Auckland Libraries blog

"I have always imagined paradise as a kind of library." If - as I imagine - you're visiting this blog because you like reading about books, chances are you've already encountered this quote from the great Argentinian poet, writer, and essayist Jorge Luis Borges. Maybe you also know that for many years Borges earned his living as "first assistant" at a municipal library in Buenos Aires, cataloging books down in the basement (also, apparently, catching up on his reading), until he was dismissed for political reasons when Juan Perón came to power – only to be appointed the director of the National Public Library of Argentina after Perón was deposed. My appreciation of this feel-good quote for readers par excellence was turned upside down recently when I read Paul Monette’s Borrowed time: an Aids memoir . Monette's friend Roger Horwitz (I use the word 'friend' because in the book Monette spends some time telling us how it is the term he p...

It's 150 years today since Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published, three years after Charles Dodgson told the story to the Liddell sisters as they boated down the Thames. Together with its sequel Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There , it is now known by all of us as Alice in Wonderland , and by me as one of my favourite books of all time. For the occasion, I thought I'd republish the love letter to Alice I wrote for a Quirky Books series we ran on our website many years ago, which I called: The mother of all quirky books Because of everyone who's loved it or borrowed from it, from Virginia Woolf to the Jefferson Airplane; because Wonderland is where surrealistic starts; because the characters play croquet with flamingos for mallets and don't follow the rules; because the logic is faultless but illogical; because it celebrates absurdity; because of "Contrariwise" and "Off with their heads!"; because Alice wants...

When was the last time you heard of someone being ruined by scandal (speaking only of our rich Western nations, I hasten to say)? Unless a conservative institution - say, a bank, or the British Royal Family - is involved, the transgressor is more likely offered a book contract or a reality TV show. Is that why scandals, and the scandalous, are so boring these days compared to those of previous eras? Because so little is at stake? How much more interesting are the stories of scandalous behaviour of times past, the desperate need to escape the "boredom of convention", or to transgress a repressive code of conduct, and nearly always paid dearly. Small wonder too, speaking of repression, that it was practically always women who were scandalous. Men who caused public outrage became notorious, from the Latin notus , "known", but women who did the same were scandalous, from the Latin scandalum , "cause of offence". Here are a few of my favourites among hist...

Is everyone up on the literary scandal du jour? The one where Salman Rushdie rated a couple dozen modern classics on Goodreads, and his clamorously low ratings for many of them ( To Kill a Mockingbird , three stars out of five?! Lucky Jim only one?!) were shared with the 30 million members of the site, as is the wont of a "social networking website", resulting in a few shocked people and much media kerfuffle? Sir Salman claims he didn't dream they would be on public view and he was just playing around, which sounded a lot like saying he didn't inhale, but he did stick up for his right not to like Kingsley Amis books, which has to count for something. Zero stars from me for The Independent , which described Sir Salman as having "sparked controversy with some trenchant opinions of some authors widely regarded as among the finest of their generation". Star-rating a book is not a "trenchant opinion"! Trenchant opinions are, well, trenchant: from t...

I still laugh about the wintry morning when I headed into the library so distracted by thoughts about trains, or rather, about stories with trains -- Anna Karenina throwing herself under a train, Coral Musker aboard the Orient Express with the guard calling "Budapest!" as a fellow passenger presses a folded note into her hand -- that I walked right into a big green loden coat. To my delight, the person inside the big coat was Paul Reynolds, the visionary who developed our first website, but also, and in this case more importantly, a keen reader, who in fact had earned his living as a book reviewer when he first arrived from the UK. Just the person to consult about the question which had me racking my brain: I could think of many books in which trains feature as elements of mystery, excitement, danger -- of romance, in short; but were there not any where aeroplanes play a similar role? Paul was on to it in a flash. "What about Biggles ?", he said. The story cam...

One of my most prized possessions is this decade-old clipping from the NZ Listener of a news item about a scientific study on memory. It's entitled "Lest we remember" and goes like this: "Will it be possible for people to have their unwanted memories erased, or at least weakened? Who knows, but scientists at UCLA have reported in the Journal of  Neuroscience that they have been able to erase the long-term memories of marine snails..." "The long-term memories of marine snails"! I was -- still am -- irremediably fascinated by the idea. Take the conch. The conch, according to the marine biologist featured in Stanford University's "microdoc" video on conch , spends its life "cruising around" (changed to "wander" for the written version) in the deep waters near the reef, eating seagrass. What could a conch's long-term memories be? So here I am, years later, reading about Shelley in Italy, the long afternoon...

"Reality, as Nabokov never got tired of reminding us, is the one word that is meaningless without quotation marks." Was Pippa Middleton the beginning of the end? Penguin would have thought it a sure-fire win. An in-law of the royals (and not just any in-law, but the one the press nicknamed "Her Hotness" when she burst onto the scene at her sister's wedding to the second in line) imparts the secret of -- not curing the King's Evil, no, something much more 'of our time': brilliant parties year-round. They handed Pippa a £400,000 advance, and she handed them Celebrate: a year of British festivities for family and friends . And it flopped! Only 2000 copies sold in its first week. In a nation of 65 million people! Plus the Commonwealth! It wasn't the first celebrity title to flop -- earlier, a book by Alec Baldwin on fatherhood failed even more spectacularly, not surprisingly, I think you'll agree -- but maybe because of the personality ...