Between the lines

Ann Donald: While the display tables at the shop would normally be laden with piles of new fiction, a few days ago the books made way for a most magnificent display of baked goods.

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We need to challenge the stupidity of those who proudly assert that they never read

The occasion was the launch of Bake, the first cookbook by Queen of Tarts proprietor Tina Bester.

Pretty meringues, deep chocolate brownies, crispy phyllo wrapped around Camembert, bite-sized quiches, roses peeking out of chocolate-ringed cake, dipped strawberries – it was a feast to behold (and with considerable restraint most of the guests at the launch managed to just look until the speeches were over).

But there was one person who didn’t give the food a second glance – a four-year-old boy named Nicholas who had eyes only for the books in the children’s section. With a flop of fringe falling over his forehead, shining eyes and his hands busily turning pages, Nicholas spent two hours looking at books while all around him the adults chatted and nibbled (well, scoffed, to be truthful), and sipped wine. He had found on the shelves many of the books he already owned and pounced on them gleefully, then went back to look for more.

Nicholas is one of many children we see who have a love for books even before they learn how to read, and we love watching them at the beginning of what we know will be a lifelong passion. What most of these children have in common are parents or grandparents who read, one or more of whom will bring the children to the bookshop as an outing.

With the younger children, we see the care and love of their parent as they patiently sit and page through the picture books. The older ones prefer to read on their own, freeing their parents to browse for themselves.

But we also see children who don’t have the gift of parents who read to guide them. One girl comes in regularly after school to pick up on a book she had been reading and see what’s new. While this girl saves up to buy a favourite book once or twice a year, other children we see regularly simply don’t and won’t have enough money to buy their own books, but they can’t resist the lure. For them the shop has become a reading room – filling the role that a school or public library would play if there was one within safe walking distance.

All of these children are lucky in their own way. They at least know, however they came by their knowledge, that books are magical. There are many others who will never discover the spell of reading simply because books will never enter their frame of entertainment options.

Many fall into demographic and geographic boxes that limit their options, of which reading is just one. But far too many non-reading children do have access to books through well-equipped schools, or parents who can take them to a library or can afford to buy them books – but who don’t. And the primary reason is that the parents themselves don’t read.

I despair of aliterate parents: If they’re not reading for themselves I’m pretty sure they’re not reading to their children either. This is tantamount to neglect (in my book anyway).

I’m only half joking when I suggest that, just as the effects of smoking and junk food have been challenged in the interests of healthy bodies and a clean environment, we need to challenge the stupidity of those who proudly assert that they never read if we want an intellectually healthy society.

Visit Kalk Bay Books.  You will be so glad you did.

Ann Donald: Cover blurbs should be read with some scepticism, especially when they casually drop in the name of a famous person, usually used as a marketing trick.

But there are times when the boast actually delivers, as in author Lionel Shriver’s quote published on the jacket of Ellen Feldman’s Scottsboro: "Anyone who wants to appreciate the scale of the miracle that a Black man has been elected president of the United States should sit down with Scottsboro."

There are two things I want to write about in connection with this book – its subject matter and its author.

The book is a fictionalised account of an historic event that has been described as one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in US history, the case that pre-empted the American Civil Rights Movement, and one of the most shameful episodes in recent American history.

It is the story of the nine young black men and the two white women who falsely accused them of rape in 1931 Alabama, and of the people who built lives and careers on their backs.

In Scottsboro, Feldman has re-imagined the time and the people and created a story that is historically authentic, with an equally powerful fictional narrative.

She has done what I believe Katherine Stockett failed to do in her powerful but flawed novel, The Help, about domestic service in 1960′s Mississippi, of which I have written previously.

While both books offer absorbing reading, where Stockett’s characters are compelling but flat and the plot page-turning but predictable, Feldman writes with nuance and depth, and a control and subtlety that lets no one off the hook.

The first book of Feldman’s I read was The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank. As in Scottsboro, she used a true story as the starting point for a work of fiction. Here her subject is Peter van Daan, the boy in the attic with Anne Frank who, she wrote on February 16 1944, had confided to her that if he got out alive, would reinvent himself entirely.

Feldman’s story picks up on this. She creates a fictionalised Peter who survives the war and is living in the US with a new name and an unacknowledged past. The book is a brilliantly realised account of what happens to the fictional Peter when Anne Frank’s diary is published. It is psychologically convincing with a thematic depth that speaks to anyone who believes they can deny or ignore their own history.

I haven’t yet read Feldman’s Lucy: A Novel – a story about the affair between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lucy Mercer, who was his wife Eleanor’s social secretary, but I have great expectations that it will deliver far more than it suggests, and will be read in the shadow of John Kennedy, Bill Clinton and our own president’s philandering tendencies.

I don’t know why Feldman has flown under the radar before now, relatively speaking (while word of mouth has put The Help at 155 on Amazon’s ranking, Scottsboro "languishes" at 82165). She has been a critical success and is not difficult to read. Her work is emotionally and intellectually satisfying and her stories, while particular, have resonance beyond their own details.

I’d like to encourage you to read her work if you haven’t already done so. And then, from this column and her books to your mouths in the hope you will agree and start spreading word.

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Ann Donald: ‘It’s what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it." Thus spake Oscar Wilde some time before he died in Paris 109 years ago tomorrow.

Safe to say that Wilde had read more than his fair share of books in the 46 years he lived. The details of what and how he read, as well as how his life was influenced by his reading, is presented in an unusual biography, Oscar’s Books, by Thomas Wright, first published in 2008 and now available in paperback.

The book opens with a description of the sale of Wilde’s "library of valuable books", auctioned in 1895 to pay his legal costs after unsuccessfully suing the Marquess of Queensberry for libel. The books were sold outside his house to the distress of their owner and the horror of his friends. Most of the almost 2000 books were bought for a song by book dealers and when displayed in their shop windows, Wilde’s friends managed to buy some of them and return them to him.

To say that Wilde was defined by his books is an understatement. Wright’s absorbing "bibliomemoir" tells of the role storytelling and books played in his life. Growing up, Wilde’s presentation of himself centered, ostentatiously as was his wont, around his bookishness. But this was not only an image he cultivated; he was one of the best and most widely read classicists of his time, and this grounding provided him with the springboard for his own writing.

Very few of us have, or want to have, the classical literary education that informed Wilde’s life. So, fortunately, Oscar’s Books is just one of a range of titles that consider books in the context of "we are what we read" that have been published recently.

On a darker level, due out in December, is the paperback of Hitler’s Private Library by Timothy Ryback. A voracious reader, Hitler was thought to have owned more than 6000 books at the time of his death, and his choice raises more directly the nature/nurture question inherent in the "we are what we read" analogy: is who we are determined by what we read, or is what we become an effect of what we read?

But because it’s the end of the year, you might be more inclined to read "lighter" books. To that end I recommend Susan Hill’s HowardsEnd is on the Landing, subtitled "A year of reading from home". I love the idea of taking the time to read or re-read books already owned, and Hill has inspired me to take a new look at my own shelves with a commitment to reading one such book every month.

Then there’s Nick Hornby’s The Complete Polysyllabic Spree – a collection of his entertaining magazine columns about books bought and read (or not read) in the preceding month. What I like about his approach is that for anyone who wants to understand how their own reading might influence their life, this type of journal-keeping would be ideal.

But all these books refer to a European context. I know nothing about the literary influences on the lives of key South Africans (Nelson Mandela comes to mind). What books have informed our authors, thinkers, journalists, political and business leaders, sportsmen and celebrities? If a chapter on this subject was added to biographies, it would add to our understanding of the people themselves.

Especially if they don’t read at all.

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Ann Donald: I’m one of those people who include Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World on the list of books everyone should read.

Nevertheless, the Pisces in me likes the notion of "hurie gurie" elements of our existence – it’s the stuff, after all, of great storytelling. Parallel universes, daemons, mystical forces, foreseeing the future, magical creatures and potions – these and their like offer wonderful material for the imagination.

But when New Age mystics, Feng Shui acolytes and other naysayers of reason sitting around a dinner table try to beguile me to their beliefs, there’s always a Dawkins-like whisper in my head saying, "C’mon!"

Yet I believe strongly that there’s a place in our lives for ritual. The act of marking transitions is important as a way to honour and remember people, places and events. Birthdays, Bar Mitzvahs, initiation rites (when they don’t kill or humiliate), anniversaries – all of these remind us of the significance of life and are an opportunity to pause and take stock of the past and look to the future.

The celebration of a "New Year" is a time when we acknowledge the moment to contemplate what lies ahead. This new year, quite fortuitously, I realised there is an important rite we can each perform that, if done with intention, could set the tone for the 365 days to follow: the choice of the first book we read.

After arriving home from a fabulous New Year’s Eve dinner party during which we toasted 2010 under the newly eclipsed full blue moon, dappled with clouds (a concurrence that palpitated with significance for New Agers), I picked up the book that inspired this column: Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin.

Using Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the two World Trade Center towers as a pivotal event, McCann tells the tale of a diverse group of characters whose stories intersect with this event.

There are many reasons to rave about this book: McCann is a masterful writer who uses words with poetic precision; the people he creates have stories that are counterpoised to create a beautifully balanced work of literary brilliance; it has emotional depths and personal insights that ensure a compelling read.

These elements make the book worth reading at any time of the year, so why do I feel that reading it as the New Year dawns is so significant?

Perhaps it is because what McCann was writing about were people who dared to live beyond the ordinary, who refused to allow the constrictions of their circumstances to determine the way they would live, who pushed themselves beyond their limits to achieve the impossible, and who inspired those they encountered to imagine their own lives differently.

Reading this book at this time, when new beginnings are on the agenda, encouraged me to look at the world, my life, and my work differently; it elicited a sense of the possibilities that exist if life is approached without fear, with integrity, without doubt, with trust.

I don’t need to bay at the moon, keep my toilet seat down or smudge my house with sage smoke – the means to living a meaningful, useful life are in my own hands, not some mystical, unknowable force outside of me.

As you embark on your year of reading, my wish is that you find books that will enrich your spirit and encourage your endeavours; that you read widely and wisely, and that when the year draws to a close, you embark on a new ritual to seek out a book worthy of welcoming 2011.

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Between the lines

Ann Donald: This morning I called someone who knows someone who’s married to someone who works with Western Cape Premier Helen Zille.

This morning I called someone who knows someone who’s married to someone who works with Western Cape Premier Helen Zille. "Could you ask him to ask her if she’s noticed what the Premier is currently reading," I ask. "She wouldn’t notice things like that," he says. "Don’t be silly," I respond. "She’s a reader. Of course she’d notice what someone else was reading."

Curiosity about the reading habits of other people comes with the territory of being a book lover. On the positive side, spying on readers in public places could lead you to books you’d forgotten about or didn’t know. Less honourably, it can lead one to making hasty judgments on the intellectual standing of a complete stranger.

Either way, it’s remarkable how powerful the presence of a book is as a symbol of who or what we are, or how we’d like to be regarded. And there’s no better place to see this in action than in watching those to whom public image is all-important, celebrities and politicians particularly.

This week someone sent me a link to a Washington Post article about the reading habits of American presidents. While I don’t doubt that they actually read the books they claim to read, the article does put the issue of what they read into the realm of public interest when those books influence policy.

This is well and good if you favour the same political standpoint but, as South Africa learned to its shame and peril, what if your president is reading and acting on books of dubious origin and credibility? It goes without saying that I believe our leaders should be required to read, but just because one is a reader, it doesn’t follow that she or he is a wise reader. By wise I mean one who reads widely and deeply, across genres and against one’s own political leanings. And then, I think, a case should be made to compel them to publish a list of what they are reading at least once a month, just so we know.

Of course, those who value the power of perception don’t need to publish lists because they are masters of the artful display of books to convey an impression of intellectual standing. According to the Post article: "Clinton once placed Yale law professor Stephen Carter’s The Culture of Disbelief on his Oval Office desk so that reporters would see what he was reading, and they dutifully reported it."

That’s not to say he didn’t read it, but I wonder what future presidents will do when all their books are stored on e-readers?

***

Two Mondays ago, rather than waking up green with envy at not being one of the lucky ones at the London Book Fair, I was ashen at the news that many of those scheduled to be there had been grounded by the volcanic eruption and weren’t able to attend.

After months of planning, at great expense and with great excitement, how dispiriting it was for their plans to be scuppered at the last moment. It was small comfort, but comfort nonetheless, that the hastily and brilliantly organised Not the London Book Fair was arranged by the Book Lounge in Cape Town to allow people an opportunity to share their book fair thoughts and readings with fellow authors, publishers and book lovers in South Africa.

More than that, this event was an indication of how supportive the local industry is of its own. Congratulations to Mervyn Sloman, Ben Williams and Helen Moffett for making it happen.

Visit Kalk Bay Books today.  You will be glad you did.

Between the lines

Ann Donald: For any journalist who writes profiles of authors coming up with interesting questions is a challenge. And even then one is dependent on the author to provide interesting answers

In the case of JM Coetzee, even Rian Malan’s thorough knowledge of the author’s works did not help him "open up" the famously reticent writer. (Being the journalist he is, Malan still managed to write an award-winning feature for his book Resident Alien.)

Even when interviewees are generous with information about themselves, there is no guarantee the writer will capture the "real" person. Indeed, how many of us truly know ourselves – or can face our real selves honestly? Brave then is the writer who attempts to portray another, and even braver the one who sets out to honestly portray himself. One such is Damon Galgut.

The three stories that make up Galgut’s new book, In a Strange Room, are based on real journeys taken by the author. Written as fiction but acknowledged as autobiographical, the question of where the line lies between the fiction and the truth is inevitable.

Speaking at the launch of the book, Galgut made the observation that all memory is fiction: what he remembers and how he remembers are not necessarily the same memories another person would have of the same events. In fictionalising his experiences, Galgut was able to step back from the events themselves to look as honestly as he could at what they could show him and teach him about himself.

The result is a powerful and unsparing account of a man who journeys across continents to find an emotional space he can call home – and it speaks to the aloneness in all of us.

Two other books that have recently been published also show ways authors can reflect on their own lives. Chinua Achebe’s The Education of a British-Protected Child is one of them. Through a series of essays, Achebe considers his life, his experiences and his relationships, and takes the reader not only into his mind, but into the worlds that shaped him, including those of literature, politics and language.

The other is Melinda Ferguson’s memoir, Hooked, which will be available next month. Ferguson’s unflinching story of her battle with addiction, Smacked, shocked and touched many who read it.

She now presents the reality of living clean. Unlike Galgut’s spare, beautiful prose or Achebe’s ability to reveal the bigger picture in the smallest scene, Ferguson’s writing is raw, direct and funny and is focused on that most personal of places, the control centre of an addict.

In the hands of a good author, whether they’re writing about themselves or someone else, reading about the lives of others is compelling. On his Cape Talk afternoon show recently, John Maytham reviewed the new biography on American poet Emily Dickinson, Lyndall Gordon’s Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family Feuds. He prefaced his views with the observation that he doesn’t need to be particularly interested in a subject to get great enjoyment out of reading about their lives.

For me, this is precisely the reason the biography section of a bookshop is my favourite spot – you never know who or what you’ll find there, but you will always find a version of someone else’s life that will enrich or inform your own.

Visit Kalk Bay Books today.  You will be very glad you did.

Let the great books be read

Between the lines

Ann Donald: I’m one of those people who include Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World on the list of books everyone should read.

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Nevertheless, the Pisces in me likes the notion of "hurie gurie" elements of our existence – it’s the stuff, after all, of great storytelling. Parallel universes, daemons, mystical forces, foreseeing the future, magical creatures and potions – these and their like offer wonderful material for the imagination.

But when New Age mystics, Feng Shui acolytes and other naysayers of reason sitting around a dinner table try to beguile me to their beliefs, there’s always a Dawkins-like whisper in my head saying, "C’mon!"

Yet I believe strongly that there’s a place in our lives for ritual. The act of marking transitions is important as a way to honour and remember people, places and events. Birthdays, Bar Mitzvahs, initiation rites (when they don’t kill or humiliate), anniversaries – all of these remind us of the significance of life and are an opportunity to pause and take stock of the past and look to the future.

The celebration of a "New Year" is a time when we acknowledge the moment to contemplate what lies ahead. This new year, quite fortuitously, I realised there is an important rite we can each perform that, if done with intention, could set the tone for the 365 days to follow: the choice of the first book we read.

After arriving home from a fabulous New Year’s Eve dinner party during which we toasted 2010 under the newly eclipsed full blue moon, dappled with clouds (a concurrence that palpitated with significance for New Agers), I picked up the book that inspired this column: Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin.

Using Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the two World Trade Center towers as a pivotal event, McCann tells the tale of a diverse group of characters whose stories intersect with this event.

There are many reasons to rave about this book: McCann is a masterful writer who uses words with poetic precision; the people he creates have stories that are counterpoised to create a beautifully balanced work of literary brilliance; it has emotional depths and personal insights that ensure a compelling read.

These elements make the book worth reading at any time of the year, so why do I feel that reading it as the New Year dawns is so significant?

Perhaps it is because what McCann was writing about were people who dared to live beyond the ordinary, who refused to allow the constrictions of their circumstances to determine the way they would live, who pushed themselves beyond their limits to achieve the impossible, and who inspired those they encountered to imagine their own lives differently.

Reading this book at this time, when new beginnings are on the agenda, encouraged me to look at the world, my life, and my work differently; it elicited a sense of the possibilities that exist if life is approached without fear, with integrity, without doubt, with trust.

I don’t need to bay at the moon, keep my toilet seat down or smudge my house with sage smoke – the means to living a meaningful, useful life are in my own hands, not some mystical, unknowable force outside of me.

As you embark on your year of reading, my wish is that you find books that will enrich your spirit and encourage your endeavours; that you read widely and wisely, and that when the year draws to a close, you embark on a new ritual to seek out a book worthy of welcoming 2011.

Visit Kalk Bay Books

Fly high the book flag, SA

Between the Lines

Ann Donald: I know envy is one of the deadly sins, but I can’t help it: right now I am so deeply envious that my eyeballs are green, because tomorrow is the opening of the London Book Fair and I won’t be there.

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This is a particularly important year at the fair as South Africa is the market focus for the three days, and our publishers and authors will be flying our literary flag high and proudly. As I’ve written previously, getting a book published at all is not easy; to get international publishers to notice works from the bottom end of Africa is considerably more difficult. So this opportunity to showcase South African writing and publishing on the international stage is as important to the book industry as winning Oscars is to the film industry.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not about needing a British or American pat on the back to validate our work; it’s about gaining access to international markets to ensure our local market can be sustained, and exposing our publishing and distribution infrastructure to potential customers.

The contingents that will be in London include all the biggies – Jonathan Ball Publishers, Penguin SA, Random House Struik, Pan Macmillan, as well as small publishers like Modjaji Press and Two Dogs, and academic and educational publishers. Joining them will be writers from across the spectrum – Andre Brink, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Evita Bezuidenhout, Ndumiso Ngcobo, Ivan Vladislavic, Antjie Krog, Angela Makholwa, Maxine Case, Mark Gevisser and Damon Galgut among them.

To keep up with events over the next three days, keep an eye on book.co.za, where the indefatigable Ben Williams will be reporting on the who, what and how of the programme. And if you hear cheering from the sidelines, that would be me wishing all the fair-goers an exciting, fulfilling trip.

I’m also cheering because in just under a month, my favourite literary event is on the diary – the Franschhoek Literary Festival. Last year, the sky opened but nothing dampened the experience. In fact, it added a certain energy as festival-goers – brollies bobbing – dodged raindrops between venues, took refuge in coffee shops and wine bars, and shouted questions to authors over the drumming on the roof.

For the next three years, new sponsors Porcupine Ridge and the Sunday Times have ensured the festival will keep doing what it does so well – bring together fascinating, funny, and fabulous writers and fascinated, amused and fabulous readers, while raising funds for the FLF Library Fund.

This year’s programme is a humdinger, with the likes of Rian Malan, Rhoda Kadalie, Allan Boesak, Krog, Ngcobo, Jonathan Shapiro, Kader Asmal, Graeme Bloch and Mark Behr stirring pots, joined by Vladislavic, Galgut, Zukiswa Wanner, Deon Meyer and Niq Mhlongo participating in discussions as disparate as Who’s Afraid of the ANC? and Writing by Numbers.

Even independent booksellers get a look in, with the Book Lounge’s Mervyn Sloman, Boekehuis’s Corina van der Spoel, and yours truly from Kalk Bay Books, talking to John Maytham about what it is we do.

The person I’m most keen to hear talk is visiting author Muriel Barbery. Last year, news of her book The Elegance of the Hedgehog, started filtering through, and this year demands for it have grown simply by word of mouth. If you haven’t yet read it, here’s an early warning.

It’s a brilliant story and you have a chance to meet its author. I’d urge you not to miss either of these opportunities. Check the full programme at www.flf.co.za and book your places soon.

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People in South Africa are buying the Kindle from local stores, when it is available cheaper and faster from Amazon direct.

Stores like Wanitall and Jump are selling it for about R3000.

It can be obtained from Amazon for US$259 dollars which converts to about R2,500.00.

We suggest therefore that you order it direct from Amazon direct and save R500.

If anything goes wrong with the Kindle you can always rely on Amazon to correct it.

As at the end of March 2009 with the exchange rate at that time the costs would be as follows:

Kindle: ZAR 1,974.38
Shipping & handling fee: ZAR 159.93
Import Fees and deposit: ZAR 304.09
Order Total: ZAR 2,438.40

If you want more information about the Kindle please contact our website

I felt like an alcoholic sneaking a sip of vodka hidden in the linen cupboard

It all started when my daughter was admitted to hospital with an as-yet undiagnosed foot infection that confined her to a hospital ward with an intravenous antibiotic drip for six days. As we gathered her belongings for what we thought would be an overnight stay, I was impressed that she took along with her Don Quixote with which to while away the hours. Far from tilting at the Silvermine mountains framed by the ward window, however, Quixote stayed put on the bedside pedestal while Andrea battled to ignore the increasing pain and discomfort.

In my experience, reading has always been the best way of distracting myself from anything unpleasant, so if Cervantes wasn’t doing the trick for her, something lighter surely would. Scanning the bookshelves at home between visits, I lit upon Bernard MacLaverty’s Grace Notes – a book I’d enjoyed enormously when I’d read it years before, and in which he writes a description of music so beautiful I cried because the piece didn’t actually exist. She managed a few pages.

Her father, who is a more pragmatic soul than I, went down to the hospital cafeteria and stocked up on You and Glamour magazines. Her friends brought along Stephenie Meyer’s The Host and Zapiro’s latest collection.

The bookshop team picked out Vanity Fair and Dan Rhodes’s Little Hands Clapping to divert her. She barely glanced at any of them, and I sat alongside her helplessly: if books didn’t work and magazines were equally unappealing, I didn’t know where else to turn.

And if she couldn’t read, then it seemed the height of selfishness to read in front of her myself. (It was only when she was finally operated on after four days that I managed to sneak a few pages of Vanity Fair in the cafeteria. I felt like an alcoholic sneaking a sip of vodka hidden in the linen cupboard.)

Now, foot bandaged and resting on an ottoman, Andrea is sitting in my study armchair, and I know she’s feeling better because she’s reading. Don Quixote is still waiting, but she’s deep into both Little Hands Clapping (a book, she says, that should probably not be on the top-10-books-to-read-in-hospital list given its morbid humour, but is ideal for someone in recovery as it is very, very funny), and The Host (a book about aliens inhabiting intelligent life forms – something akin to the unidentified bugs in her foot, I suspect).

The common factor between these two books is that, while one may be defined as literary and the other as trash, both are entertaining, that is, amusing and diverting – exactly what a good doctor would prescribe.

As it happens, it’s also what a good writer recommends. Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, has recently published a collection of 16 essays, Maps & Legends, which considers “reading and writing along the borderlands”. Through these essays, Chabon makes a plea for writers to return storytelling to a place of honour, not disparagement.

As I ponder his words, I watch my daughter. She’s forgotten the ache in her foot, the needles in her hands, the nausea. She’s lost in a story and she’s looking happy for the first time in a week.

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