A Christmas selection

BOOKS that can make good reading over the Christmas New Year break, according to storyboard’s selection, number about six fold. They would be considered our six best for the year 2011.
First on the list is The Crocodile Anthology, a review of which has been offered by the storyboard team in September/October. This anthology consists of work by Papua New Guinean writers participating in the prestigious The Crocodile Literary Prize, so named after Vincent Eri, the first published PNG novelist. The anthology also includes prize winning entries by Lapieh Landu, Jimmy Drekore, Jeffrey Febi and Martyn Namorong. A good read for the family.
Then you have an interesting autobiography by Sir Thomas Ritako. Arise Sir Thomas gives a good view of PNG’s economic, social and educational as much as political development from the fifties to the present century, through the eyes of this remarkable man Sir Thomas Ritako. Anything you want to know about the public service or the education system is warmly represented in this book.
A third interesting read is Keith Dahlberg’s The Samana Incident: a crime novel of Papua New Guinea. Here mystery and thriller as literary genres are used by the author to present an interesting case on various drug products that could prove detrimental to the growth of our youth today. Written without any element of persuasion from a missionary worker’s point of view, this book becomes a necessary read, particularly for parents.
Two others of absolute relevance to PNG readers are The Boat by Nam Le and The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. With these two books coming from our nearest northern neighbours we have to seriously ask ourselves if we do have a class system in place in Papua New Guinea. Are there segments of our communities, rural or urban, that can best be described as bourgeois and so on? Storyboard suspects that there are and this suspicion albeit assumption does point in the direction of how much Papua New Guinea has changed in social structure over the years. A chapter or page from these two books is a realistic reflection on what could be truthful about events in PNG even though the scenery and characters depicted could be on another setting. Time and again we are bombarded with new ideologies, new and clever manoeuvres in the way we manage our national affairs, political or otherwise, and we wonder that the immediate surroundings that engulf us become all the more surprising. And we look again at the three arms of government that we have, at the seemingly powerlessness of one set against the other two, and we wonder more so then if we are indeed heading in the right direction.
But as it is with all works of fiction, we look at a story, at a character, at a particular pattern of human behaviour, and we realize that there is quite a great deal that we must learn from literature. Hence, storyboard’s insistence on our realising the significance and relevance of The Boat and The White Tiger.
Our final selection on this Christmas reading list would be Tim Flannery’s Among the Islands. Talk about the rare from out of the ordinary and common by way of scientific discovery – this is the central preoccupation of this work by a zoologist who’d spent so many years on the islands of Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Fiji just to prove that point. Judging from Sinclair Solomon’s brief review of this book (Weekender 10/12/11) we foresee an important publication about to reach our shores. 
Overseas books usually find it hard to reach our pockets in Papua New Guinea in order to suit our reading habits, but the UPNG Bookshop always has a solution or two to these problems. One such solution comes in the form of a close collaboration between author, publisher and book dealer. Keith Dahlberg, for example, notes that his novel might prove expensive by the time it reaches PNG. To make the book affordable for our student population at UPNG we go for the author’s discount copies. Keith is willing to do that but we are not sure if Tim Flannery, Nam Le and others would do the same for us.
Dahlberg also points out that The Samana Incident has two sides of copyright ownership to it. One, the cover. Two, the text itself. The cover belongs to the publishers, iUniverse; the text belongs to Keith. That probably means, and storyboard has yet to ascertain this with Dahlberg, UPNG Bookshop could just print the text only for the students and give him an agreed fee and so on.
We doubt if that arrangement would work with other overseas authors but whatever the case all depends on the sort of collaborative efforts observed by individual Papua New Guineans and their overseas partners of the book world.
UPNG Bookshop would always be happy to pose as a common meeting ground for all parties concerned.
Other solutions include exam copies: these are copies lent by publishers to individual authors or university bookshops with the understanding that they can be bought back by the publishers “after use”. This last method is rarely used nowadays due to high tech complications here and there.
But each good publisher usually has its own “used car yard” of sorts for books that are remaindered. There are also other arrangements trough which keen PNG readers of fiction and the like could gain access to these expensive overseas books on PNG topics and subject matter; but these are sadly restricted to library lending agreements reached between one school and another where the public would have very little chance of enjoying a good read.
The above six titles should make a good reading list this Christmas. We would like to recommend to good parents to spare at least K50 in their shopping spree to consider a copy of at least one of the books cited above for their children. Dad in particular might elect to consider other finer moments of relaxation than the occasional six-pack for this Christmas.