Marrickville Library will host a local launch of the 2012 National Year of Reading on Friday 17 February with prominent local authors, Gabrielle Carey and Nadia Wheatley, who will speak about the books that have inspired them and how reading has enriched their lives.
The National Year of Reading will link together events involving books, reading and literacy, and create new inspirational literacy programs across the country. The Year will encourage children learning to read, help keen readers find new sources of inspiration, and support reading initiatives that also respect the oral tradition of storytelling.
Gabrielle Carey is a well-known and popular writer of fiction, non-fiction and memoir, essays and newspaper articles. Her first book was Puberty Blues, co-authored with Kathy Lette. She is currently working on a collection of essays investigating the Australian psyche, Australia on the Couch: analysing the Australian national character.
Nadia Wheatley has won a number of awards for her writing that spans fiction, history, biography and picture books. She writes for adults as well as for young people. She is the author of My Place, illustrated by Donna Rawlins, which won the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award for Younger Readers in 1988. It is based on Nadia’s knowledge of the St Peters area and tells the stories of different children over thousands of years to illustrate the history of Australia.
The local launch of the 2012 National Year of Reading is at Marrickville Library on Friday 17 February from 6.30pm to 8pm. Light refreshments will be provided. RSVPs to 9335 2173 or info1@marrickville.nsw.gov.au. Other programs and events to take place during the National Year of Reading will also be announced at the launch.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Monday, December 5, 2011
December – Summer Reads at Marrickville Library
The theme for December is Summer Reads.
Summer. Long hot lazy days, the beach, holidays, Xmas, family. The possibilities for the storyteller are endless.
When I think of summer and reading, West Australian authors Tim Winton (An Open Swimmer, Blueback, Breath) and Robert Drewe (The Bodysurfers) spring to mind. For Sydney summers, there’s Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey’s Puberty Blues. And Colin Thiele (Sun on the Stubble, Storm Boy, February Dragon) best captures the nature of the hot dry South Australian summer and landscape. Queensland has The Passage by Vance Palmer, a story set on the Gold Coast back when it was just a series of dunes and fishing shacks. And then there’s Helen Garners’s Monkey Grip, which begins randomly one Melbourne summer in 1974 – a great Australian novel.
Overseas I can think of sweltering New York in The Great Gatsby, the languid French Riviera of Bonjour Tristesse and the stifling Norfolk British summer of 1900 in LP Hartley’s The Go-Between.
What books would you nominate for Summer Reads ?
The State Library of NSW Readers Advisory twitter service is also discussing summer reads books in December via the hashtag #summerreads. More information is available at http://readit2011.wordpress.com/december/.
Summer. Long hot lazy days, the beach, holidays, Xmas, family. The possibilities for the storyteller are endless.
When I think of summer and reading, West Australian authors Tim Winton (An Open Swimmer, Blueback, Breath) and Robert Drewe (The Bodysurfers) spring to mind. For Sydney summers, there’s Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey’s Puberty Blues. And Colin Thiele (Sun on the Stubble, Storm Boy, February Dragon) best captures the nature of the hot dry South Australian summer and landscape. Queensland has The Passage by Vance Palmer, a story set on the Gold Coast back when it was just a series of dunes and fishing shacks. And then there’s Helen Garners’s Monkey Grip, which begins randomly one Melbourne summer in 1974 – a great Australian novel.
Overseas I can think of sweltering New York in The Great Gatsby, the languid French Riviera of Bonjour Tristesse and the stifling Norfolk British summer of 1900 in LP Hartley’s The Go-Between.
What books would you nominate for Summer Reads ?
The State Library of NSW Readers Advisory twitter service is also discussing summer reads books in December via the hashtag #summerreads. More information is available at http://readit2011.wordpress.com/december/.
Monday, November 14, 2011
November – Moreads at Marrickville Library
This months theme is Moreads in honour of Movember - the brainchild of three blokes drinking in a Melbourne bar in 2003. Movember has now raised over $175 million for research, treatment and education programs targeting men’s health. This month over 500,000 men will put their shavers aside and attempt to grow a moustache for the month-long campaign.
The Victorian and Edwardian years of the 19th and early 20th Century were the golden age of the moustache (apart from a fortunately brief and minor resurgence in the late 1970s). It’s perhaps fitting that this month we remember some of the great authors who also sported great moustaches.
Mark Twain was a giant of American literature and he had a moustache to match. His travel books were popular throughout his life including A Tramp Abroad and Life on the Mississippi but he made his name with the much-loved The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. An early science fiction novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court and an historical fiction, Recollections of Joan of Arc stand out as departures from his normal style. Twain was a master at writing in a relaxed and humorous style with memorable characters. He also had a keen ear for natural and realistic language.
Across the Atlantic, HG Wells moustache wasn’t a patch on Twain’s but he was an enormously popular and prolific author in England before the Second World War. He’s remembered mostly for his early science-fiction novels including The Time Machine, War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man. Much is made of the number of modern technologies that he anticipated in his writings including the atomic bomb, space travel, genetic engineering and the mobile phone…but we’re still waiting for time travel, invisibility and alien invasion. Wells also wrote some fine social and comic novels of Edwardian middle-class England such as Kipps, Tono-Bungay and The History of Mr Polly. He is worth revisiting for his richly drawn characters and vibrant imagination.
Closer to home, Henry Lawsons ‘tash is in the same league as Mark Twain. Like Twain, Lawson was a great chronicler of rural life. He was an egalitarian and a master of natural language. He never wrote a novel and even derided the short story in favour of “sketch stories” - short descriptive pieces with little plot. While the Billy Boils was his most popular prose collection.
Other significant writers with moustaches from the Victorian and Edwardian era include Jerome K. Jerome, James Joyce, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Furphy. The moustache is still popular in many non-English language cultures. Modern authors with moustaches include Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Derek Walcott and Carlos Fuentes. Is David Malouf the only significant current Australian novelist to regularly sport a moustache? Let us know!
The Victorian and Edwardian years of the 19th and early 20th Century were the golden age of the moustache (apart from a fortunately brief and minor resurgence in the late 1970s). It’s perhaps fitting that this month we remember some of the great authors who also sported great moustaches.
Mark Twain was a giant of American literature and he had a moustache to match. His travel books were popular throughout his life including A Tramp Abroad and Life on the Mississippi but he made his name with the much-loved The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. An early science fiction novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court and an historical fiction, Recollections of Joan of Arc stand out as departures from his normal style. Twain was a master at writing in a relaxed and humorous style with memorable characters. He also had a keen ear for natural and realistic language.
Across the Atlantic, HG Wells moustache wasn’t a patch on Twain’s but he was an enormously popular and prolific author in England before the Second World War. He’s remembered mostly for his early science-fiction novels including The Time Machine, War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man. Much is made of the number of modern technologies that he anticipated in his writings including the atomic bomb, space travel, genetic engineering and the mobile phone…but we’re still waiting for time travel, invisibility and alien invasion. Wells also wrote some fine social and comic novels of Edwardian middle-class England such as Kipps, Tono-Bungay and The History of Mr Polly. He is worth revisiting for his richly drawn characters and vibrant imagination.
Closer to home, Henry Lawsons ‘tash is in the same league as Mark Twain. Like Twain, Lawson was a great chronicler of rural life. He was an egalitarian and a master of natural language. He never wrote a novel and even derided the short story in favour of “sketch stories” - short descriptive pieces with little plot. While the Billy Boils was his most popular prose collection.
Other significant writers with moustaches from the Victorian and Edwardian era include Jerome K. Jerome, James Joyce, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Furphy. The moustache is still popular in many non-English language cultures. Modern authors with moustaches include Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Derek Walcott and Carlos Fuentes. Is David Malouf the only significant current Australian novelist to regularly sport a moustache? Let us know!
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Library Survey
The Swift Library Consortium consists of 22 Public Library Services (16 across Victoria and six located in NSW including Marrickville Library & History Services). These libraries share a single catalogue, processes and procedures. This provides library patrons with a greater range and variety of titles to choose from when wanting to borrow from their local library. In addition, the Consortium has been able to generate savings to libraries through its combined purchasing position.
The sharing of collections alone has seen the level of loans between Consortium libraries increase from 50,000 items in 2007 to 650,000 in the last year.
To further improve the services offered to our patrons, Swift is seeking Marrickville Library patron’s views during the month of November 2011.
The survey can be done online or by filling in a survey form at Marrickville Library.
The sharing of collections alone has seen the level of loans between Consortium libraries increase from 50,000 items in 2007 to 650,000 in the last year.
To further improve the services offered to our patrons, Swift is seeking Marrickville Library patron’s views during the month of November 2011.
The survey can be done online or by filling in a survey form at Marrickville Library.
Sunday, November 6, 2011
National Year of Reading 2012 – Our Story
The National Year of Reading 2012 – Our Story is the national poll for the eight books that best paint a picture of the Australian people and the land that we live in.
Examples of books could include stories of the Indigenous people or that captures the cultures and traditions of more recent arrivals, or a book that takes the reader on a journey from the coast through the great tracts of grazing land to the arid red centre, or a book that someone in Broome can relate to as closely as someone in Adelaide.
Readers are invited to vote for the book that will go forward to represent their state or territory and will become part of the National Year of Reading collection.
An independent panel of readers has decided on a shortlist for each state and territory, chosen from a selection put forward by publishers and libraries. Voting opened on 1 November 2011 and closes on the 6 January 2012.
To vote online visit the ABC website, or drop in to your local library or book shop and fill in a voting slip.
The eight winning books will be announced at the launch of the National Year of Reading on 14 February 2012 at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, together with details of a competition for keen readers to win the collection of all eight books.
Our Story homepage
You can also post comments to the Our Story Facebook page and become involved in the National Year of Reading by joining the National Year of Reading Book Club. Help other club members discover great Australian novels, discuss your favourite books and meet like-minded readers.
Examples of books could include stories of the Indigenous people or that captures the cultures and traditions of more recent arrivals, or a book that takes the reader on a journey from the coast through the great tracts of grazing land to the arid red centre, or a book that someone in Broome can relate to as closely as someone in Adelaide.
Readers are invited to vote for the book that will go forward to represent their state or territory and will become part of the National Year of Reading collection.
An independent panel of readers has decided on a shortlist for each state and territory, chosen from a selection put forward by publishers and libraries. Voting opened on 1 November 2011 and closes on the 6 January 2012.
To vote online visit the ABC website, or drop in to your local library or book shop and fill in a voting slip.
The eight winning books will be announced at the launch of the National Year of Reading on 14 February 2012 at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, together with details of a competition for keen readers to win the collection of all eight books.
Our Story homepage
You can also post comments to the Our Story Facebook page and become involved in the National Year of Reading by joining the National Year of Reading Book Club. Help other club members discover great Australian novels, discuss your favourite books and meet like-minded readers.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Julian Barnes wins 2011 Man Booker Prize
The Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011 has been won by Julian Barnes for The Sense Of An Ending. The prize, which celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2008, aims to reward the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland. The book was praised by the judges as a “truly wonderful novel that will have the reader immersed in the story from the very first page, and all the while marvelling at the precision of Barnes’ prose”. Julian Barnes had been previously nominated for the Booker Prize for Flaubert's Parrot (1984), England, England (1998), and Arthur & George (2005). The selection for this years prize was heavily criticised by some commentators as signs of a “dumbing down” of the competition. Comments were also made about the lack of representation of authors from outside the UK apart from two Canadian authors.
Monday, October 24, 2011
2011 Nobel Prize for Literature
The 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to Swedish poet, Tomas Tranströmer.
He is the first Swede to win the award since 1974 when the Prize caused controversy when it was given to two members of the Nobel Academy. Tranströmer is a perennial frontrunner for the award and had been nominated every single year since 1993. The Nobel Committee stated that Tranströmer's work received the prize “because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality”.
Copies of his work in English are available for loan via Inter-Library Loan.
Wikipedia entry for Tomas Transtromer
Official Tomas Transtromer website
Nobel prize for Literature 2011 webpage
He is the first Swede to win the award since 1974 when the Prize caused controversy when it was given to two members of the Nobel Academy. Tranströmer is a perennial frontrunner for the award and had been nominated every single year since 1993. The Nobel Committee stated that Tranströmer's work received the prize “because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality”.
Copies of his work in English are available for loan via Inter-Library Loan.
Wikipedia entry for Tomas Transtromer
Official Tomas Transtromer website
Nobel prize for Literature 2011 webpage
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