Tea

I forgot to mention in my last post that the other thing we did before heading to the airport was visit Victoria's Basement and Mr Tablecloth in the Queen Victoria Building. It is so jam packed with china that you have to hold your bags very close so that you don't knock anything over. I saw some really lovely things and was very restrained - I didn't buy anything. I could have bought these.

I just love black and white. This teapot makes me happy!
This cup is very pretty and reminds me of Japan. Blossoms make me happy!

This one fits in with the rest of my collection. My collection makes me happy!

Tim expressed an interest in what happened at the Readers Advisory seminar so skip this paragraph and the next if you want to. There is a NSW working group for Readers Advisory and they have set up a wiki for library staff. Anyone can contribute and it covers things like lists of books in a particular genre or sub-genre, tips for book clubs, HSC English resources, who writes like lists, blokes @ your library, and links. We were all encouraged to use the wiki as a resource for helping people find books to read, and to contribute. The theme for the day was 'Romancing your readers' so we had a speaker who sells romance fiction online. I don't read romances myself so it was very interesting to hear about all the sub-genres, eg. paranormal romances which have vampires, werewolves etc! One speaker gave us lots of links to websites about romance fiction including a classic one called 'Smart bitches who love trashy books'.

Nancy Pearl says that we all have doorways into the books we read, meaning that we like books for different reasons. Some people read for language (and are therefore unlikely to be into romance fiction which tends to be poorly written and story focused), some for characters, setting or story (eg. they like a fast paced story line, like many crime novels). Lots of us read for a few of these reasons. I tend to read for character and setting but language is also important to me. A poorly written book with little character development, or just unlikeable characters, will not appeal to me. The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks is an extremely popular book that has been made into a film. It is also one of the few books I have not finished. It was so predictable and I got very sick of reading variations on "'God, she looks good' he thought" so I gave up on it. When Chrissie heard how much I hated it she put it on our book club list! You can have much more interesting discussions when some people hate the book. One of the ladies from the club that read it last month came in and said how much she hated it too, though others in her club loved it, and she needed to read Dirt Music, her club's book for this month, to clear the cotton wool from her head!