Top Ten Tuesday: Trees

Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. Covers/Titles with Things Found in Nature (covers/titles with things like trees, flowers, animals, forests, bodies of water, etc. on/in them) (Submitted by Jessica @ a GREAT read) I am choosing to focus on trees for my post!

At the Foot of the Cherry Tree by Alli Parker - Listened to this on audio this year and it was really good! It is a fictionalised story of how her grandparents met just after WWII in Japan.

The Flame Tree by Siobhan Daiko - If you are looking for a WWII story set in the Pacific theatre of war, then this could be a good option.

Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak - This was one of my favourite reads of 2022.

Under the Christmas Tree by Robyn Carr - This is part of the Virgin River series.

The Drowning Tree by Carol Goodman - I have read a number of this author's books but it has been a while.

Family Tree by Barbara Delinsky - I don't remember anything about this book. To be fair, I did read it back in 2008.

The Red Tree by Shaun Tan - This is another author I haven't read for a long time.

The Persimmon Tree by Bryce Courtenay - I often think about the love story in this book.

Apple Tree Yard by Louise Doughty - I have had this book sitting on my shelf for a couple of years now.

The Cedar Tree by Nicole Alexander - This is one that has been sitting on my Kindle for a while! The description does sound good.

Six Degrees of Separation: Trust to Lords of the White Castle

 

Welcome to this month's edition of Six Degrees of Separation, which is a monthly meme hosted by Kate from Books Are My Favourite and Best.  The idea is to start with a specific book and make a series of links from one book to the next using whatever link you can find and see where you end up after six links.  I am also linking this post up with The Sunday Salon, hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz. 

 

This month the starting point is Trust by Hernan Diaz

My first link is using the surname Diaz. I have chosen the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

From there, my next choice is an Oscar winner, The Lost Thing by Australian author Shaun Tan.

There are many books that we could choose for the word lost. In fact, I once did a whole post just about lost things for Top Ten Tuesday not too long ago.  I have chosen The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde for this post.

My next link is to Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey.

I am once again linking from the surname, this time to Howls Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones

And for my last link I am using the word castle to Lords of the White Castle by Elizabeth Chadwick

Next month the starting point is Passages by Gail Sheehy.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books with Colour in the Titles

Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week's topic is Books with Colours in the Title.

When I looked at my books read spreadsheet, I realised that I could have done entire Top Ten lists of red and blue books. Instead, I am going to focus on the primary colours - red blue and yellow - to make up my list for this week.

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chinamanda Ngozi Adiche - I have long had an interest in reading books set in Nigeria. This was a particularly good one.

The Girl in the Yellow Vest by Loretta Hill - This is a book features a female engineer working in a construction environment in Queensland. I really enjoyed Loretta Hill's writing. It doesn't look like she is writing anymore which is a shame.

The Yellow House by Patricia Falvey - I do enjoy a book set in Ireland. This one is set in Northern Ireland in the early years of the 1900's which was quite a tumultuous time.

Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland  - This book follows a painting of a girl (in hyacinth blue) through the years from owner to owner. I really enjoyed this book!

Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore - This is the third book in the Graceling YA fantasy series. Just thinking about this book makes me want to revist the series.

Blue Shoes and Happiness by Alexander McCall Smith - This is the seventh book in the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series and features a pair of talking shoes.

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant - This book holds a special place in my blogging heart. I read this book and I just wanted to talk to someone about it and it become the first book I wrote a review of. When I read it years later it wasn't a great review but it was the start of this blogging journey.

The Red Tree by Shaun Tan - Shaun Tan writes and illustrates the most amazing books. Whilst The Arrival is my favourite, and probably always will be, this was an enjoyable.

A Red Herring Without Mustard by Alan Bradley - Among the many series that I keep on saying I really need to get back to soon is the Flavia de Luce mystery series, featuring a precocious young girl as the sleuth. This is book 3 in the series.

The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett - I am cheating for this last book because once you have all the primary colours you can make all the other colours, which quite frankly is magic!

What colourful reads do you have on your Top Ten list.

Six Degrees of Separation: Stasiland to The Arrival

Welcome to this month's edition of Six Degrees of Separation, which is a monthly meme hosted by Kate from Books Are My Favourite and Best.  The idea is to start with a specific book and make a series of links from one book to the next using whatever link you can find and see where you end up after six links. 

Normally when I participate in this my links are somewhat random. It could be locations, author names, titles, etc but this month I am going with a specific theme which is the immigrant experience, with a specific focus on Australian immigration, although I must admit the first couple of links might be a bit tenuous!

This month's starting point is Stasiland by Anna Funder. It's not a book that I have read but I have read All That I Am by the same author. All That I Am explores the story of a young woman who fines herself mixed up in anti-Nazi circles in the late 1930s. When telling the story she is an elderly woman who has lived in Australia for many years.  There's not a lot of detail about her life here though.

The Last of the Bonegilla Girls by Victoria Purman is predominantly set in a post WWII immigration camp in country Victoria. Here immigrants from many different war ravaged European countries are forced to come together as they wait for their new lives in Australia to really start. In the camp, they begin to learn English, the families wait for news of a job before they spread out across the country. The main characters are young women who become lifelong friends despite the fact that there are language and cultural differences.

The Women in Black by Madeleine St John also features immigrant characters  who are trying to make a new life here in Australia and how it was sometimes difficult to be accepted when there were so many cultural differences. This book was made into a movie last year and it is a lovely film. One of my favourite lines is where an Australian woman is meeting an immigrant man for the first time, and she asks him if he speaks English. His response is that he speaks several languages! Watch the trailer below to see it. It makes me smile every time.

Unpolished Gem by Alice Pung - Now a couple of non fiction entries featuring Asian Australians. I read Unpolished Gem a long time ago now. I think it might have been a book club read. I found this one interesting because Alice's family settled in Melbourne which is where I live.

The Happiest Refugee by Anh Do - Anh Do is arguably one of  the most famous Vietnamese Australians. He is a stand up comedian who has appeared in numerous TV shows, is a successful artist including having a TV show where he paints the portraits of famous Australians as he interviews them. It's one of our favourite shows to watch each week when it was on. He came to Australia on a boat as a very young boy. It was a harrowing journey where his younger brother nearly died, and where the young boys struggled to fit into such a different country. Despite this or maybe because of the struggles Anh became who he is today, and his younger brother was nominated as Young Australian of the Year in 2005. This book tells their story.

The Arrival by Shaun Tan -  My last book is a bit different in that it isn't an Australian immigrant story. It is a book with no words, just amazing art, which tells the story of a man who leaves his country to start a new life. Everything is different, from the food to the language. I know it's a bit presumptuous to quote from my own review but this is what I wrote when I originally read this book twelve years ago:

There are literally no words at all in this book, at least not words that we can recognise. Where there are words on buildings and things they are in a strange symbolic language. The images and the storyline represented are so strong that no words are necessary. The use of elements of fantasy to represent the threat in the old homeland and some of the things that are found in the strange new world are a very strong symbolic reminder to us that for many people who migrate to countries like Australia the things that they find here that are every day to us are sometimes completely foreign to the migrants.

And just because talking about it has made me want to watch the movie again, here is the trailer for Ladies in Black.

The starting point for next month is The Road for Cormac McCarthy - there's a fair chance it will be a long and winding road (to quote The Beatles) through the chain.

Beautiful Objects (Melbourne Writers Festival)

Whilst the final day of the Melbourne Writers Festival for this year was a couple of weeks ago, I still have one session to write up. I could just let it go, but it was a session that I enjoyed so here we are. I feel as though the fact that I did enjoy it so much is something of a bonus as it was the last session I booked because I needed one more to fill up my pass. I had searched the program numerous times before in the end I kind of just went...well, that one looks interesting! And it was!

After having attended the Cooking the Books session early on Sunday morning (which I wrote about for last week's Weekend Cooking post) I had a short time to get to the local markets, buy a new handbag and eat lunch in time to be back for the Beautiful Objects session. The brief summary of the session from the festival program said

Antique books, first editions, and art books each harbour aesthetic qualities that transcend mere function. Author and book designer Kevin Kwan joins publisher Pauline De Leavaux and Stephanie Hicks to explore the beauty of books, their transposition from the everyday to luxury items, and whether the future of eBooks will be quite as beautiful.

The session started with each of the guests being asked to give examples of beautiful books. Pauline De Leavaux works for publisher Thames and Hudson. She talked about in her first jobs, and for a lot of bigger publishers, there is always a struggle between aesthetics and budget constraints. Thames and Hudson is different in that there are fewer limits placed on the pursuit of publishing beautiful books.

In her examples of beautiful books, Pauline started with a book called I Wonder by Marian Bantjes (pictured at the top of the post). This is a book that is at the absolute pinnacle of production extremes. The front cover is embossed and gilded, the paper edges are gold, there are many more colours used inside the book and there's a ribbon. It is a book that may well be seen as a cultural artifact in the future. To get some ideas of the production values of the book click here to head to the author's website.

The next book that Pauline offered up was The Architectural Photography of John Gollings, which has a cloth bound, foiled cover underneath the slipcover and is printed on special paperstock.

The third book though proves that a book doesn't have to be expensive to make in order to be beautiful. Owl Know How by Cat Rabbit and Isabel Knowles is a children's picture book. There is no special treatments in terms of paper or the casing or gilding. What makes this book beautiful is that all of the images in it have been painstakingly made out of felt by the authors and then photographed.

Next Kevin Kwan, author and designer, shared his beautiful books. He talked about being enamoured by gorgeous old books as a child visiting his grandparents library and finding objects of wonder there.

His first object was The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk. At first this book appears as though it just has the iconic blue stripes that were used in so many of his designs but as you slowly pull down the white plastic slip cover you can see two other images as they are revealed. The first is of JPG himself and the next image is of one of his muse. I have included the slip cover on image and the whole cover above. Hopefully it will give some idea of how it works.

His next book was And the Pursuit of Happiness by Maira Kalman - a year long journey that is told by way of incredible illustrations and a funny narrative.

The next two books both had the crowd reacting audibly for different reasons. The first was called A Flight of Butterflies which was a reproduction of a book from the early 1900s which features a number of woodcuts of butterflies. It is bound in an oriental style with no spine, so that each pages unfolds, in effect revealing more and more of the images. Hopefully this photo gives some idea of the effect of the book.

The final book was A Hundred Times Nguyen. This book features a series of images of a young girl repeated over and over again. I must confess to being a bit puzzled as Kwan was showing us this book, and then he read the only paragraph of text in the book which explains the images. I am sure I was not the only person who wanted to get hold of that book straight away.

The conversation went on to talk about the cover that Kevin Kwan ended up with for his new book Crazy Rich Asians, a journey that went through four very different incarnations before everyone involved in the decision making process was happy with it.

Other topics that were touched included how cover trends, and how ebooks are impacting on book productions. Whilst ebooks tend to be a growing market there is still a market for beautiful books as objects, especially in sections of the market like cookbooks and childrens books - books that will pull the reader into bookstores. What ebooks haven't been able to do is create that feeling of beauty. Even just getting images formatted correctly doesn't seem to have happened yet (one of the reasons I don't really do cookbooks on my ereader) but ebook design is really in it's infancy so those kinds of things will develop. For the time being though, ebooks are pretty much still functional items as opposed to items of beauty. A lot of readers will still go and buy a physical copy of the book if they love it as an ebook just for the physical sensation of being able to hold a book in their hands.

All of this discussion of books as beautiful objects has me wondering about the books I buy. Do I buy them as functionary items or are there some that I buy because of their aesthetic values, beyond a pretty cover, as well? I must confess that I get a little excited if I borrow a hardcover book from the library and it has a ribbon in it or if it has deckled edge paper - small things, but to me it makes a book so much more attractive. And if a book has end papers I am curiously pleased. The most recent example of that I can think of was Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore but there could be more. Of course, I like to look at the books where the edges of the pages are coloured but that in itself does not necessarily make a book beautiful. I saw some the other day where the cover of a book was black as were the edges of the pages, so it was kind of monotone in appearance.

I do really want to buy some of the cloth covered classics. They just look so pretty, but I haven't yet actually bought one yet. One day!

What is the most beautiful book I own then? The first book that came to mind was probably the collectors edition of The Arrival by Shaun Tan that I bought a couple of years ago now. It comes in a case that is designed to look like an old leather bound book, which opens up to reveal both The Arrival and Sketches from a Nameless Land, an accompanying book that explains some of the art and story told in The Arrival. The Arrival itself is a gorgeous book because of the amazing art that tells the story. There are no words so everything in the story must be conveyed through the amazing imagery. There is a ribbon (bonus!) and it is a lovely hardcover finish. Below are some images (taken hastily at night so hopefully they will at least convey some of the gorgeousness).

What makes a beautiful book for you? What is the most beautiful book you own?

Currently Reading

Lilla's Feast by Frances Osborne, The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, The Briny Cafe by Susan Duncan and listening to A Clash of Kings by George R R Martin.

Up Next

I should check. At this point on a Sunday night I have no idea!

Look! exhibition at State Library Victoria

I had a very bookish start to the week this week, and as far as I am concerned a bookish week is a good week!

Last Sunday I talked my sister and her husband into going out into the city. It was a gorgeous day weather wise when we caught the train into the city. Our destination was the State Library of Victoria, and in particular the Look:! The Art of Australian Picture Books today exhibition which is on display until 29 May 2011.

My main reason for wanting to go was to be able to go and see a couple of examples of Shaun Tan's art from both The Arrival (have I mentioned lately how much I love that book?) and The Rabbits which was written by John Marsden who also wrote the Tomorrow, When the War Began series. I certainly wasn't disappointed by those pieces of art. The fact that The Arrival has so many images in the book, and yet is completely drawn in pencil astonishes me still three or four years after I first read the book.

Really though the target audience for the exhibition is slightly younger than me so luckily we had my 3 year old nephew and 12 year old son with us! It's always interesting to see what it is that catches the attention of a toddler. My nephew and his dad had put their tent up in the backyard on Saturday night and slept in there. There was one illustration (and this is where I wish I had of kept the list of titles of all the books featured in the display) which featured a family going camping, and he was interested, but the main thing he said was that the tent should be blue, which is the colour that their tent is.

After looking at a lot of the different illustrations, it was storytime and my nephew listened to two stories, one that was something about a pig, and the other was Mr Chicken goes to Paris by Leigh Hobbs. I thought that this was such a fun picture book. Mr Chicken is a 4 metre tall bright yellow chicken who goes on a plane to Paris and takes in all the sights! Such fun, especially if you take the time to notice all the background details!

One thing that I thoroughly enjoyed was seeing all the different mediums that illustrators were using. There were waterpaint drawings, collage, paper sculptures, native inspired art and so much more.

Photo credit

After visiting the display, we took the opportunity to visit the reading room and the fantastic dome that forms such an impressive part of the architecture at the State Library of Victoria. There are other exhibitions in the galleries which surround the dome. I had seen them before but it is always nice to go and look at books that are hundreds of years old. I was talking to one of the staff about how much a couple of the books are worth. One book alone is worth $12 million (cue jokes about reading that book on the trains!).

Follow that up with a chocolate frappe fix and it was a good afternoon all round.

I was planning on talking about my other State Library related event in this post, but I think this is probably long enough so I will do a separate post for that one.