The season of spending

Not sure how to answer KRudd's call to spend our way out of the economic crisis?

Books, we say, buy books!
Here are some tips to help fill the Christmas stocking.

for the older readers:
Somebody's Crying by Maureen McCarthy. We love Maureen. We love the way she makes us feel her characters truly exist, and that if we just turn the right corner at the right time of day, we might even run into one of them. And this one is brimming with suspicion, guilt, love and redemption. Here's a taste.

for the teenage girls:
the Stephenie Meyer Twilight books are far too big to lug to the beach (they are best enjoyed curled up on the couch so if there is to be any swooning over Edward*, one doesn't have far to fall) so we say: hello Girlfriend fiction. There are already eight out now - and two more coming very soon - don't they look GOOD! They do go so well on the beach, and there's a cartwheel on the cover of this one.
(We do like a cartwheel). Pitched perfectly for 13-16 year old girls

for the young fellas:
they're fast, they're funny and they're books especially for boys. The OK Team 1 & 2 by Nick Place, The Detachable Boy by Scot Gardner & The Dog that Dumped on my Doona by Barry Jonsberg. Laugh out loud fun for boys aged 7-12.

for the littlies:
Peka-boo The Smallest Bird In All the World by Eliza Feely - a loud and lively book about friendship and finding your voice - and at the end you can all dance the fluttering skippity with seed-cracking gusto.

Tiny, by our Jen castles and Steve Otten, is a wonderful book about a red heeler on a road trip - an excellent gift for anyone with a spirit of Australian adventure or a soft spot for dogs.

for a touch of Christmas (with things to make and do):

the wonderful Roland Harvey's Big Book of Christmas - a treasure chest of Christmas stories around the world, treats to bake, stickers (!) to stick, gifts to make and carols to sing up all the Christmas cheer you need to get you in the swing of the festive season.

and for the adults:
Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan - we are so proud of this wonderful book by our Margo - and it's thrilling that people all over the world are saying such lovely things about it. Oh, so many accolades already - slip over here to sample the many words of praise.

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas. David Marr described it as THE great Melbourne novel. You've probably seen all the glowing reviews, or had someone rush up to you and say: Oh. My. God. I just read Christos's book, it's amazing, I couldn't put it down. But if not - here, here and here are a taste of what the peeps are saying about it.

And if that isn't enough to get you champing at the bit to gallop on down to your local book store to help spend the economy's woes away - here are a whole host of other terrific Onion gift ideas.

Happy wrapping.

*Just for the record, we understand that there is a lot of swooning over Edward, but the Onions are Team Jacob.

oh, the things that we will see

Out the window, something extraordinary caught our eye. It was unexpected and brash and laced with danger: young gentlemens water-skiing in the cathedral fountains. For serious!

There are three big rectangle pools, and the water-skiing involved a rope and a 4WD and we suspect some kind of winch contraption, and they water-jumped over the low wall between each pool. They did it several times - and they did tricks! They had us standing on our desks and clapping. A tonic for our Friday afternoon flat spot. Oh, how it swept the glums away!

We've got the glums...

... well actually, that's not strictly true. It's more that wispy melancholy that sometimes seems to waft in on the warm breeze at this time of year. (Must be because of all the all the end of yearness that goes on; one Onion has even been known to get a little choked up when TV shows she doesn't watch, or even like, all start going on hiatus.)

We are stoking our light-blues by reading:

1) Frank Cottrell Boyce musing on Philippa Pearce's last book, A Finder's Magic.

'This is goodbye, not just to fiction, but to life and family and home - which explains why this pretty, light-hearted fable has such a powerful elegiac undercurrent. All Pearce's books have this strange, unobtrusive power... Every ghost story, most religions and a good deal of modern physics are about the persistence of what is past. But hardly anyone has described it so powerfully and eloquently as Pearce'

2) Felicity Dahl talking about life with and without Roald

'Children still pitch up unexpectedly at his Buckinghamshire home, Gipsy House in Great Missenden, where Felicity, 69, lives. 'It's just awful because they look over the gate and say, "Roald Dahl lives here doesn't he?" And I say, "Well he did." "Oh, has he moved?" And I have to say, "No, he died."'

3) The 10PM Question by New Zealand author Kate De Goldi. Funny, funny, funny and a little bit heartbreaking.

'Tuesday the 14th of February began badly for Frankie Parsons. There was no milk for his Just Right. There was no Go Cat for the Fat Controller, so the Fat Controller stood under the table meowing accusingly while Frankie ate his toast.'

(It's already a bestseller in NZ, but it's not out in Aus till February, so you'll just have to wait a bit.)

4) The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald, a graphic adaptation by our Nicki Greenberg

'And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close he could hardly fail to grasp it.'

Save Our Stories

Quickly, quickly go forth and save your favourite characters.

The Gift of Reading Project is all about the idea of keeping imagination alive through reading.

We like that in a project.

It seems to be a fairly dramatic approach though. And a bit scary: seeing Peter Pan old and infirm, his spirit slipping away. And Cinderella hooked up to a drip suggests she might just have partied a little too hard at the ball. But the flutter of that red cloak. Oh, Little Red Riding Hood. Quick, pick up a book; read, read against the dying of the light.

But it's not an entirely new idea. Let's not forget Puff the Magic Dragon. The song begins so sweetly, it's upbeat and full of magic and frolicking - but poor old Puff is in for a sad fate...

A dragon lives forever but not so little boys
Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys.
One grey night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more
And Puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar.

His head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rain,
Puff no longer went to play along the cherry lane.
Without his life-long friend, Puff could not be brave,
So Puff that mighty dragon sadly slipped into his cave. oh!

Oh, Puff. I believe...

’tis the season...

...for cherries, for birthdays, for cake.

(oh, I know it's always the season for cake, but I was following Obama's lead, using the tricolon for effect, and cake is clearly the most powerful way to finish any sentence).

Anyway, it always feels like true summer when the first cherries of the season appear, all red and plump and ripe with juicy goodness. A sure sign that it's time to dig out that ole Christmas spirit and swing into the festive season*.

But it's been birthday season here, and the very clever cake-maker certainly knows what to do with a cherry or thirty. Oh, hello Cherry Tart.

So 'yes we can' have cake (complete with hearts and stars and candles and a mighty fine number). Omnom.

And not so very long ago we were fortunate indeed when the cake-maker-in-waiting baked a half-century special: Butterscotch Apple Spice Cake served with butterscotch sauce (yes - that is butterscotch sauce, not gravy!) and ice-cream and cream and yoghurt and candles, and even balloons.

Hip hop happy.

*now that it's December we can happily talk up the whole Christmas spirit thang without fear of rule-breaking.

‘Leave It Alone’

If there's one thing we Onions like (apart from cake), it's singing.
No wait, it's books.

Clearly, it's singing about books. Take it away FOCL:

In what the Geelong Advertiser calls a 'a last-ditch bid' to save the town's public library, the good folk of FOCL (Friends of the Colac Library) are rocking the intertubes with the power of their message. 'Every city, every town deserves a public library.'

Colac, along with the rest of Victoria, will be voting in council elections tomorrow. We don't know much about the issue at hand, but the Onions will be watching the election results as if Colac were the 'bellwether seat' of Eden-Monaro. Will FOCL's wonderful YouTubery swing the tide and save their public library?

In which an Onion travels north

Oh, holidays – aren’t they wonderful (especially when the rains seemed to have set in on poor Piglet back at the House).

And one of the best things about them is choosing books to take. Of course this is often a difficult business because, well frankly, I always want to take them all.

So the real pre-holiday question was, if I packed the new Phryne Fisher adventure, Murder on a Midsummer Night (Kerry Greenwood), and The Slap (Christos Tsiolkas) and Joel & Cat Set the Story Straight (Nick Earls & Rebecca Sparrow) and Finnikin of the Rock (Melina Marchetta) and Looking for Alaska (John Green) and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian (Sherman Alexie), would I be able to breeze through airport check-in in a manner that suggested I was not weighed down by book-laden carry-on luggage? Hmm, I think not.

But never fear, there was a solution. Audio books to the rescue! Once transferred to an iPod, those audio books became very light indeed, and as the second leg of the journey was a very long road trip in the northerly direction, well, audio books rock.

Of course, they are not all audio books, and my reading eyes are bigger than my reading stomach, so I will not be able to finish all the books I packed, especially when there are distractions: But it’s lovely to have a choice.

So here's to lazy days of reading amid the swish of lush green leaves, and swimming in cool waterfall-fed waterholes, and dining with the scent of a sea-breeze, and afternoons that end with shadows cast long on a sweep of beach…and cartwheels at sunset; yes, let there be cartwheels.

Wish you were here.

In which Piglet is entirely surrounded by water

It rained and it rained and it rained. Piglet told himself that never in all his life, and he was goodness knows how old - three, was it, or four? - never had he seen so much rain. Days and days and days... It was rather exciting. The little dry ditches in which Piglet had nosed about so often had become streams, the little streams across which he had splashed were rivers, and the rivers, between whose steep banks they had played so happily, had sprawled out of its own bed and was taking up so much room everywhere, that Piglet was beginning to wonder if it would be coming into his bed soon.
'It's a little Anxious,' he said to himself, 'to be a Very Small Animal Entirely Surrounded by Water.' - AA Milne

Map from BoM

Getting our Yuletide on (or rule-breaking 101)

This Onion FIRMLY believes that Christmas should not be mentioned until December. No carols. No decorations. No merriness. No nothing until December 1st. Only then may you start to open your advent calender (which should NOT have chocolate! Is opening little cardboard doors not enough for you people??!!) and get fully festive.

This hard (but fair) rule is partly because my birthday is at the very end of November and CLEARLY birthdays should not be polluted with Christmas, and vice versa. They are Separate. It's also partly to do with the potential for overload. I love The Christmas Feeling - and if it's spread too thin it tends to disappear.

And (speaking of rules) there are some books that I ONLY read on Christmas Eve. Never at any other time during the year.

But I am going to break my cardinal rule and talk about them in NOVEMBER. Why? Because rules are made to be broken and if anyone suggests any awesome Christmas books of which I am unaware, I need plenty of time to acquire them by Christmas Eve.

So here is my Christmas Eve reading list:

• Two chapters from The Good Master by Kate Seredy 'Mikulas, Bearer of Gifts' and 'Christmas'. The shepherds are in from the fields, the farmhouse is snug and warm and full of food. Jancsi and Kate, snuggled down in robes in the back of the sleigh, pick up Mikulas from the train station! But the eyes twinkling above the beard look strangely familiar to Kate... (Oh wholesome joy.)
• Tasha Tudor's A Doll's Christmas. Dolls in a dollhouse having their friends over for Christmas. Tasha Tudor illustrations. (Enough said.)
• The Gift of the Magi by O Henry Sob. Hair combs. Sob. Watch chain. Sob. Selfless love. Sob.
• The chapter in Little House on the Praire where Mr Edwards walks 40 miles to (and from) Independence, Kansas, and then swims the flooded Verdigris river to bring Mary and Laura their presents. (A brief aside. Reading the 'Little House' books again as a grown up I've been struck by just how appealing Pa is: twinkling blue eyes; strong and tall; able to build anything; far less worried about making Laura stick to the traditional "girl" roles than Ma is; plays the fiddle and sings; respects the Indians; brave and adventurous but kind and gentle too. *swoons* Who's with me?)

Christmas stories that are NOT on my Christmas Eve list:

• The Little Fir Tree by Hans Christan Andersen. (Moral. Moral. Boo. Sad. Moral.)
• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (UNLESS there are Muppets involved)
  

We would love to know if you have any Christmas reading traditions. (Because we want to steal them and make them our own.) Any fabulous Christmas books or stories that we must get hold of? Any Christmas stories you WILL NOT ALLOW into your house?

PS If anyone is on the lookout for some cheesy Christmas music I can HIGHLY recommend the Ultra Lounge Christmas Cocktails CDs. Best. Purchase. Ever. Even though they are culturally inappropriate because, baby, it's really not cold outside.

Joanne Horniman - author guest post #1

Joanne Horniman has been a kitchen hand, a waitress, an editor, a teacher and a screen printer. She now writes full-time in a shed overlooking Hanging Rock Creek near Lismore, northern New South Wales (perfectly positioned 'between the rainforest and the sea'). Oh, envy...

Her novels include Mahalia, Little Wing and A Charm of Powerful Trouble, and most recently, My Candlelight Novel - a "quietly breathtaking" story told by Sophie O'Farrell. It's the follow up to the wonderful novel Secret Scribbled Notebooks as told by Sophie's sister Kate.

Here in the House, we are endlessly fascinated by where and how authors work. And how their surroundings infiltrate their writing. So we asked Jo (who once, to our extreme gratification, included a little glimpse of what we claim as the Onion office in one of her novels) to tell us something about where she writes - take it away, Jo:

You don't need to go there

I don’t seem to be able to stop writing about Lismore. I’ve been living outside it for about 30 years, and my favourite house is this one, down on the riverbank.

It probably has a real name, it certainly has a history, but I know none of it. It’s the house I call ‘Samarkand’ in Candlelight Novel and Secret Scribbled Notebooks, and a glimpse of the exterior is all I know.

I know that I could ask someone if I could go inside (I think it’s been divided up into flats – it’s not a boarding-house), but I don’t want to. I don’t want the actuality of it to spoil what I imagine.

It’s better that the real place remains unknown to me, apart from a few tantalising glimpses as I go past. That way I can make it whatever I want it to be, inhabit it with the people of my imagination. In fiction, I think you can do too much ‘research’. There’s a point where the imagination needs to take over. You don’t really need to go there.

Thanks Jo

(NB you can find out more about Joanne and her novels here - if you haven't had the pleasure of reading any of them yet - well, you're in for a treat.)

Public Displays of Reading

Does anyone else read while walking? I do. All the time. Especially during that really boring 800 metres between tram stop and home. (Actually, come to think of it, I never read on the way to the tram stop in the morning, only on the way home in the evening.) People look at me strangely sometimes. But I know that if I bumped (probably literally) into a fellow Onion, they would understand.

Because we are a company full of book nerds. Passionate, passionate book nerds. (Although, now that ‘book’ means ‘cool’ that might be a contradiction in terms.)

Here is a list of PDsR (public displays of reading) that other Onions have confessed to…

• On a plane. Crying over the ms of Judith Clarke’s new book, Winds of Heaven. And not Hollywood-style glamorous tears, but swollen-red-face-shiny-nose-wet-Tshirt-person-sitting-next-to-you-thinks-you're-completely-weird tears.
• In a café. A bunch of Onions in gales of laughter, followed by an embarrassingly loud and lengthy coughing/choking fit. (That was your fault, Justine - the luge-ing scene in How to Ditch Your Fairy.)
• On the way to work. Looking up to see the train pulling out of Melbourne Central Station, letting out a huge sigh of realisation that it's a long way back - and a change of train - to Parliament Station. Stephanie Meyer, Bella, Jacob, Edward - curses to you all.
• In church, as a child. Caught reading about the boarding school antics of Enid Blyton's hockey-playing heroines through the crochet holes in a beige poncho. Got in all sorts of trouble. But did it again, and again.
• In the pub while the rugby's on. For some reason, this seems to inspire a high degree of disgust (and occasional amusement) from surrounding rugby fans, be you in Ireland, Melbourne or New Zealand at the time. But this Onion doesn't like rugby!
• Reading at the dinner table. Always guaranteed to irritate one's parents.
• Huddled behind a little hidden-away wall near an alley. Finishing a chapter of Philip Pullman ... even though she was already late... and it seemed to be raining.
• Stopped dead under a street light at the tram stop. Looking totally demented while juggling the A4 pages of the first manuscript of Maureen McCarthy’s new (awesome!) book Somebody's Crying – because of being totally unable to walk home without knowing how the book ends.

Ever been caught reading somewhere inappropriate?

Fictions on the Field

Horses you would bet on if the 2008 Melbourne Cup were a romance novel:

• Mad Rush
• Profound Beauty
• Red Lord
• Prize Lady
• Master O'Reilly
• Boundless

If it were an Anne Rice novel:

• Barbaricus

If it were a kids fantasy:

• Septimus

If it were a fairy tale:

• Ice Chariot

If it were a World War II novel:

• Honolulu
• C'est la Guerre

If it were a website:

• Viewed

If it were a Lolcat:

• Nom de Jeu