05 March 2009
Rob Nairn on Buddhism
Share: 
Rob Nairn on Buddhism
Thursday, March 5th 2009 at 12:00 AM
March 2009
Sunday, March 1st 2009 at 12:00 AM
Beautiful Book of the Month
Miss Beautiful: South Africa in Pageants
by Stan Engelbrecht and Tamsen de Beer
This is a very different look at South Africa, as represented by its many beauty pageants. And there are indeed a great number of them: Little Miss Skwatta Camp, Miss Apple Blossom, National Potato Festival Queen, Miss Gay Disco Queen, Miss Khabzela, Mr Reach for A Dream, Miss Anti-Crime, Mr Six-Pack, Bride of the Year – and the list goes on. Coming from many of the radically different cultures that make up the Rainbow Nation, all the people in this book are united by their drive to better themselves, to achieve something, and to get the sash.
Beautifully illustrated throughout, we see beauty, spirit, grace and pride on every page, and yet such diversity – all human life is truly here.
As the Calvinia Meat Festival Queen comments – and I think she speaks for everyone – “It’s an achievement that one wants to achieve in life. I never thought in my wildest dreams it would happen to me.”
A wonderful and extraordinary book.
Curl Up With a Good Read
The Manual of Detection
by Jedediah Berry
A tightly plotted, mind-expanding novel, in which an unlikely detective, armed only with an umbrella and a singular handbook, must untangle a string of crimes committed in and through people’s dreams!
In an unnamed rainy city, Charles Unwin works as a clerk for a large detective agency, filing reports for the illustrious Travis Sivart. When Sivart goes missing and his boss is murdered, Unwin is suddenly promoted to detective – a role for which he is singularly unprepared. While looking for Sivart he is framed for murder and strange, troubling mysteries abound – and he must eventually enter the dreams of a murdered man and face a criminal mastermind. This book is a splendid read – layers of mystery, wonderful touches of humour, an homage to the art of mystery writing, and the delightful feeling almost of playing a game.
The Book of Negroes
by Lawrence Hill
This epic work tells the story of Aminata Diallo, an 11-year old girl taken from her village in Mali in 1755. She is shipped to Carolina and made to work on an indigo plantation. She endures the hardships of rape and hard labour, and only when she becomes a book-keeper for another owner does her situation show any sign of improving. But a return to her native land is never far from her thoughts. Eventually she escapes and, after holing up in a black ghetto in New York, sails to Nova Scotia with other slaves, offered a safe haven by the King of England for siding with the British during the war of Independence. But here she finds an even more twisted world where freedom seems to afford nothing more than the right to be killed in broad daylight. This may be a work of fiction but it sheds light on a very dark period in history, and shows up the harrowing realities and brutalities of the slave trade through one central character’s plight. Lawrence Hill is a Canadian author of mixed race. His non-fiction work has explored being black and white in his native Canada, and one senses in the novel that the subject matter is very close to the author’s heart. The Book of Negroes was awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and it truly is majestic in scope.
Up a Tree in the Park at Night with a Hedgehog
by Paul Robert Smith
This is the debut novel of Australian writer Paul Robert Smith. It’s all about a man who is avoiding commitment and feeling bad about not feeling worse about it all. But really, the blurb on the back is what sold it to us, and all we need to say, really: “Who can you trust when you can’t even trust yourself? Benton Kirby’s life hasn’t exactly gone to plan. This is hardly surprising, however, as he never really had one in the first place. Armed with a philosophy degree, a dead fiancé, a brother who drives death around London in his black cab, and a girlfriend with a history of suicidal pets, Benton – ambitionless and emotionally disengaged – embarks, for no apparent reason, on an affair with a beautiful, sexually adventurous, Korean virgin. Following a strange snowballing of even stranger events, he finds himself, at last, exactly not where he ever imagined he would be, up a tree at night in the park with a hedgehog.”
Black Petals
by Bryan Rostron
Unassuming archivist Macauley Vogel is examining a cache of old police archives when he suddenly comes upon a surveillance file about himself. It is a terrible shock: he doesn’t recognise this person at all. Who is the youthful Macauley in these reports? As he starts to find out, he sets off a series of dramatic events – no-one wants the past raked up any more; and his search for the truth parallels the excavation of a mysterious mass of bones in the centre of Cape Town. The site becomes a battleground for rising social and racial tensions, and Macauley is sucked into this conflict, whilst trying to resolve his own secrets, which threaten to crush him. A fascinating extremely well-written contemporary Cape Town novel.
John the Revelator
by Peter Murphy
“I was born in a storm…”
This compelling novel is narrated in the voice of introverted, watchful adolescent John Devine. Stuck in a small town, fussed over by his single mother (the chain-smoking, bible-quoting Lily) and the gregarious but sinister Mrs Nagle, he longs to escape. When the charismatic Jamey Corboy arrives in town, John’s life suddenly fills with possibilities – welcome and otherwise – and as he hides from the reality of his mother’s worsening health, he is faced with a terrible dilemma.
Brilliantly evoking all the frustrations and pent-up energy of a parochial adolescence, this book is suffused with eerie imagery and black humour.
“Everything about [this book] excited me – I couldn’t wait to turn the page and keep on going. It was like reading for the first time, almost as if I’d never read a novel before.“ Roddy Doyle
Bad Company
compiled and edited by Joanne Hichens
Crime is alive and well in Cape Town! Crime writing that is – and to prove it here is a brilliant collection of dastardly stories featuring such talents as Deon Meyer, Richard Kunzmann, Margie Orford, Tim Keegan, Andrew Brown and many more. From Jozi to Khaya, from the leafy suburbs to the dingy shebeen, from psychological suspense to sudden violence – all the South African underbelly is here.
This collection caters for all tastes, and is a perfect introduction to local crime writing.
Broderick’s Report
by Philippe Claudel
From his village in the mountains in post-war France, Broderick submits reports on the natural environment to a distant Administration. Day by day he reconstructs his own life, all but lost in the years that he spent in a camp during the war. When he returned, he found his name on the war memorial – no-one had expected to see him again.
One day, a flamboyant stranger rides into Broderick’s village, immediately upsetting the fragile balance of life there. He is named the Anderer – the ˜other’ – by the villagers, and tensions rise until one evening the newcomer is murdered in the inn. Broderick is asked to write a report on the events leading to the stranger’s death, but it becomes so much more than that – a portrait of a village coming to terms with the legacy of occupation. This is a very powerful and brilliantly imagined book – exploring the nature of intolerance and fear in a small community.
Rage of Life
by Dora Taylor
This, Dora Taylor’s last novel, was completed in her first year of exile – in a state of despair at not being able to return to her beloved Cape Town. Set in the turbulent urban jungle that was Sophiatown in the 1950s, it is a tragic tale of love, rivalry and violence. 16 year-old Linda Malindi, desperate for help with the birth of her baby, staggers into the Angels One – a shebeen whose jazz music draws gangsters in from the streets. Spurning the advice of the hard-nosed shebeen queen, she is soon enticed into a life of intrigue and danger. But then she meets Simon Manzanza, a gentle soul who has left his wife and children in his homeland to look for work. Drawn to Linda, he represents the only love and security she has ever known. He is torn between Linda and his family, and eventually returns to them – but who knows what a man will do to survive, and how strong a woman’s love can be, when there is so much at stake…?
UFO In Her Eyes
by Xiaolu Guo
Silver Hill Village, 2012. On the twentieth day of the seventh moon, Kwok Yun is making her way across the rice fields on her flying pigeon bicycle. Her world is upturned when she spots a UFThing – a spinning plate in the sky – and helps a Westerner in distress whom she discovers in the shadow of the alien craft.
It’s not long before the village is crawling with men from the NSA, armed with searching questions; and when the Westerner rewards Kwok with a large dollar cheque, she becomes a local celebrity, under even closer surveillance.
This is a startling parable of the changes in rural China, and what the future might hold, from the author of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.
“Xiaolu Guo is an instinctive, humane witness; her atmospheric, unusually physical narratives are alive.” Irish Times
Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off
selected by Kasia Boddy, Ali Smith and Sarah Wood
This collection of extracts and short pieces features such literary luminaries as Anton Chekhov, Dorothy Parker, Katherine Mansfield, Joyce Carol Oates, Virginia Woolf, AM Homes and DH Lawrence, to name but a few. All the stories and extracts feature quarrels of love, and, cheekily point out the unfortunate truth that love doesn’t always involve flowers and hearts and walks in the park. Here are new lovers testing the ground, cosy couples enjoying a quiet squabble before bedtime, and exes intent on picking up where they left off. It is often something trivial that triggers these quarrels, but the stakes are always being raised, and things inevitably escalate, because love is a risky business.
The Truth, the Whole Truth…
The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power
by David E. Sanger
Sanger is the Chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times, and therefore best placed to address this most important of issues – the complex and terrifying challenges now facing the 44th President of the US. With unparalleled access to the key decision-makers and an insider’s eye for details, Sanger takes us inside the White House situation room, as the true costs and consequences of the Iraq war, and the legacy of George W, become apparent. Distracted by managing a war gone bad, the Bush administration became blinded to the world around them. Sanger now presents the choices that face Obama, his senior intelligence officials and top policy makers, and maps out the dangerous world that confronts the new president – and the rest of us.
And for those who have great hopes for the new president there is also a lovely little volume containing his 2009 Inaugural Address, as well Abraham Lincoln’s Inaugural Address, The Gettysburg Address and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self Reliance.
Zumanomics: Which Way to Shared Prosperity in South Africa? Challenges for a New Government
edited by Raymond Parsons
We stand currently at a political and economic crossroad. The world recession has had serious consequences for South Africa – announcements have just been made heralding the first South African recession in 17 years – and 2009 is likely to be a very tough year for SA industry and public alike. Politically it would seem that, while there is a likely outcome to the election, the political landscape itself is open to change. In this book, a range of economic and political analysts explore the challenges that will face Zuma and his government, and offer 70 key findings and recommendations as to the economic direction Zuma should follow, and how business may respond to future policies. They address a variety of controversial issues, including interest rate policy, job creation and the labour market, the role of the state, and the implications of COPE on the political landscape.
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
by Michael Braungart and William McDonough
How can we avoid environmental disaster? Nowadays most of us recycle, and do our bit for the environment – but what about industry, where the real damage is being done? The industrial approach has always been a ˜cradle to grave’ manufacturing model – which creates huge amounts of waste and pollution. What we need is a radical rethink of that model. This book challenges the model and instead looks to nature to find a production system which mimics nature’s model, to our commercial and environmental advantage – a system in which waste equals food. Written by celebrated chemist Michael Braungart and inspirational architect William McDonough and first published in 2002, this updated edition is a bold and important manifesto for a new vision of industry.
Time to Tell: An Activist’s Story
by Barry Feinberg
Poet, painter and film-maker, Barry Feinberg, won acclaim for his work abroad, which helped to galvanize international opposition to the apartheid government. He was one of the founding members of Mayibuye, an extremely successful ANC music and poetry performance ensemble. He was also head of the information division of the International Defence and Aid Fund which, under his leadership, became an invaluable resource for the liberation movement.
Time to Tell is a highly readable, and often dramatically revealing, memoir of Feinberg’s 45 years of activism, travel, relationships and creative expression. The relationship between the personal and political in this narrative is beautifully expressed, and provides a unique and compelling perspective of these dreadfully volatile decades in South African history.
Avatars & Antiheroes: A Guide to Contemporary Chinese Artists
by Claudia Albertini
Contemporary Chinese art is currently enjoying a worldwide boom, fetching record-breaking prices at auction houses around the globe. China’s rapid transition from communism to consumerism, and the dizzying changes brought by urbanisation, globalisation and new technologies have created a fascinating explosion of contemporary art overwhelmingly concerned with the search for self-identity in a society that, from Confucius to Mao, has traditionally disregarded individualism for the collective good.
Avatars and Antiheroes reflects the schizophrenic undercurrents of a nation in continuous fast-forward. From the Cynical Realism and Political Pop movements associated with the post-Tiananmen generation of artists such as Yue Minjun to the pop-culture generation spearheaded by Cao Fei, this book showcases the work of the most important contemporary artists to emerge from China in recent years.
Hollywood Foto Rhetoric
by Bob Dylan and Barry Feinstein
A famous Barry Feinstein photograph, a portrait of a young Bob Dylan, adorns the cover of the album The Times They Are A Changin’. Barry took many more photographs of Dylan, and his unique photographic style has become synonymous with that time and place in rock history. So inspired was Dylan by a series of Feinstein photographs that he wrote a collection of poetry, inspired by these images. Now, in Hollywood Foto Rhetoric these photographs and the Dylan poetry, previously unpublished, are brought together, each informing and illuminating the other. The combination of Dylan and Feinstein’s unique visions are powerfully juxtaposed between these covers. Floating eerily through the book are photos of Frank Sinatra, Marlene Dietrich and Judy Garland as well as poignant images of starlets, employment agencies and palm tree-lined boulevards. Feinstein photographed world famous events like Marilyn Monroe’s memorial service, and they stand here side by side with more personal aspects of life, preserving them in a timeless collection, while Dylan’s irresistible interpretive voice narrates and informs throughout.
It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle Blower
by Michela Wrong
When Michela Wrong’s Kenyan friend, John Githongo appeared one cold February morning in the doorstep of her London flat, carrying his luggage and four mobile phones he was trying not to answer, it was clear that something was terribly wrong in the country regarded, until then, as one of Africa’s few success stories. Two years earlier, in the wave of euphoria that followed the retirement of long-serving President, Daniel arap Moi, John had been appointed Kenya’s new anti-corruption czar. In choosing this fearless crusader with a booming laugh, the new government had signaled its determination to end the practices that had made Kenya an international byword for sleaze.
But now John was on the run, having realized that Kenya’s new administration, far from breaking with the past, was using near-identical techniques to pilfer public funds. John’s tale, which has all the elements of a political thriller, is the story of how a brave man came to make a lonely decision with huge ramifications.
Kitchen talk
Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin and Carolynn Carreño
“Pancakes are a luxury, like smoking marijuana or having sex. That’s why I came up with the names Ho Cakes and Slutty Cakes. These are extra-decadent but, in a way, every pancake is a Ho Cake.”
Thus speaks Kenny Shopsin, legendary cook and owner of Shopsin’s. Since it first opened nearly 40 years ago it has been a downtown institution. A meal there is more than just a meal – yes it’s a way to eat fantastic comfort food, but it is also an entry to a world that barely exists any more – an old-fashioned salon where customers interact, and all entertainment is led by the ringmaster, Kenny himself. He holds forth on everything from the right way to raise children to the right way to run a business, from the benefits of Freudian analysis to the nature of friendship. Collected together in this profound and profane book is his nine-hundred-plus-item menu, his very unique views on the world and over 100 of his favourite recipes – there really is no other cookbook like it!
Skye Gyngell’s unique recipes make her an award-winning Australian cook the whole food world is talking about. She has fed Madonna, swapped recipes with Nigella, worked alongside some of the best chefs in town and yet this mother of two still wonders what all the fuss is about.
She has two beautiful collections of recipes on the shelf, each well worth owning. The first one, A Year In My Kitchen, is inspired by the seasons and has brilliant combinations of flavour and colour to make the reader feel very peckish. It also has many great fish and vegetable recipes for those who want to live a healthier yet delicious life. The recipes are easy to follow and are complimented by great photography. Her approach to food creates both a sense of the familiar and an expectation of new adventure. She followed this up with her second offering, My Favourite Ingredients, which is indeed an enticing collection of recipes based on Skye’s love for certain ingredients – citrus, apples and honey to name but a few. She has a great love affair with produce from Mother Nature and one can’t help but wish you had a cauliflower patch outside your kitchen so you could make her cauliflower soup with Gorgonzola and pickled pear relish. Mmmm.
Afrikaanse Hoekie
Al is die Maan ‘n Misverstand
deur Danie Marais
As jy Danie Marais se gedigte lees en jou keel trek nie toe van die rou in sy sinne, dan is jou hart van blik en is daar min wat die dokters nog vir jou kan doen. Hy kies sy woorde so versigtig soos ˜n tannie wat konfyt vir die basaar gaan maak en glo die dominee gaan dit proe. Trek ˜n stoel nader en luister hoe Danie op sy vertel trant jou laat besef dat ons ons hartseer maar vlak begrawe. ˜n Pragtige, pragtige jy-moet-ek-besit bundel wat soos klitsgras aan jou sokkies kleef.
Book Lounge Pick n Mix – books we have known and loved…
A History of the World In 10½ Chapters
by Julian Barnes
This masterpiece of modern literature is simply a delight to read, in which Julian Barnes creates a kaleidoscope of narrative voices – from fiction and fact, painting and biography – in a collection of stories that weave together gradually to create a truly universal tale.
“Immensely moving, without ever losing its sense of humour and its lightness of touch.” Peter Carey
“Funny, ironic, erudite, surprising, and not afraid to take a dive overboard into the depths of sorrow and loss. My novel of the year.” Nadine Gordimer
“You will want to read it again and again, and why not? There’s nothing around to touch it.” Literary Review
“Frequently brilliant, funny, thoughtful, iconoclastic, and a delight to read. Barnes is like a worldly, secular reincarnation of a medieval gloss-writer on sacred texts, and what he offers us is the novel as footnote to history, as subversion of the given, as brilliant, elaborate doodle around the margins of what we know and what we think we know.“ Salman Rushdie
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
by Anne Fadiman
This is a delightful little treasure – a book of essays in celebration of bibliophilia, which will appeal to anyone who has lost themselves in a book or a bookshop. Ann Fadiman’s wonderful obsession with all things bookish makes her a fund of both useful and useless facts and features, which she gathers together with humour, affection, warmth and wit in this perfect volume for book lovers. It received great acclaim on publication from, amongst others, Robert McCrum, Alain de Botton, Iain Finlayson and John Gross.
The Crimson Petal and the White
by Michel Faber
This is an absolutely wonderful novel – engaging and affectionate, shocking and dark, with an unforgettable heroine, and a delicious and wickedly delighted use of the English language.
Meet Sugar, a young woman born into the most unprepossessing circumstances in Victorian London. But Sugar has ambition, and she will do whatever it takes to drag herself out of the gutter, and become a lady. Embracing a wide range of oddball characters, including the vast social sweep of London herself, this colourful story rolls along with an energy and enthusiasm for its subject, matched only by that of Sugar herself. If you haven’t yet read this, unplug the phone for the weekend and prepare yourself for a rare treat!
Thirteen Cents
by K. Sello Duiker
Winner of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize Best First Book 2001, this is the extraordinary and unstinting account of the coming of age of a young street child trying to make ends meet on the harsh streets of Sea Point.
Every city has an unspoken dark side. Cape Town, between the postcard mountain and the chi-chi beaches, has its own underbelly, lurking among the poor and dispossessed. It is a place of dislocation and uncertainty, desperation and dependence – a world of gangsters, pimps, paedophiles, hunger and hope – and very occasional moments of happiness.
K. Sello Duiker was born and raised in Soweto. He studied journalism at Rhodes University before moving to Cape Town, where his experiences gave him the basis for this book. He died in 2005 at the age of 30.
On Reading
by André Kertész
This extraordinary collection was a life’s work for Kertesz, one of the best, most prolific and influential photographers of the twentieth century. At the edge of a career in which he redefined photojournalism, he took shots of people engrossed in reading – whether a classic book in the comfort of a bookshop, or discarded newspapers in the street. Taken between 1915 and 1970, these intimate shots tell so many stories of life in twentieth century Europe. Moving, uplifting, amusing and warm, everyone in the book is united by the pleasure reading gives to all of us. Utterly beautiful.
The Book of Salt: A Novel
by Monique Truong
The Book of Salt serves up a wholly original take on Paris in the 1930s through the eyes of Bình, the Vietnamese cook employed by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Viewing his famous Mesdames and their entourage from the kitchen of their Rue de Fleurus home, Bình observes their domestic entanglements while seeking his own place in the world. In a mesmerising tale of yearning and betrayal, Monique Truong explores Paris from the salons of its artists to the dark nightlife of its outsiders and exiles. She takes us back to Bình’s youthful servitude in Saigon under colonial rule, to his life as a galley hand at sea, to his brief, fateful encounters in Paris with Paul Robeson and the young Ho Chi Minh. Widely acclaimed on publication, The Book of Salt was a Best Book of the Year in the New York Times, Village Voice, Seattle Times, Miami Herald and others, and was a finalist of the Guardian First Book Award.
The Good Fairies of New York
by Martin Millar
This is a brilliant and unusual novel, written by the author of Milk, Sulphate and Alby Starvation. The story starts when Morag and Heather, two eighteen-inch fairies with swords, green kilts and badly-dyed hair fly through the window of the worst violinist in New York, an overweight and antisocial type named Dinnie. Who they are and how they came to New York, and what this has to do with the lovely Kerry who lives across the street, and the other fairies of New York, not to mention the repressed fairies of Britain, is the subject of this book. It has a war in it, a most unusual production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Johnny Thunders guitar solos – and what more could you want from a book?
“This is a book for every fiddler who has realised, half-way through playing an ancient Scottish air, that the Ramones’ ˜I Wanna Be Sedated’ is what folk music is all about…It’s a book for people of whatever shape and size who like reading good books…I owned it for more than five years before reading it, then lent my copy to someone who I thought should read it, and never got it back. Do not make either of my mistakes. Read it now, and then make your friends buy their own copies. You’ll thank me one day.“ Neil Gaiman, from his Introduction
Prater Violet
by Christopher Isherwood
From the author of Goodbye to Berlin, and first published in 1945, this is a stingingly satirical about the film industry. It centres around the production of the vacuous fictional melodrama Prater Violet, set in nineteenth-century Vienna, providing ironic counterpoint to tragic events as Hitler annexes the real Vienna of the 1930s. Based, like the Berlin novels, in part on Isherwood’s own experiences, the novel features vivid portraits of the imperious, passionate, witty Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann, and his disciple, a genial young screenwriter – the ficitionalised Isherwood himself. He writes with delicacy, humour and clarity about a most turbulent and destructive period of European history, while at the same time parodying the self-importance and triviality of those too wrapped up in their own muse to see what is really going on.
City of Thieves
by David Benioff
Just out in paperback, this is a haunting story of starvation and extremes in Leningrad, 1941. Winter has come and the city is starving and desperate – there is no more firewood, there are no more pigeons, and mice would be a luxury. Two prisoners are thrown together and, condemned, they have a chance of reprieve – find eggs for the commander within a week or die – but eggs are as rare as hen’s teeth, and the reprieve is a condemnation in itself. This portrait of Russia in the grip of a delirium caused by starvation and cold is written with a light enough touch to make it truly shocking at times, but also to show the remnants of humour that often survive in desperate situations, when there is absolutely nothing to live for, but we chose to go on anyway. A wonderful read.
Nuwe Kinderverseboek
saamgestel deur Riana Scheepers en Suzette Kotzé-Myburgh
Na talle gesprekke en mompelinge tussen Afrikaanssprekende ouers dat hul wens daar was meer byderwetse verse vir kinders, is die gebede verhoor. Die skrywer, Riana Scheepers en die vryskut-uitgewersredakteur, Suzette Kotzé-Myburgh het kragte saamgespan en ˜n bundel nuwe kinderverse is gebore.
Dit word verdeel in drie kategorieë, naamlik Vir Pikkies en Peuters en Bekkige Kleuters, dan, Vyf, Ses, Sewe, dis hoe ek lewe en laastens Amper Tien, dis hoe ek die wêreld sien, duidelik volgens ouderdom. Dit het selfs ˜n nota aan ouers en onderwysers. Die illustrasies is dapper en helder en laat die speelse verse opspring en jou karnuffel in die kieliebak. Vir die wat nog hul Opperman Kleuterverseboek besit, hierdie is nou wat mens noem die sequel. Lees gerus voort.
Otterjasie
Vette varkie Otterjasie
Prop sy pensie vol spinasie.
Ek het ˜n spesmasie
Sy broek het nie meer spasie.
En in sy kies is daar
Sowaar ook nog ˜n kasie!
Hanna Barkhuysen
On the Lighter Side
Baby’s First Tattoo: A Memory Book for Modern Parents
by Jim Mullen
Looking for a present for those friends who have just welcomed their little bundle of joy? Sick of all the pink stuff? Then this is for you. In this delightful little volume new parents can proudly record all those special moments that really happen in a child’s life – hours baby slept the first night (if any), hours baby slept second night (if any), first time baby screamed all night, distance baby can crawl when parents look away for 2 seconds, baby’s first webpage, restaurants we’ve been asked to leave, first time baby broke an irreplaceable heirloom, baby’s first swear word – and much much more. Very funny.
Color Me Fierce: A Fashion Activity Book
by Nike Desis
This is such a cool thing – a colouring book for grown-ups, in which you, with the help of the 6 glamorous crayons (included) get to make some very important fashion decisions.
Useful instructions are included…
Darcy is blonde. Help her fix her hair before the meeting
Make sure Sally doesn’t look like a boy! Draw her in this season’s feminine colours.
Everyone needs puppy love. Colour in this season’s hippest purse-sized pet
Based on what you can see of Amy’s backside, draw her reflection in the mirror
Nora is such a glamour puss. Cut and paste her new post-plastic surgery face.
And so on – this book is a scream, and will make a perfect pressie for the fashionista in your life!
The Book Book
by Sophie Benini Pietromachi
To anyone who is a budding author of children’s books (whether child or adult) and who is looking for a creative boost, the Book Book is what you want. Artist Sophie Benini Pietromarchi invites you on a unique and poetic journey into the world of the book, giving ideas and inspiration on how to create your own books and stories from everyday materials – she makes a crown for the emperor from pencil shavings or a zebra from paperclips. Exploring colours, textures, shapes and feelings, she demonstrates how to turn these intangible elements into pictorial narratives. This visual feast of a book – which evolved from the Sophie’s bookmaking workshops with children – is a tribute to the rich imaginative world in all of us.
Competition winner
Congratulations to Louis Pienaar, who is the winner of the Faber competition, who will be getting a bundle of five Fabulous Faber titles.
Thank you for reading, and we look forward to seeing you soon
Share: