FRIENDS OF ARMIDALE DUMARESQ LIBRARY

NEWSLETTER

February 2016

From the Committee

Welcome to our first Newsletter for 2016!

Trivia night

This will be held on Friday, 18th March 2016 at the Golf Club at 7pm (Quiz starts at 7.30pm). Tickets will still only be $15 per person, with tables of ten. We would be delighted if you are able to come. There will be room on our tables for you, or, better still, if you could organise a full table to join us! Please ring either Mary DeGabriele on 0423 275534 or Chris Stephen on 6771 9147. We are hoping for a good turn out as this function is our main fundraiser this year.

The Golf Club has let us bring our own nuts, chips or sweets but they will be providing platters at $60 which will provide for six people with an antipasto selection or hot canaps. These will have to be ordered in advance, just use phone numbers above. Dinner is also available at the club, but bookings are essential.

Membership payment

This is now overdue. It is still only $15 per annum. You may pay at the Library or send it to our Treasurer, Judy Wilford, 18 Ash Tree Drive, Armidale, 2350.

Enid's chair

This has arrived in the Library. We now have to organise the plaque and attach it to the chair. The committee also purchased another very comfortable leather chair for the library, so do try it out on your next visit.

Baby packs

We delivered another 25 a fortnight ago. Altogether in 2015, we delivered 221 Baby Packs, totally funded by Friends of the Library using funds raised by the committee.

Film night fundraiser

We are planning on having two this year, hopefully in May and after winter in September, October. It all depends on which movies come to the cinema, and which would be suitable. Hope to see you there, but we will give you plenty of advance warning.

Book review

The Girl on the Train

Paula Hawkins

The main character in this novel is Rachel who travels each weekday to London on the train. The train tracks run along the end of the gardens of the street where Rachel used to live with her ex-husband Tom. Tom still lives there with his new wife Anna and their new baby; a situation which Rachel finds it very difficult to come to terms with as she still regards it as her home. Rachel closely observes the young couple who live a few houses further down the street. They seem to her to be a perfect couple, and she imagines their ideal lives together.

This is a novel of betrayal, deceit and manipulation in which nothing is as it seems. The story is told through the eyes of the three women involved each giving their own version of events as the story progresses. Rachel is the principal narrator, but doubt is cast on the validity of her story. Although she travels to London each day, she has lost her job because of her worsening alcohol problem and unreliability. The police, when she does contact them, dismiss her concerns. As the novel progresses, the past lives of the characters emerge and the facades behind which they live crumble.

Jean Jackson

New in the Library

Welcome to a new year of engaging reading, listening and viewing.

Lets lead off with items of Australian interest, beginning with another Wyatt thriller by Garry Disher. The heat is another well-written tale where the hero is on the wrong side of the law, and he has been there since 1991, long before any HBO anti-hero series were devised. If you like this, the Library has six other novels in the Wyatt series. Catherine de Saint Phalle is another Victorian author, concentrating On Brunswick ground and exploring that local community in real fiction. JM Green also writes from Melbourne, and Good money introduces a new heroine Stella Hardy, a wise-cracking social worker with a thirst for social justice, good laksa, and alcohol. Stella's phone rings. A young African boy, the son of one of her clients, has been murdered in a dingy back alley. Stella, in her forties and running low on empathy, heads into the night to comfort the grieving mother.

Morris Lurie, dead at seventy-six and probably most well known for The twenty-seventh annual African hippopotamus race, has left us Cleaning the stables: thirteen stories, sixteen poems and a recipe. Alex Miller, another award-winning novelist, brings a distillation of forty years to The simplest words: a storytellers journey. Theres less distillation and more fermentation in Best Australian comedy writing, brewed by writers like Annabel Crabb, Andrew Denton and Shaun Micallef.

Summers crop of cricket books is abundant, too. Phillip Hughes: the official biography celebrates his all too-short life. Longer, and with a commensurately bigger bank of stories to draw on, were Richie Benauds careers: Michael Parkinson introduces Remembering Richie: in his own words with tributes from friends; and son John Benaud introduces Richie: the man behind the legend.

Also on the greensward, Margaret Simons writes about Six square metres: reflections from a small garden. Peter Butt deals with a different sort of rot and green in Merchants of menace: the true story of the Nugan Bank scandal (Guns, drug money and the CIA... These were not your average bankers. This was not your average bank). A much more benign cooking of the books is offered by Black Inc of Collingwood, by republishing Miettas Italian family recipes fifteen years after it first appeared.

There is Australian film available (Last cab to Darwin with the moving Michael Caton) as well as music. Robert Forster, co-founder of the Go-Betweens, brings us Songs to play and the ABC compiles Swoon: the classic 100: music that makes your world stand still (for 20 years, ABC Classic FMs Breakfast show has featured a daily Swoon, and each morning listeners across the country look forward to this little parcel of rapture a chance to shut out the noise and busyness of everyday life and drink in the loveliness of pure music).

And then away we go: first to Asia, sampling Tokyo cult recipes (Maori Murota) before taking more time to learn Preserving the Japanese way: traditions of salting, fermenting and pickling for the modern kitchen (Nancy Hachisu). Charles Phan also satisfies with The slanted door: modern Vietnamese food.

Further west, Felicia Campbell introduces The food of Oman: recipes and stories from the gateway to Arabia. Perhaps some exercise after digestion? Try 2,100 asanas: the complete yoga poses, by Daniel Lacerda, or contemplate a long walk uphill and down on the Tea Horse Road: Chinas ancient trade road to Tibet.

Other Asian challenges are offered by Roger Long (A history of Pakistan in 843 pages), David Slavitt (Mahabharata in a sparkling new adaptation, which condenses the original 200 thousand lines of Sanskrit verse into 577 pages) and JJ Robinson, with his labyrinthine explorations of The Maldives: Islamic republic, tropical autocracy (The Maldives is a small and beautiful archipelago south of India, more renowned for luxury resorts than experiments in democracy. It is a country of contradictions, where tourists sip cocktails on the beach while on nearby islands local women are flogged for extramarital sex and blackmarket vodka costs $140 a bottle).

Asian fiction includes Cixin Lius The dark forest (sequel to The three-body problem), Mike Stoners Jalan jalan: a novel of Indonesia and Wong Kar Wais homage to the martial arts movie, Grandmaster (starring the wonderful Tony Leung from Lust caution, Chungking Express, Flowers of Shanghai, In the mood for love and Infernal affairs).

Circling further west, we come across a Georgian film, Tangerines (Ivo takes in two wounded soldiers from opposite sides. The fighters vow to kill each other when they recover, but their extended period of recovery has a humanizing effect that might transcend ethnic divides). The tribe is an equally unique Ukranian movie directed by the distinctive Miroslav Slaboshpitsky: the Guardian reviewer explains - set in a crumbling state boarding school for deaf adolescents in Kiev all the rows and confrontations are conducted in sign language, and this is what accompanies the fistfights there are no subtitles, no intertitles, no explanations. And there is no orchestral soundtrack or incidental music. The whole thing happens in eerie quiet, as if on another planet: it is like a nature documentary with the sound turned down. The film unfolds to the continuous accompaniment of shoes squeaking and shuffling on lino floors, in squalid institutional dorm corridors where the doors open outward, like animal cages. There are inchoate non-verbal whispers, or grunts and gasps of anger and pain. A new student. inducted into a secret world of teenage gangs and crime,falls in love with one of the girls at the exact moment her gangmasters are preparing an ambitious new business move. The Penguin book of Russian poetry is a comprehensive 572 page overview from Pushkins time to the present.

Mikhail Shishkin wrote his Calligraphy Lesson short stories in Russian, but has lived in Zurich since 1995. Ludmila Ulitskaya, of an earlier generation, won the Russian Man Booker Prize one year after Shishkin. She divides her time between Moscow and Israel, but her new book, The big green tent, has attracted American attention because it speaks of the mid-twentieth century Russian dissident experience. Into western Europe, Miranda Aldhouse-Green examines Iron Age unfortunates in Bog bodies uncovered: solving Europes ancient mystery.

Tim Blanning visits the German eighteenth century to expose Frederick the Great: King of Prussia to our gaze (fascinating even to those who hated him). Nicholas Stargardt examines everyday experiences during The German War: a nation under arms 1939-1945: citizens and soldiers. Raphael Honigstein contemporises joy and t