The Children’s Place – soon there will be a wonderful surprise – read on and discover!

June 2018

From the Committee:

The Children’s Place Wall PaintingThis exciting activity will be created by local children’s literature illustrators. These amazing artists all live locally and have recently had a wonderful exhibition at the New England Art Society Gallery in the Central Mall. The Committee has decided to pay half the costs of this art work titled “Dragon Aeron Enchanted Land”.

Baby Book PacksWe made up another 42 bags in May, giving a total of 179 bags from January to May this year.

Our Annual RaffleThe Committee has decided to have a spring raffle this year at the September to October and November Markets, with the winner drawn on December the 6th. Tickets will be sold at these markets and on Saturday mornings at the library and by the library staff. Please remember all donations are gratefully received by the Committee and may be left at any time at the library. As always, all money raised will go towards the library needs such as hanging rails for art works to brighten up the walls - one of several suggestions found in the suggestion box on the front counter. Another suggestion: Council seating outside the Library continues to be an on-going saga and we await the council’s decision.

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Poetry Workshops for KidsAn excellent initiative, free at the library for children aged 6 – 12 years where they will learn to write and illustrate poems with award-winning artist author Sophie Masson. These sessions are on 18 and 25 June, and bookings are essential.

Book review

Force of Nature Jane Harper

Jane Harper’s debut novel The Dry featured Detective Aaron Falk of the Melbourne Financial Investigation Unit, and he is again the main investigator in Force of Nature. The author moves from the devastating drought that dominated The Dry to the forbidding Giralang Mountain Range, and a wilderness adventure. The same sense of location and atmosphere is tellingly conveyed.

Five women are on a team-building hike run by Executive Adventures and all are staff from the large firm of Bailey Tennants, one of whose family members is included. All five colleagues get lost in the hostile landscape and only four make it back to base. The missing member has been giving Detective Falk information about money laundering in the business, thereby involving him in the investigation into her disappearance. The story is told in alternating chapters where we are privy to Falk’s investigation and also to what happened to the five women. Tension builds as the situation worsens for the hikers, and past rivalries, personality clashes and indiscretions come to the fore.

The author creates an additional sense of menace with a 20-year-old history of a killer haunting the area, and she gives us wonderful insights into the five characters. Wet, cold and windy weather mirrors the terror of the lost hikers, and the closeness of the trees is palpable. As the end of the novel approaches, the chapters become shorter and I was unable to put the book down. It’s well written and beautifully paced and can be highly recommended.

Marnie French.

New in the Library

We leap into winter with fiction, helpful for the freezing weather expected this weekend. Firstly, The white book by South Korean master Han Kang, reflecting on death, grief and suffering. Then, The adulterants from Joe Dunthorne, a satiric tale of “sadistic estate agents and catastrophic open marriages, dysfunctional friendships and internet trolls, underwhelming panic on the streets of London, and one very immature man finally learning to grow up”. Frankenstein in Baghdad seems to be magnificently metaphorical as Ahmed Saadawi’s hero constructs a corpse from body parts found on the street and asks the government to prepare a proper burial, but when the corpse goes missing, a series of strange murders occur…. Granta 138 contains the usual wonderful mix of essays and short stories interspersed with photo essays, including a glorious photograph of an Italian cosmonaut returned to earth and smelling a wildflower in the open air. Things feel a lot more claustrophobic for the residents of Helsinki in The healer, Antti Tuomainen’s suspenseful entry into the Nordic noir style of novel.

If it’s too cold to venture outdoors, stay inside with two recordings by Grigory Sokolov, “among the most esteemed of living pianists”: his 1995 rendition of Rachmaninov’s Piano concerto no. 3 in D minor is paired with a 2005 Salzburg recording of Mozart’s Piano concerto no. 23 in A major, and packaged with a DVD full of praise for him from friends and colleagues. Meanwhile, at the blues and soul end of music street, Fantastic Negrito performs faultlessly on The last days of Oakland; Sylvan Esso ask What now in their indie-pop pleasantness; and Solange, Beyonce’s sister, presents a distinctive Seat at the Table.

Please come along to the Library on Thursday evening next week (21 June) to see and hear the Sydney Symphony Orchestra playing Verdi’s Requiem – streamed live. We will be keeping the Library open until 8pm, and the performance will start at 6.30pm in the Library’s upstairs meeting room.If winter nights are too bracing for you to venture into (even with a promise of warm air-conditioning here), then we will repeat the

livestream on Friday morning (22 June) from 10.30am to noon. We hope to see keen faces at both performances!

This Friday (15 June), the Library will be streaming a flagship TEDxSydney event – which is a unique and vital day of talks, films, music and debate, and is one of the largest TEDx events in the world. The Library upstairs meeting room will be reserved all day for these talks on the big screen, so feel free to call in at anytime to hear something stimulating.

The talks are being streamed from TEDx’s new home at ICC Sydney, Darling Harbour, and the day is billed as “the best and biggest TEDxSydney event yet”! What is TEDx, I hear you ask? Their website says it is a “platform for the propagation of Australian ideas, creativity and innovation to the rest of the world”. It evolved out of TED: a nonprofit body devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or less). TED began in 1984 as a conference where Technology, Entertainment and Design converged, and today covers almost all topics — from science to business to global issues — in more than 100 languages.

TED is a global community, welcoming people from every discipline and culture who seek a deeper understanding of the world. TED believes passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and, ultimately, the world.

TEDx events are planned and coordinated independently, under a free license granted by TED.

There is a schedule of speakers and events for the day, but the organisers have asked that we do not share any details with our attendees prior to the day - they want you to experience the

curated schedule for the first time on the day. We will have printed copies of the order of service available at the Library front desk and in the meeting room from 10am tomorrow.