The video below is by popular author of young adults novels, John Green.  He makes so many great points why everyone involved in getting a book from the author to the reader is important if a book is going to have a widespread audience.  Great speech!

The Bayside Literary Festival is on again this year with a great range of authors speaking.  In addition to our own event with Graeme Simsion, author of The Rosie Project, some of the authors I am looking forward to hearing are:

Tim Costello, 10 a.m. Wednesday 15 May, Bayside Corporate Centre
Tim is the CEO of World Vision Australia, and will share some of the stories from his book Hope – stories that he has encountered, often in everyday life, but also in the most dramatic of circumstances.

Jill Stark, 1 p.m. Sunday 26 May, Beaumaris Library
Author of High Sobriety, Jill’s book outlining her year of life without alcohol was featured on this month’s The Book Club on ABC TV.

Jo Case, 2 p.m. Tuesday 28 May, Brighton Library
Jo’s book Boomer and Me lets us into her life with her son, Leo who has Asperger’s Syndrome.  This is the bittersweet story of a twenty-first-century family and why being different isn’t a disability – it just takes some getting used to.

Andy Griffiths, 2:30 p.m. 1 June, Beaumaris Library
I don’t think I need to say anything about this popular children’s book author, except get in quick as the event is filling fast.

You can book for these events at the festival website here: www.bayside.vic.gov.au/literaryfestival

Carrie Tiffany and her book Mateship with Birds was announced as the winner of the new Stella Prize awarded for the best book published by an Australian woman in 2012 at a function last Tuesday evening.  The Stella is named after one of Australia’s iconic female authors, Stella Maria ‘Miles’ Franklin, and rewards one writer with a significant monetary prize of $50,000. 

Of the winning book, Kerryn Goldsworthy, chair of the Stella Prize judges, says:
“Mateship with Birds is a deceptively gentle-looking novel whose calm surface belies its many sharp and frank observations about the world. Set in country Victoria in the 1950s, it follows the fortunes of two people whose loneliness is offset by the many active strands of their daily lives: Harry, a farmer whose wife has left him for somebody else; and Betty, an aged-care nurse whose two children have no visible father.”

Interestingly, on the night Carrie Tiffany called all the short listed authors up to the front to share the limelight and announced that she wanted to donate $10,000 of the prize money back to be split equally among the other five shortlistees.  The other shortlisted novels were:

• The Burial, Courtney Collins 
• Questions of Travel, Michelle de Kretser 
• Sea Hearts, Margo Lanagan 
• Like a House on Fire, Cate Kennedy 
• The Sunlit Zone, Lisa Jacobson

On the international front, the shortlist for The Women’s Prize for Fiction for 2013 (formerly known as The Orange Prize) has also been announced, mainly featuring established novelists.  The shortlisted authors are:

• Kate Atkinson, Life After Life 
• A.M. Atkinson, May We Be Forgiven (available 1/6/2013)
• Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behaviour
•  Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies 
• Maria Semple, Where’d You Go, Bernadette (to order)
• Zadie Smith, NW

There has been a lot of talk in recent times as to why we need literary prizes for woman writers at all.  Helen Garner was the guess speaker for the Stella Prize presentation on Tuesday night and I think she sums it up nicely:  ‘How wonderful it would be if one day, such a prize no longer had any use. If doctors and lawyers no longer said to me, ‘Nice to meet you Helen, my wife’s read all your books.’ If designers no longer reflexively put a vase of flowers on the front of a woman’s book, even a book that is about hypodermics and vomiting and rage.”

For the children:
Come and meet  Jacqueline Harvey, the author of the wonderful Alice-Miranda and Clementine Rose series of books.  She’ll be talking about both of them this Saturday, 23 March at 12:30 p.m. at:

The Beaumaris Community Centre Hall
(next to the Beaumaris Library),
96 Reserve Road,
Beaumaris
 
 Book using the booking button opposite.  I can’t wait!

It’s good to see that we still need books, if only to provide the stories for the film industry.  You may have already caught up with the news that Argo won the Best Picture Oscar this year – a film that is based on the book of the same name.  I haven’t read the book yet, (it has just been elevated on my “to be read” pile), but I think it will be an easier read than my favourite film in the list Les Miserables (a bit of a brick at 1200 pages).

The film I have been wanting to see but haven’t is Silver Linings Playbook, another film based on a book, and don’t forget Life of Pi.  All in all, four out the nine nominees for Best Picture were originally novels.  My favourite book to film conversion  is a book called Hunting and Gathering by Anna Gavalda.  Both the book and the film are beautiful and worth reading/watching and unlike so many others, the film didn’t make me think that the book was better.  What is yours?

One of the books I read over the my summer break is The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion which is one of the new books you will find in the store in February. Simsion’s book won the 2012 Premier’s Prize for an unpublished manuscript, and I found it a lovely holiday read with quirky characters and a touch of  romantic comedy.

The main character is Don Tillman who is getting married. He just doesn’t know who to yet. As the book progresses we realise that Don has Asperger’s syndrome although the only person who doesn’t know this is Don himself.

To find the perfect partner, Don has designed the Wife Project, a sixteen-page questionnaire. She will most definitely not be a barmaid, a smoker, a drinker, or a late-arriver. Of course, Don meets Rosie, the woman who is all these things. She is also fiery and intelligent and beautiful. And on a quest of her own to find her biological father—a search that Don, a professor of genetics, might just be able to help her with.

The Wife Project teaches Don some unexpected things. Why earlobe length is an inadequate predictor of sexual attraction. Why quick-dry clothes aren’t appropriate attire in New York. Why he’s never been on a second date. And why, despite your best scientific efforts, you don’t find love: love finds you.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

For all the children that have been waiting for the latest Diary of a Wimpy Kid novel, The Third Wheel, I’m happy to say that we have lots of copies in store now.

I’ve been reading the newspaper while having a cup of coffee this afternoon (my day off) and have come to the TV guide section.  On Thursday nights, SBS usually has some great cooking/travel shows to watch and this week is not exception with My Sri Lanka with Peter Kuruvita and one of my favourites, Luke Nguyen’s show Greater Mekong.

Then my glance moves across the page, and there on channel 10 is the new Jamie Oliver show Fifteen Minute Meals.  I have to admit to being a Jamie fan, and his cookbook Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals gets a regular workout (this week was the piri piri chicken – yum).  Oh, dilemma.  What to watch?  Maybe I should watch Jamie’s show and just take the cookbooks home for the other two as both should be being unpacked at the store now.

Here’s a video featuring the people who are working behind the scenes on Jamie’s new show.  I think he has a little bit of help to reach that 15 minute target.  What do you think?

I hope everyone has put in their diaries the annual Sandringham Village Fair and Farmers Market which is on again this Sunday, 21 October between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m.  We’ll be open all day, so pop in and say hello.

We will have table of books at special prices for the day so some bargains to be had that may come in handy with only 66 days to Christmas, as well as colouring and maybe a story or two in the morning for the children.