtower was so much easier with with all the records of his phone calls, movements - and photos too!

The book is being released to coincide with an SBS documentary on Michael.