April 2018From the Committee Library RepairsIt is pleasing to see various tradesmen in the library completing work that still needs to be done. Hopefully the necessary repairs will be finished for the first year anniversary of our new building.

SeatingWe continue discussions with Council regarding seating in the alcoves outside the library and feel that we have made some progress. Many thanks to Claire Davies for her hard work and also to her wonderful husband for assistance with the photography.We still have concerns with safety issues, again writing to Council concerning these issues.

Bookmark CompetitionJudging is underway for the bookmark competition. The winners will be announced in the library on the 8th May to coincide with our one year anniversaryThe competition was particularly popular with younger community members and the judges are very busy deciding on winners from the many excellent entries!

FRIENDS OF ARMIDALE LIBRARYNEWSLETTER

Book review

Home Fire Kamila Shamsie

This novel is divided into five sections, each narrated by a different protagonist. The story begins with Isma Pasha being interrogated at Heathrow airport as she leaves Britain to further her studies in America. Her absentee father has been a jihadist, so her family is under surveillance by the authorities in Britain. The tale is taken up by Eamonn, son of the British Home Secretary, Karamat Lone. He falls in love with Isma’s younger sister, Aneeka, and she seeks to use him to help her twin brother, Parvaiz. Parvaiz dreams of being a sound engineer, but has succumbed to ISIS recruitment. In this way, the fate of both the Pasha and Lone families becomes entwined, and the book is an exploration of the role of family, society and religion in the modern world.

In elegant prose, Shamsie gives a picture of the difficulties faced by Muslims living in an adopted country. They have to deal with religious extremists as well as intolerance in the community. The conflict between individual human rights and the country’s security is told through a story of betrayal and loyalty.

Shamsie asks the reader to enter the minds and lives of others in an attempt to create empathy and understanding. This book is topical and a ‘must-read’ for anyone interested in politics and justice.

Marnie French.Events in the LibraryFirst anniversary at 182 Rusden StreetTuesday 8 MayEntry for the library’s 1st anniversary bookmark design completion has now closed. More than 100 entries were submitted, with most capturing the competition theme ‘My library means the world to me’. Judging is underway and the results will be announced at 4pm on 8th May in the library, when the Mayor will present prizes and certificates to the winners. There will be 12 designs chosen for the bookmarks and a new bookmark will be available each month starting in May. There will be a limit of 250 of each bookmark. We hope this will build an enthusiasm for the bookmarks and that they will become a great collector’s item. The library staff members are grateful to the Friends for their support of this competition.

Sydney Writers FestivalFriday 4, Saturday 5 and Sunday 6 MayOnce again, the Library will be live-streaming sessions of this Festival over three days. A program of author interviews and panel discussions from some of the world’s best writers as they discuss their work, their influences and the world of writing will run each day from 10am to 5.30pm. No bookings are required. A full schedule of the broadcast is included at the end of this newsletter.

New in the LibraryWe lead off this month with reports from the heights of fiction. Library staff members have discovered the delights of Winston Graham’s Poldark series. This may have been stimulated by the most recent television series, but the quality of Graham’s writing has impressed everyone – sustained over twelve volumes published between 1945 and 2002. The Library has subsequently placed an order for the printed collection to be supplemented by Talking Book versions in the near future.

Graeme Burnet, who made last year’s Booker Prize shortlist with His bloody project, returns with a crime novel (with the classic hallmarks, identified by the Guardian reviewer, of “heavy on lit cigarettes, light on subordinate clauses”). The accident on the A35 is set in France and ostensibly written by Raymond Brunet…..now read on. Penguin Classics have re-released Ishmael Reed’s 1972 novel Mumbo jumbo since Harold Bloom listed it as “one of the five hundred greatest books of the Western canon”: jazz, blues, voodoo and a threatening epidemic of free expression. We also have sharp short stories from Joanna Walsh (Worlds from the word’s end),classic LA noir from Dorothy Hughes (1947’s In a lonely place brought back to life as a New York Review classic) and new Nordic stories brought together as The dark blue winter overcoat and other stories from the north – just what we need as the days grow shorter.

We also have a range of moving pictures on DVD for cozier winter nights approaching. Fell is a stunning Australian film worth watching for bird calls, chain saws, taciturnity and maybe revenge. Long hot summer shows how young Paul Newman was in 1958. Cream teas, bunting, the local shop, thatched cottages swathed in roses and

quaint church spires – everything is charming when Penelope Keith brings us Hidden villages Series 3.

More shocking, but rated 9 out of 10 on Imdb , O.J.: made in America is a seven and a half hour documentary on the fallen football and movie star OJ Simpson (“the defining cultural tale of modern America - a saga of race, celebrity, media, violence, and the criminal justice system”). An equally noir thriller is After dark, my sweet, starring Rachel Ward, made in 1990, based on a 1955 Jim Thompson novel. The headless woman (Argentina 2008) will also keep you awake through its 87 minutes. Aki Kaurismaki’s distinctive Finnish outlook shines through the plot set-up of I hired a contract killer: “Despondent over losing his job and lacking the courage to commit suicide, Henri hires a contract killer to murder him at some unspecified time in the future. But almost immediately he meets and falls in love with Margaret. When he tries to cancel the contract, the killer has disappeared…”

“A crisis counselor from the Catholic Church is summoned to a home for disgraced priests in a Chilean beach town after an incident involving a man who says he was once molested by one of the residents”: can this be a blackly comic drama? Pablo Larrain directed this one (The club) in Chile only three years ago. We have tracked down a rare copy of Wim Wenders’ 1991 movie Until the end of the world (“In this futuristic 21st century adventure, an uneasy traveler is pursued by a killer, and a government that would do anything to acquire his invention”) not just to see a cast including William Hurt, Jeanne Moreau, Sam Neill and Ernie Dingo, but also to check out Peter Carey’s screenplay talents. The shock doctrine is a documentary, directed by Michael Winterbottom, based on Naomi Klein’s book about moral and ethical dimensions of capitalism. David Lynch’s documentary The art life is of a slightly smaller compass: his own life, but distinctively drawn.

More art lives are examined in our current non-fiction books: Kafka the early years is one of three volumes by Reiner Stach telling “how a boy who grew up in an old Central European monarchy became a writer who helped create modern literature”. A new volume on Modigliani celebrates an exhibition of his work at the Tate Modern which just closed in London on 2 April. Who was The great Nadar? Adam Begley answers: “The first great portrait photographer, a pioneering balloonist, the first person to take an aerial photograph, and the prime mover behind the first airmail service, Nadar was one of the original celebrity artist-entrepreneurs”. American novelist, Richard Ford, reveals his early life in Between them: remembering my parents.

Chris Patten, last Governor of the Hong Kong colony, has written First confession: a sort of memoir. Stephen Smith also reflects on an amalgam of the personal and the political in his Russia in revolution: an empire in crisis 1890 to 1928. Ron Chernow has written the big biography of Ulysses F Grant, American Civil War General, US President and sometime alcoholic: the cover photo is both touching and revealing of the man. David Horspool succinctly writes of Oliver Cromwell: England’s protector in the Penguin Monarchs series; to forestall outrage, we also have Edward VII: the cosmopolitan king, by the beautifully hyphenated Richard Davenport-Hines, to add to William I: England’s conqueror and William III and Mary II: partners in revolution from the same series.

We also have new books on Flatness as a philosophical consideration (BW Higman), A guide to stag beetles of Australia, Svend Brinkman urging us to Stay firm by resisting the self-improvement craze, and Eric Toensmeier doing a beautiful job of laying out The carbon farming solution with 480 pages providing a global toolkit of perennial crops and regenerative agriculture practices for climate change mitigation and food security. Kendra Gale also takes the trouble to be comprehensive in her Big book of miniature horses: everything you need to know to buy, care for, train, show, breed, and enjoy a miniature horse.