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 Booktaste.com
A reading feast every weekend with Cathy Macleod
During Read-an-Ebook-Week, Booktaste we’ll be slashing the price of all titles published on Smashwords by Darling Newspaper Press. From March 4 for one week the only price will be 99c.
Start treating yourself today by browsing for the books that appeal and make a list of them in preparation for the discount period. The fastest way to do this is to click on our bookshop. Or just click pick a cover and select from there. Free samples of all titles are always available.
IMMORTAL WORDS: Never a day passes over the earth but men and women of no great note do great deeds, speak great words and suffer noble sorrows. − Charles Reade (1814-1884).
Bananas versus Curry
ANOTHER literary spat! The Brits love ’em. This time it concerns the £35,000 Costa Book of thre Year, decided after “fierce debate and bitter dissent”.
Novelist Andrew Miller won the overall award but some judges said it should have gone to a biography of war poet Edward Thomas instead.
Miller’s book, Pure, follows a young engineer in 18th century Paris who is ordered by the King to demolish the city's oldest cemetery. The biography, written by Matthew Hollis, set the mood of the early part of the 20th Century.
Both apparently are great books, but I’d say that deciding this contest defied unanimous accord, because there were eight judges and five different categories. On such terms it was Consensus Impossible. The chairman of judges moaned: "It's not like comparing apples and oranges – it's like comparing bananas and curry."
So why do they try? “Book of the Year” makes a slick marketing tag, but doesn’t serve readers seeking to gratify individual tastes. Category winners are all that’s needed, and hard enough to select anyway.
Happy reading! from Cathy week ending 3 February 2012.
Fat kids, happy readers
THERE’S an almighty row flaring in Britain because fast-food giant McDonalds is giving away nine million children’s books. Instead of a free toy, when they buy a burger they’ll get a copy of a Mudpuddle Farm book by Michael Morpurgo.
The books will also be available to purchase at McDonald’s restaurants without the need to buy a meal. The “McDonalds Happy Meal” is a huge promotion.
Critics say it will encourage kids to chomp too many proteins and grow fat (there are six different Mudpuddle Farm titles). On the other hand, it should also encourage fat kids to read.
McDonalds, of course, just sees it as good marketing.
You can read about the rumpus here.
What the Dickens!
OH DEAR! This has to be the ultimate in bad timing. As the world prepares to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens (born 7 Feb, 1812), the Dickens Museum in London announces it is closing for renovations.
It closes early April and won’t open again until just before next Christmas. Defending the closure, museum authorities make it even weirder. It’s all because the museum got a Heritage Lottery grant of two million pounds. “The money was available for a limited time only and we had to seize the chance,” said its administration.
Sounds crazy to me, but I reckon Dickens could have turned the situation into one of his ironic plots.
Asia’s great authors
THE annual Man-Asia fiction award has seven finalists.Check them out online. They are:
JAMIL AHMAD, Pakistan. The Wandering Falcon (Penguin India/Hamish Hamilton).
JAHNAVI BARUA, India. Rebirth (Penguin India/Penguin Books).
RAHUL BHATTACHARYA, India. The Sly Company of People Who Care (Pan Macmillan/Pan Macmillan India/Picador).
AMITAV GHOSH, India. River of Smoke (John Murray/Penguin India/Hamish Hamilton).
KYUNG-SOOK SHIN, South Korea. Please Look After Mom (Alfred A. Knopf).
YAN LIANKE, China. Dream of Ding Village (Grove Atlantic).
BANANA YOSHIMOTO, Japan. The Lake (Melville House).
Arabian Writes
THE Arabs, too, have some great fiction worthy of awards. Click here to learn their prize authors
Happy reading! from Cathy, week ending 20 January 2012.
And still they come
FORECASTS for the year ahead, either glum or hopeful, continue to sweep us into 2012. This week I’ll stick to the absolutely positive in good reads. For this, one of the most enlightening is Katy Guest’s recent piece in Britain’s Independent newspaper.
She reminds us of the rival competition to the much vaunted, much criticised, much established Booker Prize, and mentions a few of the titles that will almost certainly be making a claim for fame when they are released in the weeks or months ahead. Read Katy here. The forthcoming goodies will go a long way to bolstering hardprint publishing against the incoming tide of the ebook!
Hating Sherlock Holmes
REAL detectives of a bygone era hated the fictional master sleuth Sherlock Holmes, according to a new book. When I came across it I was reminded of another knowall, perhaps of lesser fame yet probably more entertaining than the genius of Baker Street.
I refer to author Ann Morven’s homicide investigator in Murder Piping Hot. Inspector Sheryl Holmes in remote southwest Australia is descended from the pedantic London detective and has inherited his sweeping knowledge of the criminal mind. But she’s on the wrong track against amateur sleuth Sheil B. Wright, who is a dunce at deduction yet well versed in human frailty and traumas of the heart. Get a sample of this pageturner.
And if you wish to learn why Scotland Yard hated the original Sherlock Holmes, click here.
Nicely put. It was a giant tree, a galleon with its sails in full rig, an art museum with its entire collection on display, a mosque with a thousand worshippers praising God. As he admired it, he could feel the anger and distress draining from him. (from Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel, 2010).
Happy reading! from Cathy, week ending 13 January 2012.
Ann Morven dun it best
HERE we go into 2012, the great uncharted hope for an uncertain booktrade that is dreading the worst. Between ebooks and online sales, the year past was grim for traditional booksellers and publishers.
Many of these have (at last!) come to realise the wisdom of that old saying: “If you can’t beat them, join them”.
During 2012 several global publishers will streamline their online direct sales. And some major bookshops have already taken the plunge to compete against Amazon using the weapons Amazon has applied so effectively. In many high-street stores, physical shelves are now augmented by sales online and, yes, ebook editions also.
All this was a natural evolution but nobody knows how it will all work out in the end.
Meanwhile, the Internet is awash with “Best Books of 2011”. Every site seems to have a different list. You just have to browse and sample to decide if you missed some goodies. Booktaste has its own list, topped by whodunit author Ann Morven for a second year in succession.
Because of its clever Shakespeare allusions, my personal favourite is The Killing of Hamlet. This title, ranked by sales, comes second only to Murder Piping Hot. The latter, however, has been available longer and is published in paperback as well as digital.
All Ann Morven’s other novels and short stories are in electronic format only, via most of the main online sellers. If you haven’t sampled the chills and chuckles of her mysteries, there is a snap summary below.
After the encouraging ebook sales of 2011, Ann Morven’s other novels are heading for paperback editions. There will also be at least one new ebook (now nearing completion). My spies say its location is Singapore. Provisional title: Tears of the Goddess.
The following can be accessed online now.
The Right Royal Bastard. Alleged true heir to the British throne, a Black Australian singer is murdered on the eve of inheriting a fortune. To unmask the killer, bumbling amateur sleuth Sheil B. Wright opposes a police Anglophile and a sinister toff from Buckingham Palace.
The Killing of Hamlet. Murder stalks a modern English village while Shakespeare experts squabble over a newly discovered masterpiece. Australian folksinger Sheil B. Wright, prime suspect, challenges hi-tech British police, only to become the killer’s next target.
Murder Piping Hot. Death for dinner and an old Scottish love song send Sheil B. Wright on her most baffling whodunit trail, her mind teased by Rabbie Burns poetry. Overdrawn at the bank, overweight on the scales and nudging forty, the heavyweight chump of crime fiction bumbles through. But only after being denounced as a suicide bomber by a pedantic female police inspector descended from Sherlock Holmes.
The Seventh Petal. A creepy castle, hidden treasure, and the murders keep coming. Bumbling balladeer Sheil B. Wright finds a corpse and intrudes on an isolated weekend group in the Scottish Highlands. While a dunce at deduction, she’s well versed in human frailty and traumas of the heart. But can she catch a serial killer?
Happy reading! from Cathy, week ending 30 December 2011.
Secondhand title wins 2011 Booker
Historical adventure
JOHN Ivor heads the historical fiction list at Booktaste, for his series on The Great Southland.
These books are expertly researched and thrillingly written. They differ in theme but each narrates a history of global importance. Here’s a brief overview:
Java’s Dream. At the dawn of humanity, an apeman and his mate discover compassion, then learn it is a dangerous belief.
Captain Striver. How one man, family in disgrace, changed the social and political shape of the southern hemisphere.
Run Maggie Run. A girl flees Scotland’s hangman, only to encounter more perils of the 19th century world of the Enlightenment.
No Kiss For A Killer. Jeremy, a coward, must find the courage to avenge his father’s murder in a distant land, but this vow will sacrifice the girl he loves.
Eden’s Deadly Shore. It was a paradise for gentryfolk, until ambition and murder erupted.
Amateur Rebel. Inspired but unequal is the fight for justice in a British colony with corrupt rulers.
Happy reading! from Cathy Macleod at booktaste.com, week ending 16 September, 2011.
Booktaste.com is owned and operated by The Darling Newspaper Press, a small independent publisher in Western Australia. Its principal is Charles Bryce (charles.bryce@optusnet.com.au), lifelong journalist, Scottish born, formerly of The Sunday Post, The Straits Times, Reuters, The Sunday Times (Australia) and creator of The Darling Advertiser newspaper.
Blogger Cathy Macleod (cathy.macleod@optusnet.com.au) is an independent literary critic who monitors the Internet for good reads, bookworld views and news.
For Darling Newspaper Press email danpress@optusnet.com.au or post to PO box 176, Kalamunda, Western Australia 6926.
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