Submit a review to JimmyDs and WIN.

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.

Was dubious about Di…

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.

Seeking: Mao’s last dancer by Li Cunxin

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

Covers so bad-Too many cooks

An all but ordinary cover except for the slain gingerbread man and the stained cooks knife. When the blurb on the back of a book includes words like; hot new romance, gorgeous homicide detective, pretentious boss and seamy sex scandals, you know that the book could have been written using a romance template no thesaurus required.
Magda

Seeking:Fearless Fourteen by Janet Evanovich

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

The Flying Emu and other stories by Sally Morgan

Twenty delightful stories for children about how the world began by the author of the wonderful autobiography ‘My Place’, where she told the story of her aboriginal ancestry and mother and her grandmothers experiences living in Western Australia.
This book is in lovely condition and the stories will delight young ones.

Let’s hear it for the Byronic hero.

Two books I selected from our shelves that contain typical Byronic heroes. Wondering how I linked these together?

You may not know what I’m talking about, but you know the type. That’s the thing with stereoypes, with heroes, with protagonists. We may not have a term for these things, but we all know the type.

The typical Byronic hero is idealised but flawed. Lord Byron, for whom the Byronic hero is named, was the first “modern-style” celebrity, and nowadays he’d be characterised in the media as a rock star. His ex-lover Lady Caroline Lamb famously described him as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”, and this is the essence of the Byronic hero.

The Byronic hero is intelligent, cunning, and maybe even criminal. Crucially these more negative characteristics are set off by something negative, perhaps a tendency toward introspection and moodiness, or a streak of cowardice (perhaps just realism) or narcissism. Consider Rhett Butler from Gone With The Wind. He is shunned by his family for being thrown out of West Point, yet is obviously well-educated. He has an adversarial relationship with many characters, and his insight into human nature prevents him from salvaging his love for Scarlett. Cue bitter tears.

The Byronic hero is also intelligent, astute and educated, yet he or she (usually he) struggles with integrity, often bucking convention and suffering for it. Byronic heroes are usually physically attractive and generally in love with someone, but (again, most importantly) often are burdened with a dark secret or source of guilt. Consider Stephen Dedalus from the works of James Joyce. Stephen is considered by his friend Buck Mulligan to be a great poet, but he cannot seem to relate to many people very well. He is extremely guilty over the fact that he could not pray for his mother as she lay on her death bed – his stubborn moral decisions about religion (among other things) prevented him from doing this).

The Byronic hero may be privileged (socially or in terms of money) but will show a disregard for social conventions and their own responsibilities.

The Byronic hero often has an understanding of his of her inner world, but may be overburdened thus. You’re beginning to see a pattern, right? You know a character like this.

To further explore this, I’ll first tell you about some boring literary stuff. Then we’ll talk about some real (fictional) Byronic heroes.

Scholars have traced the tradition of the Byronic hero from the works of John Milton. Milton published the twelve-book version of his epic poem Paradise Lost in 1674. It is heavily concerned with the conflict between God’s foresight and omnipotence and man’s free will.

It wasn’t until the American and French revolutions and the Romantic period that people really began to sympathise with Satanic characters. In 1819 Percy Shelley (a contemporary of Byron) put forth that Milton’s Satan was morally superior to the tyrranical God of the poem. Most crucially, he said that Satan’s greatness of character is flawed (again) by vengefulness and pride. Byron wrote a semi-autobiographical epic narrative poem from 1812 to 1818, called Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Many of the elements of the Byronic hero are in this: a world-weary character who searches for enlightenment in foreign lands.

That’s crucial to the characterisation of the Byronic hero. The Byronic hero is flawed, and the “but” in the character’s description is very important. Brilliant BUT self-destructive, moral BUT with a Dark Secret, full of integrity but dark and mysterious, etc etc. Consider Bruce Wayne of Batman.

A few more examples: Rochester in Jane Eyre is a typical Byronic hero. Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights is also a popular example (a larger than life dark-and-handsome romance who never wavers from his goal), as well as Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. The heroes of many hard-boiled detective novels, as I discussed here, are similarly flawed. Sam Spade is a contemporary example of the Byronic hero, as is Philip Marlowe. You might also consider the titular Doctor House from the TV series House to be a similar hero — he’s brilliant but, as you probably would have guessed by now even if you don’t watch the show, Tragically Flawed in more ways than one. Gothic fiction was bursting with Byronic heroes, as are spaghetti Westerns such as The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. Consider also the Phantom of the Opera and the Vampire Lestat. The Modernist era also gave rise to a lot of Byronic heroes

Byronic heroes are a lot more interesting than your regular old white-knight hero, and there’s still usually an element of romance there… the carefully tousled hair, the enigmatic secrets, etc etc.

The Byronic hero fits into the larger genre of the antihero, which we might take a look at next time. The Byronic hero usually has an air of sweeping romance about him or her — their tragic flaws are never so tragic that you don’t adore the character eventually.

A very contemporary example is Edward Cullen from the Twilight series. And now I seem to have linked pop culture with high culture, and so I’ll finish there.

If you got the whole way through that — congratulations!

-Agnes

How Was The Play, Mrs. Lincoln?

2009 is the bicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. I was reminded of this fact when I recently bought a new copy of Obama’s inaugural address, which contained a copy of both of Lincoln’s inaugurals as well as the Gettysburg Address. Very interesting reading. The bicentennial isn’t the only reason Lincoln is interesting, of course. It might take an event such as this to get Australian readers (apart from Civil War historians and others) interested in him, but he contributed massively to the American national imagination. I enjoyed seeing Obama’s inauguration speech set out on a page, because this way I could see echoes of Lincoln in what he said. I won’t make any more Obama/Lincoln comparisons, since they’ve been done to death.

Even if you’re not as interested in this part of history (and its echoes today) as I am, you’ll enjoy the suspense and real-life-crime aspect of this book. Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase For Abraham Lincoln’s Killer. It’s very exciting, and completely avoids the dry bogging-down in details that some well-researched historical books fall into. Very exciting, a good historical account of an important point in US history. If you’re looking for a book that will make history exciting to anyone, or you’re just interested in US history, this is a book for you.

Captain Planet Would Approve

The 15th of November is America Recycles Day. A little bit closer to home, Clean Up Australia Day events are in March 2010, and the Australian Sustainable Cities awards will be presented in October.

Here at JimmyD’s we’re committed to recycling every week of the year, and we were before those chic green shopping bags came into vogue. We recycle our packaging, don’t use plastic bags, and we like gifts that are environmentally friendly, like these journals.

And of course JimmyD’s is full of good-quality recycled books. Come in and buy a second-hand book today! Ride your bike, run, or walk. Refuse a bag or buy one of our nice durable shopping bags! Write your eat-local shopping list in one of our Australian-made recycled journals! Buy some locally made coffee (we buy our coffee off a local roaster) and make an environmentally friendly day of it in Springwood!

Art, Class & Cleavage — Ben Watson

This is a rather long review: You can read a short summary here, or scroll down to read the whole shebang.

A very interesting book that challenges (vehemently) the way we think about art and politics. Prepare to have your opinion challenged — what is avante-garde? What is popular art? Read the whole thing, or dip in using the index. Perfect for anyone who likes thinking about culture, but I think it would be especially particularly useful to the “unique post-modern aesthete” that most of us know. $10, a bargain for some meaty summer reading!

An interesting book, this one. You take one look at the cover (picture of the Venus de Milo with a bikini textaed on) and the title and think it’s going to be a pop-culture journey, one of those books that’s all about travelling from the audience of The Price is Right in America to the set of a strange Japanese game show, via a fashionable Kaballah ceremony in Los Angeles and a shopping village in London. Which is fine — I love books like that. They critique culture while they’re immersed in it, and other such fashionable sociological terms. But you only need glance at the subtitle of this book (Quantulumcunque Concerning Materialist Esthetix) and you know this book is… different from that. Is it a parody? Is it a serious, weighty tome? Will the inside be peppered with incomprehensible graphs and even longer made-up words, or with semi-pornographic images in the name of “cultural exploration”)?

I took a gulp of coffee and decided to take a look. First of all I got a bit worried that in my first cursory look I might have overlooked some crucial piece of irony or satire, so I jumped on Google and had a look what some other reviewers (most considerably more informed than I am) had to say.

One reviewer on Amazon.com described the book as “dizzyingly brilliant”. “Okay,” I thought, “As long as I don’t read it while I’m standing up, I’ll be fine”. I wouldn’t want to fall over and hurt something. I ponder exactly what that “dizzyingly” means. Is the book utterly incomprehensible? Or just brilliant?

I further learn that the book is a “treatise on aesthetics”, and further that it is “stridently polemical”. In other words, it’s a book that seeks to be deliberately controversial as it defines aesthetics, our art, our perceptions of beauty. What sort of aesthetics? Does the author try to make sweeping generalizations about culture? At the end of this little research session I’d decided that the book must be quite meaty – but well-researched and probably relevant. No equating Hollywood divorces with the decline of culture or something like that – a dissection of what makes the artistic sensibilities of “our culture” (I put that in inverted commas because there are so many cultures you see mentioned in the news every day) tick. Thusly armed, I opened the book to take a look.

…And then my head exploded. Nah, only kidding.

The first couple of pages aren’t so much incomprehensible as they are “murky”. What is this guy trying to say? The Amazon reviewer I quoted before also mentioned that the book is “…food for difficult thought”. From the first pages, Watson is trying to change the way we think about art. Brian Eno, an artist who many people see as a benchmark of the Avant-Garde, is dismissed as “easy listening”. Dr Dre and Stevie Wonder engage in “materialism of sound”.

In the Introduction Watson explains that “…in today’s rapidly changing world [this is one of my least favourite sentences, but I won’t hold it against Watson since he has much more important things to say], the objective separation of manual and mental labour has resulted in a raw and painful Cleavage between the sciences that deal with Art (aesthetics) and Class (politics)”. Sorry if you read all this way thinking a that the “cleavage” of the title was actual cleavage — it isn’t. It’s metaphorical cleavage, though, which is even cooler. I imagine, (as I think Watson wants the audience to) two statue boobs, one emblazoned with the word “Art”, the other with the word “Class”. Cultural aesthetic, indeed.

This book is really, really interesting stuff, and to say that it is full of hard-to-read overpolitical raves would be to sell it short. Watson has some very important social critiques, and he organizes his thoughts well even if he does trend slightly toward ranting. In fact, I would hazard that most knee-jerk criticisms of the book probably stem from the fact that Watson doesn’t hesitate to shake the foundations of people’s perceptions of art, and it might be a hard (but necessary!) thing to hear that you are not as original or avant-garde as you think you are, that your supposedly apolitical idea of art is anything but. I think aesthetics need to be challenged, and Watson does it well.

You don’t have to attack this book from front to back. I quite enjoyed leafing through the (well-appointed) index and checking on what Watson has to say on certain subjects. And he does have a lot to say. Watson is anti-elitist, so it’s a good idea to look past his initial political ranting and take what he has to say at face value, since it’s very important. He uses a lot of footnotes, but in an entertaining way, as a way to comment on what he’s saying in the text, not supply a dry extension.

I think this book is perfect for anybody who likes to think about pop culture (and art) in an analytical way. And if you’ve got a friend or family member who’s stuck in one of those terrible ruts where they’ve convinced themselves that they’re member of an enlightened post-modern aesthetic of uniqueness, you might want to show this to them, too. It’s a great, audacious book that is meant to challenge our perceptions of ourselves and of our art, instead of back-patting and shoring up snobby opinions. I can’t wait to delve deeper into it, it’s very complicated and I’m sure I’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.

The book is $10 and you can find it in the shop today! What a bargain for some intellectual summer reading!

-Agnes.