Selfies are so last year! Our friends at MB Life asked five local personalities to share their shelfies – pictorial peeks at their bookshelves.

Milisuthando Bongela, blogger

I don’t have as impressive a bookshelf as I would like, but it’s growing slowly and I’ve read all the books on it. My bookshelf came with my place; it’s embedded in the wall. My favourite place to read is in bed, when I wake up or just before I go to sleep. Three of my favourite books on my shelf are Frontiers: The Epic Creation of South Africa and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People by Noel Mostert – I call it the book that woke me up, Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – the book that encouraged me to tell stories, and The Prophet by Khalil Gibran – the book I live by.

Zubz, musician and writer

My bookshelf is one of my favourite pieces of furniture in my house. It was custom-made to fit my wall and is a distressed-looking dusty green. It’s a prominent piece because my girlfriend and I are writers, and books occupy a big part of our lives. My favourite place to read is in my bedroom or curled up on the couch. I recently bought two Chinua Achebe books that I felt were essential to any African literature collection. I’m also big on Malcolm Gladwell’s books for inspiration. There’s also a lot of Toni Morrison on our bookshelf because my girlfriend is a huge fan and swears I’m missing out by not having read her books.

Angie Batis, co-owner of Wolves Café in Jozi, with her husband Shane Durrant, from Desmond and the Tutus

Shane and I designed our bookshelf and had a carpenter make it up for us. We wanted something with loads of big compartments because I love collecting things and wanted lots of nice little spaces to display them. My favourite place to read is on the porch of Shane’s mom’s holiday cottage in Riet River in the Eastern Cape. It’s so quiet and there are day beds so when it rains you get a blanket and some sweet tea and then it’s just you, your book and the sea in the background. It’s amazing. Paul Auster was one of the first authors I fell in love with. The first book of his I read was The New York Trilogy and his style of story-telling had me hooked from day one. He’s definitely worth checking out.

Nzinga Qunta, founder of JUCYAfrica.com and newscaster on ANN7

My bookshelf is from my varsity days – I just wandered into a shop and bought the first one I saw. I should probably get a new one since my place is heaving with books. I like to read on the couch or in bed; somewhere quiet where I can disappear into the places the book takes me. One of my favourite books is Eight Days in September by Frank Chikane. It was fascinating to read about South Africa’s biggest political story by a person who was involved. Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon is another favourite – she’s incredible at capturing emotion and weaving a beautiful story. Roots by Alex Haley taught me about the slave trade in a manner that portrayed how evil it was and how its effects still linger.

Tehn Diamond, rapper

There is no story behind my bookshelf. It’s quite literally a shelf in my closet. I keep my little treasures tucked away safely right at the back. My best reading place is in the bathtub – and I use my iPad. One of my favourite books include The Pleasures Of The Damned, the definitive collection of Charles Bukowski’s poems. It helped me get through a rough patch earlier this year. I flicked through a couple pages and landed on a poem called “The Harder You Try”, which ended with “… if there is light, it will find you”. Once I read that, a huge weight was lifted from my soul. I could breathe again, I was content to just be and wait patiently for whatever would come next. Another favourite is Empire State of Mind by Zack O’Malley Greenburg. It’s a really dope behind-the-scenes look at the business moves of one of my music industry heroes, Jay Z. I’m a massive fan of both Jay Z the musician and Jay Z the businessman, so this book was Christmas twice over.

Click here to do our shelfie quiz. We’ve put together a fun pop quiz to help you figure out what shelfie you are and have decor ideas for each personality type. When you’re done, snap a shelfie in your home and send it to us to stand the chance of winning a prize. 

Originally published on MB Life.

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Michelle Marais chats to the Desmond and the Tutus frontman, Shane Durrant, about his new noodle bar’s offbeat decor and his recipe for success. Illovo is certainly all the richer for the Good Luck Club and Wolves.

Once seen as the unpopular stepbrother of Jozi’s suburbs, Illovo has been lately seen  various trendy spaces opening their doors. One of these, the Good Luck Club, is run by a couple who believe in having fun while making more fun stuff for people to do.

Shane and Angie Durrant are no strangers to the area. They’ve been the owners of Wolves – a marvelous little coffee shop renowned for its red velvet cake – for quite a number of years. Recently, the Desmond and the Tutus frontman and his missus purchased the space next door and transformed it into a quirky noodle bar.

Michelle: Illovo has proven itself to be quite the popular little suburb in the past few years. Did you predict this prior to putting up shop?

Shane: We moved in just as things started to pick up for Illovo. So many young creative people live in the area so it always seemed a shame that there wasn’t more of a pavement culture for everyone to enjoy. I always thought it was just a matter of time – we just needed the right people to start doing the right things.

Both Wolves and the Good Luck Club are very unique. How do you go about deciding on the interior of a shop or eatery?

Angie and I both come from an ad agency background where we were constantly coming up with ideas for other people. Part of the job was knowing that your ideas will be watered down or rejected for being too “out there”. Now that we are our own clients we get to make those calls. So if we decide we want to design our own wallpaper featuring a repeat pattern of a cat in a top hat then we do it, or if we want to have a giant cat head outside, instead of a sign with our logo, then we do it. So it’s a combination of what the space needs and some weird ideas we thought would be fun.

What made you decide to work with Nicholas Christowitz on creating the corporate identity for the Good Luck Club and how do you feel about the result?

Nic is a good friend of ours and a fantastic young designer. Angie and Nic do a fair amount of work together so it seemed like a no-brainer for him to be involved. Being the creative control-freaks that Angie and I are, we were very hands-on in the development of the CI, often leaning over Nic’s laptop from either side saying things like “oh just give me the mouse” or “bigger, bigger, little to the left”. End of the day, we came up with a very cool logo that is everything we needed it to be – whimsical, light-hearted and a little bit Japanese.

When sourcing design elements, trinkets and furniture, how important is it to stay true to one’s taste vs go about incorporating trends?

We like a combination of the two but I feel it’s most important to honour your gut feel. We also love involving our friends, for example our tables are by Pedersen & Lennard, which is my cousin’s furniture design company.

It’s inspiring to see two young people be successful in their endeavours. What would you say is the Durrant recipe for success?

Shane: When we opened Wolves we really had very little idea of what we were doing, but we knew that we were doing it for fun. We wanted to create a relaxed space for the Illovo community; a community centre of sorts. So at the heart of everything we do is this philosophy: to make more fun stuff for people to do and have fun while we’re doing it.

The Good Luck Club is situated at 3 Corlett Drive, Illovo, Johannesburg. They’re open for lunch and dinner from Tuesdays to Saturdays and only for lunch on Sundays. Reservations are recommended. Contact them at 011 447 3816, hi@thegoodluckclub.co.za, thegoodluckclub.co.za

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