‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways’… Elizabeth Barrett Browning

New Envirosax. Gorgeous, handy shopping bags that you can fold up and put in your bag. Lots more instore, $9.95 each. This one is one of the NEW La Boheme range. I love them so much that I want to take them all home.

 L’Yan

…So bad. Such incongruity. So many questions.

Why is the skull old but the brains fresh? What does a skull that looks like a particularly tasteless garden ornament piled with offal have to do with a plague that “…brings the world to an end in an insane frenze [sic] of lust and violence…” Was the word “frenze” intentional?

The back cover and blurb don’t tell me much more. “Jelly fish, stewed in the boiling sea, flopped around his head. The sand was red and sizzled, the pebbles burned and a prune walked across his stomach…”

This is quite entertaining, although reading the book for anything other than laughs would surely make your head explode. A nice coffee table book for when the in-laws visit, perhaps?

-Agnes.

Someone used to give my dad  a Far Side calendar for  Christmas every year, one of those desk calendars you flip over every day. I loved reading that calendar all at once. There was something about Gary Larson that was too cool to save for a calendar.

Gary Larson, if you didn’t know, does one-panel cartoons that are often dark, surreal and wildly funny. They’re a great gift for someone with a sense of humour, I think, but they’re also addictive (hence the way I spurned the one-cartoon-a-day calendar format).

Here’s something you might not know (that I discovered on Wikipedia). One of Larson’s cartoons features two chimpanzees groooming each other. One finds a blonde hair on the other and says “ Conducting a little more ‘research’ with that Jane Goodal tramp?” This is typical of Larson’s humour, which often features anthropomorthised animals. The Jane Goodal Institute wanted to sue Larson for this cartoon, but Goodal refused since she found the cartoon funny. She has since praised Larson’s ideas for the way they contrast the way that animals and humans live.

Jane Goodall isn’t the only friend Gary Larson has in the world of zoology, either. He has had a species of butterfly and a species of louse named after him. 

You’ll love Gary Larson if you like smart, surreal, weird and “quirky” humour, if you love animals or pop culture. I think this book would be a great gift for the scientist, office worker or comedy buff in your life. Maybe I’ll give it to my dad as a replacement for the calendar, this year.

Agnes.

Joy of joys! Somebody just brought in a copy of Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts… which is also on the Top 100 lists. Therefore I simply must read it. I will slowly make my way through it and let y’all know how I go. Its a doozie.

L’Yan

The most recent film of The Painted Veil came out in 2006, starring Edward Norton and Naomi Watts. The vibrant Kitty meets Walter, a quiet but intelligent young doctor. The two marry, but Kitty has an affair and Edward accepts a place as a sort of epidemiologist in China, which is in the middle of a cholera outbreak. The movie is quite stunning visually and the nasty, loveless relationship (at least one one side — as a Facebook user would say, it’s complicated) was reminiscient, at least for me, of another Maugham work, Of Human Bondage  (that one was made into a charming and amusing film with Leslie Howard and Bette Davis).

The book is very… polite. Maugham is very much a product of his era (as all writers are), and in my (not terribly informed) opinion, that might be why his books are often dismissed as overwrought and sentimental. The latter is certainly true, but if you enjoyed the emotional interplay of the movie (which is really quite sophisticated at the same time as it is downright malicious), you’ll like the book.

Maugham’s plain prose was often criticised for being quite lowbrow,  and this is easy to see, especially when you consider that in his time Modernism was first beginning to assert itself. It’s not hard to infer that Maugham was probably confused about his sexuality (for a public man of Maugham’s generation, being openly gay was impossible), and many of the relationships in his books are dysfunctional and overemotional.

If you liked the movie, I’d recommend that you give the book a go, especially if you like reading classics. Even with the subject matter there’s a sort of comforting quaintness in this book that you won’t get in many other writers of Maugham’s vintage.

-Agnes.

You can find this one, and some other Maugham (pronounced “mawm”, by the way) works, on our Classics shelf. We have whole shelf devoted to books that have been turned into films (and vice versa), too.

What do you think of Maugham?

I love terrible blurbs. Although they are often unhelpful when I am trying to categorise a book, they at least give me a good laugh.

How’s this for a phenomenally terrible blurb:

Shirley is a prostitute. She thinks she knows all her customers: the first-timers, the talkers, the lookers, the hard guys, even the occasional psychopath. But, Mr Fox is no ordinary customer: who ever heard of a punter who quoted T.S. Eliot or arranged meetings at the Tate? With their every encounter she becomes more and more confused. Is it just a scripted pick-up? Or perhaps some bizarre kind of God-game? Love-Act toys with the reader’s curiosity right to the very end. It could be a book about seduction and manipulation or truth and invention or desire and the end of desire. Or not. It is for the reader to discover where the conundrums of M.E. Austen’s taunting game can lead in a first novel of rare and compelling ingenuity.

Blurb from M. E. Austen’s Love Act, Black Swan, 1982

An entirely unhelpful blurb of “rare and compelling” stupidity. I love it.

Excerpt from The Dag’s Dictionary by Richard Glover, published by ABC Books 2004:

Damn!nesia (damn nee’ zee ah) n.

An affliction by which you walk purposefully from one end of the building to the other, but forget mid-trip where you were going.

I suffer from this constantly.

JimmyD’s staff always get a laugh out of this book.  We have a copy in stock right now for $11. But be warned: this book never sticks around very long!

I also like this one:

Liebry (ly’ bree) n.

A pile of unread but fashionable books placed on a coffee table in order to impress visitors.

L’Yan

This copy is now SOLD. Let us know if you are interested and we can putyou on our seeking list!

Here at JimmyD’s we like to read, but we can’t read everything. Magda is a keen enthusiast of Scandinavian crime (and Fred Vargas, the French crimestress with the strange name), but my own (Agnes) favourite crime writers are Raymond Chandler and his contemporaries. L’yan knows a lot more about fantasy, but I for one wouldn’t know a David Eddings if it fell out of the sky and clocked me on the head (maybe I should do something about that, and I probably will, but after I investigate the hundred or so books and authors and series I mean to look into in the near future).

Here at JimmyD’s we like books, but we couldn’t possibly have time to read our way throuh every book in the shop, and there are people considerably more qualified to (say) tell us just what distinguishes a King Penguin from a boring old Penguin Classic.

Do YOU want to have your say? Submit a book review to JimmyD’s by commenting on one of our entries. Just tell us what you thought of a book in the comments, even — you don’t have to write something worthy of the New York Times Book Review, but of course if you can you’re more than welcome. The best book review (or comment) each and every month will receive a) our praise and b) a book voucher. Oh, and it’ll be displayed in pride of place in the window.

So what are you waiting for?!?! Get writing!

See the little speech bubble at the top right of the post, next to the title? Click that to leave a comment.

Hi all! L’Yan here.

I would like to thank all the ladies who continually recommend Di Morrissey to me as a light read. Its taken me two and a half years but finally I have read some of her work.

Recently I have tried Monsoon, The Islands and The Reef. I wouldn’t usually have bothered reading more after Monsoon as I found the characters drab and the story dragging, but I warmed to The Islands and really have to admit that I quite liked The Reef.

Why these three titles? Why, because they are on the A&R/Dymocks top 100 of course! Otherwise how would I have narrowed it down? The blurbs really don’t tell you anything: if you compare blurbs, all the books seem to be the same. So I went with the recommendations. You really can’t trust a blurb.

What I disliked: her cliche male characters; some seemingly unnecessary chapters where nooothiiiing happens (I do not have the attention span for this!). What I loved: her strong female characters; her sense of the importance of the setting to both character and reader; and her descriptions of the landscapes (she is particularly emotive about Australia, which I love!).

I would recommend Di Morrissey to fans of Judy Nunn, Monica McInerney, current Kate Grenville and Geraldine Brooks. Aussie Aussie Aussie. Let me know if you can recommend anything else.

Do you have copy of this title that you want to sell or trade at JimmyDs Bookshop in Springwood. We have a customer waiting for a copy of this book right now.
If you have a copy that you are willing to recycle please phone on 4751 8010, email magda@jimmyds.com.au or bring it in to the shop. We buy and credit books in great condition