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Exclusive Books sale, January 2006

Arja Salafranca

Anyone who goes to the opening night sales at Exclusive Books, open to Fanatics members before the sale starts the next morning, knows they’re in for a bun fight. It’s tough out there: the aisles are crowded, the people big or wide and aggressive, and you fight for a place at the tables, perusing the titles. You go armed: with attitude and determination, you’re going to get the bargains dished up by the Exclusive Books team, but boy, you’re also going to fight for them.

It says something for the popularity of books among readers in this country, and the desire for a bargain, because these twice-yearly sales do present bookworms with bargains.

This year the sale offers a variety. Some of the sale stock consists of markdowns of existing stock, but half of the books are sourced for sale from overseas. A team of book buyers had the pleasure of going to the Sale Book Fair in London recently, and a large percentage of the books come from this source.

As usual there’s a wide range of fiction, children’s books, coffee-table tomes and reference and history books. Invited to a press preview at Moyo’s at the Zoo Lake I eagerly snatched up some gems that would have been well worth it even if they hadn’t been on sale. Here’s a sample:

What we Knew: Terror, Mass Murder and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany, edited and compiled by Eric Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband, presents a compulsively readable glimpse into the lives of ordinary Germans under Nazi rule. Speaking to both Jews and non-Jews the authors succeeded in showing what life was really like under this barbaric system and it turns out it was, on the one hand, as horrific as most imagine, but many also experienced ordinary, mundane lives, especially if they were lucky enough not to be affected by Nazi horrors. The big question, of course, is: Did ordinary Germans really know what was happening in the camps to the Jews? And the answer is a complicated mix of yes and no. (On sale for R51.)

PJ O’Rourke is always acerbic and funny, and yet his writing skirts so close to and sharply towards truths and opinions that others would prefer not to acknowledge. His 2004 book of essays, Peace Kills, is subtitled “America’s Fun New Imperialism”. O’Rourke travelled to Kosovo in 1999, Israel in 2001, Iraq and Kuwait in 2003, as well as to other world hotspots to highlight both American influence and events taking place in these hotspots. The first essay is called “Why Americans hate foreign policy” and is worth a read. (On sale for R53.)
Another kind of travel writing is presented in Emma Larkin’s Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell in a Burmese Teashop. Larkin was born and brought up in Asia, has studied Burmese, and shows a deep understanding of that country. Secret Histories is about a year spent travelling the country, tracing the footsteps of Orwell in Burma – he lived there in the 1920s – and meeting the people who live there now. (On sale at R58.)
Coffee-table books include the delightful fun décor book called Kitsch Deluxe by Lesley Gillian. If you’re fed-up with a plain white bathroom and toilet seat cover, take inspiration from this book and paint it all, including the toilet seat, in swirling trails of bright paint. Or paint large flowers on your dining room walls and cover your chairs in individual bolts of bright cloth. Doesn’t do it for you? Well, then go out and get an expensive red fridge and mount a picture of Spider-Man on the space above the fridge. Containing some whacky ideas among the more sensible options, this one is on sale at R76.
Sahara: The Atlantic to the Nile is a sensitive and beautiful monument to the land and people that populate this region. Beautiful yet austere portraits of the land and people by Alain and Berny Sèbe are complemented by Hachette Livre’s prose and verse. It’s on sale at R102. Other coffee-table delights are Postcard Dogs (R34) and New Hotel Architecture and Design (R123).
On the fiction front there’s an omnibus of crime writer Ian Rankin’s The Black Book and Mortal Causes at R47. Another crime writer worth exploring is Swede Henning Mankel; his novel The Return of the Dancing Master is on sale at R27. Justin Cartwright’s The Promise of Happiness is going for R33. Ann Napolitano’s Within Arm’s Reach tells the story of interconnected lives (R52) while American literary master Tobias Wolfe’s Old School is on sale at R31.

The sale starts on Thursday, January 26th at 7.30 am. See you at the bunfight!

LitNet: 25 January 2006

to the top / boontoe

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